Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

the parking lot. I’m going to look out and see who it is.”
    â€œMaybe it’s the guy you called. The Alpha.”
    I shook my head. “It’s not his car.”

chapter 3
    I slipped through the office and opened the outside door cautiously, but the smell of perfume and herbs hanging in the night air told me we were still all right.
    A dark Cadillac was stretched across the pavement just beyond Stefan’s bus. I pushed the door all the way open as the uniformed chauffeur tipped his hat to me, then opened the car’s back door, revealing an elderly woman.
    I stuck my head back in the office, and called, “It’s all right, Mac. Just the cleanup crew.”
    Keeping the humans ignorant of the magic that lives among them is a specialized and lucrative business, and Adam’s pack kept the best witch in the Pacific Northwest on retainer. Rumors of Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya’s origins and how she came to be in the Tri-Cities changed on a weekly basis. I think she and her brood of grandchildren and great-grandchildren encouraged the more outrageous versions. All that I knew for certain wasthat she had been born in Moscow, Russia, and had lived in the Tri-Cities for at least twenty years.
    Elizaveta rose from the depths of the big car with all the drama of a prima ballerina taking her bow. The picture she made was worth all the drama.
    She was almost six feet tall and little more than skin and bones, with a long, elegant nose and gray, penetrating eyes. Her style of dress was somewhere between babushka and Baba Yaga. Layers of rich fabrics and textures came down to her calves, all covered with a long wool cape and a worn scarf that wrapped around her head and neck. Her outfit wasn’t authentic, at least not to any period or place that I’ve heard of, but I’ve never seen anyone brave enough to tell her so.
    â€œElizaveta Arkadyevna, welcome,” I said, walking past the bus to stand by her car.
    She scowled at me. “My Adamya calls and tells me you have one of his wolves dead.” Her voice had the crispness of a British aristocrat, so I knew she was angry—her usual accent was thick enough I had to make a real effort to understand her. When she was really angry, she didn’t speak English at all.
    â€œWerewolf, yes,” I agreed. “But I don’t think it is one of Adam’s.” Adamya, I had learned, was an affectionate form of Adam. I don’t think she’d ever called him that to his face. Elizaveta was seldom affectionate to anyone likely to overhear her.
    â€œI have the body in my shop,” I told her. “But there is blood all over here. The werewolf chased me with a torn artery and bled from here over to the storage facility, where he tore up the fence in two places before he bled to death out on the street. The storage facility has cameras, and I used Stefan’s bus”—I pointed to it—“to move the body.”
    She said something in Russian to her chauffeur, who I recognized as one of her grandchildren. He bowed and said something back before going around to open the trunk.
    â€œGo,” she told me, and flung her arms in a pushing gesture. “I will take care of the mess out here without your help. You wait with the body. Adam will be here soon. Once he has seen, he will tell me what he would have me do with it. You killed this wolf? With a silver bullet so I should look for casing?”
    â€œWith my fangs,” I told her; she knew what I was. “It was sort of an accident—at least his death was.”
    She caught my arm when I turned to go into the office. “What were you thinking, Mercedes Thompson? A Little Wolf who attacks the great ones will be dead soon, I think. Luck runs out eventually.”
    â€œHe would have killed a boy under my protection,” I told her. “I had no choice.”
    She released me and snorted her disapproval, but when she spoke her Russian accent was firmly in place. “There is always choice, Mercy. Always choice. If he attacked a boy, then I suppose it must not have been one of Adamya’s.”
    She looked at her chauffeur and barked out something more. Effectively dismissed, I went back to Mac and our dead werewolf.
    I found Mac crouched near the body, licking his fingers as if he might have touched the drying blood and was cleaning them off. Not a good sign. Somehow, I was pretty certain that if Mac were fully in