Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12

by Patricia Briggs

  Sorting through the implications of Tilly’s story had taken me most of yesterday.

  “The way to defeat him is to use the rules that he has to follow,” I said. Baba Yaga had told me something of the sort.

  “I can already tell,” Adam said, “that I’m not going to like this.”

  “Here,” I said. “Eat another protein bar.”

  I DROVE JESSE’S CAR TO THE ADDRESS THAT NONNIE Palsic had given me. Adam would collect what I needed from home and then follow me out; hopefully it wouldn’t take too long.

  It wasn’t that far from our house—maybe ten minutes in a direction I seldom took, one of those out-of-the-way places that didn’t lie on a direct route between our house and anywhere I was likely to need to go. It was out in the hill country between the Tri-Cities and Oregon where there was no water available for irrigation and not enough houses that the city would pipe water out. This late in the summer the hills were a pale dirt brown dusted with sparse remains of grass.

  I turned up a well-tended gravel road and followed it for a quarter of a mile that twisted around with the lay of the land, no houses in sight. It took a final turn, climbed a steep grade, and popped out on the top of a hill, where it ended in an asphalt circular driveway laid out before a huge house. The house had been carefully placed to hide itself from the highway below without impacting the panoramic views. A narrow ring of bright green grass circled the house, and there were a few raised flower beds that were unplanted.

  I parked the car near the front door, as far as I could get it from the three people on the other edge of the driveway. It left me with about twenty yards to walk—it was a big circular drive. But I didn’t want Jesse’s car to suffer the same fate my last two cars had, so I wanted it well out of the action. I couldn’t do anything until Adam got here anyway.

  I didn’t say anything as I approached the three werewolves because I was too busy looking at the tall, pillar-like rock they were huddled around. I had expected a detailed sculpture in stone—maybe because of Nonnie’s comparison to The Hobbit, or maybe because of how detailed the concrete version of the semi tractor’s tire at the Lewis Street tunnel had been. But this looked sort of like a basalt columnar joint—the kind houses like this used as landscaping focal points—except that it lacked the sharp-edged hexagonal structure.

  I walked around to the side that the others were standing in front of, and I realized that the image I should have been imagining was more like Han Solo’s encasement than Peter Jackson’s stone trolls. This side of the rock had eyes and an opening through which I could hear the faint slide of air.

  Nonnie looked at me with a tear-stained face and said, “He’s having trouble breathing now.”

  It did sound shallow and irregular.

  “Adam’s bringing what I need,” I told her.

  “What kind of a place is this?” asked Kent, sounding traumatized.

  “The kind of place where fairy tales live,” said Chen Li Qiang in a dreamy voice, “and monsters dwell.”

  I gave him a concerned look, but he just hugged himself.

  “We are the monsters,” he told me seriously. “And we are damned.”

  I frowned at him and asked the others, “Has he been bitten recently? By anything, a rabbit, maybe?”

  “No, he just falls into bad poetry when he’s sad. It was—” Kent Schwabe stopped as Adam’s big black SUV topped the rise and drove directly to where we stood.

  Li Qiang watched it for a minute, then said, “Is there something wrong with the suspension? It seems to be bouncing more than nec—”

  One of the rear windows exploded outward in a shower of glass.

  “Nothing wrong with the SUV,” I said, and turned my attention back to James. His eyes, encased in stone, were red and dry. He couldn’t blink because he did not have lids. I wondered if the smoke weaver had done that deliberately, or if it had been a cruel accident. Regardless, they didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if that was because he couldn’t move them—or because he didn’t move them.

  If it weren’t for the shaky breathing, I would never have believed that he was still alive.

  “Oh my God,” said Jesse beside me.

  “What are you doing here?” I said, horrified.

  “There wasn’t anyone to drive the car,” she told me.

  “Oh,” said Aiden in a small voice. “This. He’ll take a day or two to die all the way.”

  “Not going to happen,” I said, with a lot more sangfroid than I actually felt.

