River Marked (33 page)

He sighed. “One of us would take your place. But there are only seven of us who can or will help. I believe that a time will come when the Great Spirit will send us back out into the world again, entrusted with tasks to accomplish. But many of us were hurt when the Europeans swept through here. Disease took so many of our children, then the vampires singled out those who managed to survive and brought more death upon them . . .” He sighed. “We were allowed to retreat and lick our wounds—and for many it will take the Great Spirit to pry them out of their safe dens.” He scuffed his bare foot on the ground, rolling a rock a dozen feet. “I won’t lie. We may not have enough to do what we need, even with you. Without you?” He shook his head.

Mercedes.
The demand was angry and impatient.

I picked up a rock and chucked it in the river as my answer.

I learned a lot in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. I learned that MacKenzie’s little brother was named Curt, like my stepfather. He was four—and marked as MacKenzie was, so he didn’t fight when his sister carried him on her hip out into the river. As a treat especially for me, I think, the river devil released her hold on their minds before she killed them. But maybe it was because MacKenzie’s screams had her parents tearing out of their tent and into the water after them.

I learned that I could have exchanged my life for four people’s lives. Four.

I DIDN’T SLEEP. WHAT WAS THE POINT? I COULD HAVE nightmares while I was awake just as well as when I was asleep.

I had made the right decision, the only decision. But that didn’t make it any easier to live with the deaths of four people I could have saved.

I fed Adam, and when he grunted at me, I fed myself, too. I had to keep my strength up. If four people had died to give me a chance to help kill the river devil, it wouldn’t do to fail because I hadn’t eaten.

About 5:00 A.M., when the first pale hint of dawn touched the sky, Adam and I got in the truck and headed back up to Stonehenge. Without Adam to converse with and nothing much to do, I would drive us both crazy if we stayed at the campsite. Stonehenge needed to be cleaned up. I could do that and save Jim and Calvin some work.

It had been nearly 2:00 A.M. when we’d packed up that morning, and Jim had looked like a man who’d been rode hard and put away wet. I didn’t expect him to arrive until a more civilized hour. But he and Calvin drove up about ten minutes after I finally found the step stool so I could get high enough to remove the candles from the tops of the standing stones. Chin-ups on forty-five monoliths (I counted them while contemplating how to get the candles down) had struck me as too energetically taxing when I had a monster to kill later.

Calvin waved at me and hopped in the back of the truck to grab two boxes. He jumped back out and trotted over while Jim got out of the truck and shut the door.

“Hey,” said Calvin. “Didn’t expect—” He saw Adam and stopped dead. “Uhm. What’s wrong with him?”

Even happy werewolves are scary in broad daylight if your eyes let you really see what they are. Adam was not a happy werewolf.

“Wolf took offense at the bite,” I said. “So Adam can’t change back to human right now.”

“Jeez,” said Calvin. “That sucks—and it’s your
honeymoon
.” Then his face flushed darker with embarrassment.

That was not what had Adam’s hackles up, though. I’d told him about Coyote’s sisters after Coyote left. And whispering very quietly what the plan to kill the monster was. Adam couldn’t talk to tell me what he thought. I knew that he understood that it was the best plan we could come up with. I also knew that he didn’t like it. At all. Amazing what body language can convey.

“Coyote is sure it is temporary,” I told him, getting the next candle down while Calvin started to set them in the boxes he’d brought. The boxes were like the ones moving companies use to pack glasses, with cardboard inserts that kept each of the candles separate from the others. “Just don’t look him in the eyes, okay?”

It took us about an hour and a half to get the place cleaned up and looking the way it had before we’d come. Hardest was getting the coarse dark gravel out of the much finer pale gravel.

“You could have used a plywood board,” I told Jim, who was sitting on the altar criticizing Calvin and me while we picked up gravel one piece at a time and put it in a wheelbarrow.

“No,” he said. “I could not have. The fire had to rest on earth. Even the gravel was cheating a bit.”

“Next time.” Even Calvin the Ever Cheerful was getting grumpy. “Next time I vote we put the fire on the ground. I’ll dig it out afterward and put fresh gravel that matches the original back over the top.”

Jim grunted. “That is more work. We did it that way for a few years until I started to do it this way.”

“What about a gunnysack?” I asked. “Something porous but not so loose a weave that the big gravel can drop through. Or use gravel that would blend in better with what is already here.”

“Might work,” agreed Jim. “But then what would I use to keep my apprentice busy? I suppose I could do what my teacher did and teach him beading.”

“I’ll pick up gravel, Uncle, thank you,” Calvin said meekly.

The medicine man laughed. “I thought you might feel that way.”

I STOPPED AT THE GAS STATION IN BIGGS AND GOT A pair of ice-cream cones—banana and strawberry—and a notebook. We ate the ice cream in the truck until Adam was finished with his strawberry cone because I couldn’t feed myself and Adam and drive at the same time.

As I drove back over the bridge, still licking my banana ice cream, I could see the Maryhill Campground, full of tents, trailers, and RVs. Had MacKenzie been staying there with her family? Or had they been somewhere more private? I hadn’t noticed any other campers. But if it had been the Maryhill Campground, Coyote might have been able to get to her in time to save her while I kept River Devil busy. If she’d been at the Maryhill Campground, and we had known where she was.

