Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson 12)

“Don’t get used to it,” I warned him. “If Wulfe did something permanent, I’m pretty sure he would have bragged about it.”

“Is that what you wanted to talk about, Aiden?” asked Adam, entering the kitchen still buttoning his shirt. His skin was flushed from the change and he was barefoot.

Jeez, he was sexy.

Aiden shook his head. “I know what killed Mercy’s friends,” he said. “And it is bad.”

Adam pulled up a chair opposite Aiden, all business. “What can you tell us?”

“Did you see her wounds?” Aiden asked Adam. “Before Wulfe threw her in the river.”

Adam started to shake his head—then stopped. “I thought it was a trick of light. But it looked like there was steam rising from the bite on her neck.”

Aiden shook his head. “Not steam. Smoke.

“When I lived with my friends in Underhill”—before they all died, he meant—“there were places we knew not to go. Sometimes it was because one of us saw something—or one of us died. But mostly Tilly would warn us about them. This was before we knew what she was—though we sometimes wondered where she learned all the things she knew. One of the places Tilly warned us about was a cave where a beast lived. If it bit you, it could take your body over. Eventually it would tire of playing with you—and it would kill you. But when it bit you, the smoke that was its magic would fill you up and leak from your wounds. And once you were dead, it could take on your shape and go after your friends.” He shivered a little more, as if he couldn’t get warm. “She liked to tell those kinds of stories when we were huddled in the dark, already afraid. She called this creature the smoke beast.” He bit off the word, shook his head, and looked a little ill.

I recognized that look. When he’d escaped Underhill into the ungentle hands of the fae, they’d gifted him with a translation spell. Even the most finely crafted translation spells, I’d been told, are traumatic. They ruffle through memory and thought for the meaning of the word that needs translation. And the one they’d imposed upon Aiden had been of the quick-and-dirty variety.

“That’s not quite the right word,” he said. “Maybe ‘smoke demon’ is a better translation.” His mouth tightened again. “Though not a demon as you understand it. Evidently there is not an adequate word for it in English. I don’t know if it was one of a kind or if there are more of its kind loose in the world. I haven’t heard anyone saying anything about it.” He shook his head. “Anyway—supposedly it can become anyone or any living thing.”

“The fae can do that,” observed Adam.

Aiden nodded. “Yes. Which makes it interesting that its ability to shapeshift was one of the things Tilly warned us about. Maybe it wasn’t fae—but she didn’t say that. But the main thing she warned us about was that if he bites you, he takes over your body. I have the distinct impression, though I don’t remember why, if it takes you over, your death is inevitable.”

Something had bitten Dennis, I thought. And he had killed Anna and then himself. I remembered the tight feeling in my head, just before I’d gotten my jaws around that rabbit.

I have a limited and unpredictable resistance to magic. Maybe this was one of those kinds of magic that didn’t affect me. I felt a chill of retroactive relief at not being some sort of mind slave to the jackrabbit smoke beast who had bitten me.

“What does it want?” I asked.

Aiden shook his head. “That’s all I know about it. Other than that it was dangerous enough that Tilly warned me to stay away. I’ll ask Tilly what she knows—but you might also ask Lugh’s son if he knows anything. It was imprisoned in a territory of Underhill that his family controlled.”

“Did she release it on purpose?” I asked.

Aiden shrugged. “I don’t know.” He looked at me. “It isn’t out of the question.”

4

“FIVE IN THE MORNING IS A CRUMMY TIME FOR AN all-hands meeting,” said Honey briskly as she came in the door.

“Mercy wanted it to be at three in the morning,” said Aiden. “But Adam told her that he needed everyone functional.”

He was curled up on one of the living room couches and wrapped in a blanket. He didn’t normally feel the cold, but whatever Wulfe had done to him was still lingering.

I was pretty sure I was right that if Wulfe had done something permanent, he would have bragged about it. I didn’t think Wulfe had enough power to undo something Underhill had created—but I was less sure of that today than I would have been before last night.

The wolves had given the blanket curious looks, but no one had asked Aiden about it. At his words, though, the stragglers who were lingering in the living room, mostly hovering over too- hot-to-drink coffee they’d gotten from the pot in the kitchen, directed appalled gazes at me.

I hadn’t been serious about three a.m. But at two in the morning, Adam had been on the phone, on the Internet, or pacing for hours and hadn’t seemed likely to sleep anytime soon. Aiden, who had been seriously spooked by the creature he thought might be wandering around our home—and by having his magic quenched so thoroughly—had kept me company as I made cookies and watched Adam pace until I declared “enough” and went to bed myself.

With the wee-hour light peeking into the windows, the pack accused me of torturing them with their sleep-deprived eyes, if not words. I shrugged. They didn’t need to know how wound up Adam had been about the intrusion of another pack into our territory. And his stress was not lessened by the trouble that he had characterized as a lack of control over the wolf (but his wolf seemed to think was something different). Adam would show them what he wanted them to see, what they needed to see: their Alpha strong and resolute.

So instead of explaining, I told them, “Adam said that it wasn’t anything that couldn’t wait for the morning. It had to be early morning so that we could get the whole pack here. You can blame Auriele, who has to be at the high school by seven at the latest. Adam is upstairs if you want to head to the meeting room. He’ll start as soon as everyone gets here.”

“Do you know what this is about?” asked Ben. He took a sip of his coffee and then exploded into expletives that had a couple of the wolves taking out their phones to look up a few of the words he used. He was British, our Ben, and had the foulest mouth I’d ever heard. One didn’t, I was pretty sure, have a lot to do with the other, but both of them occasionally required translations.

“We are holding a meeting,” I pointed out to him when he’d calmed down enough to listen, “so we don’t have to repeat the same stuff over and over as new people come in.”

Sherwood Post opened the door on the end of my sentence with a steaming Starbucks venti cup in one hand.

“Starbucks is open?” asked Luke. “I could have gotten Starbucks?”

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t diss my coffee.”

“How’s Pirate?” asked Honey.

Pirate was the one-eyed kitten that Sherwood had rescued. There had been a point at which we had all been certain the kitten wouldn’t make it. But as of last week, he’d been freed from the vet’s tender care.