Текст книги "River Marked"

Автор книги: Patricia Briggs

Соавторы: Patricia Briggs
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

I thought of the way Janice Morrison, whom I would never meet, had walked willingly into the river with her struggling children.

“What do you know of how those who are like you came to be, Mercy?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t, much.”

Adam encompassed us both with a single sharp look, then went to the campsite grill and stuffed newspaper and charcoal into the charcoal chimney. He granted us the illusion of privacy because Gordon obviously wanted to talk to me—but he would listen.

It made me itch, that protective streak of his. But one of the things the past few months had taught me was that it ran both ways. Anyone who tried to hurt my wolf had me to deal with. I might be a thirty-five-pound coyote, but I played dirty.

Gordon grunted in approval.“One time before this, Coyote came upon a village where the chief had a beautiful daughter. Coyote disguised himself as a handsome young hunter. He killed a deer, slung it over his shoulders, and took it to the chief as a gift. ‘Chief,’ he said, ‘let me court your daughter for my wife.’ ”

“Is this the polite version?” I asked dryly.

Gordon displayed his missing front tooth but didn’t slow down his retelling. “The chief didn’t know it was Coyote who looked at his daughter. ‘Hunter,’ said the chief, ‘you can court her, but my daughter chooses her own husband.’

“So Coyote began to court the chief’s daughter. He brought her fresh meat, tanned hides, and beautiful flowers. She thanked him for each of his gifts. Finally, Coyote went to her father, and said, ‘What gift can I bring her that would impress her enough to take me as her husband?’

“‘Ask my daughter,’ said the chief.

“So Coyote the Hunter went to the daughter and asked her what gift she wanted most of all.

“‘I would most like a pool of quiet water where I could bathe in private,’ she told him.

“So Coyote, he went out to a quiet place in the woods, and he built her a pool at the base of a waterfall. He diverted a stream so that it flowed down the fall and into the pool. When the chief’s daughter saw the pool, she agreed to marry Coyote—still in his guise as a hunter. She welcomed him to her pool, and they laughed and played in it until the woods rang with their happiness.” The old man paused. “I think that is enough of the story. It ends tragically, as it usually does when two such different people love each other.” There was a sharpness to his tone as he said the last sentence that made it obvious he wasn’t just talking about Coyote and the chief’s daughter.

I frowned at him.“Lots of people who have more influence over both of us than you do have made that observation. We didn’t listen to them, either.”

“Is it the werewolf or the Anglo that bothers you?” asked Adam, bringing a bag of premade hamburger patties out of the trailer. Other than his question, he didn’t pay any attention to us as he passed by on the way to the grill.

“Wolves eat coyotes,” Gordon said, but from his body language, I could tell that our marriage really didn’t bother him one way or the other; he just enjoyed stirring the pot.

If he weren’t an old man, I had some rude things I could have said to that.

“Yes,” observed Adam blandly. “I do.”

Yep. That was the one that came to mind. And he didn’t even blush when he said it. Maybe Gordon would miss the double entendre. But he grinned cheerfully at Adam.

“Do you know,” I said casually, “that the Blackfeet tell Old Man stories and not Coyote stories? The Lakota’s trickster is Iktomi—the spider—though he tends to land more on the side of evil than simple chaos.”

The old man smiled slyly.“That’s because Coyote goes in many guises. And”—he shook a hand at me—“chaos is never simple unless you are Coyote.”

“So what did the story have to do with me?” I asked, not really expecting an answer.

“The chief’s daughter, who was, for a while, Coyote’s wife, had a daughter—and she could walk as coyote or human, as could her sons.”

“So I am descended from Coyote—and that red-tailed hawk we saw at Horsethief Lake”—I somehow didn’t doubt that Gordon knew about it—“is descended from Hawk.”