  I looked around and said, “Li Qiang? I am putting you in charge of making sure that Jesse and Aiden don’t get hurt. Jesse”—I tapped her on the shoulder—“is our human daughter. This is our son, Aiden.” I tapped him. I met Chen Li Qiang’s eyes. “I am trusting you because everyone else I trust will have their hands full—and Carlos has vouched for you. I trust Carlos’s judgment.”

  Li Qiang gave me an oddly formal bow that would have been more at home on another continent. “You can help my friend?”

  “I hope so,” I told him.

  “Then I will keep them safe this day as long as I have breath in my body.”

  I turned to Jesse and Aiden and started to say something, but Aiden beat me to the punch. “Your son.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “It would be weird the other way around, don’t you think?”

  His smile was a little tentative and he gave me a nod.

  “Okay—you two and Li Qiang, I want you to stand …” There was nowhere safe, not until I was further into my gambit.

  “Next to each other out of the way,” said Jesse.

  “I’ll help keep them safe,” Kent said to me. He had to raise his voice a little to be heard over the sounds coming from the SUV. “If you are what I have heard, you will know I am telling the truth.”

  He was. But he was also the one that Bran had been unsure of. I hesitated—but Aiden was capable of protecting himself, now that his fire was mostly recovered from what Wulfe had done to it.

  “Thank you,” I said, nodding toward Li Qiang, so he would know I meant him, too. I liked having the (more or less) innocent bystanders innocently bystanding instead of getting hurt.

  I looked at the SUV and said, “Hey, Jesse. You and Aiden are here. And that looks like Luke, Kelly, and your father in the car. Who is minding the fort?”

  “Joel is there,” she said. “Darryl and Auriele are on their way—about twenty minutes out. Dad was going to leave Kelly behind but”—another of the back windows in the rocking SUV exploded—“they were having more trouble than they expected. It took all three of them to get him into Dad’s SUV, and it took all three of them to keep him in. Finally, Dad said that given that Fiona and Harol-somebody were out fruitlessly hunting Kyle, the house should be safe enough for twenty minutes.”

  Ben would have heard that—which meant the smoke weaver knew it, too. So I should hurry and get started. Once I had begun, hopefully he would be too busy to launch a counterattack.

  Aiden touched my arm. “Joel is good protection,” he said. “Hard to bite a tibicena.” And that was very true. Some of my worry left me. “I thought I might be useful here given my background. But maybe I should have stayed home, too?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “Tough call to make. For what it’s worth, I’m happy to have you here. If you hear me about to do something stupid, you might warn me.”

  He nodded. “Don’t put me so far away I can’t help.”

  Nonnie touched the rock and then told me, “I will help guard your children. Help Li and Kent. I will keep them safe if it is in my power.”

  “I will do my best for James,” I said, nodding. “I have a couple of guys who need rescuing from the smoke weaver, too. I’m going to try to do it all at once.”

  She nodded mutely. Frowned and then said, “You aren’t the Alpha. You aren’t even a werewolf. Fiona says that your only gift is turning into a coyote. Why are you in charge?”

  “Because Fiona is wrong about me,” I to
ld her.

  I didn’t say anything more, because I had no idea who else or what else might be listening. And because they were not pack—and they didn’t need my secrets.

  When Li Qiang led the group the short distance to the lamppost that I had indicated, Nonnie followed. About that time, Adam, Luke, and Kelly managed to get Ben—shackled, chained, and in werewolf form—out of the back of the SUV, which now looked as though I was going to get a second chance to try to talk Adam into something other than black.

  “Over here,” I said.

  And they half carried, half dragged Ben to where I stood. All three of the men were bloody—all four if you included Ben. His rear legs looked like hamburger from the car windows. Ben, on his own, was no match for any of them by themselves, let alone all three. But they didn’t want to hurt him—and the smoke weaver had no reason to worry about hurting any of them, including Ben.

  “Ben,” I said. “Hold on.”

  “Don’t get any closer,” growled Adam.

