Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12

by Patricia Briggs

  But I had seen his wolf fading, and I worried. The pack was uneasy, though no violence broke out. Adam still would not open our bond. But he put back on some of the weight he had lost and he did not seem to be getting worse, so I bided my time. I had a date circled on the calendar—and if matters did not change, I was going to have another conversation with Bran.

  A month went by. Jesse started school and began looking for an apartment. Aiden started school, too.

  We enrolled him in sixth grade, which was a compromise. He would look younger than most of his schoolmates but not so much so as to be an outcast. Tutoring by Jesse and the pack had brought his math skills up to high school level, but his reading skills were below sixth-grade level. The translation spell did not help him read or write in English.

  We had none of the paperwork for him, but Adam and I sat down with the school district superintendent and told him the whole story, a heavily edited version of the whole story. We didn’t tell him about the fire, just that we’d found Aiden in Underhill, where he’d been trapped for a very long time. We didn’t tell him that Aiden could burn the school down if he wanted to. I figured that most kids in sixth grade could burn down a school if they wanted to anyway—they would just have to work a little harder at it than Aiden would.

  The superintendent agreed that the circumstances were unusual and gave us a paperwork path to follow that would let Aiden start school. We managed to get it done (thanks to Kyle, who knew family law and could make it dance to his tune), and Aiden made it to the first day.

  There were a few rough patches the first month of school, but Aiden finally settled in with a group of computer gamers. He still had those moments that reminded me that he was centuries older than he appeared, but mostly he looked happy.

  I didn’t visit Stefan, but he called me twice and sounded nearly himself the second time. He said that the hope I’d given him was still helping him cope. I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “I didn’t want to lose you,” I said, finally.

  “Thank you,” he’d said. And he’d disconnected shortly thereafter.

  The pack killed a pair of ghouls who had tried to settle in near Lourdes Medical Center in Pasco. Apparently hospitals are a favorite hunting ground of ghouls. We helped Marsilia roust a couple of itinerant vampires who tried to set up shop in West Richland. Renny started coming to Sunday breakfasts with Mary Jo and struck up an unlikely friendship with Ben, our candidate for wolf most likely to end up in jail. Anna’s ghost waved at me whenever I drove past my old place. I didn’t wave back.

  Life happened. And we forgot to worry about Fiona.

  14

  I COULDN’T SLEEP.

  A heavy arm wrapped around my shoulders.

  “Feeling restless?” The growl in Adam’s voice made my toes curl—they knew what that roughness meant and they liked it.

  So did I.

  “Yes,” I answered, my own voice a purr.

  “I can help with that,” he promised. And boy did he.

  His efforts were above and beyond to the point that when his phone rang in the middle of the night, I only woke up long enough to hear a bit of the conversation.

  “—false alarm, probably, sir, cameras don’ t—”

  There was no stress in Adam’s employee’s voice and it didn’t sound urgent, so I went back to sleep.

  I woke up when Adam patted my butt. I cracked my eye open suspiciously and he laughed.

  “Not waking you up for that again—not that it wasn’t fun. But we have some equipment problems. The alarms at the garage are going off again, though the cameras aren’t showing anything.”

  The system at my garage had been developing quirks over the last couple of weeks. His IT people couldn’t run it down closer than “an intermittent glitch.” Adam had finally ordered a whole new system, but it wouldn’t be in for a couple of weeks.

  “I’m going to check in on that, then drive out to work and give my people a surprise visit.” He did those to keep his people on their toes. And to let them know that he wasn’t asking them to do anything he wouldn’t do—because on his surprise visits, he’d sometimes pick a random pair of guards and do their patrols with them. Sure enough he continued, “I’ll be out most of the day. I have a couple of new people to torment.”

  I grunted at him.

  “Why don’t you sleep in this morning?” he said.

  “How is it that you are this cheerful?” I asked him plaintively. “You didn’t get any more sleep than I did.”

  “I am male,” he said, and wiggled his eyebrows like the villain from a B horror movie. “Sex is better than sleep.”