“Ayah,” he said. “Awalker”—he gave a studied emphasis on the only term I knew for what I was; “avatar” sounded like something that should be running around an Internet multiplayer game or covered with blue paint and CGI’d into a movie—“is descended from one of these matings of mortal to immortal. But it has been a long time since they walked so freely among us, and for many years now the only way one is born is for both parents to be descended from such a coupling.”

“Which is why Calvin was so certain I couldn’t be a walker,” I said. “My mother, as far as I know, is Western European—mostly German and Irish in descent.”

“Ayah,” agreed Gordon. “I do not doubt it. Which is why I ask you, do you know who your father was?”

I heard what he wanted me to. I didn’t know why he’d decided to play games with me, but I was done. My father had nothing to do with whatever it was that had attacked poor Benny and his sister. Gordon Seeker, whatever he was, was nothing to me.

“He was a rodeo cowboy,” I said. If I’d been in coyote form, I’d have had my ears pinned back. “He rode bulls and was moderately good at it. My mother was riding her friend’s horse and trying to win enough money to survive. He gave her a place to stay for a while. He was killed in a carwreck before my mother even knew she was pregnant with me.”

Adam watched from the grill. His eyes rested on the old man with cool yellow dispassion. I sucked in a breath and tried not to get mad—or let this stranger hurt me with a story older than I was. Emotions seemed to pass easier through the mating ties than words or thoughts. I was learning to control myself a little more now that Adam could feel them, too.

“Yes,” said Gordon gently. “I am sure that you are right, of course. Joe Old Coyote died thirty-three years ago on a stretch of highway in eastern Montana.” He looked up. “Ah, here they are.”

I got the keycard out of the truck.“I’ll let them in,” I said, and escaped at a jog.

What the old man implied was wrong. If I was tempted for a moment to believe—to believe that my father might still be alive because Coyote died all the time only to be reborn the next morning—then I had only to remember that I had seen his ghost dance for me. My father was dead. I stretched out and turned my jog into a flat-out run, letting the speed clear my head.

I opened the gate for Jim, who did indeed have Fred and Hank Owens sitting next to him.

“Hop in the back,” suggested Jim, once the truck was on the campground side of the gate. “I’ll give you a ride on down.”

I hadn’t ridden in the back of a pickup since I was a kid, and it was still fun. I jumped out before he stopped, just to see if I still could. I landed on my feet but let the momentum roll me backward and carry me back onto my feet again. It was a matter of timing. My foster father had taught me how todo that after he caught me trying to imitate him.

“Teaching her how to do it right, so she doesn’t break her fool neck,” he’d growled, while my foster mother, Evelyn, fussed, “is likely to be less fatal than forbidding her to do it, because that doesn’t work at all.”

He had been awesome.

So what if an old Indian thought my father was Coyote? My father had really been Bryan, the man who’d raised me. He’d been there for me when I needed him, until Evelyn died and he hadn’t been able to survive the loss. After that, I’d had Bran.

If Bran and Coyote battled it out, I’d put my money on Bran. The thought restored my usual cheery outlook.

I dusted off my backside, and Adam rolled his eyes at me, looking remarkably like his daughter when he did so.“I bet Bran yelled at you for doing stuff like that,” he said, but he didn’t sound too upset.

“I haven’t done it in a long time,” I admitted. “Does it still look cool?”

He laughed, ruffled my hair, and welcomed our guests.

We ate hamburgers, chips, and macaroni salad. We made small talk about the weather, the river, living in Washington, living in Montana, living in the military, and thereby gaining a little bit of a fix on the character of people who had been strangers a few hours ago. Eating has been a ritual between allies for nearly as long as there have been people, and all of us were well aware of the subtext.

Gordon Seeker, I noticed, didn’t talk much. Just leaned back on a camp chair and watched with an avid gaze that reminded me a little of the river devil. He caught me looking and smiled like the Cheshire cat.

