Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

thechokehold he’d gone after, but his arm was still tight around my head and neck.
    I twisted around sharply in his grip until I faced him, then threw everything I had into a short, sharp punch into the nerve center on the outside of the big muscle of his thigh. He swore, his grip loosened, and I pulled free and started fighting in earnest.
    My style of karate, Shi Sei Kai Kan, was designed for soldiers who would be encountering multiple opponents—which was good because there were three men in my living room. One of them was a werewolf—in human form. I didn’t have time to think, only react. I got in some good hits, but it rapidly became apparent that these men had studied violence a lot longer than I.
    About the time I realized the only reason I was still up and fighting was because they were being very careful not to hurt me, the werewolf hit me once, hard, square in my diaphragm, then, while I was gasping for air, tossed me on the floor and pinned me there.
    â€œBroke my f—”
    â€œLadies present,” chided the man who held me in an implacable grip that was as gentle as a mother holding her babe. His voice had the same soft drawl that sometimes touched Adam’s voice. “No swearing.”
    â€œBroke my freaking nose then,” said the first voice dryly, if somewhat muffled—presumably by the broken nose.
    â€œIt’ll heal.” He ignored my attempts to wriggle out of his hold. “Anyone else hurt?”
    â€œShe bit John-Julian,” said the first man again.
    â€œLove nip, sir. I’m fine.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry, sir. It never occurred to me that she’d have training. I wasn’t ready.”
    â€œIt’s water under the bridge now. Learn from it, boy,” my captor said. Then he leaned down and, in a voice of power that vibrated down my spine, said, “Let us chat a little, hmm? The idea is not to hurt you. If you hadn’t struggled, you wouldn’t even have the bruises you do now. Wecould have hurt you much worse if we had wanted to.” I knew he was right—but it didn’t make him my best friend.
    â€œWhat do you want?” I asked in as reasonable a tone as I could manage, flattened, as I was, on the floor beneath a strange werewolf.
    â€œThat’s my girl,” he approved, while I stared at the floor between my couch and end table, about two feet from my left hand, where Zee’s dagger must have fallen when I went to sleep last night.
    â€œWe’re not here to hurt you,” he told me. “That’s the first thing you need to know. The second is that the werewolves who have been watching your house and the Sarge’s have been called off—so there’s no one to help you. The third is—” He stopped speaking and bent his head to take a deeper breath. “Are you a were? Not a werewolf. You don’t smell right for that. I thought it might just be the cat—never had a cat—but it’s you that smells like fur and the hunt.”
    â€œGrandpa?”
    â€œIt’s all right,” the werewolf answered, “she’s not going to hurt me. What are you, girl?”
    â€œDoes it matter?” I asked. He’d called Adam “Sarge”—as in “Sergeant”?
    â€œNo,” he said. He lifted his weight off me and released me. “Not in the slightest.”
    I rolled toward the couch, and grabbed the dagger, shaking it free of sheath and belt. One of the intruders started forward, but the werewolf held up a hand and the other man stopped.
    I kept moving until I was crouched on the back of the couch, the dagger in my hand and my back to the wall.
    The werewolf’s skin was so dark the highlights were blue and purple rather than brown. He knelt on the floor where he’d moved as soon as he let me up. He wore loose khaki pants and a light blue shirt. At another gesture, the two men backed up farther, giving me as much room as they could. They were lean and tough-looking and like enough to be twins. Like the werewolf, they were verydark-skinned. Between skin tone, general build, and that “Grandpa,” I was betting that they were all related.
    â€œYou’re Adam’s army buddy,” I told the werewolf, trying to sound relaxed, like it made me think he might be on my side, like I didn’t know that he’d been involved in the debacle at Adam’s house. “The one who was Changed with