Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

talking.
    “Don’t let it find me. Don’t let it find me.” Over and over again, very softly, barely even a whisper. I hadn’t been able to pick up his exact words until I was within a stone’s throw of the boat, and I have very good hearing. The boat hitting the rocks with the gentle rise and fall of the river’s waves was louder than his voice.
    I backed out of the brush and met Adam’s eyes. Naked was going to be hard to explain, and I knew all about what those bushes were going to do with my skin. But Adam took too long to change, would be equally naked—and if whatever this man was afraid of came back, Adam the werewolf was our best defense.
    Maybe other people wouldn’t have automatically assumed that whatever this man was afraid of would need a werewolf to fight it. There were no werewolves around here, vampires tended to be more of an urban monster, and the fae reservation was an hour the other side of the Tri-Cities—two hundred miles or more away from us. But the sheer magnitude of the terror he still felt made me think I wasn’t being paranoid.
    I shifted to human. “Hey,” I called. “You in the boat. Are you okay?”
    The man’s voice didn’t alter. He hadn’t registered my words at all.
    “I think I’ll have better luck reaching him from the river side,” I told Adam. “That boat’s still floating. If he’s as badly hurt as all the blood I’m smelling makes me think he is, it’ll be easier if we’re not trying to drag him through the underbrush anyway.”
    The nearest bit of clear riverbank was about thirty feet downstream. The sun long gone, the water was icy. I stumbled on a big rock on the river bottom and made a splash when I fell. I made some noise, too—frigid water on nice warm skin when I’m not expecting it tends to make me squeak. The man in the boat screamed—from the hoarseness of his voice, it wasn’t the first time he’d screamed tonight.
    “It’s all right,” I said, regaining my feet. “You’re safe.”
    He quit screaming, but I don’t think it was because he’d understood me. Sometimes fear is too big for that—so much of your being is focused on survival that anything else falls to the side. I’ve been there a couple of times.
    The rocks under my feet were sharp, but once I was waist-deep, my weight didn’t press me down on them quite so hard. If I’d been headed downstream instead of upstream, I could have swum instead. Adam paced back and forth unhappily on the river’s edge.
    The trees hung over the river, and the shore curved back under them. Finding a path through the debris that had collected in the small backwater along with the boat forced me to wade in through a bunch of underwater plants I didn’t see until I was in the middle of them.
    My eyesight is pretty darn good at night, but the river was an impenetrable black veil, and anything below the surface was hidden. I hated not seeing. Who really knew what was in the Columbia?
    Something brushed against my leg with a little more force than the rest of the weeds, and I let out an involuntary yip. Adam, invisible on the other side of the tree, whined.
    “Sorry, sorry,” I told him. “I’m fine. Just caught my leg on one of those clumps of plants. I can’t see a damned thing under the water, and that and this guy reeking of fear has me all hopped up. Sorry.”
    The stupid plant was persistent. It clung to my calf as I approached the boat, resisting my halfhearted attempts to shake it loose. The tendency of some water plants to wrap around arms and legs of unsuspecting swimmers is one of the leading causes of drowning. However, I reminded myself, I had my feet on the river bottom, so this one was only an irritant. Nothing to panic about.
    I forgot about the plant as soon as I grabbed the side of the boat and got down to business. My eyes just barely cleared the side of the boat, so I couldn’t get a good look at the wounded man.
    “It’s okay,” I told him. “We’ll get you out of this.”
    I gave an experimental tug on the boat, but I was now up to my chest in the water, and the current threatened to push me off my feet. When I pulled on the boat, it was I who moved.
    I shifted my grip, moving nearer to the bow. If I pulled the boat the way it was designed to move instead of sideways, it should require a lot less effort. As a last resort, I could climb in and use the motor—but the tree limbs were only a few inches above the gunnel, and I didn’t really want to scrape