River Marked (26 page)

If this kept up, I thought, noticing where a spot of blood had dropped on the carpet—it could have come from any number of things in the past forty-eight hours—we might just be buying a trailer soon. While I was staring at the stain, Adam spoke.

“You could have died.” His voice was rough from the change.

“So could you have when Hank shot you,” I said, trying not to sound defensive when he hadn’t yelled at me. Yet. Adam wasn’t the only one who had to learn not to get mad about something that hadn’t happened.

He wasn’t completely human yet. He knelt on the carpeted floor on the far side of the trailer, his head bowed as he waited for the last of the change.

Even when he was finished, he stayed there, his back to me. “I cannot . . .” he began, then tried again. “When I heard you scream, I thought I’d be too late.”

“You came,” I told him in a low voice. “You came, and I am fine. When you were shot, I would have killed the man who took your life and not cared. Not even knowing it was not his fault would have made me feel bad about it.” I took a deep breath. “And when I knew you’d be okay, I wanted to yell at you for not moving faster, for not being invincible.”

“What in
hell
were you doing in that river?” He still wasn’t looking at me, and his voice had dropped even further.

“Trying to get out of it as fast as I could,” I assured him fervently. I could feel his emotion, a huge tangle I couldn’t decipher except to sense the atavistic power of it. “Adam, I can’t promise not to get into trouble. I managed it for most of my life, but these last couple of years have more than made up for it. Trouble seems to follow me around, waiting to club me with a tire iron. But I’m not stupid.”

He nodded. “Okay. Okay. I can deal with not stupid.” But he still didn’t turn around. And then he added in a quiet voice, “Or I hope so.”

After a moment, he said, “I was not tracking straight through most of this. That was Coyote? The Coyote?”

“That’s what he said—and I’m inclined to believe him.” I paused. “It also appears that he is . . . or some aspect of him was . . . my father. It was complicated. I understood it, mostly, but I had to think a little sideways to do it.”

Adam laughed. It wasn’t a big laugh, but it was a real one. “I bet.”

Adam was trying to come down from the wolf’s anger. I tried to find something to say that didn’t hurt me and wouldn’t make him mad.

“I guess Coyote playing at being human is why I am a walker, even though Mom’s not Indian,” I said.

“Your father’s not dead,” he said. “Your mom is going to be . . .”

“Yeah,” I agreed, clearing my throat and trying to sound casual. My father wasn’t dead—and he was. Had I really even had a father? Better to think about my mother.

“As much as I have this pressing urge to get back at Mom for orchestrating our wedding without consulting me, I can’t do that to her,” I said, looking at my bare feet. They’d been inside the wet shoes long enough to gain that wrinkled look and corpselike color. “She really loved Joe Old Coyote and . . . Curt is wonderful. But Joe, he rescued her, he treasured her.”

I thought of Coyote’s voice as he talked about my mother, and added, “I’m not sure that Curt could compete with the man she remembers—maybe even Joe couldn’t. And Joe is dead, really dead.” I cleared my throat. “He wasn’t really Coyote, just a suit Coyote wore for a while. Real to himself and everyone around him, but in the end he was a construct, and Coyote . . . Mom would figure it out eventually. But by the time she did, Curt might not be waiting around.”

Adam stood up then and came over to me. He put both arms around me. He didn’t say anything, just held me.

“My life used to be normal,” I told his shoulder. “I got up. Went to work. Fixed a few cars, paid a few bills, and no one tried to kill me. My father was dead; my mother was six hours away by car—I could even manage to make that trip last eight or nine hours if I worked at it.”

“Argued with your back-fence neighbor,” Adam said, his voice very gentle.

“And watched him when he wasn’t looking,” I agreed. “Because every once in a while, especially after a full moon hunt, he’d forget that I could see in the dark, and he’d run around naked in the backyard.”

He laughed silently. “I
never
forgot you could see in the dark,” he admitted.

“Oh.” I thought about it for a while. “That’s pretty good. Not quite up to my slowly eroding Rabbit, but you get points for that.”

Adam was a neat and tidy person, the kind of man who walks into a room and straightens the paintings. For years I used the junker car in my backyard to exact revenge for high-handed orders I had to follow. Had to follow because they weren’t just high-handed—they were smart. When I was particularly annoyed, I’d remove tires—never all four—and leave the trunk open or one of the doors, just to bother him.

He, evidently, had run around naked to bother me. I thought about that a moment more.

“Thank you for the years of entertainment,” I said.

“No trouble,” he responded in a serious voice. “Now that we’re married, are you finally going to do something with that car? Like tow it away or store it somewhere out of sight?”

I took a deep breath—and my lungs seemed to be working just fine with the awful my-father-who-wasn’t-my father lump in my stomach gone.

“I’ll think about it,” I told him. “Maybe you should put it on your What I Want for Christmas List?”

“You okay now?” he asked.

“Okay.”

He tightened his arms and lifted me off my feet. “Mercy?” he growled into my ear.

I wrapped my legs around his waist. “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

Adam could have died last night. I could have died twenty minutes ago. I wasn’t willing to waste a moment more.

