Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson 12)

“Not all listening devices are electronic,” she told me. “I know a witch who specializes in surveillance.”

Suddenly I was a lot more concerned about why Fiona was still here than I had been a few seconds ago. I reevaluated our interactions with Fiona and her pack, adding in witches, and some patterns started to make sense. A wolf trying to take over a pack would not make an alliance with a fae creature—which was why none of the rest of her wolves had known about the smoke weaver. Witchcraft explained why the goblins hadn’t found Fiona or her people. Bran had told me that Fiona was selling her services to the highest bidder—and the witches certainly had reason to want revenge. Or worse. I had a bad feeling about why Adam and I weren’t dead.

Fiona smiled at me; her expression would have been friendly if I hadn’t been able to see her eyes. “Now that you have finished flattering me, go sit in that chair or I shoot Adam in the head. In that case, I’ll have to kill you immediately, too, or risk getting caught by your pack. If you cooperate, I will not kill him. I know you can hear that I’m telling the truth. Now, you have three seconds. One …”

I sat in the chair. But not because she had started counting. Adam was coming around—I felt the draw on the pack bonds as he started fighting off the effects of the tranq.

I pulled the chair sideways a little so that it gave me a better view of Adam. Hopefully she’d think that was the only reason I’d done it. But it meant that while she was dealing with me, her back would be mostly toward him. I wanted her attention on me, though I didn’t think she’d ignore him entirely. If he moved, she’d react. But there was a good chance that she would trust the drug. That tranq was nasty business—but Adam had encountered it before.

“Funny,” she said. “But I don’t care which direction you face.”

I raised my eyebrows and turned the chair to face Adam directly.

“Put on the ankle chains,” she said.

The ankle cuffs were nylon and looked to be standard-issue. With them on, I could use my legs with the same grace as the average mermaid on land. I deliberately fumbled with them to give Adam more time. The power that he was pulling made me dizzy. That draw alone was going to alert the pack that something was wrong. Almost as soon as I thought that, Adam’s phone rang. Fiona’s time had just been limited; all I had to do was keep her occupied until someone figured out where we were.

“And now the wrist cuffs.”

She had used two old-fashioned metal handcuffs, attaching each one to opposite chair legs. The bracing on the chair legs ensured that the cuff wouldn’t just slide off if I tipped the chair upside down.

She knew I wasn’t a werewolf. Nylon cuffs wouldn’t hold a werewolf at all. The metal handcuffs would last longer—and really tick off the werewolf who broke them, because breaking them would hurt. She knew that I could change into a coyote. She had called me “Bran’s little coyote pet.” But she didn’t understand what I was, because otherwise she would know that the cuffs, any cuffs designed to hold a human, were worse than useless. Maybe she thought that it would take me a while to change shapes—the way it took a werewolf time.

As soon as I had the handcuffs on, she walked up to me. She bent down to tighten the cuffs on my ankles. Then, smiling, she pulled a collar out and wrapped it around my neck. It fit tightly enough that it was decidedly uncomfortable. I heard chain rattle as she attached that to the back of the chair. Unlike the cuffs, the collar would hold me, coyote or no, so maybe she hadn’t underestimated me as much as I thought she had.

“Coyote’s daughter, Kent told me,” she said. “That explains a lot—like why Bran decided out of the goodness of his heart to let bleeding-heart Bryan adopt you. I wonder what Coyote did for Bran for the Marrok to make a deal like that.”

I was pretty sure that it was my mother who had pushed Bran into accepting responsibility for me. But Fiona didn’t know my mother, so I could see why she would look for someone else. Bran wasn’t known for his soft heart.

“Kent?” I asked.

“He’s one of mine,” she told me. “Witchbound to my service like Sven was.” She gave me a thoughtful look that I’d seen on other people’s faces before. So I had my abs tight when she punched me in the stomach.

It hurt anyway. But she was a werewolf; if she had wanted to, she could have killed me with that blow.

“Hardesty family paying you?” I asked when I could breathe. I didn’t want it to be them, especially when Fiona seemed interested in keeping me alive. I had close-up knowledge of the kinds of things black witches did with living victims, and I didn’t know of any witches blacker than the ones in the Hardesty family.

Fiona smiled. “I understand you had a run-in with them recently. They are very unhappy with you. I might have been offered a reward should you die and a bigger reward for a live capture. They don’t know what you are, Mercy—I haven’t told them yet. But they know that you were the key in the deaths of their people—and they think that you might have been the one responsible for destroying a treasure that had taken them generations to build.”

Zombies.

“Charles will hunt you down,” I told her, and she flinched. She was afraid of Charles.

She should have been afraid of Adam. He had quit drawing power from the pack.

“The witches pay well enough that I can hide for generations if I need to—and they have promised protection, too.” She gave me a sisterly smile. “But you and I know how far to trust the word of a black witch. I have some value for them, too; they like to play with werewolves. Too much to ever put myself in their power.”

If she had let them witchbond people to her, she was already in their power. I didn’t exactly know what she meant by the term, but I knew witches.

“Kent told you what happened with the smoke weaver?” I asked her. It didn’t matter to me, but I needed to keep her attention on me. “Bastard. I trusted him.” True enough to keep her from reading a lie. But the bite in my voice was fake—I didn’t want her knowing that I was wasting time.

Something rose silently from the place where Adam had been lying. Something too big.

Oh, my love, what did you do?

But I knew. He’d had to pull everything he could to wash the silver and ketamine out of his system. He would not have been able to pull more to increase the speed of his shift usefully. Not to mention that she would have noticed if he had tried to shift to his wolf form—it was not a subtle thing. An unarmed human form against a werewolf with his own gun—the odds were not optimal. He’d have taken them, but he had another option.

I did not think it had taken him ten seconds to change from human to monster.

“Fucking Rumpelstiltskin,” Fiona said. “What is the world coming to when you have to make deals with a damned fae and he turns out to be Rumpelstiltskin?”

“Rumpelstiltskin” was the last word Fiona ever said. A giant nightmarish monster landed on her from fifteen feet away and ate her neck in the same motion. The gun went off because she’d had her finger on the trigger. She was dead by then, but the gun had been pointed at me and the bullet hit me in the arm.

The monster that had been Adam dragged Fiona’s body back into the corner with all the useless surveillance electronics and settled in to feed. Growling defensively, as if I might try to take his prey away.