Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)

by Patricia Briggs

“Some things you need to know about my ‘gift.’” He said it with his fingers as quotes so I knew what he thought about his gift from Coyote. “Okay.” “One. It usually comes in dreams or small bits, big Seeings aren’t that common. Two. Sometimes I see the future, sometimes the past, most times it’s the present only somewhere else where I can’t freaking do anything about anything.” I nodded. “Finally. When I do see the future, while it is possible to change it, the reason I see that particular future is because it has become the most likely scenario, and it’s pretty close to being set in stone.”

Guayota was a manitou, the spirit of the volcano, and he needed something with him that tied him to the Canary Islands.

I looked at the dead dogs again. They still looked like sacrifices to me. Witches drew power from pain and suffering, but also from death. Gary had said that Guayota needed a source of power. There had been dead dogs among the bodies I’d discovered out in Finley, too. But I didn’t think Guayota had made sacrifices to himself.

“I ranted for an hour after I saw her. Swore that if I could hit a button and destroy the human race, I’d do it in a heartbeat. You know what my Joel said? He said, ‘Niña, most people are good people. Take this dog. A lot of good people worked to save her. People noticed, they called the police. The police brought in the Humane Society, and they took her—risked getting bitten so that she could have a better life. Lots of people working to undo the work of one bastard. You know what that means? Lots more good people out there than bad.’”

We left the dogs’ bodies because we did not have time to bury them, though it felt to me as though we should have done something. But in times of war, the care of the dead is outweighed by the need for survival.

“Damn, lady,” said Zack, looking at me from the corner of his eye. “Damn, but you don’t have any quit in you at all.”

“What I really wish, though, is that there had been a camera at your house when Adam tore a strip off Christy when she wasted time playing stupid games with his phone when you were calling for help. I’d pay a lot of money to have gotten to see that.”

When we fought, he roared and stalked and fought back. He didn’t let his face go blank and wait to be hit again. Being willing to accept responsibility for the well-being of others was part of being Alpha, part of who Adam was, and she was very, very good at using that against him.

“Stay out of this,” she snapped at me, wiping futilely at her cheeks. “This isn’t your business.” “When you blamed Adam, whose only fault that I can see is that he has poor taste in wives, you made it my business,” I told her. Honey cleared her throat. “You do know you are one of his wives, right?” I raised an eyebrow. “Happily, he doesn’t know how bad off he is with me—and I intend that he never will.”

“Look.” I tried to keep my voice gentle. “No one cares if you sleep with a football team, none of whom you know and all of whom are half your age.” I repeated it so she could hear the truth in my words. “We don’t care.”

“He cut his hand,” she said, in a low voice. “And it healed like Adam’s cuts and bruises healed.” I closed my eyes. She’d known he wasn’t human, she’d known, and hadn’t warned any of us.

“Because, until she saw the video, she really did think he was a werewolf and that the reason he was coming after her was because she told him that Adam was her ex-husband, Adam the famous werewolf. She believed that knowing about Adam was why he came after her—as a strike at the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack. She thought that if she hadn’t told him about Adam, he wouldn’t have come after her. She thought it was her fault he knew her connection to Adam, and she didn’t want anyone to know that.” And she’d thought that if it hadn’t been for Adam, Juan Flores would have just let her run away—which made it Adam’s fault again. She believed it was Adam’s fault because otherwise she’d have to admit her guilt.

I’d known that Christy was going to try to break us up, but I hadn’t considered that she might get Adam killed to do it.

“You mean Guayota has killed more people.” Coyote nodded, as solemn as I’d ever seen him. “You need to understand this, both of you. Once Guayota took the first death, he can never stop. He will kill and kill and, like the wendigo, never be free of the terrible hunger because death never can satisfy that kind of need. He cannot stop himself, so he needs to be stopped.”

Coyote’s road had looked and smelled exactly as I expected—but real life doesn’t do that. Real life is full of surprises, big and small. I’d keep that in mind the next time Coyote showed up.

“Gary,” said Coyote conversationally as he turned around and raised his butt in the air until he was crouched like a runner in a sprint at the Olympics. “You should stay until the end of this story. Sometimes the end of the adventure is much better than the beginning. Besides, you might be more useful than you know if you stick around.”

“When it looks like a mortal creature, the mortal flesh encompasses the tibicena and may be killed as any mortal creature. When it is wrapped in the tibicena’s form, it cannot be harmed by mundane means.”

