Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)

by Patricia Briggs

“It’s okay,” I said to Adam, and tried to make it not a lie. “Really.” I bake when I’m stressed. If I had to make enough chocolate chip cookies to feed Richland while she was here, it would be okay because Adam needed me to be okay with it. If she tried anything, she would be sorry. Adam was mine. She had thrown him away, thrown Jesse away—and I had snatched them up. Finders keepers.

Love means leaving yourself vulnerable, knowing that there is someone to catch you when you fall.

Beauclaire was the fae who killed the man who had kidnapped his daughter with the intention of murdering her as he had so many other half-blood fae (as well as a few werewolves). Beauclaire was the man who had declared the fae independent from the US and all human dominion. He was a Gray Lord, one of the powerful few who ruled all the fae.

He continued through the dining room and around the corner into the kitchen, where he pulled up a chair with his back to the wall and sat down. I was fairly sure that his choice was important—the fae place a great deal of emphasis on symbolism. Maybe he picked the kitchen because guests came to the house and sat in the living room. Family and friends sat in the kitchen. If so, maybe he was trying to present himself as a friend—or point out that I didn’t have the power to keep him out of the center of my own home. It was too subtle to be certain, so I ignored it altogether. Trying too hard to figure out the meaning in what the fae say or do would send anyone to Straightjacket Land.

“Why didn’t Beauclaire know that you’d given the stick to Coyote?” “As best I can put together,” I told him, “Zee didn’t pass it around widely, and Beauclaire and he are not speaking because Zee killed Beauclaire’s father Lugh in order to quench Excalibur.”

I’d gotten used to keeping my clean clothes folded in drawers and dirty clothes in a hamper in the closet. Adam had gotten used to calling me when he was going to be late from work. I had learned that it was those things, compromise in the form of phone calls and folded clothes, that cemented the bedrock of a relationship.

Christy was acting as though my house were still hers. It wasn’t. But as long as she kept her actions to those acceptable in any guest, there wasn’t a lot I could do to fix it without appearing to be jealous, insecure, and petty. So I’d swallow my first reactions and deal, until it was time to set her straight.

The sandwiches were all cut into triangles and set on a plate in the center of the table, a gloriously beautiful presentation with bacon cooked exactly right, red tomatoes, and bright crispy lettuce on golden toast. A huge, cut-glass bowl held a salad and sat next to a plate with homemade croutons. Cloth napkins were folded just so, and there was a vase with the first of the spring lilies from the front flower bed. The whole table looked as though Martha Stewart and Gordon Ramsay had both come to my home to prepare a casual meal for a few friends.

I didn’t know if Christy was taking over my home on purpose or by accident, but I had my suspicions. I knew what I would do if someone else had Adam. I might use my fangs or a gun instead of a BLT dinner, but Christy’s weapons were different from mine. I did know that the only way to take control back was to be a witch—and that was just another way of losing.

“Just be careful, Mary Jo. Be very careful. You’ve made mistakes before. Everyone makes mistakes. One you should not make is to imagine that Christy will ever be Adam’s mate. He is mine, and unlike her, I don’t throw away people who are mine.”

“It’s Christy, Mercy,” said Adam. “Christy is doing it again. She has a way of making people worry about her.”

An uncomfortable werewolf might take a bite that everyone would regret.

I wiggled my fingers at Adam and trotted up the stairs with a little smile warming my heart. So I’d been spiteful, but the look on Christy’s face had been worth it. Tomorrow, I vowed, I’d be a better person. But tonight, I would enjoy my spite.

I shut our door, closing us in away from Christy. If she heard something she didn’t want to tonight, it was her own fault. I turned around, and Adam leaned against me, pushing me backward until the wall pressed into my shoulder blades. “You are the opposite of Christy,” he told me seriously.

“She’s too busy taking care of herself to take care of anyone else, you said. That’s about the best description of Christy I’ve ever heard. You? You are too busy taking care of everyone else to take care of yourself.”

He’d been nine going on fifty then, and the only thing that had changed since was that someone had rubbed off the bright and shiny cheer that had been his gift to the world. If I ever found out who had done it, I might sic a werewolf pack on them.

