Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

  I’d forgotten that there was something more shocking about us than dirt, burns, and old, mostly washed-out bloodstains.

  “Hey, you can’t bring a dog in here!” The triage nurse took three quick strides to us and met my eyes . . . and she stumbled to a halt. “Ms. Thompson? Is that a werewolf?”

  “Where is Adam Hauptman?”

  But a roar from the emergency room told me all I needed to know.

  “Whose bright idea was it to bring him here?” I muttered, running for the double doors between the waiting room and the emergency room, Ben and Sam flanking me.

  “Not me,” Ben said, sounding a little more cheerful. I think he’d been worried about what we’d find, too. “I am absolved of guilt. I was in the trailer getting toasty-warm when they sent him here.”

  A gray werewolf whose fur darkened around his muzzle stood in the aisle between the patient rooms and the central counter, his change so recent that I could still see the muscles of his back realigning themselves.

  He was missing large patches of fur where his skin was blackened and had bubbled up like wax. All four of his feet were hideously burnt, the singed skin a horrible imitation of the black fur that usually covered them. The curtain from the room was caught over his tail.

  I stopped just inside the doors, assessing the situation.

  Jody, the nurse I’d talked to the night of Samuel’s accident, was standing very still—and someone had coached her on how to behave around werewolves, because her eyes were fixed on the floor. But even from where I stood, I could smell her fear, an appetite-rousing scent for any werewolf. Mary Jo crouched in front of Adam, one hand resting on the floor, her head bowed in submission—and her tough athletic body, so fragile- appearing next to the wolf, was directly between the bystanders and her Alpha.

  I glanced down at Sam, but apparently he’d fed enough on the dead fae that his attention was all on Adam, though he stayed next to me. Ben waited on my other side, holding himself very still, as if he was trying really hard not to attract Adam’s attention.

  In other circumstances I wouldn’t have been as worried. Werewolves tend to lose their human halves when badly injured, but they can be recalled to themselves by a mate or by a more dominant wolf. Samuel was more dominant than Adam, and I was Adam’s mate. Either of us should have been able to bring him back.

  Unfortunately, Samuel wasn’t himself this evening and Adam had fried our mate bond in his panic when he thought I was trapped in the trailer. I didn’t know what that meant in terms of how he would respond to me. He lowered his head and took a step forward, and my time to dither ran out.

  “Adam,” I said.

  His whole body froze.

  “Adam?” I stepped away from Ben and Sam. “Adam, it’s all right. These are the good guys. They’re trying to help—you’ve been hurt.”

  I’m fast, and I have good reflexes, and I didn’t even see him move. He pinned me back against the doorframe, rising on his poor burnt hind legs until his face and mine were at the same height. The scent of smoke and burning things wrapped around us as his hot breath touched my cheeks. He inhaled, and his whole body began shaking.

  He’d really thought I was dead.

  “I’m okay,” I murmured while I closed my eyes and tilted my chin to expose my throat. “I wasn’t in the trailer when it blew.”

  His nose brushed from my jaw to my collarbone and he let out a low, wheezing cough that seemed to go on forever. When it was finally over, he laid his head on my shoulder and began to change.

  It would be safer for everyone if he were human, which was probably why he’d done it. But he’d just been badly hurt—and only just completed a change from human to wolf. To attempt to reverse the shift within minutes was miserably difficult. That he chose to do it anyway made it obvious to me that he was in very bad shape.

  He’d never have started changing while he was touching me if he’d been fully aware. The change is agonizing enough in itself; skin-on-skin contact makes it even worse. Add to that his awkward position and the pain Adam was already in because of his burns, and I didn’t know what would happen. I slid slowly down the wall, bringing him with me as his skin stretched and the bones moved. Watching a wolf change is not a beautiful thing.

  I put my palms flat on the floor, so as not to give in to the temptation to touch him. As much as my head knew more skin contact was the last thing he needed, my body was curiously convinced that I could alleviate the agony of the change.

