River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(50)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"She’s gone and won’t be back." I looked around, and except for a dent in the drywall where her knee had hit the wall, there wasn’t any extra damage. There was blood all over, but I was betting that Wal-Mart had cleaners to get all sorts of things out of their carpets.

I grabbed the jeans I wanted as well as the T- shirts. I put the darkest T-shirt up to wipe my nose. It hadn’t been a hard hit, and it had mostly stopped bleeding. "I’ll just go pay for this," I said. "You can put those other jeans back where they go, then call someone in to clean up."

I walked out like I knew what I was doing and paid for the clothes–with cash so there was no awkward name-left-behind-at-the-scene-of-the- crime thing. The clerk was too occupied looking at my split lip to notice that one of the shirts was bloody. As I took the receipt, I noticed a general migration toward the changing room on the part of the employees. At least one of them looked old enough to be a person of authority.

I smiled at the clerk and tried to look innocent, grab my bags, and make a quick getaway.

"Honey," said the cashier, who was half my age. "You get rid of that man. You don’t have to put up with being a punching bag."

"It was a woman," I told her. "And you are absolutely right."

I walked briskly out of the store and kept going across the parking lot as I called Adam. "I saw a sandwich shop in the little mall above Wal-Mart," I told him. "I’ll meet you there."

"It’s a little early for lunch," he said. We’d eaten breakfast just before he’d dropped me off at Wal- Mart.

"You’re a wolf," I informed him. "You can eat anytime."

"What did you do?" I heard a siren and hoped that it wasn’t someone coming looking for me. I made my brisk walk a little brisker. "Got in a fight with my girlfriend, apparently." I hung up before he could ask me anything else.

The nice lady at the sandwich shop had been happy to fill a plastic bag with ice and accepted my story about a jealous girlfriend with a sympathetic ear (I kept my wedding ring hidden). She made me two large chicken sandwiches, and I paid for them and a pair of juices.

When Adam drove up, I was watching the police cars at Wal-Mart–it must have been a slow day– with the ice bag wrapped in my new bloodstained black T-shirt. Bloodstains on a new black shirt were more a matter of texture and smell than color.

"I think we ought to go back to the camp," I told him.

He pulled the ice down from my eye and took a good look before he let me put it back up again. Then he examined my hands, and brought my free hand up to his lips so he could kiss the bruises. He led me to the truck and buckled me in.

It was a good thing that there weren’t many cars in the parking lot, or he’d never have gotten the big truck back out of it. I never had that problem with my Rabbit.

He didn’t say anything, just drove the quarter of a mile toward the highway on-ramp in silence. I made it mostly to The Dalles before I broke.

"I didn’t know anyone wanted to kill me when I made you leave me alone."

"I smelled fae," he said neutrally–the sneak. That was why he’d kissed my knuckles.

"She jumped me in the changing room," I told him reluctantly. I’d known after the doorknob hit my eye that I wasn’t going to be able to hide the fight from Adam. Not that I’d really been planning on keeping the attack secret; it had just been an option I’d wanted to keep open if I could. "I think it was one of the otterkin–and she was the weird lady from lunch the day before yesterday."

"Did you leave the body?" he asked.

"No body," I told him. "I wasn’t trying to kill her. And once I got rid of the knife, I was pretty sure she couldn’t kill me. She wasn’t any stronger than a normal human." I thought a moment. "I don’t think so, anyway. As soon as the clerk came in, she glamoured back to otterkin and left through the ceiling. She might have used magic to get up there, but otters are pretty agile."

He squeezed his nose. Then he laughed. "I guess you proved your point," he told me. "You can take care of yourself."

"I wonder why the otterkin are trying to kill me?" I said.

"I don’t think that we’ll call in the fae to help us against the river devil," said Adam. "I think the chances are that they may come down on the wrong side."

"You were thinking of asking the fae for help?" I squeaked. Help was even worse than a favor.

He gave me an exasperated look. "I said I wasn’t."

"It sounded like you might have been before I was attacked."

"You’re trying to distract me," he said. "You don’t need to. I’m not going to yell at you because you were attacked–especially since you won the fight."

"She ran away," I said.

"Without accomplishing her purpose. That’s losing in my book. Especially since you got rid of her knife before she stuck it in you."

I gave him a wary look, but he honestly didn’t appear upset.

"Mercy," he said, "in a fair fight between near equals, I’ll back you every time. It’s the demons, vampires, and river devils I worry about, and I’m working on that."

I could live with that if he could.

Chapter 10

UNLIKE THE MARYHILL MUSEUM OR SHE WHO WATCHES, Stonehenge was a place I had been to many times over the years. It’s right on the way to my mom’s house in Portland. Sam Hill had been told that the henge at Salisbury had been used for human sacrifice and decided that it was a fitting memorial for the men who were sacrificed in World War I.

Adam and I parked the truck next to a deserted orchard down by the river and walked over hill and dale to the high place where Sam Hill’s conceit looked out over the gorge.

I never could decide if Stonehenge was beautiful, spiritual, or merely a roadside oddity. Certainly it was impressive–a massive exact- sized replica cast in concrete of a place half a world away.

The original Stonehenge took about sixteen hundred years to build. The one at Maryhill took a little more than ten years to complete. It is a monument to commemorate thirteen young men of Klickitat County who died in a war nearly a hundred years ago, a silent testament of a man who knew how to dream big, and, I’d been told, a magical collection site of great power to those who knew how to access it.

I’d always taken that last bit with a grain of salt. After all, I’d have thought a powerful place would have attracted witches or something nastier (and there is not a whole lot nastier than a black witch), and in all the years I’d been visiting, I’d never seen anything dangerous. The other reason I’d doubted was because I am pretty good at sensing magic–and it had never felt any more magical than my garage.