Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson 13)

She narrowed her eyes at him. “How long ago?”

“Ten years?”

She pointed at the seat next to her. “Sit down, right here. I need you. You will be my primary source.”

She looked at me and waved her hands. “You. Stepmother. Eat your pizza somewhere else while I quiz your man about the way women were treated ten years ago in South Korea.”

With a grin, I loaded a plate with a couple of pieces of kitchen-sink pizza, a third piece with pineapple and what looked like poblano peppers, and started for the back door.

Tad hopped up and opened the door for me. “If you have a killer out hunting you, maybe I should come out with you.”

“Don’t you have a paper to write?” I asked.

But he was right, I needed to be more careful. When he followed me out the door, I didn’t object.

Normally I’d have said our house was the safest place for me to be. But normally there were three or four werewolves here as well as a demon dog. We’d sent them all away.

It was chilly outside, but I’d recovered from my earlier shivers. I’d given Adam back his coat, but I’d kept my own on. Tad only had a sweater on, but he didn’t look cold.

Tad and I had worked together for years. I felt no need to make conversation as I walked out to one of the picnic tables and put my plate on top of it.

Rather than use the bench, I climbed onto the table and sat cross-legged, facing the house. Tad sat on the other half of the table, facing the opposite direction—toward the gate to Underhill and also toward my old house, the one he was moving into in a couple of days.

Before I started eating, I took out my phone and looked up “snow in Africa.” Apparently the Atlas Mountains in Morocco regularly got dusted in snow. I switched to my weather app. It wouldn’t have Aspen Creek on it—or at least it hadn’t last time I checked. But Troy, Montana, was close. They had a winter storm warning until Saturday noon. The area expected high winds and snow accumulation up to eighteen inches in the next twenty-four hours, as much as three feet of snow in the mountains.

“You okay?” Tad asked.

“No,” I said. “Worried about a friend.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Nope,” I told him. “Me, neither.”

“That sucks,” he said.

“For sure.”

The pepper on the pizza wasn’t poblano but something a lot hotter, though it went with the acid-sweetness of the pineapple in a way I wouldn’t have predicted.

I looked up at the moon, which made a C shape, and smiled. A long time ago I’d sat on top of a picnic table while Samuel told me about the science of the moon’s phases. I’d told him that the way I could tell a waning moon was that it looked like a cookie monster had bitten into it and left a “C” in its place. I’d sung him the “C Is for Cookie” song. It was the first time he kissed me.

That had been a long time ago. And it had probably been for the best that Bran had put an end to our romance, though I hadn’t been grateful at the time. When you’re sixteen, sometimes you need the adults in the room to step in.

“You and Izzy okay?” I asked. Tad wasn’t sixteen. But he was still pretty young.

“Can’t help your other friend so maybe you can help me?” suggested Tad gently.

“Keep my nose out of it?” I asked.

He sighed. “For now. I warned her about Dad, about me, too. But I guess she hadn’t listened.”

I took another bite of pizza and crunched through a pepper that had been lurking beneath the cheese, spicier than the first. I looked around and realized I hadn’t brought out anything to drink.

“I’ll get you a water,” Tad said, jumping off the table and escaping from our discussion of his love life.

I looked back up at the moon as the door closed behind him. Then I oh-so-casually let my gaze drift back down to the house again. There was something wrong with the roofline.

As if he had only been waiting for me to notice him, a shape pulled away from the shadows to stand silhouetted against the sky. He walked a few deliberate steps until the faint light of the moon fell on him, so I could see him clearly.