River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(43)
Author: Patricia Briggs

So I made pancakes on the nifty little stove and had a hot stack waiting for him when he finished the frozen meat. He gave me a look when I set it in front of him, but he ate the pancakes with the same steady rhythm as he’d eaten the rest of the food. Meat was better, but calories were calories.

He finished before I’d gotten the last of the batter in the pan, pushing the plate away so I’d know.

"Okay," I said. "Change already."

"You need to go," he said. "This is going to hurt. Give me about twenty minutes."

I left and waited outside five minutes while our bond let me know just exactly how much pain he was in. Changing for the wolves was bad enough when they weren’t hurt. Five minutes was all I could take. I couldn’t help him, but I couldn’t bear to leave him alone, either.

"I’m coming back in," I told him, so he wouldn’t think it was some stranger. The only concession I made to safety was to sit on the far side of the trailer until the wolf heaved himself up on all fours. He started to shake himself free of the last tingles of the change and stopped abruptly. It must have hurt.

"Bedtime," I told him firmly. "Do you need help up?"

He sneezed at me, then trotted up the steps to the bed with only a slight hitch in his gait. If I hadn’t been there, it would probably have been a limp, but that he was bothering to hide it from me was a good sign that he’d be okay.

I climbed into bed and settled next to him, touching him gingerly. But he wiggled closer with an impatient sigh, so I quit worrying about hurting him. After a moment, I pulled the covers over both of us. He didn’t need them, but I did. The night was warm. I should have been warm, too, especially curled around Adam’s big furry self. But I was cold.

I waited until he’d fallen asleep before I started to shake.

He could have been dead. If Fred had been a half instant slower or Hank a smidgen faster.

Mine. He was mine, and not even death would take him from me–not if I could help it.

I WAS PRETTY SURE I WAS DREAMING WHEN I CLIMBED out of the bed, leaving Adam sleeping under a pile of blankets. He looked hot, his long tongue exposed to the air, so I pulled the blankets off him.

I put on my clothes and followed the odd compulsion that pulled me out of the trailer and out to the river. It must have been very late because there were only a few semitrucks on the highway on the other side of the Columbia.

On the west end of the swimming hole was a big rock formation. I climbed up and sat on the top, my feet dangling over the edge. My toes were ten feet above the river, which rushed darkly along toward the Pacific.

When the man came up and sat beside me, it didn’t startle me. His face in shadows, he held out something to me–a piece of grass. I took it and stuck the end in my mouth. From his silhouette, I could see that he was chewing on his own piece, the seed heads bobbing leisurely in the air.

Just a couple of hayseeds in the moonlight. It could almost have been romantic; instead it was peaceful.

We must have been sitting there in a companionable silence for ten minutes before he said, "You aren’t sleeping, you know."

I took the grass out of my mouth and dropped it into the river–or that’s what I meant to do. A stray gust of wind caught it, and it flew onto the riverbank on the swimming-hole side instead.

"Shouldn’t I feel the need to scream and run?" I asked.

"Do you?" He sounded mildly interested.

"No." I considered it. "I am pretty convinced that I am probably dreaming, though." Apologetically I shrugged. "Despite your assertion that I’m not." He looked up at the half-moon and squinted at it, as if he might see something in it I couldn’t. "I’d guess that’s because you were sleeping when I called you out here. I didn’t know if it would work. I can’t do a lot of the things I used to do. Still, I am not lying. You are quite awake."

The moon lit the face of a man who’d died more than thirty years ago. A man who had been a ghost, dancing for me in broad daylight. He was handsome and young with a devil-may-care air that was obvious even on such short acquaintance.

"Are you my father?" I asked.

He shook his head, the movement emphasized by the grass in his mouth. "Nope. Sorry and all that. But your father was Joe Old Coyote." He pronounced it as two syllables instead of three. Kye-oat not Kye-oat-ee. "He died in a car wreck and a mess with a pair of vampires. They don’t like walkers very much, and they liked him rather less than most."

I’d thought I knew why until no one but me had seen the ghost tonight. If you can see ghosts in the daylight, you can find where vampires are sleeping no matter what magic they use to hide. I’d always attributed it to being a walker, but if the other walkers hadn’t seen it, maybe there was something to what Gordon Seeker had been implying so heavily. "Oh, that," he said, as if I’d spoken aloud. "Just because you can see something doesn’t mean you have to. I’d have thought that anyone who hangs out with werewolves would know that. I mean, who but an idiot would look at a werewolf and think, `dog.’ Yet they do."

"That’s pack magic," I told him.

He nodded. "Some is. Sure. But still. Walkers see ghosts, but those two taught themselves not to see the dead quite a while ago in a `galaxy far, far away.’ A man can’t fight a war if he can see the dead and still stay sane. So they made a choice."

"You watched Star Wars?" I asked.

"Joe did," he answered as if that made sense. "Loved it. A cowboy-and-Indian story where the Indians are the good guys and everyone fights with swords."

"Cowboys and Indians?" I asked while I chewed on the first part of the sentence.

He grunted. "Think about it. Good versus evil. The foe has better armament and seems impossible to defeat–the invading Europeans. The good guys are few in number and restricted to a few bold heroes with an uncanny connection to the Force. Indians."

I’d never thought about it that way, but I supposed I could see where someone might. Of course, people said that "Puff the Magic Dragon" was about doing drugs, too. For me, Star Wars was space opera and "Puff" a kid’s song about growing up and leaving your dreams behind.

"What about the Ewoks?" I asked. "Aren’t they supposed to be the Indians?"

He grinned at me, his sharp teeth flashing white from the moonlight. "Nope. Indians aren’t cute and furry. Ewoks were a good marketing ploy."

I took a deep breath of the night air and smelled him. The ghost who’d danced for me, then turned into a coyote.

"Why did you dance? I thought you were a ghost."

"That was a ghost," he said. "That was Joe. He worried because you were headed into danger." He slanted a laughing glance at me. "Not that you haven’t been in danger any number of times since you were born. But this is different because I’m called to this one for some reason. Things that involve me tend to be chaotic–and chaos can be fatal for the innocent bystanders."