Bone Crossed (10 page)

Probably Adam should have discussed bringing me in with the Marrok, too.

Cars were pulling up in front of the house, more of the pack. I could feel the weight of them, their unease and confusion. Anger.

I rubbed my arms nervously.

“What’s wrong?” asked Stefan in a quiet, sane voice that would have reassured me more if he’d moved or opened his eyes.

“Besides Marsilia?” I asked him.

He looked at me then, his lips curving faintly. “That’s enough, I suppose. But Marsilia isn’t the reason this house is filling with werewolves.”

I sat on the thickly carpeted basement floor and leaned my head against the bars of the cage. The door was shut and locked, the key that sometimes hung on the wall across the hallway gone. Adam would have it. It didn’t matter though. I was pretty sure Stefan could leave anytime he chose—the same way he’d appeared in my living room.

“Right.” I sighed. “Well that’s your fault, too, I expect.”

He sat up and leaned forward. “What happened?”

“When you jumped inside my head,” I told him, “Adam took offense.” I didn’t tell him exactly how everything had played out. Prudence suggested Adam wouldn’t be pleased with me if I shared pack business with a vampire. “What he did—and you’ll have to ask him, I think—brought the pack down on his head.”

He frowned in obvious puzzlement, then slow comprehension dawned. “I am sorry, Mercy. You weren’t meant to ... I didn’t mean to.” He turned his head away. “I’m not used to being so alone. I was dreaming, and there you were, the only one left with a tie of blood to me. I thought I dreamed that, too.”

“She really had them all killed?” I whispered it, remembering some of what he’d given me while he’d been in my head. “All of your ...” Sheep wasn’t really PC, and I didn’t want to tick him off, even if sheep is what all the vampires called the mundane humans they kept to feed off. “All of your people?”

I knew some of them, and liked one or two. For some reason, though, rather than the faces of the people I’d met living, it was the young vampire Danny I remembered, his ghost rocking in the corner of Stefan’s kitchen. Stefan hadn’t been able to protect him either.

Stefan gave me a sick look. “Disciplining me, she said. But I think it was revenge as much as anything. And I can feed off them from a distance. She wanted me starving when I landed at your feet.”

“She wanted you to kill me.”

He nodded jerkily. “That’s right. And if you hadn’t had half of Adam’s pack at your house, I would have.”

I thought of the obstinate look on his face. “I think she underestimated you,” I told him.

“Did she?” He smiled, just a little, and shook his head.

I leaned my head back against the wall. “I’m...”
Still angry with
you didn’t cover it. He was a murderer of innocents, and here I was talking to him, worried about him. I didn’t know how to complete that thought, much less the sentence, so I went on to something else.

“So Marsilia knows I killed Andre, and you and Wulfe covered it up?”

He shook his head. “She knows something—she didn’t talk much to me. It was only me she punished, so I don’t think she knows about Wulfe. And maybe not me ...” He looked at me from under the cover of his bangs, which had grown in the last day—I’d heard a heavy feeding could cause that. “I got the feeling I was being punished by association. I was the seethe’s contact with you. I was the reason she went to you for help and gave you permission to kill Andre’s pet. I was the reason you succeeded. You are my fault.”

“She’s crazy.”

He shook his head. “You don’t know her. She’s trying to do what is best for her people.”

The Tri-City seethe of vampires had mostly been in the area before the towns were established. Marsilia had been sent here as punishment for sleeping around with someone else’s favorite. She’d been a person of influence, so had come here with attendants—mostly, as far as I knew, Stefan, Andre—the second vampire I’d killed—and a really creepy character named Wulfe.

Wulfe, who looked like a sixteen-year-old boy, had been a witch or wizard as a human, and sometimes dressed like a medieval peasant. I supposed he could be faking it, but I suspected that he was older than Marsilia, who dated from the Renaissance, so the clothes fit.

Marsilia had been sent here to die, but she hadn’t. Instead, she’d seen to it that her people survived. As civilization began to grow, life in the seethe became easier. The fight for survival mostly a thing of the past, Marsilia had settled into a decades-long period of apathy—I’d call it sulking. She had only just begun to take an interest in things going on about her, and as a result, the hierarchy of the seethe was restless. Stefan and Andre had been loyal followers, but there were a couple of other vamps who hadn’t been so happy to see Marsilia up and taking charge. I’d met them: Estelle and Bernard, but I didn’t know enough about vampires to figure out how much of a threat they were.

