Mercy Thompson 8: Night Broken (27 page)

“Juan came after you because you slept with him, then you ran,” I told her, but then I started thinking about what that meant. “If you had waited and told him you weren’t interested, he might have left you alone.” I worked through the germ of the idea. “If he’d been leaving bodies everywhere he went, Warren would have figured it out. But there weren’t bodies, there weren’t fires until you ran.” I knew there hadn’t been bodies, because Warren had looked for bodies left the same way as his victims here in the Tri-Cities. Why hadn’t there been any other bodies? “That’s not your fault,” I told her, “but it is interesting.”

She stared at me, her fists clenched.

“Had your friend slept with him before?” I asked.

Christy was competitive. I knew, because Jesse talked to me, that Christy had slept with her best friend’s husband just to prove that she could. Maybe she’d done the same thing with her best friend’s lover, assuming that Flores had been her friend’s lover. I didn’t care. I just needed to know if Flores had slept with women other than Christy.

Christy didn’t answer, but her clear skin flushed pink, telling me I’d hit the mark. All the marks.

“He didn’t stalk her?”

“No,” she whispered. “He didn’t stalk her. One night, and he was done with her. She was pretty bitter about it. But she doesn’t have an ex-husband who is a werewolf.”

Guayota hadn’t sounded like he cared if Adam was a werewolf, he sounded like he wanted Christy back. Why stalk Christy and not her friend? What was different about Christy?

The question rang in my head while I answered the nasty venom in her last sentence. “The only thing Adam has to do with this is that you bragged about being an Alpha werewolf’s ex-wife to catch Juan’s attention.” Juan had known that Adam was a werewolf and that he was Christy’s ex-husband. Could have been that he’d researched it, but there was a hint of competitiveness in the way he’d confronted Adam. The kind of competitiveness that happens when a man’s lover brags about a previous lover.

She didn’t answer me, so I knew that my shot in the dark was right that time, too.

“This guy has nothing to do with werewolves,” I told her. Guayota hadn’t cared that Adam was a werewolf, hadn’t cared about Adam, really, except that he stood between Christy and Guayota and that he had been Christy’s husband. “Congratulations, Christy. You just met one of the weird things in the world that don’t fit neatly into the fae or werewolf category.”

“Weird like you,” said Christy.

“Well, yes,” I agreed. “I thought that went without saying. Weird things like me.”

“What are you, exactly?”

I hadn’t realized she didn’t know, but I wasn’t going to let her change the direction of the conversation. Not when I’d been getting some interesting information about Guayota, and not while Christy was still trying to make the situation be someone else’s, be
Adam’s
, fault.

“This isn’t about me,” I said. “Ask me some other time, and I’ll tell you. So you got Juan’s attention, and maybe because you know to look for odd things and don’t discount them the way someone who hadn’t been married to a werewolf might, you realized he wasn’t just some rich guy on the make, not just some guy at all. He scared you—but not because he was so possessive. He scared you the same way Adam scared you. If Juan Flores had been exactly what he presented himself as—a bored young businessman not opposed to sleeping with any pretty woman who threw herself in his path—it would have been okay. Instead, you got a man who was a lot more than he appeared to be on the surface. It scared you, and you ran.”

“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.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” asked Adam, sounding, of all things, hurt. “Did you think that we wouldn’t help you?”

I wasn’t hurt. My hands curled with the effort of not smacking her because she’d put everyone in danger—and hadn’t told us everything she knew.

“I didn’t know there was anything else out there,” she said. “The fae are locked up where they belong. He wasn’t a vampire. I thought he was a werewolf.”

“Then why not tell us?” asked Mary Jo from the doorway of the kitchen.

Christy looked around and realized it wasn’t just Adam, Honey, and me who had been listening. Jesse, Ben, Darryl, and Auriele were in the kitchen, but behind them, in the doorway, in the little hallway beyond, and standing in the stairwell, the rest of the wolves had been a silent audience until Mary Jo had spoken.

“Because that would have meant that she put her foot in it,” I told Mary Jo, and everyone else. “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.

