Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

of the FBI say that phrase when talking on his cell phone to someone—and go home. More important to me at this point, they would let me go home, too.
    I closed my good eye, and when I opened it, Adam had a cup of hot cocoa and was making me drink it. I fussed at him for waking me up until I got the first mouthful down. It tasted really good, and it was hot.
    “Where’s everyone else?” I asked when I was done because it looked as though we were alone.
    “Down staring at the river devil.” Adam set the mug aside and kissed me gently on the forehead. “They got pretty excited when they realized it was still just lying there. They have about three minutes before I take you to the emergency room.”
    He was holding on to civilization by the skin of his teeth. A proper mate would be meek and subservient until he recovered.
    “I don’t want to go to the hospital,” I whined. I didn’t want to move for at least a hundred years now that I was finally warm. If I didn’t move, I didn’t hurt. Much.
    “You don’t get a choice.” His voice was oh-so-calm, but I could feel the huge storm that lay behind all that control.
    “I killed the nasty monster. I think I should get to say no,” I told him. To my embarrassment, tears welled in my eyes. I had to blink fast to make them go away. I was done, no reserves left at all. I just couldn’t bear any more tonight.
    “You are in shock,” he said grimly. “You need stitches in half a dozen places, and your leg is broken. Where do you think you should be going?”
    “Home?”
    He sighed, leaned forward, and rested his forehead on mine for a moment. “I’ll take you home tomorrow,” he promised. “Tonight, you’re going to the emergency room.”

    THEY CUT MY OLD SWIMMING SUIT OFF ME AT THE hospital, where a tired-eyed female doctor and a pair of nurses (one of them a man) scrubbed, stitched, stapled, and otherwise abused my body. I made them leave Adam’s dog tags on my neck. The doctor and both nurses flirted shamelessly with Adam even though he was now wearing a shirt and shoes with his jeans. But Adam didn’t seem to notice, so that was okay.
    By the time the sun rose, I had a bright pink cast on my leg and orders to have it checked over by an orthopedic doctor ASAP. The tibia was certainly broken, so was my kneecap, and the X-rays also showed a suspicious-looking shadow on my ankle. I had more stitches than a Raggedy Ann doll and hands wrapped up like mummies. Not only was my right hand broken, but both hands were sliced, diced, and burned. I had two black eyes. The first was the remnant of the fight in Wal-Mart. I had no idea when the second one happened. Maybe it was when the river devil landed on me after she was dead, or before that, when she was flopping around. I didn’t feel it when it happened, and I wasn’t feeling it anymore because I also had the best drugs in the known universe. I was very happy and didn’t care much that my leg still ached. It wasn’t just the drugs that made me happy; the river devil’s mark was gone.
    Once I quit hurting, Adam lost the soft edge in his voice that worried me so much, and his eyes darkened until they approached their usual color. Of course, once I quit hurting, I also quit worrying about Adam losing control and killing someone he’d feel bad about later.
    “Hey,” I asked Adam, as he took the paperwork the nurse handed him, “is this the hospital they took Benny to?”
    So Adam rolled me through the hospital in a wheelchair to go visit Benny. When we got to his room, Benny was sleeping deeply in his bed, a tired-looking woman was drowsing in a tired-looking chair, and Calvin was sitting in the wide windowsill staring out at the dawn.
    One of the wheels on the chair had a squeak; it caught Calvin’s attention. He turned his head, then darn near fell off the window.
    “What happened to you?” he asked. Then, his expression lightening, he said fiercely, “Did you do it?”
    “We are minus one monster,” I said, accidentally waking the woman in the chair—and Benny, too.
    “Pain meds,” murmured Adam in explanation of something. I think it was the giggling. “As you can see, taking out the monster was a close-run thing.”
    “Tell me,” said Benny.
    So I did. At some point—near where I was trying to climb up the river devil, I think—Adam sat on the floor next to the chair and leaned his forehead against my thigh. There was another chair in the room, so I wasn’t quite sure why he was