River Marked (37 page)

My ears started to work about then, and I realized that there was a battle taking place behind me. I heard Adam’s baleful, softest growl, the one he uses only when he is beyond angry. The power of his rage lit my soul with its singular goal: none of the otterkin would survive this night.

He was awake, and that meant I was safe. I started to turn over, but there must have been something really wrong with my leg because the moment I tried to move it, I passed out again.

When I opened my eyes again, I was looking at a dead otter instead of a dead man. His blood was still warm, so I couldn’t have been out of it for too long. There was no sound behind me, but I knew better than to try to turn over.

“Adam?” I asked. My voice was weak and had this annoying quiver in it. When no one responded, I didn’t ask again. Exhaustion should have made me numb, but I hurt too much for that. I should have been triumphant, but I hurt too much for that, too.

For a bare instant, I was afraid that the otterkin had somehow hurt him. I
reached
for the bond between us with all of my heart—and found him nearby, changing from wolf to man. Relieved, I settled in to wait for him, absorbing his fear for me, his rage, and his love with something approaching euphoria. If I could feel all of that, I wasn’t dead, and that seemed as remarkable an accomplishment as I’d ever achieved.

I MUST HAVE SLEPT FOR A LITTLE BECAUSE THE BLOOD under my cheek had cooled and there were gentle hands running over me.

“Adam,” I said. “You need to get some clothes on before those police officers get down here.” I’d been hearing their sirens approaching for a few minutes.

“Shh,” he told me. And as if a curtain had been drawn back, I could feel his feverish need to make sure I was okay. He’d sounded so calm, so sane—when he was none of those things.

“Please?”
He needed something to help him, or he was going to kill anyone who came within a dozen feet of me. Sometimes the thought had occurred to me that Adam dressed so civilized in his silk shirts and hand-tailored suits as a shield against the wildness within him.

Besides, if the police showed up to find Adam naked, they were going to have some sort of strong reaction—and Adam needed everyone to be as calm as possible.

He hesitated.

“I’m okay,” I told him. “Really I am.” I tried to move, then rethought what I’d said. “Okay. I hurt, and I think my leg is broken. And maybe my hand. But I’m not going to bleed to death, and I think we’ll have an easier time with the police and the FBI and whoever else is about to descend upon us if you are wearing jeans.”

“I don’t want to leave you here,” he said. “And I’m not moving you without a more careful look.”

“If you can’t put jeans on and be back here in under a minute, I’d be surprised,” I told him. Then I had a bright idea. “I don’t want anyone but me seeing you naked,” I told him, a little surprised that it was the truth. “Not when I can’t defend my claim.” It was stupid, and I knew it—but I also knew he’d understand.

“Damn it, Mercy,” he said—and then he was running.

I found myself smiling as I heard the door of the trailer open and realized I was smiling into the face of the otterkin whose eyes were clouded with death and whose blood made the ground sticky under my face. Tomorrow, I’d have nightmares about that, maybe. But tonight, he was dead, and I wasn’t. That was good enough for me.

It was a good thing the otterkin apparently turned back into otters when they died. If the police had come here and found six human bodies, we might have had a lot of trouble. The walking stick dug into my ribs, and I tugged it out from under me, regarding it soberly.

I’d figure out what I’d done to the walking stick in time. How bad could it be? The oakman had used it to kill a vampire, and it hadn’t changed. Whatever the walking stick had become, it couldn’t be as bad as the river devil.

THE REST OF THAT NIGHT WAS KIND OF FUZZY.

Adam, dressed only in a pair of jeans, examined me carefully to make sure I hadn’t damaged anything that moving would make worse. Then he picked me up and carried me over to the camp chairs, where he’d laid out one of the blankets to bundle me up in. He called his office and had them remotely open the gate and let in the cops—who were gathered outside the gate like hornets at their nest.

He was cleaning my face, very gently, when the police came in and all sorts of official cars drove to us.

Adam did the talking, implying a lot of not-quite-true things without ever lying. Everyone got pretty tense when Adam introduced himself as the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack. But they seemed to find it perfectly acceptable to hear that a few people believed that the recent spate of deaths by the river were not the work of a human serial killer but of a real monster.

In the interest of privacy, he told them, he couldn’t reveal who called him in.

One of the sheriff’s men murmured, “When I first met him, he was with Jim Alvin and Calvin Seeker.” From his words, I was pretty sure he was the one who’d given us a ride back to our campground when we’d found Benny, but I could only look out of one eye at this point, the other having swollen shut.

At the sound of Jim’s name, the local cops all looked wise and quit asking questions. One of them murmured, “Native American medicine man,” to the FBI agents, and suddenly no one asked Adam any more questions about why we were here. Apparently, no one wanted to create an incident with the Yakama Nation.

