River Marked (Mercy Thompson 6)

I opened my eyes and found myself face-to-face with the bearded otterkin, my cheek resting in the dirt and his warm blood. He was laughing at me as he died.

My ears started to work about then, and I realized that there was a battle taking place behind me. I heard Adam's baleful, softest growl, the one he uses only when he is beyond angry. The power of his rage lit my soul with its singular goal: none of the otterkin would survive this night.

He was awake, and that meant I was safe. I started to turn over, but there must have been something really wrong with my leg because the moment I tried to move it, I passed out again.

When I opened my eyes again, I was looking at a dead otter instead of a dead man. His blood was still warm, so I couldn't have been out of it for too long. There was no sound behind me, but I knew better than to try to turn over.

"Adam?" I asked. My voice was weak and had this annoying quiver in it. When no one responded, I didn't ask again. Exhaustion should have made me numb, but I hurt too much for that. I should have been triumphant, but I hurt too much for that, too.

For a bare instant, I was afraid that the otterkin had somehow hurt him. I reached for the bond between us with all of my heart--and found him nearby, changing from wolf to man. Relieved, I settled in to wait for him, absorbing his fear for me, his rage, and his love with something approaching euphoria. If I could feel all of that, I wasn't dead, and that seemed as remarkable an accomplishment as I'd ever achieved.

I MUST HAVE SLEPT FOR A LITTLE BECAUSE THE BLOOD under my cheek had cooled and there were gentle hands running over me.

"Adam," I said. "You need to get some clothes on before those police officers get down here." I'd been hearing their sirens approaching for a few minutes.

"Shh," he told me. And as if a curtain had been drawn back, I could feel his feverish need to make sure I was okay. He'd sounded so calm, so sane-- when he was none of those things.

"Please?" He needed something to help him, or he was going to kill anyone who came within a dozen feet of me. Sometimes the thought had occurred to me that Adam dressed so civilized in his silk shirts and hand-tailored suits as a shield against the wildness within him.

Besides, if the police showed up to find Adam naked, they were going to have some sort of strong reaction--and Adam needed everyone to be as calm as possible.

He hesitated.

"I'm okay," I told him. "Really I am." I tried to move, then rethought what I'd said. "Okay. I hurt, and I think my leg is broken. And maybe my hand. But I'm not going to bleed to death, and I think we'll have an easier time with the police and the FBI and whoever else is about to descend upon us if you are wearing jeans."

"I don't want to leave you here," he said. "And I'm not moving you without a more careful look."

"If you can't put jeans on and be back here in under a minute, I'd be surprised," I told him. Then I had a bright idea. "I don't want anyone but me seeing you naked," I told him, a little surprised that it was the truth. "Not when I can't defend my claim." It was stupid, and I knew it--but I also knew he'd understand.

"Damn it, Mercy," he said--and then he was running.

I found myself smiling as I heard the door of the trailer open and realized I was smiling into the face of the otterkin whose eyes were clouded with death and whose blood made the ground sticky under my face. Tomorrow, I'd have nightmares about that, maybe. But tonight, he was dead, and I wasn't. That was good enough for me.

It was a good thing the otterkin apparently turned back into otters when they died. If the police had come here and found six human bodies, we might have had a lot of trouble. The walking stick dug into my ribs, and I tugged it out from under me, regarding it soberly.

I'd figure out what I'd done to the walking stick in time. How bad could it be? The oakman had used it to kill a vampire, and it hadn't changed. Whatever the walking stick had become, it couldn't be as bad as the river devil.

THE REST OF THAT NIGHT WAS KIND OF FUZZY.

Adam, dressed only in a pair of jeans, examined me carefully to make sure I hadn't damaged anything that moving would make worse. Then he picked me up and carried me over to the camp chairs, where he'd laid out one of the blankets to bundle me up in. He called his office and had them remotely open the gate and let in the cops-- who were gathered outside the gate like hornets at their nest.

He was cleaning my face, very gently, when the police came in and all sorts of official cars drove to us.

Adam did the talking, implying a lot of not-quite- true things without ever lying. Everyone got pretty tense when Adam introduced himself as the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack. But they seemed to find it perfectly acceptable to hear that a few people believed that the recent spate of deaths by the river were not the work of a human serial killer but of a real monster.

In the interest of privacy, he told them, he couldn't reveal who called him in.

One of the sheriff's men murmured, "When I first met him, he was with Jim Alvin and Calvin Seeker." From his words, I was pretty sure he was the one who'd given us a ride back to our campground when we'd found Benny, but I could only look out of one eye at this point, the other having swollen shut.

At the sound of Jim's name, the local cops all looked wise and quit asking questions. One of them murmured, "Native American medicine man," to the FBI agents, and suddenly no one asked Adam any more questions about why we were here. Apparently, no one wanted to create an incident with the Yakama Nation. The less the officials knew about magic, fae otterkin, and Coyote, the more likely they would be to attribute all the deaths to a prehistoric creature--I'd heard one of the FBI say that phrase when talking on his cell phone to someone--and go home. More important to me at this point, they would let me go home, too.

I closed my good eye, and when I opened it, Adam had a cup of hot cocoa and was making me drink it. I fussed at him for waking me up until I got the first mouthful down. It tasted really good, and it was hot.

"Where's everyone else?" I asked when I was done because it looked as though we were alone.

"Down staring at the river devil." Adam set the mug aside and kissed me gently on the forehead. "They got pretty excited when they realized it was still just lying there. They have about three minutes before I take you to the emergency room."

He was holding on to civilization by the skin of his teeth. A proper mate would be meek and subservient until he recovered.

"I don't want to go to the hospital," I whined. I didn't want to move for at least a hundred years now that I was finally warm. If I didn't move, I didn't hurt. Much.