“But he wasn’t a werewolf,” Christy said. “So it
wasn’t
my fault he killed Troy, burned down my building, and killed all those women here.”

“No,” I said, tiredly. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault, Christy.

“Between your looks and running, you triggered some sort of psychotic episode. He fixated on you and gave chase. Not your fault.” I looked at her until she dropped her eyes. “Not Adam’s fault, either.”

Auriele bustled over and put her arm around Christy’s shoulders. “It was a good thing that you had us to run to,” she said. “Another woman might not have.”

“It
is
my fault,” said Christy, believing it because that was the attitude that would win over the most people. That was one of Christy’s gifts, her ability to shift her worldview whenever it was to her advantage. She turned her head into Auriele’s shoulder and burst into heavy sobs. “I was so stupid to trust him.”

Shoot me now,
I thought. I’d known that she’d turn on the tears once she had the right audience. Jesse gave me a tense smile, then turned and slipped out of the kitchen and away from her mother’s theatrics.

I found Adam.

“
I
blame her,” I muttered grumpily, if softly. My voice hadn’t been quiet enough to escape wolf ears, but none of the people gathered around Christy looked my way—even with very good hearing you have to be listening first.

Adam kissed my head and dragged me closer until my back was tight against his front. He dropped his mouth to my ear. “Okay. As long as you keep in mind that just because you blame her doesn’t mean it
is
her fault.” Though he’d put his mouth to my ear, he didn’t bother whispering.

“Only if you remember that while she is drumming up sympathy for her heaping helping of guilt—she doesn’t really feel responsible,” I said. “Just for now responsible.”

“Sounds like you know our Christy as well as those of us who lived with her,” said Honey, leaning a shoulder lightly against both of us in a gesture of solidarity. She looked at the pack, and said, “Some of us, anyway.”

On the far side of the werewolf pack trying to comfort Christy, Ben shared a cynical smile with us. He wasn’t petting Christy, either.

The pizza guy came after that and broke up the comfort-poor-Christy party. Pizza places don’t usually deliver that far out in the boonies, but Honey, it turned out, had an arrangement with a place in Kennewick—an arrangement that included a huge tip for the driver and a surcharge on the pizza.

The food was a signal, and as soon as the last scrap of pizza was gone, everyone retreated to their Honey-assigned sleeping places. Adam and I got the formal living room. Jesse opted into the giant upstairs room with her mother, where they’d decided to watch some disaster film from the seventies that had just made it to video.

“The upside of this,” Adam told me as we stood next to the air mattress, which had a fitted sheet already stretched over it, a pair of pillows, and a blanket, “is that we get this room to ourselves.”

I dropped down to sit on the mattress and gave him a look. “No door, no fun.” The sounds of the movie filtered down the stairs and into the room. Everyone in that room, everyone who was something other than human, at least, would hear whatever we said—or did—in here.

Adam smiled and plopped down beside me. The air mattress bucked under his sudden weight and tried to toss me off, so I lay down for more stability.

“I’m too tired to do anything anyway,” he said, lying back beside me. He reached over and took my hand. “If it’s any consolation, we’re not going to get a whole lot of sleep before we have to head to the lawyer’s.”

“I’d forgotten about the lawyer,” I said. “Somehow, that seems a long time ago.”

His hand clenched on mine, hard enough to hurt before his grip gentled. “I thought he’d kill you before I got there,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, trying to sound like it hadn’t bothered me. “Me, too.”

“Don’t do that again.”

“Okay,” I said agreeably. “How often can I get attacked by a volcano god in my shop?” I groaned. “Not that there is a shop.”

“You have insurance,” Adam said.

I sighed. “I’m not covered for acts of God,” I told him. “I wonder if they’ll try to find a way to make that mean volcano gods as well as God God.”

“God God,” Adam said, sounding amused. “I’ll remember that. Speaking of things to remember”—and now he didn’t sound amused at all—“I like it when you defend me. I haven’t gotten a lot of that.”