Bye, Tad. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” “’Bye, Joel. Don’t juggle porcupines.” Joel paused. “Porcupines?” Tad grinned. “One bit of obvious advice for another. If I tried doing something you wouldn’t do, it would be jail or the morgue.”

“As my father tells it, Lugh was old, powerful, and starting to get scary. Really scary. Started out as a hero and was turning into something a lot different.” He gave me a sly look as he pulled out the battery and set it aside. “Of course, my father wasn’t a white knight back then, either. He killed Lugh because he was more interested in making a cool weapon than killing someone who might be a danger to the world—but, as he likes to point out, it served both purposes, so he is happy to take credit. The fae world heaved a sigh of relief, shook their collective and disorganized finger at my dad, and then went about their business.”

Christy always had good reasons for doing the wrong thing, reasons that made everyone look stupid for questioning her.

I had known couples, growing up, where the werewolf looked to be in his twenties, and his wife was dying of old age. I didn’t want to do that to my mate. I worried about Adam because he didn’t talk about it at all, and Adam was all about discussing problems he thought had solutions. I raised my chin. “How old will I get?” He opened his mouth, then shook his head. “It’s not that kind of foresight. I don’t get dates, just possibilities. And if I did know, I don’t hate you enough to tell you.”

Joel had told me with tears in his eyes about a battered pit-survivor he’d had to put down a few months ago. He was as passionate in his desire to save his dogs as the Marrok was to save his wolves.

“Canarios are not evil dogs,” Lucia told me, “any more than my Amstaffs are evil. Canarios are guard dogs, bred to protect their people, their herds—and to hunt for food by taking down big animals. Trained and raised with common sense, they are useful and valuable members of the family.”

His dogs then will be as mine. They will not know that he is a man who attacks women who cannot fight back: a man who is a coward. They will only know that this man is their god, the one they must listen to and protect. Canarios are courageous. They will not run from you just because you are a werewolf.”

I got in the shower and stuck my head under the hot water, so I couldn’t say anything I would regret. Coyotes weren’t as territorial, as a rule, as werewolves, but we still had our hard lines. Having Christy flouncing in and out through my bedroom into my bathroom crossed one of my hard lines. I washed my hair and tried to let things, the ugly, unpleasant things I was feeling, slide down the drain with the rest of the grime that had covered my skin.

“Blasphemer,” I told him. “There are no cinnamon rolls better than chocolate.”

He patted the steering wheel nervously. “I need to know if I can trust you.” “For some things,” I told him seriously. “You can trust me not to leave people helpless against a monster. A human monster or a werewolf monster. I don’t help bad guys—even if they are someone I thought I liked or felt some loyalty to. Bad guys need to be stopped.”

“Witchcraft,” said Willis neutrally. I nodded. It wasn’t a secret; the witches had been hiding in plain sight for a hundred years or more. In places like New Orleans or Salem (Massachusetts, not Oregon), they were virtually a tourist attraction. That human culture dismissed the validity of their claims was something the witches I know thought was a delicious irony: when they had tried to hide, they had been hunted and nearly destroyed. In the open, they were viewed as fakes—and, even more usefully, a lot of the people claiming to be witches really were fakes.

“Maybe someone is trying to make trouble for the werewolves,” Tony said. “I think it is the werewolves making trouble for themselves,” said Willis. “You brought me out because you wanted my opinion,” I told them. “It could be a werewolf, but if it is, isn’t one of our pack. I don’t think it’s a werewolf. I don’t smell one, but I can’t get close enough to check.”

Christy’s favorite tablecloth, unearthed from the linen closet, had a stain on it—discovered just as I came in from work. She hadn’t looked at me, but the sad note in her voice had Auriele glaring at me and a few reproachful looks from everyone else, including Jesse. The other tablecloths were dirty, and there was no way we could eat at a table without a tablecloth. I had not said a number of things—one of which was, if it was such a favorite of hers, then why hadn’t she taken it with her? Another unsaid comment was that if I’d known her grandmother had given it to her on her wedding day, I would have ripped it into shreds and used a paper tablecloth before I’d put it on the table for last Thanksgiving. Instead of saying anything, I’d ignored the whole dramatic show and gone upstairs to change my clothes from work, leaving Adam to listen to Christy try to decide if there was any way to salvage her grandmother’s tablecloth.

