Mercy Thompson 8: Night Broken
Read Mercy Thompson 8: Night Broken Online
Authors: Patricia Briggs
Tags: #Fiction / Fantasy / Contemporary
Patricia Briggs
lived a fairly normal life until she learned to read. After that she spent lazy afternoons flying dragon-back and looking for magic swords when she wasn’t horseback riding in the Rocky Mountains. Once she graduated from Montana State University with degrees in history and German, she spent her time substitute teaching and writing. She and her family live in the Pacific Northwest, and you can visit her website at
www.patriciabriggs.com
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Find out more about Patricia Briggs and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at
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Y
P
ATRICIA
B
RIGGS
The Mercy Thompson novels
Moon Called
Blood Bound
Iron Kissed
Bone Crossed
Silver Borne
River Marked
Frost Burned
Night Broken
The Alpha and Omega novels
Cry Wolf
Hunting Ground
Fair Game
Aralorn: Masques and Wolfsbane
COPYRIGHT
Published by Orbit
ISBN: 9781405513487
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Hurog, Inc.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Orbit
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
Contents
For our good friends—you know who you are. I don’t know how we ended up surrounded by so many people who are, as my father used to say, “folk to ride the river with.” I especially would like to dedicate this to two people who went above and beyond for us this year as we tried to combine stupid travel schedules with horses who wait until I’m gone before turning their minds to mischief.
Dr. Dick Root, DVM, held my daughter’s hand when Tilly had her foal while Mike and I were on signing tour. There aren’t actually many people who will put up with a dozen phone calls at four in the morning without losing their cool. Thank you, Dick. May you and Ally (OFW Alivia) travel many happy miles together.
Deken Schoenberg also comes to my rescue, whether it be by trimming horses in triple-digit weather, lending me a hand when I get in over my head, or, as a not random example, helping when I am stuck five hundred miles away in a different country and a silly yearling decides that that is the day to get himself hurt. Magic is sorry he kicked you, especially after you drove the better part of fifty miles to come help him. He promised me that he will treat our friends better in the future.
Next time we leave town, I’m not telling the horses.
The phone rang while I was elbow-deep in sudsy dishwater.
“I’ll get it,” said my stepdaughter, Jesse, hastily dumping two glasses and a fork in my sink.
A werewolf pack that eats together stays together, I thought, scrubbing stubborn egg off a plate. Sunday breakfasts weren’t attended by the whole pack—some of them had families just like regular people or jobs they worked on the Sabbath. The breakfasts weren’t mandatory because that would have ruined the intent. Darryl, Adam’s second, who usually prepared the meals, was a hellaciously good cook, and his food attracted anyone who could manage to come.
The dishwasher was running, stuffed full and then some. I would have let the rest of the dishes wait until it was done, but Auriele, Darryl’s mate, wouldn’t hear of it.
I didn’t argue with her because I was one of the three people in the pack who outranked her, so she’d have to back down. That felt like cheating, and I never cheat.
Unless it is against my enemies,
whispered a soundless voice in my head that might have been mine but felt like Coyote’s.
The second reason for my compliance was more self-serving. Auriele and I were getting along, which made her the only one of the three female werewolves in the pack who was friendly with me at the moment.
Auriele hadn’t been happy having me as the Alpha’s mate, either—I was a coyote shapeshifter among wolves. She didn’t think it was a good thing for pack morale. She also thought, correctly, that I brought trouble for the pack with me. She liked me despite herself. I was used to the company of men, but it was nice to have a woman besides Jesse, my teenage stepdaughter, who would talk to me.
So, to please Auriele, I washed dishes that the dishwasher could have taken care of, ignoring the burn of hot soapy water in the wounds of my trade—barked knuckles are a mechanic’s constant companion. Auriele dried the dishes, and Jesse had volunteered to tidy up the kitchen in general. Three women bonding over household chores—my mother would be pleased if she could see us. That thought hardened my resolve that next week, some of the men would do cleanup. It would be good for them to expand their skill set.
“There’s this kid in my second-period class.” Auriele ignored the ringing phone as she hefted a stack of plates up to the cupboard with a grunt of effort. It wasn’t the weight of the dishes that was the problem—Auriele was a werewolf; she could have lifted a four-hundred-pound anvil onto the shelf. It was that she was short and had to stand on tiptoe to do it. Jesse had to dodge around her to get to the phone.
“All the teachers love Clark,” Auriele continued. “All the girls and most of the guys, too. And every word out of his mouth is a lie. ‘Enrique cheated off my paper,’ he told me when I asked him why they both had all the same mistakes. Enrique, he just gets this resigned look on his face; I expect that Clark has done this to him before.”
“Hauptman residence,” said Jesse cheerfully. “Can I help you?”
“Is Adam there?”
“So I told him—” Auriele stopped talking abruptly, her sensitive ears caught by the familiar voice on the line.