  I looked up at Ben and jerked my chin toward the nurse . . . and the doctor who’d pulled the curtain back to join the fuss out front. Ben gave me a “why me?” look. In return, I glanced at Adam—obviously incapacitated—and then Sam, who was a wolf.

  Ben looked up at the sky, invoking God’s pity, I supposed. He trudged over, hands cradled in front of his body, to solve the problems he could. I caught Mary Jo’s eye and interrupted a look directed at me . . . such a look. As soon as she realized I was looking at her, her face cleared. I couldn’t interpret the emotion I’d seen, just that it was very strong.

  “Anybody hurt?” asked Ben. When he extends himself beyond his usual nasty personality, people tend to find Ben reassuring. I think it’s the nifty British accent and composed appearance—and even with the burns and the charred clothing, he looked somehow more civilized than anyone else.

  “No,” said the doctor, whose name tag read REX FOURNIER, MD. He looked to be in his late forties. “I surprised him when I opened the curtains.” And then in a spirit of fairness seldom seen in terrified people, he said, “He was pretty careful not to hurt anyone, just knocked me aside. If I hadn’t stumbled over the stool, I’d have kept my feet.”

  “He was unconscious when I left,” Mary Jo told Ben, half-apologetically. “I came out to see if I could find someone to help him—we’d been here for a while. I didn’t realize I’d been away long enough for him to change.”

  “Not so long,” I said. “I saw the ambulance pass us. You can’t have been here more than a half hour, and it takes about half of that for him to complete the change. Whose bright idea was it to bring Adam to the hospital in his condition anyway?”

  It had been Mary Jo’s. I could see it in her face.

  “All he needed was the dead flesh peeled off,” she said.

  A really, really painful procedure—and no painkillers work on werewolves for long. It was such a bad idea that we all stared at her, all of us who knew, anyway—Ben, Sam, and I. Adam was preoccupied with his change.

  “I didn’t realize how bad it was,” she defended herself. “I thought it was just his hands. I didn’t see his feet until we were already in the ambulance on the way over here. If it had just been his hands, it would have been okay.”

  Maybe. Probably.

  “I thought you and Samuel were dead,” she said. “And that left it my problem as the pack medic. And as medic and as my Alpha’s loyal follower, I deemed the hospital the safer option.”

  She’d just lied.

  Not about Adam being safer at the hospital than home. With the recent upheavals, she was probably right that a badly wounded Adam wasn’t safe with the pack in his condition. They’d tear him apart and apologize and maybe even feel bad afterward. But that first statement . . .

  Maybe she thought we were too overwrought to notice—and Ben was sometimes not as aware of subtle cues as some of the other wolves. But maybe Mary Jo didn’t realize that I could tell when she was lying as well as any of the wolves could have.

  “You knew we weren’t in the house,” I said slowly. And then the light dawned about what that meant. “Did Adam send you out to keep watch over me while he met with the others? Did you see us leave?”

  She had. It was in her face—and she didn’t bother denying it. She might be able to lie to the humans in this room, but not to the rest of us.

  “Why didn’t you tell him?” asked Ben. “Why didn’t you stop him before he went into the fire?”

  “Answer him,” I said.

&nbsp
; She met my eyes for a long count of three before finally dropping them. “I was supposed to follow you if you left. Make sure you didn’t get hurt. But you see, I think everyone would be better off if one of the vampires had killed you.”

  “So you chose to defy Adam’s orders because you disagreed with him,” said Ben. “He picked you to watch Mercy because he trusted you to take care of business while he dealt with the pack—and you betrayed that trust.”

  I was grateful that Ben kept talking.

  Mary Jo was one of the people in Adam’s pack I’d thought was my friend. Not because a debt the fae owed me had kept her from dying a little while ago . . . I suspected that had been a mixed blessing, like most fairy gifts. But we’d spent a lot of hours in each other’s company because Adam liked to use her as a guard when he felt I needed one.

  Mary Jo wanted me dead. That was what that look had been about.

  It was such a shock that I might have missed her answer to Ben’s question if she hadn’t sounded so defensive.

  “It wasn’t like that. She was safe enough; she left with Samuel. There’s nothing I could do that would protect her better than Samuel could.”

