Moon Called (Mercy Thompson, #1)

by Patricia Briggs

Tony was good at that—it was his job. His black hair was slicked back and tied into a short ponytail and he was clean-shaven. His right ear, I noticed, was pierced four times and held three small hoops and a diamond stud. He’d added two since last time I’d seen him. In a hooded sweatshirt unzipped to display a thin tee that showed the results of all the hours he spent in a gym, he looked like a recruitment poster for one of the local Hispanic gangs.

Most of my visits are very short. I love them, but I love them better at a distance.

Werewolves can take as much as fifteen minutes to shift shape—and shifting is painful for them, which is something to keep in mind. Werewolves aren’t the most friendly animals anyway, but if they’ve just shifted, it’s a good policy to leave them alone for a while. Walkers’ shifting—at least my shifting, because I don’t know any other walkers—is quick and painless. One moment I’m a person and the next a coyote: pure magic. I just step from one form into the next.

There’s a lot of truth in the adage that all cars named after animals are lemons.

Kieran McBride was fae, a garden sprite, and he couldn’t hold cold iron, not even through thick leather gloves.

anyone who has seen a Shar-pei puppy knows there is great charisma in a certain sort of ugliness.

the lesser fae, the weak and attractive, revealed themselves at the command of the Gray Lords. The great and terrible, the powerful or powerfully ugly, stayed hidden, awaiting the reaction of the world to the more palatable among them.

He’d seen what happened to some of the fae who tried to continue their lives as if nothing had happened.

No one wanted a fae for a teacher, a mechanic, or a neighbor.

Fae who lived in upscale suburbs had windows broken and rude graffiti painted on their homes. Those who lived in less law-abiding places were mugged and beaten. They couldn’t defend themselves for fear of the Gray Lords. Whatever the humans did to them, the Gray Lords would do worse.

If a fae agreed to live on a reservation, he was given a small house and a monthly stipend. Their children (like Zee’s son Tad) were given scholarships to good universities where they might become useful members of society . . . if they could find jobs.

Whatever ills it created, the reservation system had lessened the growing problems between the human and fae, at least in the US.

I am not fae, broad though that term is. My magic comes from North America not Europe, and I have no glamour (or need of it) to allow me to blend with the human population.

Love thy enemies, it says in the scriptures. My foster mother always added, “At the very least, you will be polite to them.”

the most prevalent of the cautionary tales werewolves tell each other is what happens the first time a werewolf changes if he doesn’t know what he is.

You have to be taught how to use your senses.

Here in the US, most werewolves are brought over by friends or family. There is a support structure to educate the new wolf, to keep him and everyone around him safe—but there are still the occasional attacks by rogue werewolves. One of the duties of a pack is to kill those rogues and find their victims.

any person bitten by a werewolf doesn’t turn into another werewolf. It takes an attack so vicious that the victim lies near death to allow the magic of the wolf to slip past the body’s immune system. Such attacks make the newspapers with headlines like “Man Attacked by Rabid Dogs.” Usually the victim dies of the wounds or of the Change. If he survives, then he recovers quickly, miraculously—until the next full moon, when he learns that he didn’t really survive at all. Not as he had been. Usually a pack will find him before his first change and ease his w...

“Just remember, I’ve been known to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

There was no drug in the world that would undo the Change, and darn few werewolves who considered their state a curse after the first few months. Eventually most of them felt that becoming short-tempered and occasionally furry was a small price to pay for extraordinary strength, speed, and senses—not to mention the fringe benefit of a body immune to disease and old age.

As a human I didn’t stand a chance against a werewolf. The coyote was still not a match—but I was fast, much faster than a real coyote and just a hair quicker than a werewolf.

I’d never killed anyone before. He shouldn’t have been dead. Werewolves are hard to kill. If he had bothered to stanch the wound, or if he hadn’t chased me, the wound would have healed before he could bleed out.

“In the US, all the packs follow the Marrok, a title taken from the name of one of King Arthur’s knights who was a werewolf. The Marrok and his pack have oversight of all the werewolves in North America.” “There are more of us?” he asked. I nodded. “Maybe as many as two thousand in the US, five or six hundred in Canada, and about four hundred in Mexico.”

Women’s liberation hadn’t made much headway in the world of werewolves. A mated female took her pack position from her mate, but unmated females were always lower than males unless the male was unusually submissive. This little fact had caused me no end of grief, growing up, as I did, in the middle of a werewolf pack. But without someone more dominant than he, Mac wouldn’t be able to take control of his wolf yet. Adam wasn’t there, so it was up to me.

Marrok’s pack call themselves the Marrok.

Adam was an Alpha, and if he’d been ugly he would have held the attention of anyone who happened to be nearby, wolf or human—but

Defiance was a habit I’d developed to preserve myself while growing up with a pack of dominant and largely male werewolves. Werewolves, like other predators, respect bravado. If you are too careful not to anger them, they’ll see it as a weakness—and weak things are prey.