He looked up at me. There was heat in his gaze—there is always some spark of heat when Adam looks at me, but there was also need that was deeper than sexual. I could see the shadow caused by worry, possessiveness, and a vulnerability that allowed him, the Alpha wolf, to stay on the ground when I was standing. That vulnerability (and the possessiveness) meant that Adam would never let me leave him, as he’d let Christy leave him.

“Mercy?” Wulfe’s voice was enough to wake me right up. “You wanted to talk to me?” I wished I had more of Mary Jo’s glass of water left. “Mercy,” he whispered. “Mercy. I can still taste you in my mouth.” I pulled the phone away from my ear because I didn’t want his voice that close to me. “I long for your blood on my tongue, little coyote-girl.” Creepy. Of all the creepy people and monsters I’ve encountered—and a lot of monsters are pretty creepy—Wulfe is the one who gets to me the worst. I think it’s because he scares me the most. I had been thinking about drinking, and he started talking about it, as though he was reading my mind. He does that kind of thing a lot. He knows it bothers me, and that just encourages him. “And I can see you turning to dust in the middle of the afternoon under the hot summer sun,” I told him, trying to sound bored. I did a pretty good job. Exhaustion and boredom sound a lot alike. “If your dream comes true, then mine gets to come true, too.”

The one thing that is not going to happen is you visiting the court jester of the evil undead alone.”

There is nothing more useless than a watchdog that barks at normal things the same way it does at a thief at the door.

“She’ll never be off-limits to you, isn’t that right?” “His tie to her was broken,” said Adam. “It must have been a strong link,” said Wulfe, hanging limply from Stefan’s hands. “It must have been strong if the Monster couldn’t take it. But then a lot of people underestimate our Soldier, our Stefan. Even so, a stronger vampire than Stefan should be able to supercede the blood bond he has with you, Mercy—we could fix that for you. Who would you rather serve, Mercy—Marsilia or me?” Wulfe giggled some more.

Face abruptly expressionless, he confronted Stefan. “Did you think that I wouldn’t tell her? You think to keep her, and that keeps you from rejoining Marsilia because through you, Marsilia would have access to Mercy.”

This was why Wulfe had insisted we come to his house—because he wanted to confront Stefan. I hadn’t missed that Wulfe watched me as much as Stefan. He’d also wanted me to attack Stefan for lying to me—to give Stefan no one to turn to except Marsilia.

“Come, Stefan. With you in the seethe, Marsilia will fight to protect Mercy because she is needed to keep you in line. You have been Marsilia’s Soldier for four centuries and more. Marsilia needs you. You’ve been hiding your secret bond from the coyote-girl. Now that she knows, you have nothing more to hide. Marsilia will give her word that she will not touch the bond you share with Mercy, won’t try to claim her for herself—no matter how useful a tame walker would be.”

“I counted you my friend,” Adam said, his voice icy. “I am,” said Stefan. “We’ll speak of this later.” “Yes,” said Adam. “We will. There is one way to cut such a bond.” “No,” said Stefan sadly. “No. I would only take her with me at this point. She accepted the bond willingly, and that makes it a lot stronger than one that is forced on someone.

“I have your back on this one, love.” I grunted. Adam laughed. I frowned at him, and he said, “Sorry. That’s my grunt you stole. I’ve been thinking, and you should have, too. If Wulfe is right, and I see no reason to doubt that, the tie between you and Stefan has been going on a long time now. And he has never used it—except this once, to protect you.” Twice. He had used it twice. “Stefan tries to be honorable, as honorable as his condition allows.” “Condition?” I said wryly. “That makes it sound like he has rabies or distemper.” “Rabies has a lot in common with vampirism,” said Adam. I grunted again.

Adam was right. All that Stefan had done with our link was to help me twice. But Stefan was right, too. Knowing that the tie was still there chafed. Knowing that Adam had known about it and not told me . . . that chafed me even more.

She watched it from beginning to end, and her poker face was flawless. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought that she saw fights between volcano gods and mechanics on a daily basis.

“You’ve done a lot of karate, right? That looked like an outtake from some of the old martial arts shows—before they learned to get the actors to slow down so the audience could see what they were doing.”

“Someone came in with Adam and saved my skin,” I told her. “The means that someone used would make that someone very valuable to the military or any number of other disreputable types who might resort to kidnapping to get that kind of power under their control. I’m just glad that the glitch happened when it did. That way, we can just give the credit to my husband and ensure that a Good Samaritan doesn’t suffer for saving my bacon. We’d like to leave that person out completely.”

