River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(57)
Author: Patricia Briggs

Adam hopped up on the altar where I was sitting and stepped over me with his front paws. He lowered his head and showed the hawk his teeth. Both hawks retreated to the far edge of the altar because neither was stupid, and maybe because Adam had great big teeth.

I glanced first at Jim, who seemed to be very focused on his song and on feeding the last of the tobacco leaves into the fire, then out at Coyote and Gordon–who were gone.

Adam licked my ear, then lay down between me and the hawks. His front paws hung down over the front of the altar, and I suspect his back paws were off on the other end. The three feet of cement that was the width of the altar was generous for me but wasn’t nearly enough to hold a whole werewolf.

Jim closed his eyes and held up his right hand. When he closed his fist, the drumbeat stopped– and with it, the overwhelming pulse of magic. It was like someone had pulled the plug at a nightclub, and all the music stopped. As suddenly as if someone had slammed a door, Stonehenge was as mundane as an exact model of a neolithic calendar could be.

No magic, no mystery, just a gray cement monument that suddenly had a lot more people in it than there had been when the drum had been sounding.

Gordon and Coyote in their human guises were standing in front of the monoliths they’d started out on top of. Between us and them, six Indian men I’d never seen before stepped away from the monoliths.

One man, who looked no older than Calvin, was in a three-piece suit. Adam had taught me to recognize good suits, and this one was several thousand dollars of very nice. Another, like Gordon, was wearing a modern cowboy look, though his was toned down a fair bit. Brown boots, jeans, earth-tone striped shirt, and a brown Montana-style (narrow-brimmed) cowboy hat. Iron gray hair was braided tightly and fell over his shoulder and almost to his knees.

The other four wore traditional native garb, though unlike Coyote’s sisters, no two of them were dressed alike. There were two in hunting leathers of slightly different styles. The older one, whose wrinkled face and white hair made Gordon look like a young man, wore leathers that were nearly as pale as the doeskin Coyote’s sisters had worn. Except for the fringe around the shoulder seams, his leathers were very plain. The other man’s hunting leathers were a rich dark brown with ornate quillwork around his neckline. There were stains on his clothes, as if he’d gone hunting many times wearing that particular shirt and leggings.

The third man in native dress wore leather leggings, but his loose shirt was made of patterned red gingham and tied with a hemp belt that ended in a fringe to which tiny brass bells were tied. His hair was cut straight around his jawline.

The fourth had a red cloth wrapped around his head, almost like a turban, from which maybe a dozen brownish red feathers stuck straight up. He wore a beaded breechclout that reached his knees in front and back. His shirt was a striped cotton that looked to have been loomed by hand rather than machine from the slight irregularity of the weave.

I got a really good look at his shirt because he walked right up to the altar and grabbed the hawk nearest me, one hand confining the wicked talons. He pulled the bird hard against his body, trapping the wings with his arm, and the sharp beak with his hand.

"So," he said, his voice heavily accented. "She tries to steal my hawk’s will."

"As I told you, Hawk," said Coyote. "Can you fix it?"

The man holding the bird gave Coyote a cold stare with eyes as sharp as those of the animal who took his name. The hawk left behind made a soft noise, like a baby bird in the nest.

"I do not approve of you, Coyote. You have always been more concerned with the two-legged people than the people in fur."

"I was asked to help. Would you have refused the request of the Great Spirit?"

Hawk snorted. "You were doing it before that. And look what has happened." He let go of the hawk’s talons to make a sweeping gesture. It didn’t matter because Hank was limp in his grasp. "There are cars and roads, bridges and houses until the earth cannot breathe. It would have been better had the Great Spirit stopped with the first people."

Coyote sneered, just a little. "As I’m sure you would tell him."

"I’m telling you," said Hawk.

He reached down and grabbed a handful of dirt and small gravel. He tossed it into the air, and the wind caught it, held it. He held the bird up over his head, and the wind blew the handful of earth through the hawk, who cried out when it hit him.

He threw the bird up in the air, gave Coyote another cold look, and disappeared. The bird dropped, and Hank landed in a naked human heap on the ground. Naked meant that it was easy to see that the mark was gone.

Beside me, Fred, also in human skin, scrambled off the altar and over to his brother. Jim, now seated on the rug and looking exhausted but fascinated, motioned to his apprentice, and Calvin took off at a run, presumably for clothes, but I wasn’t certain.

"Hawk is impetuous," said the man in the suit. "And I don’t like agreeing with him." His casual gaze traveled around Stonehenge in mild curiosity. It passed over Adam and me, then returned. Pale blue eyes that looked wrong and somehow utterly right in that oh-so-Native- American face focused on Adam.

"Ah," he said, striding over in the same no- nonsense ground-covering way that Adam used to cross a crowded room. "This is the werewolf."

Adam got slowly to his feet and shook himself lightly. As he stood on top of the altar, his head was level with the collarbone of the suited man– who could only be Wolf.

"I had heard of your kind," Wolf said.

I glanced at the other men there, but they seemed to be happy to let Wolf take center stage as Hawk had done a moment ago.

"Werewolf." Wolf frowned. "I had thought it an abomination when I heard it first. Wolf trapped in the same skin as a human–always in opposition with each other. And in some ways it is abominable. But look at you. You are beautiful."

I thought so, too.

"How is that different from our walkers?" asked Coyote in an interested tone. "They carry both spirits, too."

"No," said Wolf absently, still lost in his examination of Adam. "In our descendants, there is only one spirit that expresses itself as either human or animal. This is different. The wolf is mine, and the man not at all. And yet it works."

He touched Adam, and I felt it through our bond, felt Adam’s wolf come forward to meet Wolf. Adam was wary but not alarmed, neither dominant nor dominated.

Wolf’s hands traveled all over Adam’s head and neck, like a judge at a dog show. Adam showed no sign that it bothered him though it bothered me. Adam was mine.