Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12

by Patricia Briggs

  I caught myself before confessing that I’d probably have been all right, or at least my nose would have been okay, if the seat belt hadn’t given way. Because that would feed his argument and not mine.

  I thought about where I could start looking for another car as I started walking. It had taken me a while to find the Jetta. I’d call all the scrapyards here, in Yakima, and in Spokane, let them know I was looking for a car that was reasonably restorable. Maybe I’d have to give in and pay a little more—it was hard to find them cheap. At least those old Jettas and Rabbits weren’t doing what the Vanagons had done—Vanagons were more expensive to buy used than they’d sold fresh off the assembly line. My Syncro was worth a lot more now than it had been new.

  “Maybe another Rabbit,” I mused. “My old Rabbit lasted me more than a decade. The Jetta didn’t even make it a year.”

  “No more Rabbits,” said Adam. “At least not this week. I think we’ve had quite enough rabbits for one week.”

  He trailed me down the stairs. Or maybe he was herding me down the stairs. I was starting to get an odd vibe from him.

  I snuck a peek over my shoulder at him. Caught off guard, his eyes were still as unhappy as they had been when I opened the bedroom door.

  “What?” Adam asked me.

  But before I had to answer, Warren approached to ask him about the schedule for guard duty—and if we were still running with that plan after everyone had been told to bunk up.

  IT TOOK US ABOUT A HALF HOUR BEFORE WE ACTUALLY got going. We didn’t talk in the SUV on the way to my office. I wasn’t sure why not.

  I mean, of course I knew why I didn’t say anything. I was still mulling over what Bran had said, trying to organize it so it made sense. Sorting through the things Bran had actually said—and the things I’d extrapolated from those. The first being important, the second being a little more suspect.

  But I didn’t know why Adam didn’t say anything. Maybe he’d forgotten what he wanted to talk to me about in the avalanche of questions he’d dealt with on our way out the door.

  When I looked at him, his eyes were opaque in the shadows. For a moment, though, I was caught by the way the dashboard illuminated the planes and curves of his face. He had the kind of beauty that would make maidens in old tales throw themselves off cliffs in order to attract his attention. Mesmerizing.

  He didn’t notice me watching him, though—too focused on whatever had been keeping him quiet the rest of the drive. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a good thought, judging by the tension in his shoulders.

  I put my hand on his thigh. I wasn’t sure he noticed. That was really not like him at all. By the time we made it to the garage, I was starting to worry about him—or about what he had to say. Maybe he knew something more than I did about our current circumstances, but it didn’t feel quite like that.

  The parking lot was lit up a lot better than it had been before we’d rebuilt the garage. I could have sat on the front step and read a book. The light made it easier for Adam’s security cameras to get clear pictures.

  I stopped on the way to the office and stared at one of the cameras. Not that I could see it—it was really small. But I knew where it was.

  “Adam,” I said thoughtfully. “How often do you purge the surveillance video from here?”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  That distracted me. “Really? Never? Doesn’t that take up a lot of data storage?”

  “Data storage is cheap at twice the price,” he said. “You have been attacked here by werewolves, vampires, volcano gods, and—” He stopped and grimaced.

  “A Tim,” I told him stoutly. “Though he came out the worst in that encounter.”

  He gave me a short nod. “I don’t erase anything.”

  “Okay,” I said, getting my brain off Tim and onto more current matters. “If you don’t erase it, do you have some nifty way of sorting through it?”

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  “James Palsic brought a car in for me to repair a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t notice him then, because I am pretty sure that remember-me-not thing he has going is a variation of pack magic that he’s learned to twist to his own use. Zee was here that day—and he didn’t even notice James was a werewolf.”

  “If you didn’t recognize him then, how did you figure out he came in?” he asked. “Did he tell you?”

  I shook my head. “Something clicked while we were exchanging words at Kelly’s house and that magic quit working on me. Apparently, it quit retroactively, too. Because as soon as it quit working, I remembered him.

  “If you can find him on the feed, maybe he left some clue about where they are staying,” I said.

  We had the plates to the Ford truck, but they were registered to a fictional address, according to George. They did tell us that the wolves had been here for long enough to acquire Washington plates. I didn’t expect the plates on his VW bug to be any more use. Especially because I was pretty sure those plates had been from out of state. But he had given us a phone number that might be of use.

  Adam nodded and sounded more like himself when he said briskly, “Sounds like a good idea.”

  I keyed in the sequence that would unlock the door—for a garage that specializes in inexpensive repairs to cars that tend to be older than I am, my shop’s security is pretty high-end.

  “I know it’s a long shot,” I told him. “But I hate waiting for the bad guys to make a move. We could head to your office after we get done here.”

  “I don’t like defensive wars, either,” Adam agreed. “I can access the video files from here.”

  I let us in but didn’t turn the lights on in the office. There were windows all the way around, which was awesome for working there. But just now, lighting up the office would make us a perfect target for someone sitting outside with a gun.

  It was true that the immediate threats I knew about were unlikely to be sitting outside with a gun. Though werewolves (and I supposed Wulfe, too) could use guns just fine, shooting us in an attempt to take over the pack would make them look weak. A bullet wouldn’t be enough fun for Wulfe to try.

