River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(47)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"Still mad about the unexpected swim, huh?" he said, whining a little, a noise that would have been more at home coming from a canine throat. "All in the name of information."

"So why is the magic component bad for us?" I asked.

He looked at me like I was an idiot. "Because we have a sixty-four- to ninety-six-foot monster to kill –and it uses magic."

I had a thought. "Can you fix Hank like this?" He shook his head. "No. He’s not one of mine. But I know someone who can. We’re going to need help here, kids."

He pursed his lips and tapped his toes impatiently. "I know. We need Jim Alvin and his sidekick, that Calvin kid, to meet us at the Stonehenge at midnight tomorrow. Tell him to bring Hank. I’ll tell him what he needs to do, but he’s not going to believe in me. Sad that a medicine man will believe in werewolves, ghosts, and vampires and won’t believe in Coyote, but that’s what it is these days."

"I don’t have his number."

"Where’s your cell phone?"

"In the trailer."

He grabbed my hand and pulled a felt-tipped pen out of an empty pocket and wrote a phone number on my hand. "Here. Call him in the morning. If you don’t, he’ll think I’m just a dream."

He patted me on the head, ignoring Adam’s low growl. "Go in and get warmed up." He wiggled his eyebrows at Adam. "I bet you know how to warm her up, eh?"

Adam had very nice big white teeth, and he showed most of them to Coyote.

Coyote veiled his eyes and showed his teeth in return. "Go ahead. Just try it. You’re out of your league."

I touched Adam’s nose and frowned at Coyote. "You stop baiting him–or I’ll call my mom."

Coyote froze, his face blank, and I almost felt bad–except that he’d been threatening Adam. After a moment, he inhaled.

"I’ll see you at Stonehenge," he said, and walked off without a look back.

We were most of the way to the trailer when I saw what Adam had done.

"Wow," I said.

A rocket bursting out of the window wouldn’t have done more damage. The window and its frame were toast, and a little of the outside skin had been bent up.

At least all the glass was on the outside. "Be careful you don’t step on the shrapnel," I told him, taking the long way around the trailer to keep him away from it. My tennis shoes might be wet, but they were proof against a few shards of glass.

In the trailer, I stripped out of my wet clothes and put them in the sack with the bloody clothes from earlier.

"I’m going to need clothes," I said, sorting through my suitcase. When I looked over, Adam had started to shift back to human, so I grabbed clean underwear and a T-shirt and gave him some room.

After I dressed, I found a towel big enough to cover the broken window frame and taped it up using some of the first-aid tape from the kits because I couldn’t find any duct tape. I keep a couple of rolls of duct tape in all of my cars. The first-aid tape wasn’t the wussy kind, though. This was the stuff that needed WD-40 to get off skin once it was taped down. I hoped the repair people would be able to get it off without damaging the trailer further.

If this kept up, I thought, noticing where a spot of blood had dropped on the carpet–it could have come from any number of things in the past forty-eight hours–we might just be buying a trailer soon. While I was staring at the stain, Adam spoke.

"You could have died." His voice was rough from the change.

"So could you have when Hank shot you," I said, trying not to sound defensive when he hadn’t yelled at me. Yet. Adam wasn’t the only one who had to learn not to get mad about something that hadn’t happened.

He wasn’t completely human yet. He knelt on the carpeted floor on the far side of the trailer, his head bowed as he waited for the last of the change.

Even when he was finished, he stayed there, his back to me. "I cannot . . ." he began, then tried again. "When I heard you scream, I thought I’d be too late."

"You came," I told him in a low voice. "You came, and I am fine. When you were shot, I would have killed the man who took your life and not cared. Not even knowing it was not his fault would have made me feel bad about it." I took a deep breath. "And when I knew you’d be okay, I wanted to yell at you for not moving faster, for not being invincible."

"What in hell were you doing in that river?" He still wasn’t looking at me, and his voice had dropped even further.

"Trying to get out of it as fast as I could," I assured him fervently. I could feel his emotion, a huge tangle I couldn’t decipher except to sense the atavistic power of it. "Adam, I can’t promise not to get into trouble. I managed it for most of my life, but these last couple of years have more than made up for it. Trouble seems to follow me around, waiting to club me with a tire iron. But I’m not stupid."

He nodded. "Okay. Okay. I can deal with not stupid." But he still didn’t turn around. And then he added in a quiet voice, "Or I hope so."

After a moment, he said, "I was not tracking straight through most of this. That was Coyote? The Coyote?"

"That’s what he said–and I’m inclined to believe him." I paused. "It also appears that he is . . . or some aspect of him was . . . my father. It was complicated. I understood it, mostly, but I had to think a little sideways to do it."

Adam laughed. It wasn’t a big laugh, but it was a real one. "I bet."

Adam was trying to come down from the wolf’s anger. I tried to find something to say that didn’t hurt me and wouldn’t make him mad.

"I guess Coyote playing at being human is why I am a walker, even though Mom’s not Indian," I said.

"Your father’s not dead," he said. "Your mom is going to be . . ."

"Yeah," I agreed, clearing my throat and trying to sound casual. My father wasn’t dead–and he was. Had I really even had a father? Better to think about my mother.

"As much as I have this pressing urge to get back at Mom for orchestrating our wedding without consulting me, I can’t do that to her," I said, looking at my bare feet. They’d been inside the wet shoes long enough to gain that wrinkled look and corpselike color. "She really loved Joe Old Coyote and . . . Curt is wonderful. But Joe, he rescued her, he treasured her."

I thought of Coyote’s voice as he talked about my mother, and added, "I’m not sure that Curt could compete with the man she remembers– maybe even Joe couldn’t. And Joe is dead, really dead." I cleared my throat. "He wasn’t really Coyote, just a suit Coyote wore for a while. Real to himself and everyone around him, but in the end he was a construct, and Coyote . . . Mom would figure it out eventually. But by the time she did, Curt might not be waiting around."