  “Go away,” I moaned, rolling over to bury my face in my pillow.

  He laughed and started to do that.

  “But kiss me first.”

  He rolled me back over and did that, too.

  When my alarm went off an hour later, I was really tempted to sleep in. Then I remembered that it was Saturday and I would be the only one at work.

  Jesse and her friends were going to a concert in Seattle. Adam had fretted about security—so Jesse had called Tad and invited him along as her “muscle.” Which was all well and good, but it left me alone to mind the shop. I could have asked Zee to come in, but he had a project of some sort going on and told me not to bother him for a couple of weeks.

  My official hours didn’t start until noon on Saturday, but I had some cars to finish up and a boatload of paperwork. After a recent IRS audit, I was religious about my paperwork. In the end, I owed them $452.00, which they had graciously rounded down from $452.34. But at one point, before I finally located a box of receipts where I’d used it to balance a transmission, they had claimed I owed them a little over six thousand dollars. Which meant, my accountant (Lucia) pointed out, if I could have found the other missing box, the government would probably have owed me money.

  So off to work I needed to go.

  I felt better after a shower and some painkiller to ease away the ache of repeated vigorous nighttime activity. I paused as I was brushing my teeth. I never used to have to resort to painkillers. Was I getting old? Or had Adam started to use sex to make up for the fact he was keeping our bond closed down?

  Hmm.

  When I got to the garage, it was still early enough that the lights in the parking lot were on. I waved to the camera and imagined Carlos or Butch—or Adam—waving back. The office, when I let myself in, smelled overwhelmingly of gasoline.

  I grimaced. Fuel odors were par for the course when running a garage—and at least gasoline was volatile and would clear pretty quickly once I opened the bay doors.

  I’d parked a ’62 Mercedes convertible in the garage last night for safekeeping, and I assumed that was where the fuel smell was coming from. It belonged to a local car collector, the prize of his collection, and it was in for its annual checkup. It wasn’t surprising that it had developed a fuel line problem. Even the best auto engineers in the world didn’t factor in better than a half century of use.

  It was a little odd that Adam hadn’t called me about it when he’d been here earlier to check the security system—but he knew I was planning on coming in early. And he knew that he’d left me short of sleep.

  I was smiling as I tucked my purse in the safe and locked it. The safe was on the floor under the counter and my back twinged as I stood up. I stretched, touched my toes, and the ache dissipated. The stiff muscles clinched it, though. I would start with finding the fuel line problem, and that would give me plenty of opportunity to work out any lingering stiffness before I started on paperwork.

  I turned on the stereo and found a soft-rock station. I hummed along with “Spirit in the Sky,” a song nearly as old as the ’62 Mercedes, as I opened the door to the bays.

  “Hello, Mercedes Thompson,” Fiona said. “We have some business to conduct.”

  She’d been waiting on the far side of the garage, where she had a clear shot at me. And she was standing in classic shooter position with—if I w
as not mistaken—Adam’s carry gun in her hands.

  I took a moment to assess the situation.

  A gas can had been overturned near the door, leaving a puddle of gasoline—designed to keep me from scenting an intruder. To keep Adam from realizing that he wasn’t alone, too. In the corner where the real brains of the security system lurked, Adam lay unmoving on the ground.

  He wasn’t dead, I told my panicking soul. I would know if he were dead.

  “If you cooperate,” she said, “I will not kill either of you today.

  “There is a chair,” she said. “Go sit down.”

  A couple of weeks ago I’d pulled one of the sturdy metal chairs from the office into the bays—I couldn’t remember offhand just why. She had set it in front of the lift in bay one. And on the ground around it were cuffs and chains that looked very businesslike.

  I glanced again at Adam—he was breathing.

  “Don’t worry, your mate is alive. He’ll stay that way if you follow my directions.” She wasn’t lying.

  “What did you do to him?” I asked.

  “Ketamine and silver,” she said. “A little trick I learned along the way.”