The less the officials knew about magic, fae otterkin, and Coyote, the more likely they would be to attribute all the deaths to a prehistoric creature—I’d heard one of the FBI say that phrase when talking on his cell phone to someone—and go home. More important to me at this point, they would let me go home, too.

I closed my good eye, and when I opened it, Adam had a cup of hot cocoa and was making me drink it. I fussed at him for waking me up until I got the first mouthful down. It tasted really good, and it was hot.

“Where’s everyone else?” I asked when I was done because it looked as though we were alone.

“Down staring at the river devil.” Adam set the mug aside and kissed me gently on the forehead. “They got pretty excited when they realized it was still just lying there. They have about three minutes before I take you to the emergency room.”

He was holding on to civilization by the skin of his teeth. A proper mate would be meek and subservient until he recovered.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” I whined. I didn’t want to move for at least a hundred years now that I was finally warm. If I didn’t move, I didn’t hurt. Much.

“You don’t get a choice.” His voice was oh-so-calm, but I could feel the huge storm that lay behind all that control.

“I killed the nasty monster. I think I should get to say no,” I told him. To my embarrassment, tears welled in my eyes. I had to blink fast to make them go away. I was done, no reserves left at all. I just couldn’t bear any more tonight.

“You are in shock,” he said grimly. “You need stitches in half a dozen places, and your leg is broken. Where do you think you should be going?”

“Home?”

He sighed, leaned forward, and rested his forehead on mine for a moment. “I’ll take you home tomorrow,” he promised. “Tonight, you’re going to the emergency room.”

THEY CUT MY OLD SWIMMING SUIT OFF ME AT THE hospital, where a tired-eyed female doctor and a pair of nurses (one of them a man) scrubbed, stitched, stapled, and otherwise abused my body. I made them leave Adam’s dog tags on my neck. The doctor
and
both nurses flirted shamelessly with Adam even though he was now wearing a shirt and shoes with his jeans. But Adam didn’t seem to notice, so that was okay.

By the time the sun rose, I had a bright pink cast on my leg and orders to have it checked over by an orthopedic doctor ASAP. The tibia was certainly broken, so was my kneecap, and the X-rays also showed a suspicious-looking shadow on my ankle. I had more stitches than a Raggedy Ann doll and hands wrapped up like mummies. Not only was my right hand broken, but both hands were sliced, diced, and burned. I had two black eyes. The first was the remnant of the fight in Wal-Mart. I had no idea when the second one happened. Maybe it was when the river devil landed on me after she was dead, or before that, when she was flopping around. I didn’t feel it when it happened, and I wasn’t feeling it anymore because I also had the best drugs in the known universe. I was very happy and didn’t care much that my leg still ached. It wasn’t just the drugs that made me happy; the river devil’s mark was gone.

Once I quit hurting, Adam lost the soft edge in his voice that worried me so much, and his eyes darkened until they approached their usual color. Of course, once I quit hurting, I also quit worrying about Adam losing control and killing someone he’d feel bad about later.

“Hey,” I asked Adam, as he took the paperwork the nurse handed him, “is this the hospital they took Benny to?”

So Adam rolled me through the hospital in a wheelchair to go visit Benny. When we got to his room, Benny was sleeping deeply in his bed, a tired-looking woman was drowsing in a tired-looking chair, and Calvin was sitting in the wide windowsill staring out at the dawn.

One of the wheels on the chair had a squeak; it caught Calvin’s attention. He turned his head, then darn near fell off the window.

“What happened to you?” he asked. Then, his expression lightening, he said fiercely, “Did you do it?”

“We are minus one monster,” I said, accidentally waking the woman in the chair—and Benny, too.

“Pain meds,” murmured Adam in explanation of something. I think it was the giggling. “As you can see, taking out the monster was a close-run thing.”

“Tell me,” said Benny.

So I did. At some point—near where I was trying to climb up the river devil, I think—Adam sat on the floor next to the chair and leaned his forehead against my thigh. There was another chair in the room, so I wasn’t quite sure why he was sitting on the floor. The drugs had fuzzed our bond, so it took me a moment to feel the sick fear that racked him.

“Walking stick?” asked Calvin, distracting me from Adam’s distress.

I blinked at him. I couldn’t remember if the walking stick was supposed to be a secret or not.

“It’s an old fae artifact that attached itself to her while she was risking her neck to save a fae she knows,” Adam muttered, and I could tell he wasn’t happy about remembering me trying to save Zee, either.

“He was a friend,” I reminded him.

“She does stuff like this all the time?” asked Calvin, looking at Adam with respect.

Adam lifted his head, and his eyes were yellow again—but his voice was only a little rough. “To be fair, it’s usually not her fault. She doesn’t start things.”

“But it looks like she finishes them,” said the woman holding Benny’s hand. I was going to jump out on a long limb and assume that she was his wife. I must have said that aloud because she nodded. “Yes. I am. I have to thank you and your husband for saving Benny.”