Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

There were a lot of places you could just go camping. “No.”
    “Then no.”
    “Damn it,” I said.
    You or they die. Bargain. You die, they live.
    “Is there anyone else who could take my role?” I asked.
    “None that I know of. I was surprised that you were not controlled by her mark. You are the only creature who is wholly of this realm that I have seen resist her.”
    “If I weren’t here, what would you do?”
    He sighed. “One of us would take your place. But there are only seven of us who can or will help. I believe that a time will come when the Great Spirit will send us back out into the world again, entrusted with tasks to accomplish. But many of us were hurt when the Europeans swept through here. Disease took so many of our children, then the vampires singled out those who managed to survive and brought more death upon them . . .” He sighed. “We were allowed to retreat and lick our wounds—and for many it will take the Great Spirit to pry them out of their safe dens.” He scuffed his bare foot on the ground, rolling a rock a dozen feet. “I won’t lie. We may not have enough to do what we need, even with you. Without you?” He shook his head.
    Mercedes. The demand was angry and impatient.
    I picked up a rock and chucked it in the river as my answer.
    Coward to save yourself at the expense of a child. You shall see what you have done.
    I learned a lot in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. I learned that MacKenzie’s little brother was named Curt, like my stepfather. He was four—and marked as MacKenzie was, so he didn’t fight when his sister carried him on her hip out into the river. As a treat especially for me, I think, the river devil released her hold on their minds before she killed them. But maybe it was because MacKenzie’s screams had her parents tearing out of their tent and into the water after them.
    I learned that I could have exchanged my life for four people’s lives. Four.

12

    I DIDN’T SLEEP. WHAT WAS THE POINT? I COULD HAVE nightmares while I was awake just as well as when I was asleep.
    I had made the right decision, the only decision. But that didn’t make it any easier to live with the deaths of four people I could have saved.
    I fed Adam, and when he grunted at me, I fed myself, too. I had to keep my strength up. If four people had died to give me a chance to help kill the river devil, it wouldn’t do to fail because I hadn’t eaten.
    About 5:00 A.M., when the first pale hint of dawn touched the sky, Adam and I got in the truck and headed back up to Stonehenge. Without Adam to converse with and nothing much to do, I would drive us both crazy if we stayed at the campsite. Stonehenge needed to be cleaned up. I could do that and save Jim and Calvin some work.
    It had been nearly 2:00 A.M. when we’d packed up that morning, and Jim had looked like a man who’d been rode hard and put away wet. I didn’t expect him to arrive until a more civilized hour. But he and Calvin drove up about ten minutes after I finally found the step stool so I could get high enough to remove the candles from the tops of the standing stones. Chin-ups on forty-five monoliths (I counted them while contemplating how to get the candles down) had struck me as too energetically taxing when I had a monster to kill later.
    Calvin waved at me and hopped in the back of the truck to grab two boxes. He jumped back out and trotted over while Jim got out of the truck and shut the door.
    “Hey,” said Calvin. “Didn’t expect—” He saw Adam and stopped dead. “Uhm. What’s wrong with him?”
    Even happy werewolves are scary in broad daylight if your eyes let you really see what they are. Adam was not a happy werewolf.
    “Wolf took offense at the bite,” I said. “So Adam can’t change back to human right now.”
    “Jeez,” said Calvin. “That sucks—and it’s your honeymoon .” Then his face flushed darker with embarrassment.
    That was not what had Adam’s hackles up, though. I’d told him about Coyote’s sisters after Coyote left. And whispering very quietly what the plan to kill the monster was. Adam couldn’t talk to tell me what he thought. I knew that he understood that it was the best plan we could come up with. I also knew that he didn’t like it. At all. Amazing what body language can convey.
    “Coyote is sure it is temporary,” I told him, getting the next candle down while Calvin started to set them in the boxes he’d brought. The boxes were like the ones