Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

moving companies use to pack glasses, with cardboard inserts that kept each of the candles separate from the others. “Just don’t look him in the eyes, okay?”
    It took us about an hour and a half to get the place cleaned up and looking the way it had before we’d come. Hardest was getting the coarse dark gravel out of the much finer pale gravel.
    “You could have used a plywood board,” I told Jim, who was sitting on the altar criticizing Calvin and me while we picked up gravel one piece at a time and put it in a wheelbarrow.
    “No,” he said. “I could not have. The fire had to rest on earth. Even the gravel was cheating a bit.”
    “Next time.” Even Calvin the Ever Cheerful was getting grumpy. “Next time I vote we put the fire on the ground. I’ll dig it out afterward and put fresh gravel that matches the original back over the top.”
    Jim grunted. “That is more work. We did it that way for a few years until I started to do it this way.”
    “What about a gunnysack?” I asked. “Something porous but not so loose a weave that the big gravel can drop through. Or use gravel that would blend in better with what is already here.”
    “Might work,” agreed Jim. “But then what would I use to keep my apprentice busy? I suppose I could do what my teacher did and teach him beading.”
    “I’ll pick up gravel, Uncle, thank you,” Calvin said meekly.
    The medicine man laughed. “I thought you might feel that way.”

    I STOPPED AT THE GAS STATION IN BIGGS AND GOT A pair of ice-cream cones—banana and strawberry—and a notebook. We ate the ice cream in the truck until Adam was finished with his strawberry cone because I couldn’t feed myself and Adam and drive at the same time.
    As I drove back over the bridge, still licking my banana ice cream, I could see the Maryhill Campground, full of tents, trailers, and RVs. Had MacKenzie been staying there with her family? Or had they been somewhere more private? I hadn’t noticed any other campers. But if it had been the Maryhill Campground, Coyote might have been able to get to her in time to save her while I kept River Devil busy. If she’d been at the Maryhill Campground, and we had known where she was.
    I drove back to camp and started writing. A letter to my mother and one to each of my sisters. I did not, of course, mention Coyote. A long letter to Samuel and Bran. A letter to Jesse. A letter to Stefan. A lot of pages that I’d burn if I survived the night.
    Jesse called Adam’s phone while I was in the middle of writing the letter to her. He brought his phone to me so I could answer it—after a little fumbling.
    “I need Daddy,” Jesse said intensely. “Now.”
    “He can’t talk.” Adam put his chin on my leg.
    “I don’t care. Take the phone to him in the bathroom.”
    “He’s a wolf, Jesse,” I told her patiently. “He can’t talk. Is there something I can do for you?”
    “Why is he a wolf?” she said, sounding shocked. “It’s your honeymoon.”
    “Jesse. Much as I’d love to discuss my honeymoon with you—what do you need?”
    “It’s Darryl,” she wailed. “He’s impossible. Auriele left to do something or other, and he says I can’t go shopping. My favorite store has a four-hour sale, from noon to four, and he won’t let me go.”
    Jesse, to my certain knowledge, had never cared about shopping. There were other things she did worry about, and I could think of only one of them that would put that frantic tone in her voice.
    “Gabriel wants to go do something,” I interpreted. “Maybe a movie? Darryl would be an inconvenience, and you thought if you figured out something that he would not do, he’d let you do it without him.”
    “Darryl’s right here, you know?” she said.
    “Your father might have bought your story, but I doubt it,” I told her. “Where are you going?”
    “Darryl critiques movies,” she said. “Loudly. During the movie, and Gabriel . . .”
    Gabriel had changed in the last half year. He’d been kicked out of his house by a mother he loved (and who loved him back—that was part of the problem) and held captive by a fairy queen. Things like that change a person. Mostly he was a little more wary and a lot more somber.
    Gabriel was living in the house that replaced my old one, so he and Jesse were now neighbors. But he’d lost the easy confidence that everything would turn out right—once he’d seen the monsters being monsters. Around some of the werewolves he was very . . .