Mercy Thompson 8: Night Broken (5 page)

Someone cleared their throat tentatively and scared the bejeebers out of me—though I managed not to jump. He was standing behind me—a strange man, who was also a strange werewolf, my nose told me belatedly. Thankfully, he’d stayed back, waiting just outside the open garage-bay door.

Tad was twenty feet away in the office—
and
the stranger was probably only a customer who’d come around to the open garage bays instead of to the office. It happened all the time. I was perfectly safe. Reason didn’t have much effect on my spiking heartbeat and the shaft of terror that was my body’s reaction to being startled by a strange man in my garage.

I’d been assaulted a while ago. Just when I thought I was over it, some stupid little thing would bring it back.

I nodded stiffly at him, then visibly focused on the job ahead, no matter where my panicky attention really was. I kept talking to the bolt, finding the soothing tones surprisingly useful even if they were my own. I fought to regain control by the time the bolt came out. Every twist, I told myself, meant I had to calm a little more. To my relief, the silly exercise worked—six twists of the wrench, and I was no longer on the verge of shaking, tears, and (more rare, but what it lacked in frequency it made up for in humiliation) throwing up on a perfect stranger.

I set the wrench down and turned with a smile to face him. He had stayed right where he had been—at a polite and safe distance. He didn’t look directly at me, either—he was a werewolf, he’d know that I had panicked, but he’d allowed me to save face. Points to him for courtesy.

He was neither tall nor short for a man and carried himself pulled tightly toward his core. Arms in, shoulders in, head tipped down. His hair was curly and pulled back in a short ponytail. He looked as though he could use a good meal and a pat on the head.

“I’m looking for a place to be,” he said. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder that looked as old as the Beetle I was repairing. Maybe it was.

Several years ago, another werewolf had approached me at the garage, looking for a place to be. He was dead.

I nodded at this new wolf, to show him that I heard him and that I was not rejecting his almost request. But between panic attack and memory, words were beyond me at the moment.

“I called the home number of the local Alpha.” He’d given me time to talk and sounded a little stressed when he had to break the silence. “The girl that answered sent me here when I told her I didn’t have easy means of transport out that far. The city bus got me over here.” He glanced over his shoulder as if he’d rather have been anywhere else. It dawned on me that the reason he wasn’t looking me in the face had more to do with him than with my almost–panic attack. “I drift, you know? Don’t like to stay anywhere long. I’m bottom of the pack, so that means I don’t cause no trouble.”

His American accent was Pacific Northwest, but there was something about the rhythm of his words that made me think that English was not his native tongue, though he was comfortable in it. “Bottom of the pack,” like his averted eyes, meant submissive wolf: they tended to live longer than other werewolves because they weren’t so likely to end up on the losing end of a fight to the death. Submissive wolves also got to travel because no Alpha would turn down a submissive wolf—there weren’t many of them, and they tended to help a pack function more smoothly.

Honey’s mate, Peter, who had been killed a few months ago, had been our only submissive after Able Tankersley left. A wolf I’d only been barely acquainted with, Able had taken a job offer in San Francisco. It was not only the violence of Peter’s death but his absence that was affecting the pack. A new submissive wolf would be welcome.

“Bran send you to us?” I asked.

“Hell no,” he said, with emphasis. “Though he gave me a list of numbers when I told him I was drifting this way. Neither of us knew I would end up here at the time.” He looked out the garage door, again, at the bare beginnings of spring. “Don’t think I’ll stay here long, though. Hope you don’t take it amiss. I don’t generally stay where it’s hot, and I heard tell at the bus depot that this place gets scorching in the summer.”

“That’s fine. Do you need a place to stay?”

He gave my garage a dubious look, and I laughed. “I don’t know how much you know. I’m Mercy Hauptman, and my husband’s the Alpha here. We have extra bedrooms at home—that are open to pack members who need them.” Maybe with another visitor, the effects of Christy’s stay would be diluted.

“I’m Zack Drummond, Ms. Hauptman. I’d be grateful for a room tonight, but after that, I’d rather find my own place.”

“All right,” I said. “I’m headed out there at five thirty”—usually it was closer to six thirty, but
usually
my husband’s ex wouldn’t have been running around in my territory that used to be hers—“if you want to catch a ride. I can’t officially welcome you to the pack, that’s my husband’s job, but we don’t have a submissive in our pack, and we could use one.”