  He was right. I didn’t heal the way that the werewolves did, and I was not nearly as strong. So I stood back and did not touch him the way I wanted to.

  “I see you,” I said. “And I have a bargain for you.”

  Ben quit thrashing.

  Adam murmured, “Set him down.”

  The other two gave him incredulous looks. But he was their Alpha and they were used to doing what he told them to.

  “A bargain,” I told him, “must have something that I want—and something that you want.”

  And I realized I had a problem. “I need Ben to be able to talk,” I told Adam.

  He didn’t tell me it was impossible, as he had every reason to do. I thought it might be impossible, too. Poor James’s breathing didn’t sound like he had time to wait at all. But this wouldn’t work if Ben’s body couldn’t speak.

  Usually it doesn’t matter much that werewolves cannot speak in their wolf form. They communicate very well using body language, and they can scratch out letters if something is very important. If a matter is truly urgent, then sometimes the pack bonds provide a way to communicate with Adam.

  None of that would work for the smoke weaver—what I needed to do required a voice.

  Adam sent Jesse to the SUV to grab a ring of keys that was in the glove compartment. She had to rummage a bit but found it. She threw the keys to me before going back to where I’d asked her to wait.

  Adam unlocked all of the chains that bound Ben. Undid the silver muzzle and the band around his chest. The only binding he left on was a heavy silver collar and a thick chain attached to it, which Adam kept hold of. Ben’s fur was burned where the bindings had wrapped him.

  If there were any other way to hold a crazed werewolf, Adam would have done that instead. But the wolf had very few weaknesses, and steel bindings alone were not enough to hold the strongest of them. And, Bran had told me once, never assume that you have one of the werewolves who can be restrained without silver. If you make that mistake, it might be the last time you get a chance to be wrong.

  Ben sat still for it all.

  Adam glanced my way—and that was when the smoke weaver went for him. I knew it was not Ben. I didn’t need to see it in his eyes to know that Ben would never attack Adam.

  Adam had the other wolf on the ground so fast I didn’t see him move. He put his head next to the great mouth as it snapped and growled.

  “Change,” said Adam.

  I felt the hard tug from the pack bonds as he pulled power from all of us. Kelly staggered and Luke reached out to steady him.

  Adam leaned closer and licked Ben’s face where blood gathered from a small wound. “Change.

  “Hold him down,” Adam said, his voice strained.

  Luke and Kelly piled on. Changing for a werewolf is a horrible, painful, and slow process. The more dominant wolves can change relatively quickly—ten or fifteen minutes, a little faster if they pull hard on pack bonds. Wolves lower in the pecking order, like Ben, took longer—except when their Alpha forced power into the change.

  But the painful part was important. I tried really hard not to touch a werewolf who had recently changed to either form for a few minutes because their skin was hypersensitive—and their muscles and bones ached from being reshaped and moved. Ben, changing to human with Adam, Luke, and Kelly on top of him, had to be in agony.

  I hoped the smoke weaver would feel some of that, too.

  I glanced away from Ben and my eyes fell upon the rock that held—or that was—James Palsic, and I found myself wondering why he’d been turned to stone instead of made a puppet.

  According to my calculations, the smoke weaver was limited in the number of people he could control, and not being able to take me over at all had made him, according to Ben, obsessed with me. He had taken Ben, who belonged to our pack, and Stefan. How had he known about Stefan? Maybe Stefan had been coming to our house when I didn’t answer his call? The hitchhiker didn’t count, because she had been earlier. Lincoln could also have been lurking around our house when he’d been bitten, but the weaver had been riding him while still controlling Ben and Stefan—which meant that he should be able to control three people at a time.

  It made sense, having taken Lincoln, that the smoke weaver was aware of these wolves and could choose another victim from among them after Lincoln died. But why had he turned James into a rock? Why hadn’t he bitten him if he could control one more person?