The first time I met Marsilia, I’d kind of admired her ... at least until she’d enthralled Samuel. That had scared me. Samuel’s the second-most-dominant wolf in North America, and she and her vampires took him ... easily. That fear had grown with every meeting.

“Not to be argumentative, Stefan,” I said. “But she’s bug-nuts. She wanted to create another of those ... those
things
that Andre made.”

His face closed down. “You don’t know what you are talking about. You have no idea what she gave up when she came here, or what she has done for us.”

“Maybe not, but I met that creature, and so did you. Nothing good could ever come of making another one.” Demonic possession isn’t a pretty thing. I inhaled and tried to control my temper. I didn’t succeed. “But you are right. I don’t know what makes her tick. I don’t know you, either.”

He just looked at me, expressionlessly. “You play human very well, driving around like Shaggy in your Mystery Machine. But the man I thought you were could never have killed Andre’s victims like that.”

“Wulfe killed them.” He was making a point, not defending himself. It made me angry; he
should
feel the need to defend himself.

“You agreed to it. Two people who had already been victimized enough, and you two snapped their necks as if they were nothing more than chickens.”

About that time he got angry, too. “I did it for you. Don’t you understand? She would have destroyed you if she’d known. They were nothing, less than nothing. Street people who would have died on their own anyway. And
she
would have killed
you!”
He was on his feet when he finished.

“They were nothing? How do you know? It wasn’t like you had a conversation with them.” I stood up, too.

“They would have had to die anyway. They knew about us.”

“There we disagree,” I told him. “What about your vaunted power over human minds?”

“It only works if the contact with us is very short—a feeding, no more than that.”

“They were living, breathing people who were murdered. By
you.”

“How did you know that Mercy was at Andre’s?” Warren’s calm voice broke between us like a wave of ice water as he came down the stairs. He walked past me and used the key to open the cage door. “I’ve been wondering about that for a while.”

“What do you mean?” asked Stefan.

“I mean that
we
knew she’d found Andre because she told Ben, thinking he couldn’t tell anyone else because he’d not changed back from his wolf in all the time since the demon-possessed died. Ben changed so he could tell us, but we still couldn’t go after her because we didn’t know where Andre was. You had no way to know what she was doing. How did you know she was off killing Andre, just in time to cover up the crime?”

Stefan made no move to come out of the cage. He folded his arms and leaned a shoulder against the bars instead as he considered Warren’s question.

“It was Wulfe, wasn’t it?” I said. “He knew what I was doing because one of the homes I found was his.”

“Wulfe,” said Warren slowly, after Stefan didn’t answer. “Is he the kind of man who would be outraged that Marsilia would call down a demon to infest a vampire? Would he want it stopped at the cost of Andre’s destruction? Go to you for help doing it?”

Stefan closed his eyes. “He came to me. Told me Mercy was in trouble and needed help. It was only later that I wondered why he’d done it.”

“You’ve had these thoughts already,” Warren said. “So what did you decide?”

“Does it matter?”

“It’s always a good thing to know your enemies,” answered Warren in his lazy Texas drawl. “Who are yours?”

Stefan gave him the look of a baited bear, all frustration and ferocity. “I don’t know.” He gritted out.

Warren smiled coolly, his eyes sharp. “Oh, I think you do. You aren’t stupid; you aren’t a child. You know how these things work.”

“Wulfe used me to get to you,” I said. “Then he told Marsilia what you’d done.”

Stefan just looked at me.

“With you and Andre out of the way, there is Wulfe, Bernard, and Estelle.” I rubbed my hands together and wondered if knowing what had happened would do Stefan any good. It wouldn’t change things, and knowing that he’d fallen into Wulfe’s trap wasn’t going to help Stefan now. Still, as Warren had said, it is a good thing to know your enemies. “And Bernard and Estelle, Marsilia already doesn’t trust them, right?”