  “Gerry Wallace has a lot to answer for,” I said. Gerry had been the first to concoct a tranquilizer that would work on werewolves. But I felt a little better. The tranquilizer could be fatal if the silver concentration was too great. But Adam was an Alpha werewolf. It would take a lot of the tranquilizer to kill him.

  “Sit in the chair, Mercy.”

  If I did that, all of my options were gone.

  “The alarm glitches were you,” I said, to engage her in conversation.

  “There is a reason that ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ is a classic,” she answered. “I have a way with electronics.” She nodded toward the corner where Adam and the heart of the surveillance system lay. “The video is currently playing a loop—after it replayed a segment of Adam coming in and leaving from a few days ago. His people won’t know that there is anything wrong until they don’t see you come in at noon.”

  “But you needed more than just to game the security system,” I said. “This is not only your taking advantage of an opportunity. You had to watch us, track our habits—without anyone in a pack of werewolves noticing.” I put a little admiration in my voice.

  There is very little that arrogant people like more than an appreciative audience. At the moment, I didn’t really care about reasons or methods; I was trying to buy time. I didn’t know what I would do with it yet—that depended upon her and whatever opportunities she gave me.

  “That was trickier,” she acknowledged. “And more boring. Your house is supposed to be the home of a werewolf pack—so why are you teaching some kid to read? If I had to listen to another hour of ‘H is for horse,’ I’d have to shoot someone. Do you know that you have a baby vampire who likes to watch your house?”

  “Yes,” I told her.

  I’d thought she had watched us, but she’d done one better. She had bugged our house. Those lessons with Aiden took place in the kitchen, the heart of the home. But she hadn’t managed to bug all of it, I didn’t think. We didn’t talk about Wulfe a lot because we didn’t want to worry the pack, but he made sure that he didn’t go unnoticed. Two days ago, I know that Adam and I had talked about Wulfe in our bedroom. If she had overheard us—or come face-to-face with him—she would never have referred to him as a “baby vampire.”

  After considering my words carefully, I said, “For the past few months we have had the government trying to bug our house on a regular basis. Adam does a daily sweep for bugs. How did you manage?”

  I didn’t mention the fact that there were werewolves in and out of the house at all hours. She could not have done it without magic—and I didn’t remember her being able to use magic. Bran would have mentioned that when I talked to him. And magic … magic worried me. I thought about how she had called me by my married name that afternoon at Kelly’s house. She had known me by my maiden name. If she and her group of lost wolves were searching for a pack to take over, I was not important except as a weakness to exploit. But, in retrospect, I realized she had looked at me like someone addressing a target.

  “Not all listening devices are electronic,” she told me. “I know a witch who specializes in surveillance.”

  Suddenly I was a lot more concerned about why Fiona was still here than I had been a few seconds ago. I reevaluated our interactions with Fiona and her pack, adding in witches, and some patterns started to make sense. A wolf trying to take over a pack would not make an alliance with a fae creature—which was why none of the rest of her wolves had known about the smoke weaver. Witchcraft explained why the goblins hadn’t found Fiona or her people. Bran had told me that Fiona was selling her services to the highest bidder—and the witches certainly had reason to want revenge. Or worse. I had a bad feeling about why Adam and I weren’t dead.

  Fiona smiled at me; her expression would have been friendly if I hadn’t been able to see her eyes. “Now that you have finished flattering me, go sit in that chair or I shoot Adam in the head. In that case, I’ll have to kill you immediately, too, or risk getting caught by your pack. If you cooperate, I will not kill him. I know you can hear that I’m telling the truth. Now, you have three seconds. One …”

  I sat in the chair. But not because she had started counting. Adam was coming around—I felt the draw on the pack bonds as he started fighting off the effects of the tranq.

  I pulled the chair sideways a little so that it gave me a better view of Adam. Hopefully she’d think that was the only reason I’d done it. But it meant that while she was dealing with me, her back would be mostly toward him. I wanted her attention on me, though I didn’t think she’d ignore him entirely. If he moved, she’d react. But there was a good chance that she would trust the drug. That tranq was nasty business—but Adam had encountered it before.

