Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

river had a scattering of fishing boats that were dwarfed by a pair of barges traveling upstream.
    “They left you to be raised by a wolf pack,” he said. “Their loss. Would you rather have had them, or Bran and his pack?”
    He wore the pair of dark sunglasses that he sometimes did while driving. He used to wear them more often when the wolves were still trying to hide what they were. And his face was as bland as his voice.
    “You have an irritating way of pointing out the obvious,” I told him, touching his arm to let him know I was teasing. One of my favorite things about being mated and now married was that I got to touch him whenever I wanted to—and the more I touched, the more I wanted to.
    “Good that you find it obvious,” he said. “Maybe Gordon and the other walkers had their reasons for staying away, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Who do you think is the second walker, the hawk? Is it Jim?”
    “Could be,” I said, thinking hard. “But I don’t have any medicine-magic, almost the opposite, because magic doesn’t work on me like it does everyone else. I suppose he could be two things at once. It could also be someone we haven’t met as a human yet.”
    “What bothered you so much about the river-devil petroglyph?” He made the turn into the campground and swiped the card on the box that opened the gate. “All I caught was your shock. I couldn’t pick up anything else.”
    “Remember that nightmare I had on the way to Horsethief Lake?” I said. “I saw something that could have inspired a drawing like that.” And I told him what I remembered of the dream.
    By the time I’d finished, we were at our campsite. Adam didn’t say anything for a while, and I helped him set up to feed an unknown number of people.
    “Do you often have dreams like that? About people you don’t know?”
    “No,” I told him. “Usually the people I do know are sufficient to spawn any number of nightmares without inventing any.”
    He stopped what he was doing and pulled out his magic phone.
    Okay, the phone isn’t magic, but it does things my computer struggles with.
    “Good,” he said. “We have a signal. What was your teacher’s name? Do you remember?”
    “Janice Lynne Morrison,” I said.
    He glanced at me, a little surprised by my ready answer. I had trouble remembering the names of people I should know. An unfortunate number of my customers were known to Zee and me as Yellow-Spotted Bug or Blue Bus. I’ve had to check my paperwork to make certain of the names of people I’d known for years.
    I shrugged. “Horror has a way of making things stick.”
    He tapped into his magic phone for a while. If I had a phone that complicated, I’d have to bring Jesse along to run the damned thing.
    “There’s a Janice Lynne Morrison who teaches third grade at a school in Tigard, one of the Portland suburbs,” Adam said with a frown. He turned the phone so I could see its screen. The face that looked back at me was grainy and too formal.
    “That’s her,” I said, my heart sinking to my feet. “What am I doing dreaming about real people, Adam? What am I doing dreaming about their deaths?” I gripped his wrist because I needed to hold on to something solid. “Is it a true dream? I don’t do true dreaming. Did I see the future, so I should warn her somehow?” I knew I was babbling, but this was Adam I was babbling to. He didn’t mind and wouldn’t think I actually expected him to have an answer.
    He tucked his phone away with his free hand and let me hold on as tightly as I needed to.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll find out. Warning her without more information won’t help, either. People don’t tend to take warnings about monsters who are going to eat them very seriously. Especially when they come from total strangers.”
    “This is true,” said Gordon heavily as he walked around the end of the trailer. “It is why those who know things must sound mysterious. It is like fishing. The mystery the bait, the truth the hook—which is why it sometimes hurts.”
    “The fish ends up dead,” I said dryly.
    “Not the ending we are hoping for,” Gordon said with a sigh. “But always a possibility.” Today he wore jeans and a Dresden Dolls T-shirt.
    He looked at me. “Who was your father, Mercedes Thompson?”
    “Hauptman,” said Adam coolly. “Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman.”
    “Joe Old Coyote,” I said, leaning against Adam a little and relaxing my grip on his arm,