Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

college with. “Amber?”
    Amber had been my college roommate Charla’s best friend. She’d been studying to be a veterinarian, but I’d heard she’d dropped out her first year in vet school. I hadn’t heard from her since I’d graduated.
    When I’d last seen Amber she’d been wearing a Mohawk and had had a ring in her nose (which had been bigger) and a small tattooed hummingbird at the corner of her eye. She and Charla had been best friends in high school. Though it had been Charla who had decided they shouldn’t room together, Amber had always blamed me for it. We had been acquaintances rather than friends.
    Amber laughed, doubtless at the bewildered look on my face. There was something brittle in the sound, not that I was in any position to be picky. My manner was stiffer than usual, too. I had a vampire feeding from a werewolf behind me; I wondered what she was hiding.
    â€œIt’s been a long time,” she said, after a short, awkward silence.
    I joined her out on the porch and shut the door behind me, trying not to look like I was keeping her out. “What brings you here?”
    She folded her arms over her chest and turned to gaze at my scraggly-looking field where a rusty VW Rabbit rested on three tires. From where we stood, the graffiti, the missing door, and the cracked windshield weren’t visible, but it looked junky anyway. The old wreck was a joke between Adam and me, and I wasn’t going to apologize for it.
    â€œI read about you in the paper,” she said.
    â€œYou live in the Tri-Cities?”
    She shook her head. “Spokane. It made CNN, too, didn’t you know? The fae, werewolves, death ... how could they resist?” For a moment there was a flash of humor in her voice, though her face stayed disconcertingly blank.
    Lovely. The whole world knew I’d been raped. Yeah, that might have struck me as funny, too—if I’d been Lucrezia Borgia. There were a lot of reasons I’d never bothered to keep in contact with Amber.
    She hadn’t driven over from Spokane to hunt me down after ten years and tell me she’d read about the attack, either. “So you read about me and decided it might be fun to tell me that the story about how I killed my rapist was all over the country? You drove a hundred and fifty miles for that?”
    â€œObviously not.” She turned back to face me, and the awkward stranger had been replaced by the polished pro who was even more a stranger to me. “Look. Do you remember when we took a day trip to Portland to see that play? We went to the bar afterward, and you told us about the ghost in the ladies’ room.”
    â€œI was drunk,” I told her—which was true enough. “I think I told you I was raised by werewolves, too.”
    â€œYes,” she said with sudden intentness. “I thought you were just telling stories, but now we all know that werewolves are real, just like the fae. And you’re dating one.”
    That would have come out in the newspaper story, I thought. Double yippee. There was a time when I tried to stay out of the spotlight because it was safer. It was still safer, but I hadn’t been doing so good at stealthy living the past year.
    Unaffected by my inner dialogue, Amber kept talking. “So I thought if you were dating one now, you had probably been telling the truth then. And if you told the truth about the werewolves, then you were probably telling the truth about seeing ghosts, too.”
    Anyone else would have forgotten about that, but Amber had a mind like a steel trap. She remembered everything. It was after that trip that I quit drinking alcohol. People who know other people’s secrets can’t afford to do things that impair their ability to control their mouths.
    â€œMy house is haunted,” she said.
    I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I took a step toward Amber and turned a little. I still couldn’t see anything out there, but with Amber a little downwind so her perfume didn’t ruin my nose, I could smell it: vampire.
    â€œAnd you want me to do something about it?” I asked. “You need to call a priest.” Amber was Catholic.
    â€œNo one believes me,” she said starkly. “My husband thinks I’m crazy.” The porch light caught her eyes, just for a minute, and I could see that her pupils were dilated. I wondered if it was just the darkness of the night or