  “So why didn’t you stop the arsonists?”

  Arsonists? There had been arsonists?

  “I wasn’t ordered to protect her place. She wasn’t in there.”

  Ben smiled in such satisfaction that I realized he hadn’t known there were arsonists either. “Who were they, Mary Jo?”

  “Fae,” she said. “No one I knew. Just more trouble she’s bringing to my pack’s door. If they wanted to burn down Mercy’s house, what did I care?” She looked at me, and said viciously, “I wish they’d burned it up with you in it.”

  “Ben!”

  How he managed to stop his hand before it hit her face, I don’t know. But he did. She’d have wiped the floor with him afterward. She might be nominally below him in the pack hierarchy, but that was only because unmated women were at the bottom of the pack.

  She wanted to fight him. I could see it in her face.

  I couldn’t move with Adam mostly on my lap. “That’s enough.” I kept my voice soft.

  Ben was panting, his hands shaking in rage . . . or pain. His hands were really damaged.

  “He could have died,” Ben said to me, his voice rough with the wolf. “He could have died because this—” He stopped himself.

  And the violence was gone from Mary Jo’s posture as quickly as if someone had hit a switch. Her eyes brightened with tears. “Don’t you think I know that? He came running from the house, calling her name. I tried to tell him it was too late, but he just pulled the wall apart and jumped through the hole he’d made. He didn’t even hear me.”

  “He’d have heard you if you told him she wasn’t in there,” said Ben, unaffected by the tears. “I was right behind him. You didn’t even try. You could have just told him she was alive.”

  “Enough,” I said. Adam’s change was nearly finished. “Adam can settle this himself later.”

  I looked over at Sam. “Two changes is bad when there’s tissue damage, right? It heals wrong.” The human ear I could see was scarred, and the top half of Adam’s head from his eyebrows up seemed to be as well. He must have had a wet towel or something over his head to cover his face, but it had fallen down at some point and hadn’t protected his scalp.

  Sam sighed.

  The doctor had been listening to Mary Jo’s story with fascination—I bet he watched soap operas, too. “I’m sorry,” he told me, sounding it. “Unless you have some means of effectively restraining him, I cannot treat him here. I won’t risk my staff.”

  “Can we have a room, then?” I asked.

  Time wasn’t our friend. We could take him back to his house and take care of him . . . but once Mary Jo had reminded me of the danger he’d be in wounded, in the middle of his pack, I really didn’t want to take him back there and hurt him.

  Sam caught my eye and looked down the line of curtained rooms to the one I’d retrieved him from.

  I looked back at the doctor. “A real room would be best. Could we use the X-ray storage room?”

  The doctor frowned, but Jody came to my rescue. “This is Doc Cornick’s Mercy,” she said. “She’s dating Adam Hauptman, the pack Alpha.”

  “Who is lying in my lap,” I told them. “I’m sorry. If it were anyone except for Adam who was hurt, we could make sure your personnel were safe—but Adam’s the only one who could keep a lid on it reliably. You are right not to risk your people. But I’ve got a couple of wolves here—Mary Jo’s an EMT—and we can manage on our own. If it weren’t urgent that we get started, I’d just take him home. But if we don’t do something soon, the scars will be permanent.”

  His feet were the worst. Wholly human and . . . I could see bone under blackened skin. He was unconscious, sweaty, and four shades paler than usual.

  “What can we get you?” Fournier asked.

  “A stretcher,” said Mary Jo. She looked at Sam, waiting for him to take over. Then she realized that in this place he couldn’t possibly show them he was a werewolf. I don’t think she had noticed the full extent of Samuel’s problem yet. She just turned to the doctor and started speaking medical gibberish.

  A gurney appeared, and Ben lifted Adam out of my lap and onto it. A host of hospital personnel showed up and emptied the X-ray storage room of boxes—with very little respect for the existing organization. Someone was going to be upset about that. Dr. Fournier was paged to the third floor and left with the same brisk efficiency with which he seemed to manage everything—including werewolves in his ER.

