Moon Called (Mercy Thompson #1)(59)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"David Christiansen."

"Yes." It didn’t surprise me that the Marrok would know who I was talking about. Bran managed to give the impression that he knew every werewolf anywhere personally. Maybe he did.

"David works with humans," Bran said slowly. "But not with other werewolves. I wouldn’t have thought he would ever be a part of a plot that included rape-Changes like that experienced by your Alan MacKenzie Frazier. Still it is something to consider. I’ll call Charles and see what he makes of it."

"He’s still in Chicago?"

"Yes. You were right; it was Leo. Apparently his salary wasn’t enough to support the kind of living he wanted to enjoy." Bran’s voice sounded neutral. "He didn’t know the wolf he sold the young victims like your Alan MacKenzie Frazier to-there were six of them altogether. He didn’t know what they wanted the young ones for, either. Stupid of him. The Alpha’s second is the one who set up the deal, but Charles is having difficulty getting any more information out of the second because he has left town. It may take us a while to find him. The rest of the pack seems to have been unaware of what was going on, but we are breaking them up anyway."

"Bran? If you hear from Samuel or Adam, will you tell them to call me?"

"I’ll do that," he said gently and hung up.

Chapter 13

I was in no mood for working on the Beetle after talking to Bran, so I closed up shop and went home. Bran had thought my ideas had merit, which was all well and good, except it did not answer the tightness in my belly that told me I should have gotten a call by now. My nose had told me that Adam hadn’t found Jesse at the empty house in West Richland, but it didn’t tell me where they’d gone afterward.

I paused again on my porch at the smell of death that still lingered there. I decided Elizaveta Arkadyevna was punishing me for not telling her what was going on. I’d have to clean the porch myself or be reminded of Mac’s death every time I walked in my house for the next few months.

I opened the door, still thinking of Mac, and realized what else my senses had been trying to tell me a moment too late. All I had time to do was drop my chin so that the man who’d been standing behind the door didn’t get the chokehold he’d gone after, but his arm was still tight around my head and neck.

I twisted around sharply in his grip until I faced him, then threw everything I had into a short, sharp punch into the nerve center on the outside of the big muscle of his thigh. He swore, his grip loosened, and I pulled free and started fighting in earnest.

My style of karate, Shi Sei Kai Kan, was designed for soldiers who would be encountering multiple opponents-which was good because there were three men in my living room. One of them was a werewolf-in human form. I didn’t have time to think, only react. I got in some good hits, but it rapidly became apparent that these men had studied violence a lot longer than I.

About the time I realized the only reason I was still up and fighting was because they were being very careful not to hurt me, the werewolf hit me once, hard, square in my diaphragm, then, while I was gasping for air, tossed me on the floor and pinned me there.

"Broke my f-"

"Ladies present," chided the man who held me in an implacable grip that was as gentle as a mother holding her babe. His voice had the same soft drawl that sometimes touched Adam’s voice. "No swearing."

"Broke my freaking nose then," said the first voice dryly, if somewhat muffled-presumably by the broken nose.

"It’ll heal." He ignored my attempts to wriggle out of his hold. "Anyone else hurt?"

"She bit John-Julian," said the first man again.

"Love nip, sir. I’m fine." He cleared his throat. "Sorry, sir. It never occurred to me that she’d have training. I wasn’t ready."

"It’s water under the bridge now. Learn from it, boy," my captor said. Then he leaned down and, in a voice of power that vibrated down my spine, said, "Let us chat a little, hmm? The idea is not to hurt you. If you hadn’t struggled, you wouldn’t even have the bruises you do now. We could have hurt you much worse if we had wanted to." I knew he was right-but it didn’t make him my best friend.

"What do you want?" I asked in as reasonable a tone as I could manage, flattened, as I was, on the floor beneath a strange werewolf.

"That’s my girl," he approved, while I stared at the floor between my couch and end table, about two feet from my left hand, where Zee’s dagger must have fallen when I went to sleep last night.

"We’re not here to hurt you," he told me. "That’s the first thing you need to know. The second is that the werewolves who have been watching your house and the Sarge’s have been called off-so there’s no one to help you. The third is-" He stopped speaking and bent his head to take a deeper breath. "Are you a were? Not a werewolf. You don’t smell right for that. I thought it might just be the cat-never had a cat-but it’s you that smells like fur and the hunt."

"Grandpa?"

"It’s all right," the werewolf answered, "she’s not going to hurt me. What are you, girl?"

"Does it matter?" I asked. He’d called Adam "Sarge"-as in "Sergeant"?

"No," he said. He lifted his weight off me and released me. "Not in the slightest."

I rolled toward the couch, and grabbed the dagger, shaking it free of sheath and belt. One of the intruders started forward, but the werewolf held up a hand and the other man stopped.

I kept moving until I was crouched on the back of the couch, the dagger in my hand and my back to the wall.

The werewolf’s skin was so dark the highlights were blue and purple rather than brown. He knelt on the floor where he’d moved as soon as he let me up. He wore loose khaki pants and a light blue shirt. At another gesture, the two men backed up farther, giving me as much room as they could. They were lean and tough-looking and like enough to be twins. Like the werewolf, they were very dark-skinned. Between skin tone, general build, and that "Grandpa," I was betting that they were all related.

"You’re Adam’s army buddy," I told the werewolf, trying to sound relaxed, like it made me think he might be on my side, like I didn’t know that he’d been involved in the debacle at Adam’s house. "The one who was Changed with him."

"Yes’m," he said. "David Christiansen. These are my men. My grandsons, Connor and John-Julian." They nodded as he said their names. John-Julian was rubbing his shoulder where I’d gotten a good grip with my teeth, and Connor was holding a wad of tissue to his nose with one hand while the other held my Kleenex box.