“I need Adam.” My husband’s ex-wife’s voice was thick with tears. Christy Hauptman sounded desperate and half-hysterical.
“Mom?” Jesse’s voice was shaky. “Mom, what’s wrong?”
“Get Adam.”
“Mom?” Jesse gave me a frantic look.
“Adam,” I called. “Christy’s on the phone for you.”
He was in the living room talking to Darryl and a few of the pack who had lingered after breakfast, so I didn’t have to raise my voice much. It wasn’t the first time Christy had called needing something.
Dealing with Christy was usually enough to give me a stomachache. Not because of anything she could do to me or Adam. But Jesse, who loved her mother but was currently fighting to keep liking her, suffered every time that woman called. There was nothing I could do to stop it.
“He’s coming, Mom,” Jesse said.
“Please,” Christy said. “Tell him to hurry.”
Desperate, hysterical tears—those weren’t unusual. But she sounded scared, too. And that wasn’t anything I’d heard before.
Adam walked into the room, and from his grim face, I could tell he’d heard at least part of what Christy had said. He took the handset from Jesse but hugged her with the other arm. Jesse’s eyes grew watery under his comforting hold. She gave me a frantic look before bolting away, out the door, and up the stairs, presumably to her room, where she could collect herself.
“What do you need?” Adam said, most of his attention still on his daughter.
“Can I come home?”
Auriele glanced at me, but I was already wearing my blank face. She wouldn’t be able to tell what I was thinking from my expression.
“This isn’t your home,” Adam said. “Not anymore.”
“Adam,” Christy said. “Oh, Adam.” She sobbed, a small, hopeless sound. “I’m in trouble, I need to come home. I’ve been so stupid. He won’t leave me alone. He hurt me, he killed a friend of mine, and he follows me everywhere I go. Can I come home, please?”
That wasn’t anything I’d expected. Auriele quit trying to pretend she wasn’t listening to every word and jerked her face toward the phone.
“Call the police,” Adam said. “That’s what they are there for.”
“He’ll kill me,” she whispered. “Adam, he’ll kill me. I don’t have anywhere else to run. Please.”
Werewolves can tell when people are lying. So can some of the other supernatural critters running around—like me, for instance. Over the phone is a lot trickier because a lot of the telltale signs involve heartbeat and smell—neither of which is possible to detect over a phone line. But I could hear the truth in her voice.
Adam looked at me.
“Tell her to come,” I said. What else could I say? If something happened to her when we could help … I wasn’t sure if I could live with that. I knew that Adam couldn’t.
Auriele continued to watch me. She frowned, finally turned away, and started to dry the dishes again.
“Adam, please?” Christy pleaded.
Adam narrowed his eyes at me and didn’t say anything.
“Adam,” Mary Jo said from the doorway. Mary Jo is a firefighter, tough and smart. “She is owed by the pack for the years that she was yours. Let her come home, and the pack will protect her.”
He gave Mary Jo a look, and she dropped her eyes.
“It’s okay,” I said to Adam, and tried to make it not a lie. “Really.”
I bake when I’m stressed. If I had to make enough chocolate chip cookies to feed Richland while she was here, it would be okay because Adam needed me to be okay with it.
If she tried anything, she would be sorry. Adam was mine. She had thrown him away, thrown Jesse away—and I had snatched them up. Finders keepers.
Maybe she didn’t want them back. Maybe she just needed to be safe. My gut wasn’t convinced, but jealousy isn’t a logical emotion, and I had no reason to be jealous of Christy.
“All right,” Adam said. “All right. You can come.” Then, his voice gentle, he asked, “Do you need money for plane tickets?”
I went back to the dishes and tried not to hear the rest of the conversation. Tried not to hear the concern in Adam’s voice, the softness—and the satisfaction he got from taking care of her. Good Alpha werewolves take care of those around them; it’s part of what makes them Alpha.
I might have been able to ignore it better if all the wolves still in the house hadn’t drifted into the kitchen. They listened to Adam’s finalization of the details that would bring Christy here and snuck occasional, furtive glances my way when they thought I wouldn’t notice.
Auriele took the last cup from my hand. I unplugged the sink and shook the water from my hands before drying them off on my jeans. My hands aren’t my best feature. The hot water had left my skin pruney, and my knuckles were red and swollen. Even after washing dishes, there was still some black grease embedded in my skin and under my nails. Christy’s hands were always beautiful, with French-manicured nails.
Adam hung up the phone and called the travel agent he used to coordinate his not-infrequent business travel: both business business and werewolf business.
“She can stay with Honey and me,” said Mary Jo to me, her voice neutral.
Mary Jo and Honey were the other two female werewolves in the pack. Mary Jo had moved in with Honey when Honey’s mate had been killed a few months ago. Neither of them liked me very much.
Until Mary Jo made the offer of hospitality, I’d been half planning to put Christy up with one of the other pack members because I hadn’t thought it through. I knew that putting Christy in with Mary Jo and Honey would be a mistake.