  With everything out, there was room, if only just, for all of us, the gurney, and the tray of tools Jody brought in.

  “Fournier isn’t as good as Doc Cornick when things go bad.” Jody gave me a sharp look as Mary Jo and Ben maneuvered Adam to the center of the little room, and I wondered if she was thinking about how many werewolves I seemed to know and connecting it to the fact that I was Samuel’s roommate. If so, she didn’t seem to be hysterical at the thought of all the werewolves who were here at the moment, so maybe she’d keep quiet about her suspicions.

  “Fournier didn’t get hurt,” I said. “He didn’t make anything worse. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Do you need help?” she asked bravely.

  I smiled at her. “No. I think that Mary Jo can handle it.” I’d have rather had Jody and the doctor, but Adam wouldn’t thank me for putting humans at risk. Like Jody, I’d really rather have had Samuel . . . who had disappeared from my side.

  “It’s not a sterile environment, but it sounds like that’s not important.”

  “No,” I told Jody distractedly. Where had Sam gotten to? “Werewolves deal with germs better than people do. Looks like they’re ready to go.”

  I closed the door, took a deep breath, and turned to Mary Jo. “Do you know what to do? I have to find Sam.”

  “I’m here.” Samuel was naked as the day he was born, and sweating freely from the speed of his change. His skin was filthy with dust and fae blood—a condition he was remedying with a bucket of water and a towel that must have been among the things Mary Jo had required. His eyes were gray, a shade or two lighter than normal, but the other wolves would doubtless put it to changing. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Samuel,” I said.

  But he looked away and took up something that looked like a scrub brush, with stiff bristles. “I need you to hold him down. Ben, lie across his hips. Mary Jo, I’ll tell you where I need you. Hands will be the worst, so we’ll start with them.”

  “What about me?” I asked.

  “You talk to him. Keep telling him we’re helping him with this torture. If he hears you and believes you, he won’t fight us as hard. I’ll give him some morphine. It won’t help much or for long, so we’ll need to move fast.”

  So while Samuel scrubbed the dead skin and almost-healed scabs off Adam with a stiff-bristled brush, I talked and talked. The burns had killed
tissue that had to be removed. Once it was gone, the raw wounds would heal cleanly and without scars.

  Adam kept going into coughing fits. When they’d happen, everyone backed off and let him cough until he spit up blood with great hunks of black in it. Ben had a few of those fits, too, but he rode them out while still keeping his weight on Adam.

  Every so often, Samuel would stop and dose Adam with more morphine. The worst of it was that Adam never made a noise or struggled against the people holding him down. He just kept his eyes on mine while he sweat and his body shook with small tremors that grew and subsided with whatever Samuel did.

  “I thought you were dead,” he said, his voice a bare rasp while Samuel moved from his hands to his feet. It didn’t seem to hurt as much—at a guess there weren’t a lot of nerves left. He’d jumped into a burning building barefoot to save me.

  “Stupid,” I said, blinking hard. “As if I’d die without taking you with me.”

  He smiled faintly. “Was it Mary Jo who betrayed us at the bowling alley?” he asked, proving he hadn’t been entirely unaware of what had been going on while he was changing.

  Both of us ignored the pained sound Mary Jo made.

  “I’ll ask her later.”

  He nodded. “Better—” He quit talking, and his pupils contracted despite the morphine he’d been given.

  He arched up and twisted so he could press his face into my belly, making a noise somewhere between a scream and a growl. I held him there while Samuel snarled at Ben and Mary Jo to hold him still.

  Another shot of morphine, and Samuel moved us all around. Ben across Adam’s legs—“And don’t think I haven’t noticed your hands, Ben. You’re next up.” Mary Jo on one arm, just above the elbow. Me on the other.

  “Can you hold him?” asked Samuel.

  “Not if he doesn’t want me to,” I told him.

  “It’ll be all right,” Adam said. “I won’t hurt her.”

  Samuel smiled tightly. “No, I didn’t think you would.”

  When Samuel started on Adam’s face with the brush, I had to close my eyes.