Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

wiggled until I was on top of her muzzle instead of in front of it. I’d managed to pull open Adam’s shirt while she was hauling me to her, and now I slipped a knife out of the bandoleer and sliced the tentacle just around my ankle.
    Her tentacles must have been extremely sensitive. Just as she had when Adam freed me, she jerked her head up out of the water. Since I was on top, the motion catapulted me out of the river, off her head, and into the air. I landed about fifteen feet from where I’d started and plunged back into the water. She’d thrown me upstream, so the current would bring me right back to her. I broke surface again just about the time she let loose with a shriek that hurt my ears.
    She saw me and dropped back into the water, disappearing under the surface. I swam as fast as I could, but, not being a fish, I was pretty sure I was going to be food.
    Something grabbed my shoulders and I screamed, reaching up to grab whatever it was as it yanked me out of the water. I quit screaming as the river devil’s open mouth appeared on the surface of the water below my toes, which were now about five feet in the air. My hands closed around two leather-covered steel-strong bones that could only be the legs of a very, very big predatory bird.
    My food, my food. Thief! The river devil’s voice in my head made me tighten my grip on the great bird’s legs and draw my feet up as far as I could.
    He shouldn’t have been able to bear my weight, even as big as he was—and with his wings outspread, he was huge. But he wasn’t just a thunderbird—he was Thunderbird—and I supposed that made a difference.
    The river devil broke the surface but had misjudged her strike because Thunderbird swooped sideways at the last moment. She hung where she was a moment before toppling sideways and crashing into the river like a whale breaching. Thunderbird carried me to the river’s edge and dropped me, gently, next to where Adam should have been waiting.
    And wasn’t.
    “Adam,” I shrieked, wiping the water out of my eyes. She couldn’t have him. He was mine . I staggered into a run toward the river about the time Adam emerged, knocking me over and drenching me further with the water held by his fur.
    I swore at him. “You have got to stay out of the water,” I told him through gritted, chattering teeth. “If she gets you, she won’t have to bother killing me—she can make you do it.”
    It scared me. I understood why he’d done it, understood it viscerally, but he had to stay out of the river. I tried to roll out from under him, but a big paw on my shoulder held me down and he snarled at me.
    That’s when I realized that I wasn’t dealing with Adam. Adam knew why he had to stay out of the water. But the wolf didn’t understand, and the wolf had taken over.
    We didn’t have time for this. I had to get my fins on and be ready to swim out to wherever the river devil was when she went comatose.
    I heard a war cry—someone had made it out to her.
    “Adam,” I said. “Let me up.”
    Instead, he lay down on top of me. Damn Wolf. If Adam had been in his human shape, the wolf would never have gotten this much of an upper hand.
    But I knew how to deal with this—if I calmed down, he would, too. He was responding as much to the frantic beat of my heart and my fear as he was to seeing me jerked underwater. He hadn’t seen me fight underwater with something I couldn’t see, where I could only feel those sharp spiky teeth and—that wasn’t going to help me quiet down at all.
    I closed my eyes and sought that calm place I’d learned to find in the dojo. It came in handy both when working on engines and when dealing with unhappy customers.
    It took longer than it might have because I couldn’t help but listen to the sounds of the battle I couldn’t see, but eventually my pulse settled down, and I was relaxed under Adam.
    “Okay,” I told him. “I’m okay. You need to get off of me before I’m squished.”
    The wolf growled.
    “Adam,” I said sharply. “Get off me.”
    He closed his yellow eyes and took a deep breath.
    “Adam?”
    When his eyes opened it was Adam who looked back at me. He stood up and backed off.
    “Thank you,” I said, rolling to my feet a little less gracefully than I meant to.
    Out in the river there was a feeding frenzy going on. There was blood in the water; I could smell it even though I couldn’t see. I could hear the cries of the birds—Hawk, Raven, and Thunderbird as they