“I think,” said Jim finally as he dumped his empty paper plate in the garbage can, “we should introduce ourselves again. To know our allies is a good thing. I am Jim Alvin of the Yakama Nation. My mother was Wish-ram, my father Yakama, and I possess a little magic of the people.” He took his seat on the picnic-table bench where he’d eaten and turned to the Owens brothers.

“Fred Owens,” said Fred, though his brother was the one who sat next to Jim. “USMC retired.” He glanced at Adam and smiled. “Red-tailed hawk when it suits me. Rancher.”

“Hank Owens,” his brother said. “USMC retired. Rancher. Welder. Red-tailed hawk when it suits him.” He tilted his head at his brother. Evidently it was a family joke because his brother smiled a little. “It was Fred who couldn’t let Calvin handle the job on his own.”

“We left Calvin—” Jim began to explain, but Gordon interrupted him.

“—at the hospital. I told them.”

There was a little strain between Jim and Gordon that reminded me of when there were two Alphas in the room. They might be allies, even friends, but they were waiting for the slightest sign of weakness or aggression.

“Adam Hauptman,” said my husband, who was sitting in the second of our camp chairs. “Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack. Army, honorably discharged 1973. Mate and husband of Mercedes Thompson Hauptman. In my spare time, I run a security firm.”

Jim gave him a startled look. I was surprised myself. Werewolves might be out, but the public doesn’t know everything. And one of the things that Bran was not telling the public about werewolves was that they were immortal.

“Long time ago,” observed Fred.

“Vietnam,” said Hank. “You were a ranger in Vietnam.”

From my observation post on the ice chest, I watched Adam’s face. He’d offered the chair—but I hate the camp chairs. Ten minutes, and my feet are falling asleep.

What was he up to? If Bran found out, he wouldn’t be pleased. But Adam always had a reason for what he did. I usually figured it out about five years after the fact. He seemed to be watching Gordon. Maybe it was something as simple as acknowledging that we were all going to be sharing secrets before this was over.

“Nasty time,” said Jim.

Adam tipped his water bottle toward Jim, then brought it up to tip his imaginary hat. He looked at me.

“Mercedes Thompson Hauptman,” I said, obedient to the look that told me he wanted to move things along. “VW mechanic. Coyote walker mated to Adam Hauptman.”

“Gordon Seeker,” said Gordon. “But Indian names change from time to time. I have had others. I work a little healing, a little magic, a little of this and that. When I was young, I was a mighty hunter, but it has been a long time since I was young.” He eyed Adam. “Maybe even longer ago than when this one was as young as he looks.”

“All right,” said Adam, when it became obvious that the old man had said all he intended to. “Jim and Calvin told us a few things this afternoon. Namely that we have a monster in the river that has killed at least one person—though the tally is unlikely to stop with Benny’s sister. Let metell you some things you don’t know—some of which might not have anything to do with our current problem at all.” He told them about the faes’ redirection of our honeymoon, including Yo-yo Girl Edythe’s prophecy and the otterkin who had been relocated to the Columbia.

Fred frowned and glanced at Jim.“I told you those otters we saw looked odd. Their heads are the wrong shape.”

“I have seen them,” said Gordon, his voice dismissing their importance. “Prophecy is a weak crutch to lean on.”

“Have you met Edythe?” I asked in an interested voice. “Short. Usually looks about ten?”

Gordon raised his eyebrows, and I thought that the answer might have been yes.

I smiled cheerfully at him.“Fae are deceptive. The weaker and more harmless they appear, the more dangerous they are likely to be. Edythe is probably the scariest monster in a raft of scary monsters. I’m not inclined to discount anything she said. And I’m not sure relegating the otterkin to harmless—even though our contact with the fae seemed to be doing it—is very smart.”

“They aren’t eating people,” observed Fred.

“That you know of,” I said at the same time that Adam said, “Yet.”

He smiled at me.“I’ll admit that they don’t appear to be part of this—but I don’t like that they are here. They were watching Mercy when she pulled Benny out of the water.”