“But this is like being in the middle of an episode of Criminal Minds.” She paused. “Okay. That’s dorky. Sorry. But most of our cases are like somebody’s kid got drunk and hit a fence and wants to make reparations but would rather not lose their driver’s license. The only murders we’ve been involved with have been those ‘everyone knows who did it,’ and our job is to get our client the lightest sentence possible . . . and I’m talking too much.” She blinked at us. “It’s just that I moved here hoping I might get the chance to see a fae, because the reservation is just over in Walla Walla. And here I am talking to a werewolf about a fire demon who is killing people and burning down buildings.”

This is my father’s walking stick, though it has changed from the last time I held it a thousand years ago, more or less. I did not expect that it would. His small magics tend to be more stable than the larger ones, which have, up to this point, showed themselves to be more adaptable.”

“The thing you have to ask yourself is this,” Gary said. “Is it Guayota Coyote wants to rid the world of, or us? I can tell you that he won’t care if we die. Death doesn’t mean the same thing to him as it does to us. Possibly it’s a test of strength. Survival is one of those Catch-22s. If you live through one of Coyote’s games, it delights him because then he can push you into one that is more dangerous.

“This is not my pack,” Samuel said to Adam’s unspoken comment. “But Mercy is part of my family by my choice, and that makes you, by extension, my brother by marriage. I’m going. You don’t get a choice.”

“Guayota is our enemy. He is not our enemy because he hurt one of our own, though he has. He is not our enemy because he violates our territory, though that is also true. He is not our enemy because he attacked my mate. He is not even our enemy because he is evil. He is our enemy because he kills those who cannot protect themselves against him. Because he will not stop until someone stops him.” He paused and took a deep breath. “I have seen him fight—and so have you. I am not sure this is a fight we can win. But there is one thing I do know, and that is that we will not, we cannot, wait around until he kills another innocent. We might die fighting him, but if we do not try and stop him, we are already defeated.”

We were silent because he wanted us to be so, and he was the Alpha. His eyes lingered on mine, and if there was grief in them, I think it was only our mating bond that let me see it. He didn’t think he was going to survive this—or he’d have taken Darryl with him.

Warren?” Warren drawled his “Yes, boss” without hesitation. The wolves stirred and began to howl. Emerging from human throats, it was not as pure or carrying as it would have been out of the wolves, but the emotion was the same. There was respect and a celebration of his bravery in accepting and in the honor of being chosen to fight beside his Alpha. It took Warren entirely by surprise. He grabbed Kyle’s hand and held on as his eyes brightened with tears that threatened to spill over.

God help us and keep us from receiving what we deserve—it was a favorite saying of my foster father, Bryan.

There are some things that honest, honorable people don’t do to the people they love. They don’t propose marriage on TV. They don’t bring home small cuddly animals without checking with their spouses first. And they don’t tell their ex-husband they love him in front of a crowd that includes their daughter and his current wife right before he goes off to almost certain death. It didn’t help that most of us could tell that she wasn’t lying.

My grief was so huge that I had no room for jealousy.

I was pretty sure that the walking stick had served Coyote’s purpose by showing me what lay within the tibicenas. If it would have been effective against them, he’d have told me—or couched it in some kind of riddle that I’d still be puzzling out when one of the tibicenas killed me.

Killing the tibicenas, his two giant dogs, might do it. But you can only kill their mortal forms, when they look like mostly normal dogs instead of polar-bear-sized monsters. I suspect they are not going to be fighting werewolves in their mortal forms.”

Naked, I took off Adam’s clothes and folded them as I set them down, as if taking care with his clothing might show him how much I longed to take care of him. Unusually, his body was slow to awaken, and so was mine—but that was okay because this was about saying good-bye. About impregnating my skin with his scent so that I would have him with me after he was gone. About remembering exactly—exactly—what the soft skin just to the side of his hip bone felt like under my fingertips and under my lips. It was about love and loss and the unbearable knowledge that this could be the last time. Was probably the last time.

I wish . . .” My stomach hurt and it would have been kindness to put me out of my misery, but I wasn’t going to share that with Adam. I know, he said. “You weren’t supposed to get that,” I told him. “I know that, too,” he said, his voice tender. “You should know that you can’t hide things from me.” “Good,” I said, my voice fierce. “Good. Then you know, you know I love you.”

Seven werewolves and a walker against a god.

But death isn’t a tragedy to God, only to those left behind.

Maybe Guayota would manage to kill us all—it felt like that kind of night.

I’d never seen Darryl and Auriele fight together, and they were beautiful. For the first time in my life, I wished I were a singer like the Marrok and both of his sons were because only music would do them justice.