River Marked (27 page)

The lady working the dressing rooms gave me a bored look, handed me a plastic “6” and a “1,” and sent me in. Apparently, they were out of “7”s.

The only other occupant of the rooms was a harried mother and her teenage daughter arguing about how tight the girl’s jeans were. They stood in the larger area in the center of two rows of small rooms in front of the big mirror.

“They are fine, Mom,” the girl said in the long-suffering tones used by put-upon teens everywhere, probably back to the dawn of time.

“You’ll sit down and the seat will split, just like happened to your aunt Sherry when we were in high school. She has never gotten over it.”

“Aunt Sherry is a . . . Well, anyway, I am not Aunt Sherry. These are mostly Lycra, Mom. They’re
supposed
to fit tight. Look.”

I squeezed past the girl, who was doing deep knee bends.

I found an empty room, then tuned them out. I don’t know about normal folks, but if I wanted to, I could have listened in on the conversations of everyone in the store. I’d had to learn early to ignore them or I’d have gone crazy. Adam paid
attention
to all that noise because he worried about safety, but I wasn’t worried enough to put up with the discomfort.

The first pair of jeans had a puzzling bulge halfway down my thigh on the left leg. I tried turning around to see if it was just my imagination, but the left-leg bulge stayed where it was.

The teenager and her mother had left the changing rooms when I went out to look in the bigger mirror, so I had the whole thing to myself. Unless I’d mysteriously gained a lump on the side of my thigh, there was a problem with these jeans.

I went back into my room and pulled them off. Then I checked in the smaller mirror to make sure that I
hadn’t
suddenly mutated. To my relief, without the jeans, my thighs looked like a matched pair. The river mark was still curled around my calf—I’d have to remember to ask Coyote if he could get rid of that one, too.

The second fit better, no odd bulges, and my butt didn’t look bigger than it ought to in them—but it had fake pockets on the front. I
use
my pockets. No-pocket jeans are only slightly less irritating than thong underwear.

The third pair didn’t fit as well as the second one had, but they had pockets that worked. I could live with them. If they bothered me too much, I’d just wear them to work until they were ripped and greasy enough I didn’t feel bad throwing them away.

I had fifteen minutes to pay and get out to the parking lot. I hung up the rejects and pulled my own pants on. I buttoned them just as something dropped onto my shoulders, knocking me to my knees. I caught a glimpse of a blade in the mirror and grabbed the hand that held it even as I fell.

I jerked my head back hard and pulled the hand forward at the same time—connecting with some body part that was also hard, a chin, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure. Her chin, because it was a woman’s body that had hit me. I slammed her wrist on the wooden bench along the back wall, and the brass-bladed knife fell out of her hand.

I dropped my hold on her, grabbed the knife, and tossed it back up through the hole in the ceiling she’d come from: I didn’t want to be caught with a knife in Wal-Mart. I was the wife of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack—knife fighting was not an acceptable activity. If she tried to crawl back up there and get it, I’d use the time to run out to the main store, where cameras could catch me defending myself against an armed foe.

“You leave her be,” she said. “Finders, keepers. She belongs to us.”

The river devil?
I thought, but I had no chance to ask her.

She ignored the knife and threw herself at me. I let her momentum pull me to my feet and carry us into the larger area between the changing rooms. The big mirror showed me her face—it was the odd woman who’d been staring at Adam and me the day before yesterday at the restaurant. I’d been right. She had been fae—more specifically water-type fae, because she smelled of it. Dollars to doughnuts, she was one of the otterkin.

She fought like an otter, too. Coming in close—inner circle—fast and furious, trying for my throat with fingernails and teeth. Fortunately for me, we were not in the water, and she was not an otter but a fae—though she smelled like both.

Glamour has never made sense to me. It is a kind of magic the fae use to change their appearance. According to Zee, the ability to use glamour is what makes a fae a fae instead of some other kind of thing that uses magic. Glamour is an illusion—but not. Because with glamour, a twenty-five-pound otter is a hundred-and-forty-pound woman.

Tactics that work really well for an otter don’t work as well for a human, not even a human with a knife—particularly since I have a brown belt in karate. I was
not
helpless. The thought that Adam would never again let me out without a keeper if I got hurt made me determined to win this fight.

In the couple of minutes we engaged, I ended up with a bunch of bruises—including what was going to be an awesome shiner from where she ran me into a doorknob—a split lip, and a bloody nose. On the other hand, I broke
her
nose, and while she grabbed it, I got a really good kick into her ribs. If she didn’t have a broken rib out of it, she had one or two cracked ones, which should slow her down some.

I heard the footsteps behind me and the flushed face of the formerly bored changing-room lady appeared. At the sight of us, she exclaimed,
“What’s going on here?”

The otterkin woman screamed—not in terror but in anger. Then she turned into an otter and ran up the wall into the ceiling and was gone.

As the fae woman’s scent faded from
here
to
was here
, I turned to the clerk. Her mouth was opened unattractively as she stared up at the ceiling.

“You don’t get paid enough to deal with this,” I told her firmly. I didn’t borrow authority from Adam for fear that it would worry him, but I know how it sounds and can imitate it when I have to.

“She’s gone and won’t be back.” I looked around, and except for a dent in the drywall where her knee had hit the wall, there wasn’t any extra damage. There was blood all over, but I was betting that Wal-Mart had cleaners to get all sorts of things out of their carpets.

I grabbed the jeans I wanted as well as the T-shirts. I put the darkest T-shirt up to wipe my nose. It hadn’t been a hard hit, and it had mostly stopped bleeding.