“I have a few more things to add,” I said. And just then the wind picked up a little, and Benny’s sister, Faith, sat down beside me on the edge of the ice chest. I looked at the others—at Fred, Hank, and Gordon, who were supposed to be like me—expecting … I don’t know. Some sort of recognition, I suppose. But no one jumped up and exclaimed the dead woman’s name—or even seemed to see her. Not even Gordon Seeker.

“It wants him,” she said. She wasn’t looking at me; she was looking at Hank.

“Him who?” I asked.

“Benny.” She sighed. “Stupid. I know better than to lean out over the water like that. But he was stupid, too. I can swim. He should have stayed in the boat. But now … it’s like the crocodile inPeter Pan. It’s had a bite of him and wants the whole meal.”

“We’ll keep him safe,” I told her.

Everyone was watching us—or me at least. Adam had stood and was holding up his hand, keeping the others from interrupting. It might not be important—sometimes ghosts could be incredibly stubborn. But sometimes a loud noise or a sudden move, and they disappeared like rabbits.

“I don’t know if you can keep him safe,” she said sadly. “You know, in the story, all the first people the river monster ate came back to life after it was dead.”

“I thought Coyote left it alive?”

She turned toward me, finally, and smiled. It didn’t look like a smile that should be on the face of a dead woman. She had a good smile. “There are several versions of that story. When he was a little boy, Calvin always did like the ones in which everyone lived.”

She stood up and wandered over to the grill, her fingers passing through the grating, and pressed on the coals beyond.

“Be careful,” she told me, her gaze on the coal. “When it marks someone, they belong to it.” She looked at Hank again.

“It was always him for me, you know? Ever since high school. But he never had eyes for me.” She turned to me in sudden alarm. “Don’t tell him that. He doesn’t deserve to feel guilty.”

“I won’t,” I assured her.

“And don’t believe Jim’s mysterious-Indian schtick, either. He’s got a Ph.D. in psychology and taught over at UW in Seattle until he retired last year.”

She put her hands back on the grill, but this time she didn’t go through the grating but kept them on top of the hot metal, tapping her fingers lightly on the grill as if it fascinated her that she could do that without burning herself. I wanted to go and pull them off, even though I knew it couldn’t hurt her anymore.

She glanced at the Owens brothers.“And Fred trains cuttin’ horses. He’s starting to make a name for himself. Hank works with him on the business side, then does welding to help balance the books.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.

“So I remember,” she whispered. “Tell them not to call my name. I don’t want to stay here like this. Tell Benny I’m okay. Tell him to pick a flower for me and put it on Mama’s grave this year for me.”

I had never dealt with a ghost quite this coherent before. Usually, they don’t even notice me. The few that do don’t really seem to be aware that they are dead.

“I’ll tell them,” I promised, helpless to do anything to make this easier on anyone.

She looked up and met my eyes—and in hers I could see a flicker of violent green, the color of the river devil’s eyes. “See that you do.”

And she was gone.

Adam, watching me, dropped his hand when I met his eyes.

“Thanks,” I told him.

“What the hell is that?” growled Hank. “Who were you talking to?”

“I thought that all walkers could see the dead,” I said. “It’s why the vampires don’t like us.”

“Vampires?” said Fred. “There are vampires?”

Jim laughed.“Not all walkers are alike, Mercy. No more than two men wear the same shirt at the same time.”

I looked at Gordon.

“That is not my burden,” Gordon told me. “Besides, I’m not a walker. Who did you see?”

Calvin had said that Gordon could take animal form, and he hadn’t been lying. Still, there were other people who could shift shapes in the Native American stories I’d read. Instead of pursuing what he was, I answered his question.

“She didn’t want you to use her name, but could you give me a description of Benny’s sister? Before I tell you what she told me, I’d like to make sure I’m talking about the right person.”

“No,” said Jim coolly. “You tell us what she looked like, and we’ll tell you if you get it right.”

