Moon Called (Mercy Thompson #1)(31)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"I was in the kitchen, so I don’t know exactly what happened, but from the sounds, I’d say they shot him as soon as he opened the door."

"Which was stupid," commented Samuel. "They’d know you had to hear the shots-even a tranq gun makes a pretty good pop."

Adam started to shrug-then stopped with a pained expression. "Damned if-excuse me, Mercedes-I’ll be darned if I know what they were thinking."

"They didn’t kill him on purpose, did they?" I said. I’d been thinking, too. A gun with silver bullets is a much more certain thing than a dart full of experimental drugs.

"I don’t think so," Samuel agreed. "It looked like a massive allergic reaction to the silver."

"There was silver in the dart Mercedes found? Just like Charles thought?" asked Adam.

"Yes," said Samuel. "I’ve sent the dart off to the lab along with a sample of Mac’s blood for proper analysis, but it looks to me as though they combined silver nitrate with DMSO and Special K."

"What?" I asked.

"Special K is Ketamine," Adam said. "It’s been used as a recreational drug for a while, but it started out as an animal tranquilizer. It doesn’t work on werewolves. Silver nitrate is used to develop film. What’s DMSO?"

"Silver nitrate is a convenient way to get silver in a solution," Samuel said. "It’s used to treat eye infections, too-though I wouldn’t recommend it for a werewolf."

"I’ve never heard of a werewolf with an eye infection," I said, though I understood his point.

He smiled at me, but continued to talk to Adam. "DMSO-Dimeythyl Sulfoxide. It has a lot of odd properties, but the one of most interest here is that it can carry other drugs with it across membranes."

I stared at the road ahead of me and put my right hand in front of the heater to warm it. The seals on my windows needed replacing, and the heater wasn’t keeping up with the Montana air. Funny, I didn’t remember being cold on the way over. No room for simple discomfort when you are trying to save someone, I guess.

"There was something in chem lab my freshman year," I said. "We mixed it with peppermint oil and put a finger in it-I could taste peppermint."

"Right," said Samuel. "That’s the stuff. So take DMSO and mix it with a silver solution, and presto, the silver is carried throughout the werewolf’s body, poisoning as it goes so that the tranquilizer, in this case, Ketamine, goes to work without interference from the werewolf metabolism that would normally prevent the drug from having any effect at all."

"You think Mac died from the silver rather than an overdose of Ketamine?" asked Adam. "They only shot him twice. I took at least four hits, maybe more."

"The more recent exposure you have to silver, the worse the reaction," said Samuel. "I’d guess that if the boy hadn’t spent the last few months in their tender care being dosed up with silver, he’d have made it just fine."

"Obviously the silver nitrate and the Ketamine are relatively easily obtainable," Adam said after a while. "What about this DMSO?"

"I could get it. Good stuff is available by prescription-I’d bet you could buy it at any veterinary supply, too."

"So they’d need a doctor?" I asked.

But Samuel shook his head. "Not for the veterinary supply. And I’d expect you could get it fairly easily from a pharmacy, too. It’s not one of the drugs they’d track carefully. I’d expect they could make as much of their cocktail as they wanted to without much trouble."

"Great." Adam closed his eyes, possibly envisioning an invading army armed with tranquilizer dart guns.

"So they killed Mac," I said when it became apparent that Adam wasn’t going to continue. "Then what happened?"

"I came charging out of the kitchen like an idiot, and they darted me, too." Adam shook his head. "I’ve grown used to being damn near bulletproof-served me right. Whatever they gave me knocked me for a loop, and when I woke up, I was locked up, wrist and ankle in cuffs. Not that I was in any shape to do anything. I was so groggy I could barely move my head."

"Did you see who they were?" I asked. "I know one of them was the human who accompanied the werewolf I killed at the garage. I smelled him in Jesse’s room."

Adam shifted on the bench seat, pulling a little against the seat belt.

"Adam." Samuel’s voice was quiet but forceful.

Adam nodded and relaxed a little, stretching out his neck to release the build-up of tension. "Thank you. It’s harder when I’m angry. Yes, I knew one of them, Mercedes. Do you know how I became a werewolf?"

The question seemed to come from left field-but Adam always had a reason for everything he said. "Only that it was during Vietnam," I answered. "You were Special Forces."

"Right," he agreed. "Long-range recon. They sent me and five other men to take out a particularly nasty warlord-an assassination trip. We’d done it before."

"The warlord was a werewolf?" I asked.

He laughed without humor. "Slaughtered us. It was one of his own people who killed him, while he was eating poor old McCue." He shut his eyes, and whispered, "I can still hear him scream."

We waited, Samuel and I, and after a moment Adam continued. "All the warlord’s people ran and left us alone. At a guess they weren’t certain he was really dead, even after he’d been beheaded. After a while-a long while, though I didn’t realize that until later-I found I could move. Everyone was dead except Spec 4 Christiansen and me. We leaned on each other and got out of there somehow, hurt badly enough that they sent us home: Christiansen was a short-timer, anyway, and I guess they thought I was mostly crazy-raving about wolves. They shipped us out of there fast enough that none of the docs commented about how quickly we were recovering."

"Are you all right?" asked Samuel.

Adam shivered and pulled the blankets closer around himself. "Sorry. I don’t talk about this often. It’s harder than I expected. Anyway, one of my army buddies who’d come back to the States a few months earlier heard I was home and came to see me. We got drunk-or at least I tried. I’d just started noticing that it took an awful lot of whiskey to do anything, but it loosened me up enough that I told him about the werewolf.

"Thank goodness I did because he believed me. He called in a relative and between them they persuaded me that I was going to grow furry and kill something the next full moon. They pulled me into their pack and kept everyone safe until I had enough control to do it myself."