River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(16)
Author: Patricia Briggs

Multnomah is the most impressive, but there are dozens of waterfalls on Larch Mountain, and we spent most of the day hiking the trails that webbed the mountainside from one falls to another. Since it was a nice day in the middle of summer, there were a lot of other people doing the same thing.

I didn’t mind the company, and I didn’t think Adam did, either. It felt like we were a friendly party of strangers, drawn together by the extraordinary beauty of water dropping in white sheets from rocky cliffs. There was a sense of awe that connected us all, bringing us together. The ties were not as real as the pack bonds, but it felt like the beginnings of the same thing. It was magic, just a little of it, built of fair weather and joy.

That feeling of belonging to something greater than myself was the gift Adam gave to me.

My whole life I’d been an outsider: first a coyote raised in a pack of werewolves, then a supernatural outsider in my mother’s mundane household, finally an outsider who had too many secrets to really have friends. I was good at appearing to fit in, so no one really took notice of me.

Until Adam. With Adam beside me, I felt like I belonged, like he was my connection to the rest of the world. And because of him, I could be just one of these happy hikers who were out to enjoy themselves. I shook off the faint shadow that recalling my vision had left upon me. Indian or not, coyote or human, I wasn’t alone anymore.

Some of the trails were easy, even handicap accessible. Not too far from Multnomah, those all went away, and the fun started in earnest. The top of the mountain is a little more than four thousand feet above the trailhead, and not much of that climb is gentle.

I HEARD THE CRYING BEFORE I SAW THEM. THINKING someone was in trouble, I broke into a jog up the trail, and Adam ran behind me.

"Honey, I can’t carry you." The woman’s voice was on the edge of tears. "I just can’t. You have to be a big boy and help me, Robert."

There followed a boy’s voice, unintelligible to me and interspersed with sobs.

Around a bend in the trail we came upon two very upset people. A frazzled woman in her forties and a boy with a tear- and dirt-streaked face.

"Hey," I said. "Sounds pretty rough. What can we do to help?"

She started to refuse help–and then her eyes fell on Adam and lit up with avarice. I sympathized with her entirely–but was happier when I realized it was the strength of his back she was excited about and not his pretty face.

Her son was not nearly as excited as his mother. Robert, his mother informed us, was eight, but he had Down’s syndrome and was as wary of strangers as most two-year-olds. He wasn’t happy about the idea of Adam hauling him down the mountain to the parking lot.

While his mother tried to reason with him, Adam got down on one knee and looked the boy in the eye. He didn’t say anything at all. But after almost a full minute, the boy nodded, and when Adam stood up, he climbed onto Adam’s back without another protest. He still wasn’t happy about it, but he knew who was in charge.

"Well," said Robert’s mother, flabbergasted.

"Adam’s good at giving orders," I told her truthfully. "Even without saying anything."

So Adam carried one very tired and cranky eight-year-old boy who had a sprained ankle down the trail while the boy’s even-more-tired mother thanked him all the way.

"I didn’t know it would be so steep," the boy’s mother said to me, when Adam stretched his legs a little and got ahead of us. I thought it was to stop her incessant thanks, but maybe I was being uncharitable.

"Robert was so tired of being in the car. Eugene is still a long way, and I thought it might be nice if he ran off some energy; then he would sleep the rest of the way. I hope your young man doesn’t hurt himself. Robert weighs almost eighty pounds."

"Don’t worry," I assured her. "Adam was in the army. He can carry an eighty-pound pack down the mountain. That’s also why he knows the difference between a twisted ankle, a sprained ankle, and a break."

I wasn’t going to tell her that he was a werewolf who could probably carry us all down if he could figure out a good way to make a manageable bundle of us. Adam was out to the public, but neither Robert nor his mother looked like people who could deal with werewolves at this point in their trip. The army part was true–they didn’t need to know that his army life was back in the Vietnam era.

"Get his ankle X-rayed anyway," advised Adam, who’d had no trouble hearing us. "I’m not a doctor, and sprains can be tricky."

By the time we made it down to the parking lot, Robert had recovered except for an exaggerated limp. His mother had lost the desperate edge to her voice. She thanked us again, and Robert gave Adam a wet kiss on his cheek.

"My hero," I told Adam, as they drove away. "You done here? Or would you mind going back up again?"

To my intense pleasure, Adam and I hiked for another couple of hours, then ate in Hood River. I’d never spent so much time with him without interruption. Here, there was no other demand on either of us.

I loved it. Loved watching the alertness fade and the strain of taking care of the pack, of me, of his daughter, of his business just wash away from his face and his body.

Usually, Adam looked like a man well into his thirties–though werewolves don’t age at all. By the time we returned to the campground, he’d lost ten years of care and looked not much older than his daughter. Laughter lit his face in a way that I’d never seen before.

I had done this. Me. Okay, me and God’s waterfalls and mountainside forest. Even though it had seemed I couldn’t get through a day without throwing him in the middle of my hot water. Even though he’d had to fight vampires, demons, and waterlogged fae because of me. Even though he’d had to fight his own pack, I was good for Adam.

I’d seen him ticked off, in pain, in sorrow. It was indescribably better to see him happy.

"What?" he asked, finishing the second of his nine-ounce steaks, medium rare. "Why are you looking at me that way?"

The trendy little restaurant that occupied the old Victorian intimidated me a little, not that I’d let anyone, including Adam, see it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything, except possibly my mother, intimidate Adam. But it was more than that.

He fit here. He’d fit out running around in the trails–and packing the little boy down the mountainside. For someone like me, who’d had to fight to make my own place because I didn’t fit anywhere, he was … Well, the truth of the matter was that he fit me, too.

Though, from their sideways looks, a lot of the rather affluent diners eating there obviously didn’t think so. Adam might be going casual in jeans and a T-shirt, but he still looked like he just stepped off a modeling job. I looked like I’d been hiking all day even though I’d pulled the leaves out of my hair in the restaurant bathroom.