Okay. I could deal with that.“She’s a little shorter than I am and she has muscle. Not casual muscle but the kind that comes from some sort of hard work or sport. She has a little scar just in front of her left ear.” I put my finger where the scar was.

“She has a Web site,” said Hank hostilely. “Her photo is up on it.”

“This,” Adam said abruptly, “isn’t going to work that way. If you don’t believe Mercy saw Benny’s sister, nothing she tells you is going to convince you.”

“She told Calvin that there was a woman following them at Horsethief Lake.” Jim scuffed his boot in the dirt. “She told him that the woman was wearing a dark blue shirt with a pair of macaws on the back before he told her that Benny’s sister had been with him on the boat. Beyond that, I don’t see what pretending she could see Fai—” He stuttered a little as he switched words. “Benny’s sister gains her at this point.”

“She loved that shirt,” Hank muttered. “Got herself a new sewing machine, one that could do fancy embroidery. That shirt was the first thing she made on it.”

“Benny gave her a bad time about the damned parrots,” said Fred. “White cockatoos.” He laughed and shook his head.

I thought I would have liked Faith if I’d known her while she was alive.

“What did she say?” Adam asked.

“She said that it had a taste of Benny and wanted the rest. I told her that we could keep him safe, but she wasn’t convinced of it.” I glanced at the men sitting on the bench of the picnic table. “Other than that it was just a few things—and a message to Benny. She wants him to know she’s okay, and she wants him to put a flower on her mother’s grave for her this year.”

I rolled up my pant leg to show everyone the mark I had on my leg. The blood and pus were gone, but it still was a dark brown scab circling my leg. It itched mildly, but I didn’t touch it.

“River marked, you said,” I told Gordon. “What does it mean?”

He crossed one scarlet boot over his opposite knee and pursed his lips. But before he could say anything, there was the sharp crack of a pistol, and, beside me, Adam jerked.

8

HANK HELD THE GUN LIKE HE KNEW WHAT HE WAS doing with it. I bolted for him, but no matter how fast I moved, I had to cross twelve feet, and he only had to pull the trigger. But I wasn’t the only one moving—his brother hit Hank’s gun hand as he shot a second time.

Fred grabbed the gun and jerked it down toward the ground, where Hank spent his third shot.“What are you doing? Hank? Stop it.”

Hank didn’t get a fourth shot because I grabbed the stick I’d almost tripped over like a baseball bat and hit him in the back of the head, knocking him cold.

I wouldn’t have cared if I killed him—and I might well have because the stick I’d grabbed was the fairy walking stick that had followed me—however it follows me—ever since I’d first encountered it.

No matter that it didn’t have feet and wasn’t alive, it was old fairy magic, and that was apparently enough for it to trail after me like a faithful dog. Though it was graceful and slender, the end was shod in silver and heavy. I might as well have hit Hank in the back of the head with a lead pipe.

Lugh never made anything that couldn’t be used as a weapon, the oakman had told me just before he’d used the stick to kill a very nasty vampire. Lugh was an ancient hero of theTuatha de Danann—I’d looked him up later. If the oakman had been right about the walking stick’s origins, it predated Christ’s birth and then some. It might even be older than Bran.

I dropped the artifact that had been old when Columbus first set foot on the Bahamas on the ground as if it were garbage and returned to my mate’s side before anybody else moved.

Hank had shotAdam.

Adam hadn’t even moved. He’d just slumped over on the stupid camp chair. That told me it was bad. Very bad. I could smell his blood.

As I reached Adam, Gordon was on the other side, plucking Adam off the chair with an ease no old man would ever be able to imitate. Adam was solid muscle and heavy, even in his human form, and Gordon couldn’t weigh half what Adam did.

It didn’t seem to slow him down, though.

I ripped Adam’s shirt open so I could see the damage.

There was a neat hole with a sliver of bone sticking out of his chest. The good news was that his heart was still beating because the blood was pulsing. The bad news was there was no exit hole in his back, and there was too much blood.