“If I can’t find another way out,” he said, “I’ll be here at five fifteen.”

He hesitated, started to say something, then hesitated again.

“What is it?” I asked.

“What
are
you?” he said. “You aren’t fae or werewolf.”

“I’m a shifter—Native American style,” I told him. “Better known as a walker. I change into a coyote.”

His eyes widened and, finally, rose to examine every inch of me. “I’ve heard of your kind,” he said finally. “Always thought they were a myth.”

I smiled at him and gave him a salute. “A few years ago, and that would have been the pot calling the kettle black, Mr. Drummond.”

Zack Drummond didn’t show up at five fifteen. Five thirty saw me fretting because the Beetle wasn’t done, and I’d promised it would be finished at eight the next morning.

“Go home, Mercy,” said Tad, who was on his back working on the undercarriage of the Beetle. “Another hour, and I’ll have it buttoned up and done.”

“If I stayed, it would shave fifteen minutes off,” I told him.

One of his booted feet waggled at me. “Go home. Don’t let that bitch steal your man without a fight.”

“You don’t even know her.”

He slid back out from under the car, his face more oil-colored than not. Ears sticking out a little, his face just this side of homely—by his choice. His father was Siebold Adelbertsmiter. Tad’s mother had been human, but his father’s blood had gifted him with glamour and, from things he’d said, a fair bit of power.

“I know you,” he told me. “I’m betting on you. Go home, Mercy. I’ll get it done.”

He’d been working in this shop when he was just a kid. He might be thirteen years younger than me, but he was at least as good a mechanic.

“Okay,” I said.

In the oversized bathroom, I stripped out of my overalls and scrubbed up. The harsh soaps that cut through the grease and dirt have never bothered my skin—which is good because I use them a lot. Not even industrial soap could get out all the ingrained dirt I had on my hands, but my skin tones hid most of that.

A glance in the mirror had me unbraiding my hair. I ran a comb through it—braiding it when it was wet gave it a curl it didn’t have normally. Nothing was going to turn me into a girly girl, but the curls softened my appearance a little.

I was almost out the door, and Tad was back under the Beetle, when he said, “When Adam’s ex drives you into making sweet things with chocolate, just remember I like my brownies with lots of frosting but no nuts.”

I opened the front door to the smell of bacon and the sound of sizzling meat.

Adam, Jesse, and I shared kitchen duties, taking turns making dinner. Tonight was supposed to be Jesse’s night, but I wasn’t surprised that the only person in the kitchen was Christy. Her back was to me as she cooked in the kitchen she’d designed.

She’d been angry, her daughter had told me, that Adam had insisted on moving all the way out to Finley instead of building in one of the more prestigious neighborhoods in West Richland or Kennewick. He’d given her free rein in the house to make up for the fact that he’d wanted the house next to my trailer because Bran, who ruled all the weres in this part of the world, had told him to keep an eye on me. In addition to ruling hundreds and maybe thousands of werewolves, Bran had been the Alpha of the pack my foster father, Bryan, had belonged to. That had occasionally left Bran with delusions that he had a right to interfere with my life long after I’d left Montana and his pack behind.

Christy was shorter than me by a couple of inches, about the same size as Jesse. The body in the blouse and peasant skirt was softly curved, but not fat. Her hair, brown when I’d last seen her, was now blond-streaked and French-braided in a thick rope that hung to her hips.

“Could you find some paper towels, Jesse?” she asked without turning around. “They’ve been moved, and I have bacon ready to come out of the frying pan.”

I opened the cabinet that held the paper towels exactly where she probably had put them on the day she first moved in. I hadn’t changed the organization of the kitchen. Too many people were already using it, so it made more sense for me to learn where everything was than for me to reorganize it to my tastes.

So Christy’s kitchen was exactly as she’d left it—still hers in spirit if not in truth. Her presence in my kitchen felt like an invasion in a fashion that the Gray Lord who’d been here in the wee hours of the night had not, despite his intentions.

Christy knew I wasn’t Jesse, I could smell her tension—which was sort of cheating, so I didn’t call her on it. Also, accusing her of lying right off the bat didn’t seem like a good way to make peace with her.