Bran said he once encountered a wendigo, and he believes that it was physically capable of killing this way. They smell oddly of magic, the way Mercy described them. But he didn’t think that it would have left canid paw prints—or left anything except bare bones. Their curse is that they hunger in a way that cannot ever be satisfied. Also, they tend to haunt the mountain passes, not the open shrub steppe.

If her stalker didn’t kill Christy soon, she might just drive me to it. At this point, I wasn’t even certain how much of it was her fault and how much of it was me being jealous. Not of Adam, Adam belonged to me, soul and wolf. If it were just Adam, I’d have more control. It was the pack.

I went limp against him, and said, dramatically, “I’m helpless against your kisses.” He laughed like a villain in a cartoon. “Aha. So that’s how it’s done. Well, there’s no help for you, then.” “No,” I said in a faint voice, putting an arm over my forehead as I arched back over his arm in the classic pose of the helpless ingénue. “I guess you’ll just have your wicked way with me again.” “Cool,” said my husband, a wicked growl in his voice. “Don’t worry. You’ll enjoy every minute of it.”

“You’ve been concentrating on Coyote when you should have been also looking at Beauclaire.” Tad held up a finger. “Without you, it is unlikely that Beauclaire will ever see the walking stick again—and he knows it.” Two fingers up. “Two: That means that you have a bargaining chip, and it also means that Beauclaire loses if something happens to you. Da also said you’ve been making Beauclaire the villain when he is more comfortably the hero. Beauclaire is honorable, as fae understand the word, and he has spent a human lifetime as a lawyer; he’ll understand compromise. If you can convince Beauclaire that you will sincerely return the walking stick to him when and if you see Coyote, he will probably grant you time to do so. Time, Da also asked me to remind you, is less precious to a Gray Lord like Beauclaire than it is to you.”

Stopping at the grocery store before I came home wasn’t a problem. Having Christy ask me to do it was a different matter. Pack is all about hierarchy. I understood how it works even if, before marrying Adam, I had been on the outside looking in. Humans have hierarchy, too. What Christy had done was the equivalent of the new-hire office girl calling the CEO and asking him to bring coffee for the break room—and she’d done it in front of Adam and the four attending wolves. If they hadn’t known about it before, they would have known about it afterward. Pack hierarchy was one of those things I’d agreed to deal with when I married Adam, so I paid attention to make his life easier. I couldn’t do much about Christy’s faux pas without looking like a jealous, arrogant bitch while Christy graciously apologized because she hadn’t realized what it was she had done—though she’d lived with the pack for years. So I’d filled her order, then brought two dozen Spudnut donuts for the pack.

In a wolf pack, the dominant members protect—they don’t need protection. I was not just the Alpha’s wife, I was his mate and a pack member. That all meant that what I did mattered, and I was expected to make a better showing than Adam’s fragile ex-wife, who’d driven this man off with nothing more than a frying pan. So I stood watching the monitors, waiting for him to break in, instead of hiding in safety. But the knowledge I chose to face him, that I had other options, seemed to have pushed the panic attack away.

His body language changed as he straightened, like an actor shedding a role. He licked his lips. “Horsemeat is not my first choice, no, but it sufficed at the time.” He liked to talk with his hands. “He understands the message I left in that field, your husband, does he not? I do not recognize his territory, and I hunt freely therein. He has taken she who is mine, so I shall take from him she who is his. Balance. Only then will I take his life—and that is vengeance. There is no one safe from my—” I shot the dog. A clean killing shot to his head.

The bullets had knocked Flores back. He hit a rack of miscellaneous parts and sent it crashing to the floor. Flores bounced off the rack, almost followed it to the ground, but caught his balance at the last instant. I felt a cold chill because with three bullets in his face and two in the chest, he caught his balance and stayed on his feet.

Flores’s face changed as he laughed, flowing and darkening, but beneath the darkness, visible in cracks in his skin, was a sullen red light. My changes are almost instantaneous, the werewolves take a lot longer than that with the exception of Charles. But none of us glowed.

I slid back one step to see what he’d thrown at me without having to look away from him. It was about the size of a finger, blackened and oozing on one end. I chanced a quick glance and realized that not only was it the size of a finger, it had a fingernail. I almost nudged it with my foot to be sure, but the paint was blackening and bubbling up around it, and directly underneath it, the metal was sagging.