Darryl was a big man, well over six feet. His mother had been Chinese, Jesse had told me, and his father an African tribesman who had been getting an engineering degree at an American university when they met. Darryl’s features were an arresting blend of the two cultures. He looked like someone who should have been modeling or starring in movies, but he was a Ph.D. engineer working at the Pacific Northwest Laboratories in some sort of government hush-hush project.

I whispered the swear words I usually only bring out for rusty bolts and aftermarket parts that don’t fit as advertised to give me courage as I ran.

For all their size, werewolves still resemble their gracile cousin the timber wolf more than a Mastiff or Saint Bernard, who are closer to their weight.

Marlin .444’s were not built for home defense; they were built to kill grizzlies and have even been used a time or two to take out elephants. Just what the doctor ordered for werewolves. One shot at all but point-blank and he was dead. I walked up to him and shot him one more time, just to make sure.

In Europe, murder was still mostly the way the rule of the pack changed hands. The old Alpha ruled until one of the younger, hungrier dominant males decided the old one had grown weak and attacked him. I knew of at least one European Alpha who killed any male who showed signs of being dominant.

But could someone have come into Adam’s house and done this much damage without help from Adam’s pack?

A Vanagon resembles nothing so much as a Twinkie on wheels; a fifteen-foot-long, six-foot-wide Twinkie with as much aerodynamic styling as a barn door. In the twelve years that VW imported them into the US, they never put anything bigger in them than the four-cylinder wasser-boxer engine. My 1989 four-wheel-drive, four-thousand-pound Syncro’s engine put out a whopping ninety horses.

Siebold Adelbertsmiter, Zee for short, had taught me everything I knew about cars. Most fae are very sensitive to iron, but Zee was a Metallzauber—which is a rather broad category name given to the few fae who could handle metal of all kinds. Zee preferred the modern American term “gremlin,” which he felt better fit his talents.

Charles, Bran’s son, was a financial genius, and the Marrok’s pack would never be begging on street corners.

When I left here, I’d had ten thousand dollars in a bank account, the result of part of my minimum wage earnings invested by Charles.

Charles, the cinnamon wolf, stopped at the edge of the trees and began to change. He was an oddity among werewolves: a natural-born werewolf rather than made. The only one of his kind that I have ever heard of.

Charles’s mother had been a Salish woman, the daughter of a medicine man. She had been dying when Bran came across her, shortly after he arrived in Montana. According to my foster mother, who told me the story, Bran had been so struck with her beauty that he couldn’t just let her die, so he Changed her and made her his mate. I never could wrap my imagination around the thought of Bran being overcome by love at first sight, but maybe he had been different two hundred years ago. At any rate, when she became pregnant, she used the knowledge of magic her father had given her to keep from changing at the full moon. Female werewolves cannot have children: the change is too violent to allow the fetus to survive. But Charles’s mother, as her father’s daughter, had some magic of her own. She managed to carry Charles to term, but was so weakened by her efforts that she died soon after his birth.

She left her son with two gifts. The first was that he changed easier and faster. The second was a gift for magic that was unusual in werewolves. Bran’s pack did not have to hire ...

I don’t know how old he is. All I know is that he was old when he came to this continent to work as a fur trapper in the late eighteenth century. He’d traveled to this area of Montana with the Welsh cartographer David Thompson and settled to live with his Salish mate.

Charles didn’t touch anyone casually. I had always thought he rather despised me, though he treated me with the same remote courtesy he used with everyone else.

In my own world of engines and CV joints, I’d grown used to being competent. If Adam had been a car, I’d have known what to do. But in Aspen Creek, I’d always been not quite good enough—some things, it seemed, hadn’t changed.

His voice was soft and sweet as molasses; but my mother once told me that you had to trust that the first thing out of a person’s mouth was truth. After they have a chance to think about it, they’ll change what they say to be more socially acceptable, something they think you’ll be happier with, something that will get the results they want.

The T-shirt he wore was a little small and clung to him like a second skin. If he’d had an extra ounce of fat or a little less muscle, it would have looked stupid, but he was built like a Chippendales’ dancer. His body was lovely, but I don’t know if anyone else would have called him handsome. He certainly didn’t have Adam’s strikingly beautiful features. Sam’s eyes were deeply set, his nose was too long, his mouth too wide. His coloring in human form was much less striking than his wolf: light blue-gray eyes and brown hair, streaked just a bit from the sun.

the Marrok knew, he was like that. He told me why Samuel wanted to take me as his mate—and it hadn’t been for any reason I could accept. So while Samuel waited for me, Charles was driving me down to Libby to catch the train to Portland that morning instead.

In his own way, Samuel was the most honorable person I’d ever known—something that made his betrayal hurt worse because I knew that he’d never meant me to believe he loved me. He’d told me he would wait for me, and I knew he’d waited long after he’d realized I wasn’t going to come.

A sandy-haired young man with a nondescript face

“Never starve a werewolf, or he might ask you to join him for lunch.”

My foster parents were both of them almost seventeen years dead. She died trying to become a werewolf because, she’d told me, every year she got older and he didn’t. There are a lot fewer women who are moon called, because they just don’t survive the Change as well. My foster father died from grief a month later. I’d been fourteen.