Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)

by Patricia Briggs

“Screw me and stake me out.” Gary’s voice was in my ear. “I think she’s dead. How could she be burned this badly and not be dead?” He was talking about me, I realized, but I didn’t remember getting burned. Coyote had told me my neck was broken. Gary was still talking. “I’ve sent back steaks that were this overdone. Mercy?”

He huffed half a laugh. “Finally found a sibling I could stand to talk to for more than ten minutes, and . . .” He didn’t finish that sentence. “I gotta tell you, you look bad, Mercy.”

They were all mostly changed to wolf, barely, when I had another Seeing, one of the big ones. Saw you and a couple of werewolves fighting Guayota on Honey’s front lawn and realized why I had to go with the wolves.

I laughed, but that was a mistake. My vision went black for a few minutes, then, slowly, the sky, clouds, and grass were back. “Don’t do that,” said Coyote. “It makes it difficult to hold you here. I break things, a lot of things, but I don’t want one of them to be you. So just rest here.”

“You need to wake up pretty soon, though. Dad needs you. So do I.”

“Coyote said I was dying,” I told him. “And Christy wanted me to.” “Coyote, eh?” He gave me an odd smile. “I went to grab some coffee that first night you were here, and when I got back, he was sitting on the edge of your bed. As a coyote.” He rubbed his face and took a deep breath. “Samuel said the first X-rays showed that you’d broken your neck. He . . . wasn’t optimistic. But after Coyote had his visit, things got better.

“Joel?” He laughed, a happy uncomplicated laugh. “And I thought I threw the fox in the henhouse when I brought you into the pack. Joel is . . . yesterday he stayed human for almost an hour.”