River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(25)
Author: Patricia Briggs

He had known my father.

Suddenly, antihistamine or no antihistamine, I wasn’t at all sleepy. But there was a disconnect between my tongue and the questions that were galloping through my head. I looked at Adam. His eyes were half-lidded, and his expression was neutral. His body language said, "Isn’t he interesting? Let’s see what he does."

The old man looked down at my leg and hissed. "That looks bad. River Devil is back for sure." He sat beside me and opened the purse that wasn’t a purse and pulled out a bundle wrapped in a silk scarf. He opened it up and began singing.

If you’ve never heard Native American music, it is hard to convey the feel of it. Sometimes there are words, but Gordon Seeker didn’t use any. The music flowed up from his chest and resonated in his sinuses–as had the music made by the dancing ghost of my father. Still singing, Gordon Seeker took out a homemade honeycomb wax candle and lit it. It looked as though he lit it with magic, but I can usually sense when someone uses magic. I didn’t see a match though I could smell sulfur.

I sniffed suspiciously and he grinned at me and I noticed he was missing one of his front teeth. Still singing, he held up his empty hand and closed his fingers. Then he opened the hand, and he held a burnt matchstick.

Then he pulled a segment of leaf out and held it to the candle. It was dry and lit fast. He let it go, and I tensed to grab it before it burned the trailer– but the flames consumed the leaf before it hit the carpet, leaving only a smattering of ash and a surprising amount of smoke.

I recognized the plant by its smell when I hadn’t recognized the leaf. Tobacco. I guess he didn’t smoke a pipe.

Gordon leaned forward and blew the smoke from the tobacco and the candle toward my leg. The blowing didn’t seem to affect his song. He tilted his head, and I could only see one of his eyes.

And in his eye I saw a predatory bird that looked somewhat like an eagle. It was so darkly feathered that at first I thought it was a golden eagle, which, despite the name, often looks almost black; but it moved differently.

He closed his eyes, blew again, and when his eye opened, it was bright and predatory–but it was also just an eye in which no bird flew. I decided the antihistamine I’d just taken must have been affecting me more than usual.

He opened a jar and took some yellowish salve out and spread it on the mark the not-a-hemp- rope-not-a-weed had left on my leg. The relief was almost immediate.

He stopped singing, wiped his greasy fingers on his jeans. Then he put the candle out.

Adam looked at me. "It feels a lot better."

"Magic?" Adam asked our visitor.

The old man grinned. "Maybe." He still had the little earthenware jar and tipped it toward me. "Or maybe it’s the Bag Balm. I use it on all my cuts and burns." I’d thought that salve had smelled familiar. He’d added something to it, but the base was definitely Bag Balm. My foster mother had used Bag Balm as a cure-all, too. I kept a tin of it at work. "I understand your feet took quite a beating, too. Why don’t you get them out where we can see them?"

"How do you know me?" I asked, peeling off my shoes and socks.

Adam had decided to judge this frail old man a possible threat. I could tell because he’d taken a step back out of reach. He was standing guard, ready to do whatever the circumstances required, trusting me to handle the rest. Likewise, I’d trust his judgment about the threat.

Our opponent might be an old man, but both Adam and I had lived around very old things that were dangerous. We wouldn’t underestimate this man who smelled of tobacco, woodsmoke … and magic. It wasn’t fae magic, so I hadn’t noticed it right away. This was sweeter and subtler, though I didn’t think it was any less potent.

Charles smelled a little like this sometimes.

The old man smiled at me and held the unguent pot. "And how would I not know Mercedes Thompson who is married to Adam Hauptman, Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack?"

He did the not-lying thing very well. There are a lot of Other creatures who know when you are lying. Some of the fae, werewolves, some of the vampires–and me. The art of not lying without telling the truth is a valuable skill if you’re going to have to deal with people who are Other.

He hadn’t known who I was when he came into the trailer. But he’d taken one look at me, and his surprised recognition had been genuine.

"You know what I am," I said, suddenly certain of it. My heartbeat picked up with the excitement of it. He knew what I was and who my father had been.

"Use that salve on your feet," he said. "They look sore." He canted his head toward Adam without taking his eyes off me. "Do you have something for an old man to drink?"

"Soda or apple juice."

"Root beer?" The old man’s voice was hopeful.

Adam got a cloth out of a drawer near the little sink and dampened it. Then he opened the miniature fridge and pulled out the silver can and handed it over Gordon’s shoulder. He tossed me the damp cloth, then went back to his self- appointed observation post.

I wiped my feet. My calf was still sore, but it wasn’t the bonedeep throbbing, and there was no itching. It felt like a rope burn and nothing worse. There had been some sort of magic on whatever had cut my calf, magic that the old man had nullified.

I’m immune to a lot of magic–but not all. Usually, the worse the magic is, the less likely I am to be immune.

The old man opened his pop can and drank it down. He drank the whole thing without taking a breath. When I was a kid, we used to say anyone who could drink a can or bottle dry had killed it. We’d tried it a lot, but the only one of us who could do it was one of the older boys. I’d forgotten his name. He died before I left Montana–a victim of the Change.

Gordon Seeker and I could bandy words back and forth all night–I grew up in a werewolf pack; I knew how to not-lie, too. However, sometimes straightforward was more useful.

"I’m a walker," I told the old man as I rubbed his magic Bag Balm on my feet. "How did you know what I was?"

He laughed, slapping his hands on his thighs. "Is that what they call it?" he said. "After those abominations down south, I suppose? You don’t go around wearing the skins of those you kill, do you? How can you be a skinwalker, then? Abominations." He hissed through his teeth, and the sound whistled a little as the air escaped in the gap where the tooth was missing.

"Not a skinwalker but a shapechanger, you are. Coyote, right? Ai." He shook his head. "Coyote brings change and chaos." His head tilted sideways, and he looked as though he was listening to someone I couldn’t hear. I glanced at Adam, but he was frowning at the old man.