Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

son.”
    â€œDoes Corban know he’s not Chad’s father?”
    She hit the brakes so hard that if I hadn’t been belted in, I might have become better acquainted with her windshield. She sat there in the middle of the road for a moment, oblivious to the honking horns around us. I was glad we were in a stout Mercedes rather than the Miata she’d driven to my house.
    â€œYou forget,” I said blandly. “I knew Harrison, too. We used to joke about his eyelashes, and I’ve never see eyes like his since. Not until today.” Harrison had been her one true love for about three months until she dropped him for a premed student.
    Amber started forward again and drove for a little until traffic settled down. “I’d forgotten you knew him.” She sighed. “Funny. Yes, Corban knows he’s not Chad’s father, but Chad doesn’t. It didn’t used to matter, but I’m not so sure. Corban’s been ... different lately.” She shook her head. “Still, he’s the one who suggested I ask you to come over. He saw the article in the paper, and said, ‘Isn’t that the girl you said used to see ghosts? Why don’t you have her come over and have a look-see?”’
    I figured I’d been pushy enough, so I asked a question that was less intrusive. “What does the ghost do?”
    â€œMoves things,” she told me. “It rearranges Chad’s room once or twice a week. Chad says he’s seen the furniture moving around.” She hesitated. “It breaks things, too. A couple of vases my husband’s father brought over from China. The glass over my husband’s diploma. Sometimes it takes things.” She glanced at me again. “Car keys. Shoes. Some important papers of Cor’s turned up in Chad’s room, under his bed. Corban was pretty mad.”
    â€œAt Chad?”
    She nodded.
    I hadn’t even met him, and I didn’t like her husband. Even if Chad was doing everything himself—and I had no evidence to the contrary—throwing him into reform school didn’t sound like the way to make things better.
    We picked up a morose Chad, who didn’t seem inclined to converse, and she quit talking about the ghost.
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    AMBER WAS WORKING IN THE KITCHEN. I’D TRIED TO HELP but she finally sent me to my room to stay out of her way. She didn’t like the way I peeled apples. I’d brought a book from home—a very old book—with real fairy tales in it. It was borrowed and I’d have to return it soon, so I was reading as fast as I could.
    I was taking notes on kelpies (thought extinct) when someone knocked at my door twice and then opened it.
    Chad stood with a notebook and a pencil in hand.
    â€œHey,” I said.
    He turned the notebook around and I read, “How much is my dad paying you?”
    â€œNothing,” I said.
    His eyes narrowed, and he ripped away that page and showed me the next one. Evidently he’d thought about this for a while. “Why are you here? What do you want?”
    I set my book aside and stared back at him. He was tough, but he wasn’t Adam or Samuel: he blinked first.
    â€œI have a vampire who wants to kill me,” I told him. Which I shouldn’t have, of course, but I wanted to see what would happen. Curiosity, Bran has told me more than once, might be as fatal for coyotes as it is for cats.
    Chad crumpled the paper and mouthed a word. Evidently he hadn’t expected that response.
    I raised my eyebrow. “Sorry. You’ll have to do better. I don’t lip-read.”
    He scribbled furiously. “Lyer” said his paper.
    I took his pencil, and wrote, “liar.” Then I gave him back his notebook, and said, “You want to bet?”
    He clutched his notebook to his chest and stalked off. I liked him. He reminded me of me.
    Fifteen minutes later his mother barged in. “Red or purple?” she asked me, still sounding frantic. “Come with me.”
    Bewildered, I followed her down the hall and into the master bedroom suite, where she’d laid out two dresses. “I only have five minutes before I have to put the rolls in,” she said. “Red or purple?”
    The purple had considerably more fabric. “Purple,” I said. “Do you have shoes I can borrow, too? Or do you want me to go barefoot?”
    She gave me a wild-eyed look. “Shoes I have, but not