“There’s no exit wound,” Gordon muttered.

“Noticed that,” I said shortly. “Got to get it out yesterday.” No telling if it was silver or lead, but I had to assume the worst. They all knew Adam was a werewolf, and the silver-bullet stuff was common lore.

I bolted for the truck and the supercomprehensive-when-hell-breaks-out first-aid kit stored behind the backseat in three backpacks. One of them had a surgical kit. One had bandages of all sizes. Another had various ointments and miscellaneous first-aid paraphernalia. I didn’t stop to try to figure out which one was which, though they were color-coded. I grabbed them all and hauled them back to Adam.

I dropped them down beside him and knelt by his head—just as Gordon used a very small but wicked-looking black blade to slice into skin because the entry wound had already started to close. That could be good news; wounds made by silver tended to heal as slowly as they did for the rest of us.

“Hold him,” grunted Gordon. “Jim, Fred—Hank will keep. He’s not dead. Get over here. If he wakes up, we’re going to need you all.”

“He’s awake,” I told them. “He’ll keep still. Probably better off if everyone else stays back. He’ll sense them, essentially strangers, and come up fighting—and the four of us wouldn’t be able to hold him if he decides he needs to.”

I’m not sure if Fred or Jim had moved toward us when Gordon called them over, but they stayed back out of the way after I told them to. However helpful in getting the bullet out, unconscious was not a good sign. I found an explanation for it when I turned his head and discovered a bloody cut alonghis temple where the second shot had creased him.

It was already healing, so that bullet, at least, had been lead. Even so, if Hank had hit Adam in the forehead with it, it still stood a good chance of killing him. I owed Fred because I wouldn’t have been fast enough.

I stroked my fingers over Adam’s face, where he would smell me and know that I was watching out for him, then turned to watch what Gordon was doing. Adam was conscious; I could feel it. But he was trusting me to help him while he did his best to keep his body alive. Even if the first bullet had been lead, it needed to come out, or Adam would be sicker than a kid at Halloween for days until it festered out.

It was about then that I realized the knife Gordon was using wasn’t some sort of fancy thing, painted black to make it look military. It was an honest-to-goodness obsidian knife. Stone knives, I remembered inconsequentially from Anthropology 101, were both sharper and more fragile than most steel knives. More important to me than the oddity of the knife was that Gordon looked like he knew what he was doing.

“Remove many bullets?” I asked, just to be sure. I scrambled in the bags until I found the surgical kit and a probe and a pair of forceps.

He gave them a look when I held them up for him.“Usually do this with my fingers,” he told me.

Infection wasn’t a concern with werewolves—or apparently to Gordon.

“A probe and forceps do less damage when you have to go in deep,” I told him firmly. “I can do it if you don’t want to.”

I had so far in my life avoided pulling bullets out of people, and had no illusions that I’d be good at it. But me with forceps would be better than Gordon’s fingers.

He gave me a gap-toothed grin and took the probe.

“Have to work quickly on a werewolf,” I told him.

“Healing pretty fast,” he grunted, sliding the instrument into the wound he’d reopened with the odd little knife. “Good news, I think, as long as we get the bullet out.”

“Dominant werewolves do,” I said. “And they don’t come much more dominant.” Thank goodness. Despite his earlier words, he looked like he knew what he was doing. “You’ve used a probe before.”

He switched hands, holding the probe with his left and taking the forceps with his right.“Only a hundred or two,” he said, closing his eyes. “Got it. It’s up against his shoulder blade.”

A silver bullet doesn’t mushroom like a lead bullet does. If it had made it all the way through Adam, it would have left a neat hole going in and an equally neat hole going out. The bullet Gordon pulled out of Adam was squashed and had doubtless bounced around inside and torn up muscle and organs. More painful but infinitely less lethal.

As soon as Gordon’s hand was out, I dried my hands on my jeans and hauled out my phone to call Samuel.