At some point in the night he kissed my pawprint tattoo and laughed. “Did you really tell Coyote this was a wolf print?”

“To you, it is a coyote print,” I said firmly. “For him, it is a wolf print. Only I and my tattoo artist know for sure.”

I WOKE IN THE MORNING TO THE SOUND OF ADAM’S stomach growling under my ear.

“Sorry,” he said. “Too many changes and not enough food.”

I patted his hard belly and kissed it. “Poor thing,” I told it. “Doesn’t Adam treat you right? No worries.
I’ll
go feed you.”

My head bounced when Adam laughed.

“Let’s go find someplace to eat breakfast and get some groceries.” And then he proved that even when he was distracted, he still listened to me. “And some clothes for you.”

WHILE I WAS DRESSING, I NOTICED THE NUMBER WRITTEN on the palm of my hand and remembered I was supposed to make a phone call.

“Yes?” Jim’s voice was wary.

“Coyote told me to call you,” I told him. “He said that you wouldn’t believe that he was real unless I did.”

The man on the other side of the phone didn’t even breathe.

Adam grinned at me as he buttoned up his shirt.

“How is your husband?” Jim asked politely.

“He’s fine.” Even the red mark was gone. How fast a wound healed varied from wolf to wolf and wound to wound. As Alpha, Adam tended to heal even faster than most. I’d expected that to change since we were so far from the pack, but evidently it hadn’t.

“How are Hank’s head and Benny’s foot?” I asked.

“Hank is okay. Once we got him away from you, he seemed to recover a bit. Though he has a concussion, it’s not a bad one.” He cleared his throat. “Fred told the doctor Hank took a fall. The doctor seemed to think it might involve a pipe or tire iron, but Hank told him it was a fall, too. Fred is keeping an eye on him. Benny has been tranquilized ever since he tried to get up and leave the second time. He seems perfectly happy.”

“So we’re meeting you at Stonehenge? Coyote seemed pretty sure something could be done for Hank.”

“You are very casual about meeting Coyote,” he said. “Maybe we both just had a dream.”

“You’re the medicine man,” I told him. “You should know better than that—and be casual, too.” Maybe that wasn’t fair. “Eventually, anyway. I’m married to a werewolf, and I’ve met Baba Yaga. At least Coyote doesn’t fly around in a giant mortar.”

“Baba Yaga? No. I don’t want to know.” Jim sighed. “Maybe I should go back to teaching school about crazy people instead of being one. Yes. I’ll see you and your husband at Stonehenge at midnight. The memorial is supposed to be closed after dark, but I have a few contacts. Indian sacred ceremonies usually works, but I have a few more tricks up my sleeve if I need them.”

ADAM DIDN’T APPROVE OF WAL-MART.

“There is a department store back in The Dalles,” he said with a touch of grimness as we walked through the doors into the warehouselike building.

“Do they still call them department stores?” I wondered aloud, then shrugged it off. “Doesn’t matter. Wal-Mart is the Happy Shopping Grounds for the financially challenged.
And
those who ruin clothing on a daily basis. I don’t care about ripping up five-dollar T-shirts. And destroying twenty-dollar jeans hurts less than eighty-dollar jeans.”

He growled, and I really looked at him.

The bright lights over our heads flickered and gave his skin a slightly green cast. That was the fault of the cheap bulbs, but the tension in his neck and the hunted expression were different. Too many strangers, too many smells, way too many sounds. A paranoid person—or an Alpha wolf—might feel like he couldn’t make sure no one blindsided him in a place like Wal-Mart.

“Hey,” I said, coming to a stop. “How about I shop here, and you head over to the grocery store and grab some food. I’ll shop in peace, and you can pick me up in forty-five minutes?”

He shook his head. “I’m not leaving you here alone.”

“The only thing that wants to kill me is in the river,” I told him, trying to keep my voice down, but the woman pushing a cart past us gave me an odd look. “I’ve been shopping at Wal-Marts for most of my life, and I’ve never been assaulted in one.” I narrowed my gaze at him though I kept it focused on his chin. “As long as it’s not demons, fae, or sea monsters, I can also take care of myself pretty well. I’m not helpless.” And suddenly it mattered very much that he not treat me like some ninny who needed to be protected at all times, someone who would stand around waiting to be rescued.

He saw it in my face, I think, because he took a deep breath and looked around. “Okay. Okay.”

I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”

He kissed me back. Not on the cheek. By the time I’d recovered enough to process information, he was striding out the door, and everyone in view was staring at me.

I flushed. “We just got married,” I announced, then felt even stupider, so I hurried to escape in the aisles.

The Wal-Mart in Hood River wasn’t as big as any of the three in the Tri-Cities. But it had jeans and shirts, and that was all I was worried about.

I grabbed four dark-colored T-shirts and three pairs of jeans in the proper size and headed for the dressing rooms. I didn’t need to try on the T-shirts, but I never buy jeans without putting them on first. It doesn’t matter what size they say they are—some of them are shaped differently than others.