  But there were a lot of people who were unhappy about the changes taking place in the world, and everyone knew that the Columbia Basin Pack’s Alpha was mated to Mercy, who owned that garage in east Kennewick.

  There were shades on the windows for just that reason, but they were a pain in the butt. They were supposed to be electronic, but that had lasted exactly a week. We were in discussions with the manufacturer that felt like they might take a long time.

  “Can you see well enough to get into the video system?” I asked Adam. “I could just pull the shades and turn on the lights if that’s useful.”

  “I can see fine.” He walked toward the door to the bays instead of to the corner of the office where a monitor that scrolled through the cameras sat on an expensive-looking pile of electronics.

  “Adam?” I asked. “Where are you going?”

  “The controls in the office are dummy controls,” he told me. “The real controls are in the garage proper.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “We give the bad guys something to ‘shut down’ and they quit looking,” he explained. Which was why he made the big money in security.

  “Okay,” I said. “While you do that, I’ll search the receipts. We require a phone number and an address. The address may be bogus—but we called him to get his car.” I was pretty sure he hadn’t given the name James Palsic. That was an odd enough last name, I’d have remembered it. And a pseudonym might be a clue, too.

  “So he’ll be on the cameras twice,” Adam said.

  “Yep. He came in about four p.m., maybe as early as three thirty, but no earlier than that. Not last week but sometime in the previous two weeks,” I told him.

  “Okay.”

  He waited in the open doorway while I settled myself on a box behind the counter and pulled the office keyboard and monitor down where I could use them. Tucked behind the
counter, they were low enough that no one would see the light from the monitor from the outside.

  “Why did we put all the windows in here, again?” Adam asked as I sat down. I think he was trying for a teasing tone, but his eyes were focused on my face. On my nose. The tape strapped across the bridge of my nose was going to be my friend for a week or so; I’d get rid of it about the same time my black eyes would turn yellow. At least they hadn’t had to pack it.

  “Because windows are more friendly than walls,” I told him, touching my nose a little self-consciously. “And mostly we are in the bays anyway.” Having our bond shut down was making me ridiculous. Adam loved me, broken nose and all. I reassured myself of that with the memory of his face when he’d first seen me in the hospital. Even so, I couldn’t help but say, in a voice that was a little wobbly, “They said it would heal without a bump.”

  “You get hurt a lot,” he said softly.

  I couldn’t read his body language or his tone, which was unusual. But where he was standing was oddly shadowed, the strong light from the window obscuring the lower half of his face.

  “This was my choice,” I told him. “Me or Makaya. My nose or her life—it wasn’t even a difficult decision.”

  Adam grunted and disappeared into the bays, where he’d hidden the real controls to the surveillance system. Good to know that if I wanted to shut the system down, I’d have to go looking for the secondary controls …

  I wanted to say something more to him. Something that would feel better than that last exchange did. Still, Adam was pretty good at communication—better than I was. Maybe I just needed to give him some space. Resolutely I turned my attention to the files.

  We fixed maybe fifteen cars on a good day with all three of us working. That didn’t count the parts we sold, but it wasn’t an insurmountable number. It took me about ten minutes to find the right bill, but only because we hadn’t put the year and model of the car in the computer.

  But the notes jibed with what I remembered.

  Generator not charging, does not respond to polarizing. Recommend new generator. Customer agrees.

  The bill was complete with address and phone number. He’d paid with a credit card in the name of John Leeman, his address was out in north Richland near the Uptown Mall, an area with a lot of apartments, and looked suspiciously like the false address that had been used to register the plates on the truck. But the phone number could be useful.

  “Got it,” I said, and told Adam the date of the bill. “Time stamp on the charge is eleven twenty-eight.”

  Adam grunted.

  He sounded odd.

  “Adam?”

  “What did you want to talk to me about, Mercy? That we couldn’t talk about at home?” He was speaking so softly I could barely make out his words—and my hearing was coyote-good.

  “I have a few insights I wanted to share about the werewolves we are facing,” I told him cautiously.

  There was a long pause. I didn’t want to conduct a serious discussion with him in there and me out in the office. I set the keyboard on top of the counter and bent to heft the monitor.

  “I thought you might want to discuss last night.”

  The monitor skidded on the counter as I set it back where it belonged, so I thought I might have misheard him. “Last night?”

  Locking up Ben? But he made it sound as if something had happened that needed discussion. Something personal. Oh.

  “Are you talking about the reason you made me an apology breakfast sandwich? Thank you, by the way.” I had everything put away in the office. I could have headed into the bays to talk to him, but I hesitated, my instincts keeping me right where I was.

  “I put you in danger,” he said.

  I loved Adam and trusted him in a way I’d never trusted anyone. I had never been afraid of him. Not really. Okay. He was a werewolf—but this was different. It was the way his voice was traveling out of the darkness. My heartbeat picked up.

  “I put myself in danger,” I told him. “You certainly had nothing to do with my broken nose today.”