Stefan nodded. “They work against her where they can, and she knows it. They are of another’s making, given as gifts by a vampire not easily refused. She must take care of them, as she would any such gifts—but that doesn’t mean she has to trust them. Wulfe ... Wulfe is a mystery even to himself, I think. You believe Wulfe engineered this as a rise to power?” He looked away and didn’t speak for a minute, obviously thinking about what I’d said.

Finally, he wrapped his hands around the bars of the open cage. “Wulfe already has power ... if he wanted more, it was his for the asking. But it looks like he had a part in my downfall for whatever reason suited him.”

“If Marsilia knows that you helped when Mercy killed Andre, why isn’t Mercy dead?” Warren asked.

“She was supposed to be,” Stefan said savagely. “Why do you think Marsilia starved me until I was no more than a ravening beast, then dropped me into Mercy’s living room? You didn’t think I did it myself, did you?”

I nodded. “So she thought she’d get it all without cost to her or the seethe? If you’d killed me, she could have claimed you’d escaped while she was punishing you. Too bad you showed up in my house and killed me. But she underestimated you.”

“She did not underestimate me,” said Stefan. “She knows me.” He gave me a look that let me know that my earlier dig about not knowing him had stung. “She just did not plan on you having the Alpha werewolf in your home to spoil her plans.”

I’d been there—and I didn’t think he would have done it.

Stefan sneered at me when he saw my face. “Don’t waste your time on romantic notions about
me.
I am
vampire,
and I would have killed you.”

“He’s cute when he’s mad,” observed Warren dryly.

Stefan turned his back on us both.

“She’s all by herself, and she doesn’t even know it,” he said in soft anguish.

He wasn’t talking about me.

He’d been hurt a lot recently, and I thought he deserved a rest. So I turned to Warren, and asked, “Why aren’t you upstairs at the meeting?”

Warren shrugged, his eyes veiled. “The boss will do better without me to rock the boat.”

“Paul hates me more than he hates you,” I told him smugly.

He threw his head back and laughed—which is what I’d intended. “Wanna bet? I kicked his ass from here to Seattle and back. He’s not happy with me.”

“You’re a wolf. I’m a coyote—there’s no comparison.”

“Hey,” said Warren in mock offense. “You’re no threat to his masculinity.”

“I’m polluting the pack,” I told him. “You’re just an aberration.”

“That’s because you called him a ... Stefan?”

I looked around, but the vampire was gone. I hadn’t gotten a chance to ask him about the crossed bones on my door.

“Shee-it,” exclaimed Warren. “Shee-it.”

 

 

 

“DID YOU CALL BRAN?” I ASKED ADAM THE NEXT EVENING , tugging down the short skirt of my favorite green-blue dress until it was as good a barrier between Adam’s SUV’s leather seats and my naked skin as it was going to be.

He hadn’t told me where we were going on our date, but Jesse had called me as soon as he left and described what he was wearing—so I knew I’d need the big guns. Though we share a back fence, the distance by car is significantly longer, and I’d had time to skim into the correct dress before he pulled up at my door.

Adam does suits. He wears suits to work, to pack meetings, to political meetings. Since his hours are about the same as mine, that means six days a week. Still there was a difference between his usual work suits and the one he was wearing tonight. The first were made to announce that this was the man in charge. This one said, “And he’s sexy, too.” And he was.

“There’s no need to call Bran,” he told me irritably as he swung the big vehicle onto the highway. “Half the pack probably called Bran as soon as they got home. He’ll call me when he’s ready.”

He was probably right. I hadn’t asked, but his grim face when Warren and I emerged from the basement last night—after everyone had left except for Samuel—had told its own story.

Samuel had kissed me on the lips to irritate Adam and ruffled my hair, “There you are, Little Wolf. Still naturally talented at causing trouble, I see.”

That was unfair. It had been Stefan and Adam who’d caused this. I informed Samuel of that, but only after he’d escorted me back home.

Adam called me once, earlier in the afternoon, to make sure I remembered he was taking me out. I’d promptly called Jesse with orders to let me know what her father was wearing. I owed her five bucks, but it was worth it to see Adam smiling when I hopped into his SUV.