Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson #5)(12)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"He said I could find him in the X-ray storage room."

She laughed. "Well, I guess it is quiet in there. You know where it is?"

I smiled, which is tough when you’re ready to skin someone.

"Sure." Still smiling, I walked briskly past curtained-off rooms that smelled of blood and pain, nodding to a med tech who looked vaguely familiar. At least the baby’s cries had muted to whimpers.

Samuel had tried to commit suicide.

I knocked on the storage-room door, then opened it. White cardboard file boxes were piled up on racks with a feeling of imposed order – as if somewhere there was someone who would know how to find things here.

Samuel sat on the floor, his back against a stack of boxes. He had a white lab coat on over a set of green scrubs. His arms rested across his knees, hands limp and hanging. His head was bowed, and he didn’t look up when I came in. He waited until I shut the door behind me to speak, and he didn’t look at me then either.

I thought it was because he was ashamed or because he knew I was angry.

"He tried to kill us," Samuel said, and my heart stopped, then began to pound painfully in my chest because I’d been wrong about the bowed head. Very wrong. The "he" he was talking about was Samuel – and that meant that "he" was no longer in charge. I was talking to Samuel’s wolf.

I dropped to the ground like a stone and made damned sure my head was lower than the werewolf’s. Samuel the man regularly overlooked breaches of etiquette that his wolf could not. If I made the wolf look up at me, he’d have to acknowledge my superiority or challenge me.

I change into a thirty-odd-pound predator built to kill chickens and rabbits. And poor silly quail. Werewolves can take out Kodiak bears. A challenge for a werewolf I am not.

"Mercy," he whispered, and lifted his head.

The first thing I noticed was hundreds of small cuts all over his face, and I remembered Jody the nurse saying that they’d had to get the glass out of his skin. That the wounds weren’t healed yet told me that there had been other, more severe damage his body had to address first. Nifty – just a little pain and suffering to sweeten his temper.

His eyes were an icy blue just this side of white, hot and wild.

As soon as I saw them, I looked at the floor and took a deep breath. "Sam," I whispered. "What can I do to help? Should I call Bran?"

"No!" The word left him in a roar that jerked him forward until he was crouched on both hands, one leg knee up, one leg still down on one knee.

That one knee on the ground meant that he wasn’t, quite, ready to spring on me.

"Our father will kill us," Sam said, his voice slow and thick with Welsh intonation. "I . . . We don’t want to make him do that." He took a deep breath. "And I don’t want to die."

"Good. That’s good," I croaked, suddenly understanding just exactly what his first words to me had meant. Samuel had wanted to die, and his wolf had stopped him. Which was good, but left us with a nasty problem.

There is a very good reason that the Marrok kills any werewolves who allow the wolf to lead and the man to follow. Very good reasons – like preventing-mass-slaughter sorts of reasons.

But if Samuel’s wolf didn’t want them to die, I decided it was better he was in charge. For a while. Since he didn’t seem to want to kill me yet. Samuel was old. I don’t know exactly how old, but sometime before the Mayflower at least. Maybe that would allow his wolf to control himself without Samuel’s help. Maybe. "Okay, Sam. No calls to Bran."

I watched out of the corner of my eye as he tilted his head, surveying me. "I can pretend to be human until we get to your car. I thought that would be best, so I held this shape."

I swallowed. "What have you done with Samuel? Is he all right?"

Pale ice blue eyes examined me thoughtfully. "Samuel? I’m pretty certain he’d forgotten I could do this: it has been so long since we battled for control. He let me out to play when he chose, and I left it to him." He was quiet a moment or two, then he said, almost shyly. "You know when I’m here. You call me Sam."

He was right. I hadn’t realized it until he said it.

"Sam," I asked again, trying not to sound demanding, "what have you done with Samuel?"

"He’s here, but I cannot let him out. If I do, he’ll never let me get the upper hand again – and then we will die."

"Cannot" sounded like "never." "Never" was bad. "Never" would get him killed as surely as suicide – and maybe . . . probably a lot of other people along the way.

"If not Bran, what about Charles’s mate, Anna? She’s Omega; shouldn’t she be able to help?"

Omega wolves, as I understand them, are like Valium for werewolves. Samuel’s sister-in-law, Anna, is the only one I’ve ever met – I’d never heard of them before that. I like her, but she doesn’t seem to affect me the way she does the wolves. I don’t want to curl up in a ball at her feet and let her rub my belly.

Samuel’s wolf looked wistful . . . or maybe he was just hungry. "No. If I were the problem, if I were ravaging the countryside, she might help. But this is not impulse, not desperation. Samuel just feels that he no longer belongs, that he accomplishes nothing by his existence. Even the Omega cannot fix him."

"So what do you suggest?" I asked helplessly.

Anna, I thought, might be able to put Samuel back in the driver’s seat, but, like the wolf, I was afraid that might not be a good thing.

He laughed, an unhappy laugh. "I do not know. But if you don’t want to be trying to extract a wolf from the emergency room, it would be good to leave very soon."

Sam rocked forward to get up and stopped halfway with a grunt.

"You’re hurt," I said as I scrambled up to give him a hand.

He hesitated but took it and used me to give him better leverage so he could get all the way to his feet. Showing me his weakness was a sign of trust. Under normal circumstances, that trust would mean I was safer with him.

"Stiff," Sam answered me. "Nothing that won’t heal on its own now. I drew upon your strength to heal enough that no one would know how bad the injuries were."

"How did you do that?" I asked, suddenly remembering the fierce hunger that had resulted in a rabbit-and-quail dinner on top of the salmon I’d had with Adam. I’d thought it had been someone in Adam’s pack – for the very good reason that borrowing strength was one of those things that came with apack bond. "We aren’t pack," I reminded him.

He looked directly at me again, then away. "Aren’t we?"

"Unless you . . . Unless Samuel’s been conducting blood ceremonies when I was asleep, we’re not." I was starting to feel panicky. Claustrophobic. I already had Adam and his pack playing with my head; I didn’t particularly want anyone else in there.