I got four hits on him, three with the wrench and one with the gun, and in that time, I learned a lot about him. He wasn’t used to his prey knowing how to fight back. He had never been trained to fight hand-to-hand. He was slower than I was. Not much slower, but it was enough for me to get in four hits. He was oddly sticky, and I lost the gun to him when it sank into his flesh to be quickly consumed and absorbed. And, finally, nothing I tried seemed to hurt him.

“You are wrong. I found my love, who had been taken from me, and I celebrated the sun’s countenance, warmth, and beauty. I gave her all that I was, all that I had been, all that I could be.”

Luckily, we were under the local police jurisdiction, barely, because Adam’s initial call had only told them that there was a man who might have been responsible for murder and arson trying to break in to my garage. Human attacking human, even if she was the wife of a werewolf, was not enough to allow Cantrip to take over the case.

“There is a huge old volcano on Tenerife called El Teide. It’s the tallest peak in Spain and one of the tallest volcanos in the world. The old people who once lived on the island called it Echeyde, which means either ‘hell’ or ‘the gates of hell’ depending upon the person you ask. Guayota lived in El Teide, either guarding the door, ruling there, or both. Only the old ones could tell you for certain, and they are gone long, long ago.”

“Now Guayota was, like the Greek Titans, a violent and impetuous creature of great power. He roamed the mountain in the shape of a great, black, hairy dog with red eyes, and tragedy befell any who met him in his runs because he would eat them up. One bite for children, two for mothers, or three for big warriors who came to fight him.”

“Guayota was terrifying, but he was also lonesome. Every day, he would look up and see Magec, the sun, running her path in the sky. He thought her beautiful and wondrous and him so lonely and miserable on that mountain. So that old Guayota, he plotted to take her for his own.”

Witches feed off other people’s pain; I wondered if they could feed off terror as well.

“So one day, he jumped, the old devil, he jumped out of the top of El Teide and captured her for himself. Loud she cried and hard she fought, but she was no match for old Guayota. She could not burn him with her fierceness, for though she was the fire of day, he was born in the fire of the earth, which is more ferocious even than the sun. Nor could she blind him with her bright beauty because his eyes were used to the molten rock of his home. And when she got too bright for his eyes, the old dog, he just closed his eyes and used his ears and his nose, which were as sharp as any shepherd’s dog’s and more so. “He took her down to his home and caged her inside the volcano. For weeks, the sky was dark, and smoke filled the air. It was then that Guayota’s children were born, while he held Magec in his caves. They are the tibicenas, fierce, hairy black dogs that emerged from the mountain in those days when Guayota held Magec his prisoner. The only light that shone on Tenerife was Magec’s light, escaping here and there from the caves in the old volcano, and the light of the tibicenas’ eyes. “But the people of the island were frightened that they had no sun. They called and prayed to Achamán, he who created the world. Achamán listened to the cries of the people and came down to the volcano to rescue Magec. Guayota fought mightily because he did not want to give up Magec. The volcano spewed fire and rock, and many died as the two gods battled. At last, knowing that he could not win...

I drifted off into a dream of a witch who changed children into great, shaggy black dogs that looked like long-haired versions of the dog I’d shot, the one who’d turned into a man. The man raised his dead head to meet my eyes with his. His eyes were the color of lava. “Mercy,” he said. “Where is my sun?”

“Coyote, Raven, Wolf, are different than manitous. Coyote is the spirit of mischief, of second chances, of adaptation—the archetype of coyotes. It is true that he shares characteristics with the great manitous. Like him, they can take the shape of people, though they are not people. They are powerful in their sphere of influence. “Mostly the great manitous ignore us and pay attention only to those things that matter to them. The Columbia has a great manitou, I can feel it sometimes, but I’ve never heard of it manifesting itself, not even in stories.” “You think Guayota is a great manitou, the spirit of the volcano,” I said. “Sort of like Pele in Hawaii?”

Maybe Guayota grew lonely. The only thing I know is that, although great manitous can manifest and travel for a time, they do need a strong connection to their spirit-home. Without that connection, they will return to their spirit shape and be pulled home.”