“That voice,” I said, and he laughed happily, though even his laugh held that rough sexual overtone. He rolled until he was on top of me, and he nibbled along my jawline.

“You like my body,” he told me, “you like me sweaty, and watching my belly when I do sit-ups.”

“Hey,” I said, trying for indignation, “I never told you that.”

He laughed again. “Sweetheart, you tell me that every time you can’t look away, and you know it. But”—he laughed again, then said, in that deep growly voice that was his own personal secret weapon—“you really like it when I talk to you, like this.”

“No door,” I squeaked. “She’ll walk in on us and make sure Jesse is with her.”

Adam froze and growled for real. “You’re right. You’re right. And I almost don’t care.”

“Jesse,” I said.

“Jesse,” he agreed with a groan, then rolled up—abdomen flexing nicely—and onto his feet. He began to strip, not bothering to hide his arousal. If Christy walked in, she’d get quite a show of what she’d thrown away.

“You might as well get ready for sleeping,” he told me in grumpy tones. “Morning is going to come early.”

“I’m keeping my clothes on,” I told him, equally grumpily. “Without doors, everyone will feel pretty free and easy stopping in to bring you their complaints.” Everyone being Christy. “I’m not taking chances.”

“They come in, they deserve what they get,” Adam told me and, naked, spread the blanket over the mattress and me.

I wiggled until I was right way around. Then I pulled the blanket off my face while he climbed under the covers. He planted himself right next to me, and his scent spread over both of us.

I was well on my way to sleep when a thought occurred to me. “He’s broken,” I told Adam.

Adam grunted. Then, when I didn’t say anything more, he laughed once. “Okay, Mercy. Who is broken?”

“Guayota, Flores, whoever,” I told him. “He was doing okay in the modern world before he ran into Christy. Before she reminded him of someone he lost a long time ago.”

Adam was thoughtful for a moment. “Because there weren’t any other bodies.”

“Warren would have found them if there were, right?” I asked.

“Warren or my buddies in the DEA,” he agreed.

“The women he killed, the ones Tony brought me in to look at, they all looked like Christy,” I told him. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

Adam reached over and pulled me closer. “I believe that Guayota is very old and that Christy was his trigger. You know better than most how it is with the very old wolves. They’ll do fine—until suddenly they snap.”

“I still think we should give him Christy,” I said.

“No, you don’t,” he told me firmly. “I was there for your speech in the kitchen, remember?”

“If we gave him Christy,” I said persuasively, “we could visit them in the Canary Islands.”

“Like Lucia wants to visit Joel’s mother?” he asked. “Giving him Christy won’t fix him, Mercy. There’s no reasoning with the old ones once they are broken. He’s started killing and he’ll keep killing. And then there is Joel.”

I sighed. “I suppose you’re right. I think we’re going to wish that we’d had Tad come over here instead of going to Fairyland.”

“Tad didn’t have much of a choice,” Adam said. “We’ll figure something out.”

That meant he didn’t know how to kill Guayota, either, but that wasn’t going to stop him. 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. I lay tense and miserable beside him. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t place the blame on Christy. It was just bad luck.

“So,” Adam said brightly, changing the subject, “have you planned what you’re going to tell Beauclaire when he comes looking for his walking stick two nights from now?”

“Yes,” I told him. “I’ll tell him to go ahead and take out the Tri-Cities, as long as he makes certain he takes out Guayota when he does. Then you, Jesse, and I can drive to my mom’s house in Portland for a surprise visit.”

“Mercy,” he said reprovingly.

“Okay,” I told him, “we don’t have to go to Mom’s. Montana would work, too.”

“Mercy,” he repeated. “We’ve been in tough places before. It will be okay. You’re just tired, or you wouldn’t be so upset.” He pulled me all the way over on top of him and patiently waited while I wiggled until I was comfortable.

“Go to sleep,” he said. “Things will look better in the morning.” I was almost asleep when he murmured, “And if it doesn’t, we’ll invite your mom down to deal with Guayota
and
Beauclaire.”