Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

happened that I’d missed while my eyes had been on the hawk, and I wasn’t sure what it was.
    Whatever it was, Adam was pretty mad at Calvin. I wondered if he pulled me behind him to protect me—or to keep me from protecting Calvin.
    “No,” said Calvin—which was a mistake. He should have learned how to not-lie from his grandfather. Besides, I knew enough Native American legends to know that there were lots of stories about people who turned to animals—and animals into people, for that matter. And he knew about Adam, who was certainly a person who changed into an animal.
    Adam smiled, showing his teeth. I couldn’t actually see him do it, but Calvin’s face told me he had clearly enough. Adam had put away his civilized face and let Calvin see the real one.
    “Can’t lie to werewolves,” I told the young man. “You might as well have shouted, ‘Yes, but I don’t want you to ask me about it.’”
    Calvin swallowed, his fear pressing on my nose like perfume.
    “Mercy?” asked Adam.
    He was going somewhere with this—and I trusted him as long as his temper held. Werewolves are monsters. I grew up with them, and I loved Adam—and he would never hurt me. That did not apply to people he didn’t care about. The faster the situation—whatever the situation was—was defused, the safer for everyone.
    Information can sometimes be gotten when the opponent thinks you know all about it anyway. That was what Adam had been asking me to do—tell Calvin who I was.
    “I can turn into a coyote,” I said. “My mom tells me I must get it from my father.”
    Calvin’s jaw dropped, then his face froze. “Your mother was a white woman,” he said urgently. “You can’t turn into a coyote.”
    “Can, too,” I said indignantly. It was one thing for me to tell him he was lying—I knew I was right. It was an entirely different matter for him to tell me I was lying.
    “Can’t.”
    “Can.”
    “Can’t.”
    “Can, too.”
    “Mercy,” said Adam with exaggerated patience tinged with humor. He knew I was doing it on purpose. That was okay because he wasn’t angry anymore.
    “Cannot,” said Calvin.
    “Knock it off, both of you. Neither of you is five.” He glanced at Calvin. “He answered what I wanted to know anyway. That hawk was no natural animal, and this one knew it.”
    No one reads body language like a werewolf, I thought. And then I realized what Adam was saying.
    The blood shot from my head so fast that I had to step sideways to keep my feet—and sideways was three feet down the hillside. Adam jerked me back on the trail before I managed to fall. “Okay?” he asked.
    I nodded, though I wasn’t sure it was true.
    I’d never met another one of my kind. After more than thirty years, I’d sort of assumed that there were no more left, that I was the only one.
    I’d also assumed they’d be coyotes like me. Hadn’t the old man last night kind of implied that? He’d known I was a coyote, and I’d only told him I was a walker.
    I didn’t know much about being a walker. Only what Bran had told me, and he hadn’t known much—or he’d told me exactly as much as he intended to. I’d grown up thinking the last was true, but over the past year or so had come to believe the first.
    “She is a walker,” Adam told Calvin. “Coming up with reasons it can’t be so doesn’t help, and neither does arguing. I should know: I was bitten and Changed by a bandit warlord in Vietnam. Even now, I don’t know of any werewolves living in Asia—there are things over there that don’t like us, and they can make their dislike fatal. Yet there he was. Mercy changes into a coyote. You can’t argue with fact. Just accept it and get over it. Was that your grandfather?”
    If Gordon Seeker was a walker who turned into a red-tailed hawk, that would explain why he was able to disappear so effectively. There still should have been a pile of clothes where he’d changed, but being a walker would answer most of my questions.
    “Grandpa Gordon changes,” said Calvin. He looked as though he had sucked on a lemon as he stared at me.
    He didn’t not-lie very well, either. Maybe it was something medicine men learned when they were older. I had a feeling that his uncle Jim could not-lie as smoothly as any fae, and I’d seen that his grandfather could do the same. So why had they sent Calvin out with us? Unless they wanted us to share their secrets.
    And the reason they might want us to know was tied up with Gordon