I drove back to camp and started writing. A letter to my mother and one to each of my sisters. I did not, of course, mention Coyote. A long letter to Samuel and Bran. A letter to Jesse. A letter to Stefan. A lot of pages that I’d burn if I survived the night.

Jesse called Adam’s phone while I was in the middle of writing the letter to her. He brought his phone to me so I could answer it—after a little fumbling.

“I need Daddy,” Jesse said intensely. “Now.”

“He can’t talk.” Adam put his chin on my leg.

“I don’t care. Take the phone to him in the bathroom.”

“He’s a wolf, Jesse,” I told her patiently. “He can’t talk. Is there something I can do for you?”

“Why is he a wolf?” she said, sounding shocked. “It’s your honeymoon.”

“Jesse. Much as I’d love to discuss my honeymoon with you—what do you need?”

“It’s Darryl,” she wailed. “He’s impossible. Auriele left to do something or other, and he says I can’t go shopping. My favorite store has a four-hour sale, from noon to four, and he won’t let me go.”

Jesse, to my certain knowledge, had never cared about shopping. There were other things she did worry about, and I could think of only one of them that would put that frantic tone in her voice.

“Gabriel wants to go do something,” I interpreted. “Maybe a movie? Darryl would be an inconvenience, and you thought if you figured out something that he would not do, he’d let you do it without him.”

“Darryl’s right here, you know?” she said.

“Your father might have bought your story, but I doubt it,” I told her. “Where are you going?”

“Darryl critiques movies,” she said. “Loudly.
During
the movie, and Gabriel . . .”

Gabriel had changed in the last half year. He’d been kicked out of his house by a mother he loved (and who loved him back—that was part of the problem) and held captive by a fairy queen. Things like that change a person. Mostly he was a little more wary and a lot more somber.

Gabriel was living in the house that replaced my old one, so he and Jesse were now neighbors. But he’d lost the easy confidence that everything would turn out right—once he’d seen the monsters being monsters. Around some of the werewolves he was very . . . cautious. Adam didn’t seem to bother him, but Darryl did.

“How about Kyle and Warren?” I asked. Warren had that whole aw-shucks-ma’am going for him and was nearly as good at hiding his dominance as Bran. People tended to like Warren, and he and Gabriel got on just fine.

There was a little silence. “Kyle’s
important
, Mercy. He and Warren can’t just take the time to go to a movie with a couple of kids.”

I laughed, and Adam sneezed. “Did you hear that, Darryl? Kyle’s
important
.”

“Good to know someone is important around here,” he grumbled. He wasn’t angry, though. Darryl had a Ph.D. and worked in a federally funded think tank as an analyst of things too complex for most people’s brains. He and his mate, Auriele, had become Jesse’s de facto babysitters when her mother left because female werewolves were few and far between: Adam’s pack only had two. And Darryl was Adam’s second in command, a wolf more than up to taking on anyone who might try to hurt the daughter of the Columbia Basin Pack’s Alpha.

“I’ll call them,” Darryl said. “Now that I know what the trouble is. You could have told me, Jesse.”

“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” Jesse muttered. “It’s not that he doesn’t like you.”

“I know exactly what it’s about.” Darryl’s voice was so deep it rumbled. “It’s okay. I don’t mind scaring people. I especially don’t mind scaring your boyfriends.”

“Everything good now?” I asked.

“I guess,” Jesse said.

“If Kyle and Warren can’t go, check with Samuel and Ariana.”

“I’ll do that,” said Darryl.

“Love you, Jesse.” I kept it casual. “See you.” Probably. Maybe. The death of eight-year-old MacKenzie in the wee small hours this morning had taken the edge off my usual optimism.

“Tell Daddy he better not spend the whole honeymoon in wolf shape,” Jesse said. “Love you both.”

Adam had been reading my letter. I finally figured out how to hang up his phone, then met his eyes.

“I’m not planning on dying,” I told him. “But, Mr. Always Prepared for Anything, there are things I’d like to tell people if I do.”

Like I loved them. Like someone needed to watch out for Stefan, who still didn’t seem to be doing too well. Warren had called with an update a couple of days ago and reported that Stefan’s people seemed to be better. Stefan had collected a couple of people in Portland, but he was still too thin. Warren and Ben would be taking turns dropping by and feeding Stefan themselves, but that was a temporary fix. And someone needed to wait about ten more years, then track down the grown-up kids who belonged to that poor trucker who’d been framed for murders committed by a vampire and tell them he hadn’t suddenly gone crazy and killed a bunch of innocent people. Those kinds of things needed to be taken care of if I wasn’t there to do it.

Adam was restless and angry, so I sent him out to hunt something. Maybe killing something would make him feel better.

I wrote his letter while he was gone. When I was through, I lay down on the bed and tried to figure out some other way out of this disaster.

Calling the werewolves for help was out. The fae . . . Zee was my friend. I could call Zee. I considered it. Was it a good idea?

Not if the river devil could mark the fae, I realized. Fae were not proof against magic. I’d seen a fairy queen force other fae to worship her—and some of those had been fairly powerful.

If the river devil could suborn Zee . . . I’ve only seen Zee without his glamour a couple of times, and it was impressive. More impressive was the way the other fae treated him: wary respect—even from the Gray Lords themselves. If he had to obey the river devil, it would not be a good thing.