Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

was down three of her most powerful vampires. If he wanted to move against her, now was the time to strike at her. Kidnapping me wasn’t a strike—it was, at best, an end run. Especially now that Marsilia had declared a truce with the wolves. Kidnapping me, I judged, would do nothing except send Adam to Marsilia with an offer of alliance.
    See? It was stupid to take me—if his purpose was to take over Marsilia’s territory.
    Since Blackwood couldn’t be that dumb, and I found myself indisputably lying in Corban’s trunk, I was inclined to think we had been wrong about Blackwood’s intentions.
    So what did he want with me?
    It could be as simple as pride. He’d claimed me as food—maybe as he claimed anyone who came to Amber’s house. Then Stefan came along and took me from him.
    The theory had the benefit of conforming to the KISS principle—Keep It Simple, Stupid. It meant that Blackwood didn’t have anything to do with Chad’s ghost. It supposed that it was sheer dumb bad luck that I had gone blithely into his hunting ground when I went to Amber’s to look for a ghost.
    Vampires are arrogant and territorial. It was not only possible but probable that having fed from me, he would believe I belonged to him. If he was possessive enough—and his holding the city for himself presupposed that Blackwood was very possessive—it was entirely reasonable that he would send a minion to fetch me.
    It was a neat, simple solution, and it didn’t depend upon my being anything special. Ego, Bran liked to say, got in the way of truth more often than anything else.
    Trouble was, it still didn’t quite fit.
    Being alone in the trunk with nothing better to do gave me time to analyze the whole thing. From the beginning, Amber’s first approach had bothered me. Upon reflection, it struck me as even more wrong. The Amber with whom I’d had a water fight, who gave dinner parties for her husband’s clients, would be neither so thoughtless or gauche as to approach me to help her with a ghost because she’d read about my rape—the rape of a near stranger, really, after all these years—in the newspaper.
    I hadn’t seen her in a long time. But, in retrospect, there had been an awkwardness in her manner that was unlike either the woman she’d been or the one she’d grown to be. It might have been explained by the odd situation, but I thought it more probable that she’d been sent.
    Which left the question, why did Blackwood want me?
    What could he have known about me before he required me to travel to Amber’s?
    The newspapers announced that I was dating a werewolf. Amber knew I saw ghosts. I sucked in a deep breath—she also knew I’d been raised with a foster family in Montana until I was sixteen. It wasn’t something I’d kept hidden—just the part about my foster family being werewolves, except that time when I was drunk.
    But among the werewolves, the knowledge of the walker, the coyote shapeshifter, who’d been raised by Bran, was well-known. So say that he didn’t know anything about me until the newspaper articles. Say Amber looked at the newspaper, and said, “Goodness—I know her. I wonder if she might not be useful helping us deal with our ghost. She said she could see ghosts.”
    Blackwood said to himself, “Hmm. A girl whose boyfriend is the Alpha of the Tri-Cities. A girl with an affinity for ghosts.” And being much older than me, he might have known more about walkers than I did. So he put two and two together and got, “Hey, I wonder if she might not be that walker who was raised by Bran a few years ago.” So he asked Amber if I was from Montana. And she told him I was raised by a foster family there.
    Maybe he wanted something from a walker. Here I had an uncomfortable moment remembering Stefan telling me about the Master of Milan, who was addicted to the blood of werewolves. But Stefan had taken blood from me and hadn’t seemed to be much affected by it. Anyway, suppose Blackwood wanted a walker and so he sent Amber to find me and persuade me to come to Spokane.
    I didn’t like it as well as the KISS theory. But that was mostly because it meant that he wouldn’t quit hunting me just because I’d escaped from this car. It meant that he’d just keep coming until he got what he wanted—or he was killed.
    It fit what I knew. Walkers are