River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(40)
Author: Patricia Briggs

I dropped them down beside him and knelt by his head–just as Gordon used a very small but wicked-looking black blade to slice into skin because the entry wound had already started to close. That could be good news; wounds made by silver tended to heal as slowly as they did for the rest of us.

"Hold him," grunted Gordon. "Jim, Fred–Hank will keep. He’s not dead. Get over here. If he wakes up, we’re going to need you all."

"He’s awake," I told them. "He’ll keep still. Probably better off if everyone else stays back. He’ll sense them, essentially strangers, and come up fighting–and the four of us wouldn’t be able to hold him if he decides he needs to."

I’m not sure if Fred or Jim had moved toward us when Gordon called them over, but they stayed back out of the way after I told them to. However helpful in getting the bullet out, unconscious was not a good sign. I found an explanation for it when I turned his head and discovered a bloody cut along his temple where the second shot had creased him.

It was already healing, so that bullet, at least, had been lead. Even so, if Hank had hit Adam in the forehead with it, it still stood a good chance of killing him. I owed Fred because I wouldn’t have been fast enough.

I stroked my fingers over Adam’s face, where he would smell me and know that I was watching out for him, then turned to watch what Gordon was doing. Adam was conscious; I could feel it. But he was trusting me to help him while he did his best to keep his body alive. Even if the first bullet had been lead, it needed to come out, or Adam would be sicker than a kid at Halloween for days until it festered out.

It was about then that I realized the knife Gordon was using wasn’t some sort of fancy thing, painted black to make it look military. It was an honest-to-goodness obsidian knife. Stone knives, I remembered inconsequentially from Anthropology 101, were both sharper and more fragile than most steel knives. More important to me than the oddity of the knife was that Gordon looked like he knew what he was doing.

"Remove many bullets?" I asked, just to be sure. I scrambled in the bags until I found the surgical kit and a probe and a pair of forceps.

He gave them a look when I held them up for him. "Usually do this with my fingers," he told me.

Infection wasn’t a concern with werewolves–or apparently to Gordon.

"A probe and forceps do less damage when you have to go in deep," I told him firmly. "I can do it if you don’t want to."

I had so far in my life avoided pulling bullets out of people, and had no illusions that I’d be good at it. But me with forceps would be better than Gordon’s fingers.

He gave me a gap-toothed grin and took the probe.

"Have to work quickly on a werewolf," I told him.

"Healing pretty fast," he grunted, sliding the instrument into the wound he’d reopened with the odd little knife. "Good news, I think, as long as we get the bullet out."

"Dominant werewolves do," I said. "And they don’t come much more dominant." Thank goodness. Despite his earlier words, he looked like he knew what he was doing. "You’ve used a probe before."

He switched hands, holding the probe with his left and taking the forceps with his right. "Only a hundred or two," he said, closing his eyes. "Got it. It’s up against his shoulder blade."

A silver bullet doesn’t mushroom like a lead bullet does. If it had made it all the way through Adam, it would have left a neat hole going in and an equally neat hole going out. The bullet Gordon pulled out of Adam was squashed and had doubtless bounced around inside and torn up muscle and organs. More painful but infinitely less lethal.

As soon as Gordon’s hand was out, I dried my hands on my jeans and hauled out my phone to call Samuel.

"Who are you calling?" asked Gordon.

"A doctor friend of mine," I told him. "And his."

A hand wrapped around the phone, and Adam said hoarsely, "Don’t. Not until we know what’s going on." He sat up, using his stomach muscles and not his arms. He didn’t do it for effect– moving his shoulder would be painful for a while yet. He looked at Gordon. "Thanks for the surgery. That felt like the fastest extraction I’ve had."

Gordon raised an eyebrow. "Do you find yourself saying that often? If so, I advise a different lifestyle."

Adam smiled to acknowledge Gordon’s point, but when he spoke, it was on another subject. "You said something last night about river marked –about how Mercy wouldn’t be a good slave. What’s special about that mark? Did the river devil do it?"

He hurt; I could feel just how much. But he wasn’t going to show it in public.

"River marked," Gordon said. He looked over to where Fred was exploring the back of Hank’s head. "I do see why you are asking. There was once a place where a band of Indians lived. `Don’t go to that village; they are marked by the river,’ the people would say. `If you go there, you will not come back. They will feed you to the river.’ All the people of that village wore a brown mark on their bodies, and they obeyed the hungry river in all things. I’ve forgotten the rest of the story."

"Check Hank," Adam said, his voice only a little more breathy than normal. "He didn’t strike me as the shoot first and negotiate later kind of person. Even those crazy jarheads usually need a reason to pull the trigger."

Fred didn’t protest the slur, just stripped off Hank’s jeans and shirt–and found a dark brown oozing sore across Hank’s back that looked a lot like what my calf had looked like before Gordon and his salve had come along.

I jerked up my pant leg. "Looks like what I’ve got."

"Could have happened when he was coming onshore with our boat last night," said Jim. "He didn’t say anything about getting hurt–but Hank’s like that. Coyote walkers are immune to the effects?"

Gordon grunted. "This coyote walker, evidently."

And when Hank groaned and started to move, Jim added, "I have a rope in the truck." And he jumped up to get it.

"We don’t want the pack here," Adam said very quietly to me, explaining why he hadn’t let me call Samuel, I thought. "First–wolves don’t do well in water. Second–just think what this thing could do if he controlled a pack of werewolves."

"Wouldn’t pack magic stop that?" I asked. If the river devil could control Hank, another walker, maybe it wasn’t the walker part of me that had kept it from doing that to me. Maybe it was the pack–or even my mate bond with Adam.

Adam shook his head. "Maybe. But I’m not willing to risk it. Not unless things get a lot more desperate." "You heal fast," said Jim neutrally as he returned with a rope.