“Paper towels,” I said as peaceably as I could manage, setting them down on the counter beside the stove.

She turned to look at me, and I saw her face.

“Holy Hannah,” I said before she could say anything, distracted entirely from my territorial irritation. “Tell me you shot him or hit him with a two-by-four.” She didn’t just have a shiner. Half her face was black with that greenish brown around the edges that told you it hadn’t happened in the last twenty-four hours.

She gave me a half smile, probably the half that didn’t hurt. “Would a frying pan be okay? Not as effective as a baseball bat, but it was hot.”

“I would accept a frying pan,” I agreed. “This”—I indicated the side of my face that corresponded to her damaged cheek with my fingers—“from the guy you’re running from?”

“It wasn’t my aunt Sally,” she said tartly.

“You go to a doctor with that?” I asked.

She nodded. “Adam made me go. The doctor said it would heal okay. He gave me a prescription for pain meds, but I don’t like to take prescriptions. Maybe tonight if I can’t sleep.”

The front door opened, and I didn’t have to back out of the kitchen to see who it was; Adam had a presence I could feel from anywhere in the house.

“Hey, honey,” said Christy. “I’ve got BLTs going on the stove. They’ll be done in about ten minutes if you want to go upstairs and get cleaned up.” She glanced at me, and said, “Oops. Sorry, just habit.”

“No worries,” I said pleasantly, as if she hadn’t bothered me at all when she’d called my husband by an endearment—then could have shot myself because I saw the satisfaction in her face. My reaction had been too controlled to be real, and she’d caught it.

“Maybe you could set the table?” she asked lightly.

As if it was still her kitchen, her house to rule.

“I need to get out of these clothes,” I said. “You should ask Jesse to set the table since you took over her job tonight. We might have one more for dinner—a new wolf in town.”

I left before she could reply and rounded the corner for the stairs to see Adam. He walked with me up the stairs.

“Any luck hunting down the guy who hit her?” I asked, stripping off my clothes once we were in our bedroom. Even though my overalls absorbed most of the mess of mechanicking, the clothes I wore under them reeked of oil and sweat.

“No. It’s not that we can’t find people named Juan Flores, it’s that there are too many Juan Floreses,” he told me. “John Smith would be easier, though it helps that he doesn’t look like most Juan Floreses. He’s around six feet tall with blond hair; she said his English was good. He has an accent, but she doesn’t think it was Mexican or Spanish, despite his name.”

“She met him in Eugene?”

He shook his head. “Reno. She was out partying with some friends. He was a friend of a friend. Rich—with cash—not just credit cards. He talked about Europe like he was very familiar with it, but he didn’t tell her if he was living there or if he just traveled there a lot.”

“Cash means real money,” I said. “Not just someone pretending to be wealthy.”

“Probably,” Adam agreed.

“Did she call the police when he hit her?”

“She called them before he broke into her apartment and started hitting her. He left when he heard the sirens, though it might have been the frying pan she hit him with.” There was admiration in his voice, and I did my best not to flinch. Of course he was proud of her. It takes guts to fight back effectively after a hard hit to the head. “The police didn’t have any better luck than I’m having running the name he gave her.”

Adam stripped off his tie and unbuttoned the cuffs of his dress shirt impatiently. “Later that night, someone mugged the man she went out with after she returned to Eugene. Broke his neck and took off with his wallet. She’s sure it was Flores, that stealing his wallet was just a cover. The police are undecided but told her that she might find somewhere else to be while they ran down leads.”

“If her boyfriend is responsible, he kills pretty competently,” I said, pulling on clean jeans, which were in a drawer with a stack of other clean jeans.

I’d gotten used to keeping my clean clothes folded in drawers and dirty clothes in a hamper in the closet. Adam had gotten used to calling me when he was going to be late from work. I had learned that it was those things, compromise in the form of phone calls and folded clothes, that cemented the bedrock of a relationship. I wondered what habits Adam and Christy had left over from their marriage.

“I thought so, too,” Adam said, unaware of the twist of my thoughts. “My sources say that the kill was clean. Not so clean it couldn’t have been an accident—but unusual in a mugging, especially in Eugene, which isn’t exactly a hotbed of that kind of crime. So maybe he spent some time in the military.”