River Marked (22 page)

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 the
Tuatha 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 shot
Adam
.

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 along his 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.

It is difficult to tie up a person so he can’t escape. When I was about ten, a whole bunch of us kids in Aspen Creek, inspired by some movie or other, spent a whole month tying one another up at recess with jump ropes until Bran came and put a stop to it. He probably wouldn’t have bothered if we hadn’t left Jem Goodnight tied to the swing set after the bell rang. We felt pretty justified because Jem told us that no girl could tie him up in such a way that he couldn’t get out of it. “Girls,” he’d pronounced, “can’t tie knots.”

It had taken us three recesses to get it right, but after a half hour of working on it, it had taken Bran’s knife to finally free Jem. I could tie knots, girl or no. Bryan, who’d once been a sailor on the tall ships with sails, had worked with me since I first tied my own shoes.

Adam’s phone rang, and he glanced at the screen before he answered it. With a grimace he opened it, and said, “I’m fine, Darryl. Just a misunderstanding.” Pack bonds could be a nuisance sometimes, like when Adam had been shot and didn’t want the pack to come running.

“You’re hurt,” said Darryl’s voice, and I think the only person who didn’t hear him was Jim.

“It’s minor.”

“Felt like you got shot,” Darryl said dryly. “I know what a bullet feels like. You had a misunderstanding on your honeymoon that resulted in your getting shot? We could be there in a couple of hours.”

“It was a misunderstanding,” growled Adam, speaking slower, as if that would make Darryl more compliant. “Stay where you are. I’ll call you in if I need you.”

There was a pause. “Let me talk to Mercy.”

“
Who
is Alpha?” Adam’s voice was a low threat.

“You are,” I told him, and snatched the phone out of his hand. “But this is payback for your making poor Darryl watch out for me when you were in D.C. Hey, Darryl. He got shot with a .38 in the shoulder, lead. We’re not sure exactly what’s going on right now other than the excitement is over for the night. If we need you, we’ll call you. Right now, that’s looking like it might not be a really good idea.”

“Boss man is okay?”

“Grumpy,” which was shorthand for hurt, which I wouldn’t say, and Darryl would understand that. Wolves never admit how badly they’re hurt. “But he’s okay. We are safe and not in need of rescue.”

“Good enough. I’m keeping the bags packed in case something changes.”

“How’s Jesse?” I asked. “Has she been throwing parties and living wild?” Jesse made a good change of topic because both Adam and Darryl relaxed as soon as Darryl responded.

“She dyed her hair orange, and it has these glittering purple strings in it,” he said, sounding moderately aghast and intrigued at the same time. “I figured since she does it when Adam is in charge, he wouldn’t kill me. Does she know that too much dyeing could make her hair turn green?”

I snorted. “Her hair was green. Did you miss it?”

“I forgot,” he said. “Maybe not having kids is a good idea after all. Tell the boss all is okay here.”