  He didn’t answer. Aching cold shivered through me like a blade drawn through my chest—and it wasn’t an emotion, it was my mating bond, our mating bond. I reached out for it in that place where I could see the ties that bound me.

  I understood that no one else in the pack had a place like that they could go. I supposed my place, my otherness, had something to do with the fact that the first time I beheld the pack bonds was when a fairy queen locked me into my own head while she held me imprisoned. The Marrok, possibly with the help of a rogue fae walking stick, used the bonds to locate me. In the process, he pulled me someplace where he could show me the spiritual and magical ties I bore. Over time, I had learned how to get there on my own. Mostly this otherness had a dreamlike quality in that it was changeable and responsive to my subconscious. But in some ways, it was more real than any other place I had ever been.

  The pack bonds were still there. This time there were no lights, but they were still bright-colored and festive Christmas garlands strung in all directions as if they were part of a giant spider’s web. Sometimes I perceived the wolves in the pack as rocks or bricks. Once, they were flowers, and I never did figure out why. But this time the bonds just stretched out into the darkness. If I’d needed to know which was which, I could have grabbed one and yanked on it, but for now, none of those were the bond I was looking for.

  The bond I usually tried not to pay too much attention to was there as well. Visually that one changed a lot more than the other bonds. Even so, another time it would worry me that the tie that existed between me and Stefan was a gossamer black weaving that looked as though a good wind would blow it away. Not that I enjoyed being bound to a vampire, even Stefan—but that frailty didn’t say good things about my friend and his battle with the smoke weaver.

  Sometimes the most important thing I looked for, here in the otherness, was the last thing I found. The bond between Adam and me was wrapped securely around my waist—where it burned me with its cold. The cord itself had changed from the thick red cord I’d last seen to something like a flexible cable made of ice.

  I blinked that image away and stood once more in my garage office, feeling neither enlightened nor reassured. Having our bond turn to ice, even if only in the imagery of my other place, could not possibly be a good thing.

  “Adam?” I said cautiously, not moving from where I stood behind the counter. “What are you doing to our bond? I don’t like it.”

  “You need to get out of here.”

  That wasn’t Adam. That was the wolf speaking from Adam’s throat. I heard a ripping noise.

  “Adam, are you okay?” I asked, ignoring the wolf’s advice.

  The silence was so deep that I started when Adam spoke, his voice gravelly as it sometimes got when he was changing into his wolf form. I could usually smell the magic gathering when one of the wolves was changing form—but my nose was broken. For all that Adam maintained that I wasn’t really smelling magic, that I was just interpreting it as a scent, I couldn’t tell if he was really changing or not without my nose working.

  “When you spoke to Bran, did you talk to him about me, Mercy mine?”

  That didn’t sound like any tone I’d ever heard from Adam. It didn’t sound like Adam or the wolf.

  I remembered the way Ben had sounded. Had the smoke weaver bitten Adam?

  The creature hadn’t been able to fool me for more than a few minutes when he’d been using Ben. And my instincts, which had never steered me wrong so far, told me that this had nothing to do with the smoke weaver. Stefan’s bond in my otherness, I now remembered, though I hadn’t noticed at the time, had an odd odor—just like the jackrabbit. It had smelled like the smoke weaver. Apparently even with a broken nose I could smell when I was in that other place.

  The bond between Adam and me had still smelled … tasted like us. This, whatever this was, was about whatever had been troubling Adam long before the smoke weaver had e
scaped.

  “I asked you a question,” he growled from the depths of the big space beyond the office door. “Did you go to Bran with the trouble you are having? With me?” The last was a roar that sounded more wolf than human and hurt my ears with the sudden volume.

  I didn’t answer, didn’t know how to answer.

  “Mercy?” The soft question came out singsong, emerging from the echoing bays, sounding more menacing than the blast of sound that had preceded it.

  I didn’t think that telling him yes would be smart right then. But I wouldn’t lie to him. And I didn’t think this was a conversation we should be having while I cowered behind a counter that would be no barrier against a werewolf.

  This is Adam, I reminded myself. Whatever his troubles, whatever was happening to him, he would not hurt me if he could help it. He was in trouble and I had to help him.

  I walked to the door to the bays. Inky darkness stretched out endlessly in front of me. I can see in the dark pretty well, but my eyes were adjusted to the relative light of the office, and the bays were as dark as a cave. I reached for the lights.

  Adam said, “Don’t.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked. I couldn’t use my nose, and the sound effects of the empty bays kept me from pinpointing where Adam was.

  “You should leave,” he said, his voice gritted, almost vicious. “God damn it, Mercy.” Desperate. “Obey me for once in your life and get the fuck out of here.”

  I heard him open the under-the-counter gun safe that held a loaded gun. However cautious I was around agitated werewolves, I was absolutely certain that Adam wasn’t about to shoot me.

  I hit the light.

  10

  I EXPECTED TO SEE ADAM, GUN IN HAND.

  I did not expect him to be eight or nine feet tall, looking like something horrible had happened to his change from human to wolf. I’d seen him in an in-between stage before, a blend between wolf and human that was oddly graceful, no matter how frightening. This wasn’t that.