“Who are you calling?” asked Gordon.

“A doctor friend of mine,” I told him. “And his.”

A hand wrapped around the phone, and Adam said hoarsely,“Don’t. Not until we know what’s going on.” He sat up, using his stomach muscles and not his arms. He didn’t do it for effect—moving his shoulder would be painful for a while yet.

He looked at Gordon.“Thanks for the surgery. That felt like the fastest extraction I’ve had.”

Gordon raised an eyebrow.“Do you find yourself saying that often? If so, I advise a different lifestyle.”

Adam smiled to acknowledge Gordon’s point, but when he spoke, it was on another subject. “You said something last night about river marked—about how Mercy wouldn’t be a good slave. What’s special about that mark? Did the river devil do it?”

He hurt; I could feel just how much. But he wasn’t going to show it in public.

“River marked,” Gordon said. He looked over to where Fred was exploring the back of Hank’s head. “I do see why you are asking. There was once a place where a band of Indians lived. ‘Don’t go to that village; they are marked by the river,’ the people would say. ‘If you go there, you will not come back. They will feed you to the river.’ All the people of that village wore a brown mark on their bodies, and they obeyed the hungry river in all things. I’ve forgotten the rest of the story.”

“Check Hank,” Adam said, his voice only a little more breathy than normal. “He didn’t strike me as the shoot first and negotiate later kind of person. Even those crazy jarheads usually need a reason to pull the trigger.”

Fred didn’t protest the slur, just stripped off Hank’s jeans and shirt—and found a dark brown oozing sore across Hank’s back that looked a lot like what my calf had looked like before Gordon and his salve had come along.

I jerked up my pant leg.“Looks like what I’ve got.”

“Could have happened when he was coming onshore with our boat last night,” said Jim. “He didn’t say anything about getting hurt—but Hank’s like that. Coyote walkers are immune to the effects?”

Gordon grunted.“This coyote walker, evidently.”

And when Hank groaned and started to move, Jim added,“I have a rope in the truck.” And he jumped up to get it.

“We don’t want the pack here,” Adam said very quietly to me, explaining why he hadn’t let me call Samuel, I thought. “First—wolves don’t do well in water. Second—just think what this thing could do if he controlled a pack of werewolves.”

“Wouldn’t pack magic stop that?” I asked. If the river devil could control Hank, another walker, maybe it wasn’t the walker part of me that had kept it from doing that to me. Maybe it was the pack—or even my mate bond with Adam.

Adam shook his head.“Maybe. But I’m not willing to risk it. Not unless things get a lot more desperate.”

“You heal fast,” said Jim neutrally as he returned with a rope.

“Werewolves do,” I said—and remembered that one of the side effects of rapid healing was an even larger than usual need for food. Adam needed to eat meat—lots of it, the rawer the better. He was holding on to his control, which couldn’t be easy, with his wound exposed to all of these possibly hostile strangers. Alpha wolves can’t afford that kind of weakness. He hid his pain well, but they all knew he’d been shot and they could see the blood.

“I’ll get some food,” I told him.

“No,” Adam said, holding on to my arm before I could go. “Not yet. We’ll get this meeting over with first.”

He didn’t want to betray any more weakness among these people. I supposed I could understand it, but it didn’t make me happy. But he was Alpha, and I was his mate. I’d argue with him in private … Okay, who was I kidding? I’d argue with him in front of the pack. But not in front of strangers. Not when he was hurt, anyway.

He glanced at the others, who were mostly working on restraining Hank with Jim’s rope. Gordon had gone over to supervise the others.

Adam raised his good hand to me, and said quietly,“Give me a hand up.”

I did, and tried not to show how much strength it required to get him on his feet. He walked—only a little stiffly—to the picnic table and leaned a hip on it. Apparently, he was satisfied with the job Fred was doing because he didn’t say anything until Fred had finished hog-tying his brother.