  And I thought of Fiona’s reactions to Lincoln. She dealt with witches, why not fae? Assuming that she did not care about Lincoln—which I thought might be a safe assumption to make about her. What if she had bargained with the fae instead of opposing him? They had, after all, a similar goal. The smoke weaver, like Fiona, was driven to attack my pack. I didn’t know why.

  James was taking Fiona’s pack from her, and the weaver had acted against him. That made sense. But again, why turn him to stone when he’d be of more use bitten? His mate would know that he was bitten, I thought. And then I had a terrible thought. What if he had not bitten James—because he had bitten someone else?

  Oh. Oh no.

  He had bitten someone else. Not Li Qiang, not Kent or Nonnie. I would know if it were one of them; I was pretty confident that I could read the signs. He had bitten either Fiona or her mate. And I was betting on her mate. And that meant—

  “He can talk now,” said Adam sounding tired.

  One enemy at a time, I told myself firmly, squelching panic as far down as I could. This was a chance, possibly my only chance, to send our unwelcome visitor back to Underhill.

  Kelly and Luke pulled Ben up to his knees so he was looking at me. Adam kept hold of the chain.

  “Mercy,” Ben croaked, his eyes terrified. Because he’d known all along what I’d just understood. It hadn’t been the smoke weaver kicking the bejeebers out of Adam’s SUV. It had been Ben, desperate to convey the information we all equally desperately needed.

  “I know,” I said. “I just figured it out.”

  Adam frowned at me and I shook my head. It didn’t matter because there was nothing to be done until this was finished.

  “We’re here now, Ben. Now we have to do it this way or it will be an even bigger disaster.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Hurry.”

  “Smoke weaver,” I said. “I have a bargain.”

  Bargains, properly made, Ariana’s e-mail had read, are complicated things.

  “Bargains must be made,” he said. His voice was Ben’s, but it was not Ben.

  “If you come here, in your own—”

  “Blood and bone,” supplied Aiden.

  “Blood and bone,” I said, trusting him. “You may bite me once to test your power against mine. You in your most powerful form.”

  I was guessing that this was a factor. What bit Stefan had been much bigger than the rabbit who bit Ben. If the rabbit had been enough, why would the weaver trade up to bite Stefan at nearly the same time and place? Stefan was a very old vampire and a power in his
own right among his kind. Ben might be a beloved member of our pack, but his actual age was very close to my own, and he was pretty far down the pack structure in power. Stefan was much tougher prey than Ben.

  “If I win?”

  “Then I am yours,” I told him.

  He snorted. “What then the incentive? I could come upon you when you least expect it and have the same result.”

  Could he? I wondered. Why hadn’t he, then? But it is important when dealing with immortal creatures to not allow them to distract you from your goal.

  “Ask me what happens should you lose,” I told the smoke weaver.

  “What happens if I lose?” he asked.

  “Because I have defeated your magic once before,” I said, “it is only fair that I should pay you a penalty for the opportunity to make a bargain where the odds are not in your favor.”

  Above all else, a proper bargain is balanced. I hoped that I had judged it correctly.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What would you?” I asked.

  “Answer three questions,” he said.

  I pretended to consider it.

  “I will answer one question because you come here where I am,” I told him. “I will tell you one true thing because I have already withstood your bite once.”

  He stared at me. “Why do you bargain?”

  “Fair question,” Aiden said.

  “It is important to know if your bite at fullest power will affect me—or else I will always be worried that you will sneak up behind me in the dark.” True—but not the answer to his question.

  Flattered, he smiled. It was Ben’s face, but it was not Ben’s smile. “I come,” he said.

  And then Ben went limp in Kelly’s and Luke’s arms, and he began, brokenly, to swear. He looked up at me once, and I shook my head. It would take too long to explain—and at this point there was no good to be had telling the others. The weaver knew that we’d left our vulnerable alone in our home with only one protector—because Ben knew we’d left our vulnerable alone in our home with only one protector. And what Ben knew, the weaver knew, and what the weaver knew—Fiona and her mate knew.

  Joel was home. That would have to be enough.