“I’ll just go pay for this,” I said. “You can put those other jeans back where they go, then call someone in to clean up.”

I walked out like I knew what I was doing and paid for the clothes—with cash so there was no awkward name-left-behind-at-the-scene-of-the-crime thing. The clerk was too occupied looking at my split lip to notice that one of the shirts was bloody. As I took the receipt, I noticed a general migration toward the changing room on the part of the employees. At least one of them looked old enough to be a person of authority.

I smiled at the clerk and tried to look innocent, grab my bags, and make a quick getaway.

“Honey,” said the cashier, who was half my age. “You get rid of that man. You don’t have to put up with being a punching bag.”

“It was a woman,” I told her. “And you are absolutely right.”

I walked briskly out of the store and kept going across the parking lot as I called Adam. “I saw a sandwich shop in the little mall above Wal-Mart,” I told him. “I’ll meet you there.”

“It’s a little early for lunch,” he said. We’d eaten breakfast just before he’d dropped me off at Wal-Mart.

“You’re a wolf,” I informed him. “You can eat anytime.”

“What did you do?”

I heard a siren and hoped that it wasn’t someone coming looking for me. I made my brisk walk a little brisker. “Got in a fight with my girlfriend, apparently.” I hung up before he could ask me anything else.

The nice lady at the sandwich shop had been happy to fill a plastic bag with ice and accepted my story about a jealous girlfriend with a sympathetic ear (I kept my wedding ring hidden). She made me two large chicken sandwiches, and I paid for them and a pair of juices.

When Adam drove up, I was watching the police cars at Wal-Mart—it must have been a slow day—with the ice bag wrapped in my new bloodstained black T-shirt. Bloodstains on a new black shirt were more a matter of texture and smell than color.

“I think we ought to go back to the camp,” I told him.

He pulled the ice down from my eye and took a good look before he let me put it back up again. Then he examined my hands, and brought my free hand up to his lips so he could kiss the bruises. He led me to the truck and buckled me in.

It was a good thing that there weren’t many cars in the parking lot, or he’d never have gotten the big truck back out of it. I never had that problem with my Rabbit.

He didn’t say anything, just drove the quarter of a mile toward the highway on-ramp in silence. I made it mostly to The Dalles before I broke.

“I didn’t know anyone wanted to kill me when I made you leave me alone.”

“I smelled fae,” he said neutrally—the sneak. That was why he’d kissed my knuckles.

“She jumped me in the changing room,” I told him reluctantly. I’d known after the doorknob hit my eye that I wasn’t going to be able to hide the fight from Adam. Not that I’d really been planning on keeping the attack secret; it had just been an option I’d wanted to keep open if I could. “I think it was one of the otterkin—and she was the weird lady from lunch the day before yesterday.”

“Did you leave the body?” he asked.

“No body,” I told him. “I wasn’t trying to kill her. And once I got rid of the knife, I was pretty sure she couldn’t kill me. She wasn’t any stronger than a normal human.” I thought a moment. “I don’t think so, anyway. As soon as the clerk came in, she glamoured back to otterkin and left through the ceiling. She might have used magic to get up there, but otters are pretty agile.”

He squeezed his nose. Then he laughed. “I guess you proved your point,” he told me. “You can take care of yourself.”

“I wonder why the otterkin are trying to kill me?” I said.

“I don’t think that we’ll call in the fae to help us against the river devil,” said Adam. “I think the chances are that they may come down on the wrong side.”

“You were thinking of asking the fae for
help
?” I squeaked. Help was even worse than a favor.

He gave me an exasperated look. “I said I wasn’t.”

“It sounded like you might have been before I was attacked.”

“You’re trying to distract me,” he said. “You don’t need to. I’m not going to yell at you because you were attacked—especially since you won the fight.”

“She ran away,” I said.

“Without accomplishing her purpose. That’s losing in my book. Especially since you got rid of her knife before she stuck it in you.”

I gave him a wary look, but he honestly didn’t appear upset.

“Mercy,” he said, “in a fair fight between near equals, I’ll back you every time. It’s the demons, vampires, and river devils I worry about, and I’m working on that.”

I could live with that if he could.

UNLIKE THE MARYHILL MUSEUM OR SHE WHO WATCHES, Stonehenge was a place I had been to many times over the years. It’s right on the way to my mom’s house in Portland. Sam Hill had been told that the henge at Salisbury had been used for human sacrifice and decided that it was a fitting memorial for the men who were sacrificed in World War I.

Adam and I parked the truck next to a deserted orchard down by the river and walked over hill and dale to the high place where Sam Hill’s conceit looked out over the gorge.

I never could decide if Stonehenge was beautiful, spiritual, or merely a roadside oddity. Certainly it was impressive—a massive exact-sized replica cast in concrete of a place half a world away.

The original Stonehenge took about sixteen hundred years to build. The one at Maryhill took a little more than ten years to complete. It is a monument to commemorate thirteen young men of Klickitat County who died in a war nearly a hundred years ago, a silent testament of a man who knew how to dream big, and, I’d been told, a magical collection site of great power to those who knew how to access it.

I’d always taken that last bit with a grain of salt. After all, I’d have thought a powerful place would have attracted witches or something nastier (and there is not a whole lot nastier than a black witch), and in all the years I’d been visiting, I’d never seen anything dangerous. The other reason I’d doubted was because I am pretty good at sensing magic—and it had never felt any more magical than my garage.

In the night, it was different.

The minute my foot landed on the flattened area around the monument, I could feel the pulse of magic under my feet. Adam sensed it, too—though werewolves don’t usually feel magic other than their own. He lifted his head and took a deep breath.