Moon Called (Mercy Thompson, #1)

by Patricia Briggs

The most common rumor is that he really can read minds.

I asked Adam to keep an eye on you for me when you moved into his territory.”

“Not even lies of omission. Hard truths can be dealt with, triumphed over, but lies will destroy your soul.”

Suicide is difficult for werewolves. Even silver bullets don’t always defeat the wolf’s ability to heal itself. Decapitation is effective, but rather difficult to achieve in a suicidal situation. Drowning works very well. Werewolves are very densely muscled; they tend to have a difficult time swimming even if they want to, because, like chimpanzees, they have too much muscle and not enough fat to float.

Bran had a tendency to dismiss the humans around him as if they didn’t exist. Samuel once told me that it was because humans were so fragile, and Bran had seen too many of them die. I thought that if I could handle Evelyn’s death when I was fourteen, then, by hang, Bran could, too.

I had Samuel at my back. He’d been funny and charming. Lightheartedness is not a gift often given to werewolves, but Samuel had it in abundance. Under his wing, I learned joy—a very seductive emotion.

“You told me he needed a mate who could bear his children.” Human women miscarry a little over half of the children they conceive by a werewolf father. They carry to term only those babies who are wholly human. Werewolf women miscarry at the first full moon. But coyotes and wolves can interbreed with viable offspring, so why not Samuel and me? Samuel believed that some of our children would be human, maybe some would be walkers like me, and some would be born werewolves—but they all would live.

Samuel had none of the traits of the older wolves. He drove a car, had a stereo system and a computer. He actually liked people—even humans—and Bran used him to interface with police and government officials when it was necessary.

Samuel was born to my first wife, when I was still human.”

Alphas—especially this Alpha—never looked away when others were watching them. It was a mark of how bad he felt that he would do it now.

“Samuel is old,” he said. “Nearly as old as I am. His first wife died of cholera, his second of old age. His third wife died in childbirth. His wives miscarried eighteen children between them; a handful died in infancy, and only eight lived to their third birthday. One died of old age, four of the plague, three of failing the Change. He has no living children and only one, born before Samuel Changed, made it into adulthood.”

in you he’d found a mate who could give him children less vulnerable to the whims of fate, children who could be born werewolves like Charles was.

I don’t think it would have changed my decision. I knew that because I still wouldn’t have married someone who didn’t love me; but I think I would have thought more kindly of him. I would have left him a letter or called him after I reached my mother’s house. Perhaps I’d even have gathered the courage to talk to him if I hadn’t been so hurt and angry.

Samuel saw in you the answer to his pain, and not the answer to his heart. But that wasn’t all Samuel felt for you—I doubt he knew it himself.”

“He was grieving over his lost mate,” said Bran. “Werewolves aren’t that different from our wild cousins in some respects. It took me too long to figure it out, though. Before I did, he left us without a word.

“He didn’t love me,” I said. “Not as a man loves a woman.” “No,” agreed Bran. “But he had chosen you as his mate.”

I wanted to be out of Aspen Creek, where the memories of being sixteen and alone tried to cling no matter how hard I flinched away; but obedience to Bran was too ingrained—especially when his orders made sense. I didn’t have to be nice about it, though.

“Livin’s easier than dyin’ most times, Mercy girl,” he said kindly, repeating my foster father’s favorite saying. “Dance when the moon sings, and don’t cry about troubles that haven’t yet come.”

“We think the time is coming when we will no longer be able to hide from the humans,” said Samuel, who had finished wrapping Adam in the blankets. “But we’d rather control how that happens than have a group of murdering wolves reveal our existence before we’re ready.”

“I appreciate your time,” I said, narrowly skirting an outright thank you—which can get you in trouble. The wrong kind of fae will take your thanks as an admission that you feel obligated to them. Which means that you must then do whatever they ask.

I have a whole spiel about how sick it is to carry around the instrument of Christ’s torture as a symbol for the Prince of Peace who taught us to love one another.

“I can see it now, Mercy holding a roomful of vampires at bay with her glowing silver sheep.”

I have a degree in history, which is one of the reasons I’m an auto mechanic.

“I’m not immune to magic.” “I didn’t say you were,” he answered. “But some of our magics pass you by. Why do you think you stood against Marsilia’s rage when the rest of us fell?” “It was the sheep.” “It wasn’t the sheep. Once upon a time, Mercedes, what you are would have been your death sentence. We killed your kind wherever we found them, and they returned the favor.”

I knew that vampires, like the fae, and werewolves and their kindred were all Old World preternatural creatures. They’d come over for the same reasons most humans did: to gain wealth, power, or land, and to escape persecution.

So vampires came to the New World, victims of religious persecution like the Quakers and the Puritans—only different. Werewolves and their moon-called kindred came to find new territory to hunt. The fae came to escape the cold iron of the Industrial Revolution, which followed them anyway. Together these immigrants destroyed most of the preternatural creatures who had lived in the Americas, until at last, even the bare stories of their existence were mostly gone.

I had to fight not to flee. Part of me knew that so much fear must have a cause. The rest of me figured out why some werewolves had a bad reaction to the vampire’s Kiss—waking up unable to move, his last memory being something sucking his blood was bound to hit every panic button in a werewolf’s arsenal.

Wolves, the real wolves, are not usually vicious animals unless they are frightened, hurt, or cornered. Werewolves are always vicious, always ready for the kill.

I try not to worry about one impossible task until I’ve completed the first.