Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

dead, and that seemed as remarkable an accomplishment as I’d ever achieved.

    I MUST HAVE SLEPT FOR A LITTLE BECAUSE THE BLOOD under my cheek had cooled and there were gentle hands running over me.
    “Adam,” I said. “You need to get some clothes on before those police officers get down here.” I’d been hearing their sirens approaching for a few minutes.
    “Shh,” he told me. And as if a curtain had been drawn back, I could feel his feverish need to make sure I was okay. He’d sounded so calm, so sane—when he was none of those things.
    “Please?” He needed something to help him, or he was going to kill anyone who came within a dozen feet of me. Sometimes the thought had occurred to me that Adam dressed so civilized in his silk shirts and hand-tailored suits as a shield against the wildness within him.
    Besides, if the police showed up to find Adam naked, they were going to have some sort of strong reaction—and Adam needed everyone to be as calm as possible.
    He hesitated.
    “I’m okay,” I told him. “Really I am.” I tried to move, then rethought what I’d said. “Okay. I hurt, and I think my leg is broken. And maybe my hand. But I’m not going to bleed to death, and I think we’ll have an easier time with the police and the FBI and whoever else is about to descend upon us if you are wearing jeans.”
    “I don’t want to leave you here,” he said. “And I’m not moving you without a more careful look.”
    “If you can’t put jeans on and be back here in under a minute, I’d be surprised,” I told him. Then I had a bright idea. “I don’t want anyone but me seeing you naked,” I told him, a little surprised that it was the truth. “Not when I can’t defend my claim.” It was stupid, and I knew it—but I also knew he’d understand.
    “Damn it, Mercy,” he said—and then he was running.
    I found myself smiling as I heard the door of the trailer open and realized I was smiling into the face of the otterkin whose eyes were clouded with death and whose blood made the ground sticky under my face. Tomorrow, I’d have nightmares about that, maybe. But tonight, he was dead, and I wasn’t. That was good enough for me.
    It was a good thing the otterkin apparently turned back into otters when they died. If the police had come here and found six human bodies, we might have had a lot of trouble. The walking stick dug into my ribs, and I tugged it out from under me, regarding it soberly.
    I’d figure out what I’d done to the walking stick in time. How bad could it be? The oakman had used it to kill a vampire, and it hadn’t changed. Whatever the walking stick had become, it couldn’t be as bad as the river devil.

    THE REST OF THAT NIGHT WAS KIND OF FUZZY.
    Adam, dressed only in a pair of jeans, examined me carefully to make sure I hadn’t damaged anything that moving would make worse. Then he picked me up and carried me over to the camp chairs, where he’d laid out one of the blankets to bundle me up in. He called his office and had them remotely open the gate and let in the cops—who were gathered outside the gate like hornets at their nest.
    He was cleaning my face, very gently, when the police came in and all sorts of official cars drove to us.
    Adam did the talking, implying a lot of not-quite-true things without ever lying. Everyone got pretty tense when Adam introduced himself as the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack. But they seemed to find it perfectly acceptable to hear that a few people believed that the recent spate of deaths by the river were not the work of a human serial killer but of a real monster.
    In the interest of privacy, he told them, he couldn’t reveal who called him in.
    One of the sheriff’s men murmured, “When I first met him, he was with Jim Alvin and Calvin Seeker.” From his words, I was pretty sure he was the one who’d given us a ride back to our campground when we’d found Benny, but I could only look out of one eye at this point, the other having swollen shut.
    At the sound of Jim’s name, the local cops all looked wise and quit asking questions. One of them murmured, “Native American medicine man,” to the FBI agents, and suddenly no one asked Adam any more questions about why we were here. Apparently, no one wanted to create an incident with the Yakama Nation.
    The less the officials knew about magic, fae otterkin, and Coyote, the more likely they would be to attribute all the deaths to a prehistoric creature—I’d heard one