Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

time, pick a monster who doesn’t live in a river or ocean, and I’ll be more help.”
    “Okay.” I paused and thought about it. “I don’t want a next time.”
    He sighed. “Me, either.”
    If I could have moved without moaning, I’d have leaned against him. I settled for leaving my hand on his thigh where he’d put it.
    “But if there is,” I told him, “and evidence suggests that there will be—I’d rather fight monsters with you than with anyone else I can think of.”
    “I have a confession to make,” he told me. “I wanted to wait until you were a little closer to your usual fighting weight, but I don’t think it will work.”
    “You found a cute waitress, and now you want a divorce,” I said.
    He laughed. “No. But I’ll look for one at the next available opportunity.”
    “Cool. I found a handsome nurse, but I think he liked you better than he liked me.”
    “Seriously,” he said. “I did something I shouldn’t have.”
    I was still feeling a little muddled, so I’m not sure if my sudden insight came from our mating bond or from the fact that he sounded a little too much like my mother did when she told my little sister that she’d found her diary and read it. Since I’d told Nan that she shouldn’t write anything down she didn’t want someone to read, I’d been surprised by how upset my mother was. Turned out that Nan figured that if someone was going to sneak and read her diary, they deserved what they got. It took her about ten minutes to convince Mom she wasn’t dealing drugs to pay for her abortion.
    “You read the letters,” I said, doing my best to sound offended.
    “I read the letter you wrote to me.”
    I yawned, and it sort of ruined my pretense of indignation. I patted whatever part of him I could reach. “That’s okay,” I told him. “It had your name on it.”
    We drove for a while more before he spoke again. “I love you, too.”
    I smiled at him without opening my eyes. “I know you do.”
    I dozed a little, and, before I knew it, we’d pulled into Adam’s driveway. Someone would have to back the thing out, but it wouldn’t be me, so I decided not to worry about it.
    The screen door opened, and Jesse bubbled out.
    “Dad. Hey, Dad. Why’re you home early? Someone from your office came and left a big package that says it’s a wheelchair in the garage. Is that what it is? Why did we get a wheelchair?”
    I opened my door and contemplated the difficulties of making it down to the ground while Adam hugged Jesse. If we’d been in my Rabbit, I could have gotten out on my own, because my Rabbit doesn’t have a three-and-a-half-foot drop to the ground. Not that it would have done me much good, though. I wasn’t going anywhere on my own anyway.
    Jesse looked up, and her jaw dropped. “Dad,” she said in a horrified voice, “what did you do to Mercy?”

    UNCLE MIKE WAS NOT HAPPY WHEN I CALLED HIM THE next morning and told him we killed all the otterkin. He did listen when I told him what they had done, though. I gave him an inventory of the damage to my person (I’d quit taking anything but over-the-counter painkillers and was feeling whiny).
    “ How many stitches?” he asked when I was through.
    “One hundred and forty-two,” I told him. “And four staples. And all of them itch.”
    It wasn’t so bad when I had a distraction. Since I couldn’t do anything, that meant talking to people. I was home alone right now—which was why I’d decided to call Uncle Mike and fill him in.
    “And do you know, when you have a broken hand and a giant cut under your arm, crutches don’t work, and neither does a wheelchair unless you have a minion to wheel you around. My good hand is burnt, so I can’t even turn circles.”
    “I think I’ll pitch it to the Gray Lords as suicide by werewolf,” he said after a long moment of silence. “Anyone who hurts you in front of Adam is too stupid to live anyway.”
    “Adam only killed five of them. I killed the other one.” I paused. “Okay, not quite. I was holding the walking stick when it killed him.”
    There was a long pause. “Oh?”
    I told him about using the walking stick to kill the river devil, what the otterkin had told me afterward, and how the walking stick had killed him.
    “You quenched Lugh’s walking stick in the blood of an ancient Native American monster?”
    “I screwed up?”
    He sighed. “What else was there to be doing? If you hadn’t used it, you’d be dead—and there would be