  “Funny,” she said. “But I don’t care which direction you face.”

  I raised my eyebrows and turned the chair to face Adam directly.

  “Put on the ankle chains,” she said.

  The ankle cuffs were nylon and looked to be standard-issue. With them on, I could use my legs with the same grace as the average mermaid on land. I deliberately fumbled with them to give Adam more time. The power that he was pulling made me dizzy. That draw alone was going to alert the pack that something was wrong. Almost as soon as I thought that, Adam’s phone rang. Fiona’s time had just been limited; all I had to do was keep her occupied until someone figured out where we were.

  “And now the wrist cuffs.”

  She had used two old-fashioned metal handcuffs, attaching each one to opposite chair legs. The bracing on the chair legs ensured that the cuff wouldn’t just slide off if I tipped the chair upside down.

  She knew I wasn’t a werewolf. Nylon cuffs wouldn’t hold a werewolf at all. The metal handcuffs would last longer—and really tick off the werewolf who broke them, because breaking them would hurt. She knew that I could change into a coyote. She had called me “Bran’s little coyote pet.” But she didn’t understand what I was, because otherwise she would know that the cuffs, any cuffs designed to hold a human, were worse than useless. Maybe she thought that it would take me a while to change shapes—the way it took a werewolf time.

  As soon as I had the handcuffs on, she walked up to me. She bent down to tighten the cuffs on my ankles. Then, smiling, she pulled a collar out and wrapped it around my neck. It fit tightly enough that it was decidedly uncomfortable. I heard chain rattle as she attached that to the back of the chair. Unlike the cuffs, the collar would hold me, coyote or no, so maybe she hadn’t underestimated me as much as I thought she had.

  “Coyote’s daughter, Kent told me,” she said. “That explains a lot—like why Bran decided out of the goodness of his heart to let bleeding-heart Bryan adopt you. I wonder what Coyote did for Bran for the Marrok to make a deal like that.”

  I was pretty sure that it was my mother who had pushed B
ran into accepting responsibility for me. But Fiona didn’t know my mother, so I could see why she would look for someone else. Bran wasn’t known for his soft heart.

  “Kent?” I asked.

  “He’s one of mine,” she told me. “Witchbound to my service like Sven was.” She gave me a thoughtful look that I’d seen on other people’s faces before. So I had my abs tight when she punched me in the stomach.

  It hurt anyway. But she was a werewolf; if she had wanted to, she could have killed me with that blow.

  “Hardesty family paying you?” I asked when I could breathe. I didn’t want it to be them, especially when Fiona seemed interested in keeping me alive. I had close-up knowledge of the kinds of things black witches did with living victims, and I didn’t know of any witches blacker than the ones in the Hardesty family.

  Fiona smiled. “I understand you had a run-in with them recently. They are very unhappy with you. I might have been offered a reward should you die and a bigger reward for a live capture. They don’t know what you are, Mercy—I haven’t told them yet. But they know that you were the key in the deaths of their people—and they think that you might have been the one responsible for destroying a treasure that had taken them generations to build.”

  Zombies.

  “Charles will hunt you down,” I told her, and she flinched. She was afraid of Charles.

  She should have been afraid of Adam. He had quit drawing power from the pack.

  “The witches pay well enough that I can hide for generations if I need to—and they have promised protection, too.” She gave me a sisterly smile. “But you and I know how far to trust the word of a black witch. I have some value for them, too; they like to play with werewolves. Too much to ever put myself in their power.”

  If she had let them witchbond people to her, she was already in their power. I didn’t exactly know what she meant by the term, but I knew witches.

  “Kent told you what happened with the smoke weaver?” I asked her. It didn’t matter to me, but I needed to keep her attention on me. “Bastard. I trusted him.” True enough to keep her from reading a lie. But the bite in my voice was fake—I didn’t want her knowing that I was wasting time.