Patricia Briggs - River Marked

“She was ours,” he said indignantly. “She was sleeping in our home.” He paused, contemplating that, I think, though it was hard to read thought in his face. When he spoke again, his voice was a soft croon. “So beautiful and deadly, my lady was. We woke her up to see her beauty living—and, as we petitioned her to do, she hunted humans until we all fed in the wealth of her hunting. She was everything our hearts could desire. She fed us and we her. She was our weapon of perfect vengeance.”

The brush next to him rattled a bit, and more people came out of the bushes. One of them was the woman who had attacked me in Wal-Mart, and she was holding her bronze knife. She was crying, which looked really odd on her blank face.

Uncle Mike said there were seven of them, but I only saw six.

“There should be one more of you, shouldn’t there?” I asked.

“One was sacrificed when our Goddess came to life,” said the man.

I thought of the dream I’d had, the one where I’d eaten an otter. I’d been river marked then. It never occurred to me that that dream, too, had been a true dream.

Behind him, all of the otterkin’s mouths moved at the same time, as if they were mouthing his words as he spoke them. They brought with them an air of menace that was not entirely owed to the weaponry they carried.

There was one big man in the group. I noticed him because over his shoulder he was carrying a big, dark, and shiny stick shaped something like a golf club. I didn’t recall ever seeing a shillelagh in the flesh before.

“He died, our brother, exalted by the gift his sacrifice brought to his people.” The bearded man who was apparently the spokesman for them all paused again. It didn’t seem to be an affectation for emphasis, but something integral to his speech. Maybe he was translating, or maybe his thoughts were just that slow. “And you have ruined that.”

He swung whatever he’d been holding behind his back at me without much warning. But I’d been watching for something of the sort, and I surged to my feet, my weight entirely on my good leg. I caught the blade of the bronze sword on the walking stick that had been lying just under Adam’s body instead of buried in the river devil because that was where I needed it to be.

It hurt. If I hadn’t been so worried for Adam, who was unable to protect himself, I doubt I could have done it. Even so, I knew it was useless. There were six of them and only one battered, damaged me. But I’d made a promise in my letter to Adam, and I was determined to keep it.

The bronze sword flared with an orange light and broke. Whatever magic it had held wasn’t up to dealing with Lugh’s walking stick.

Then something really disconcerting happened. The walking stick buried its suddenly sharp-again end in the otterkin’s throat with no help from me. The lunge it made forced me to come down hard on my bad leg. I might have blacked out a bit after that.

I opened my eyes and found myself face-to-face with the bearded otterkin, my cheek resting in the dirt and his warm blood. He was laughing at me as he died.

My ears started to work about then, and I realized that there was a battle taking place behind me. I heard Adam’s baleful, softest growl, the one he uses only when he is beyond angry. The power of his rage lit my soul with its singular goal: none of the otterkin would survive this night.

He was awake, and that meant I was safe. I started to turn over, but there must have been something really wrong with my leg because the moment I tried to move it, I passed out again.

When I opened my eyes again, I was looking at a dead otter instead of a dead man. His blood was still warm, so I couldn’t have been out of it for too long. There was no sound behind me, but I knew better than to try to turn over.

“Adam?” I asked. My voice was weak and had this annoying quiver in it. When no one responded, I didn’t ask again. Exhaustion should have made me numb, but I hurt too much for that. I should have been triumphant, but I hurt too much for that, too.

For a bare instant, I was afraid that the otterkin had somehow hurt him. I reached for the bond between us with all of my heart—and found him nearby, changing from wolf to man. Relieved, I settled in to wait for him, absorbing his fear for me, his rage, and his love with something approaching euphoria. If I could feel all of that, I wasn’t dead, and that seemed as remarkable an accomplishment as I’d ever achieved.

I MUST HAVE SLEPT FOR A LITTLE BECAUSE THE BLOOD under my cheek had cooled and there were gentle hands running over me.

“Adam,” I said. “You need to get some clothes on before those police officers get down here.” I’d been hearing their sirens approaching for a few minutes.

“Shh,” he told me. And as if a curtain had been drawn back, I could feel his feverish need to make sure I was okay. He’d sounded so calm, so sane—when he was none of those things.

“Please?” He needed something to help him, or he was going to kill anyone who came within a dozen feet of me. Sometimes the thought had occurred to me that Adam dressed so civilized in his silk shirts and hand-tailored suits as a shield against the wildness within him.

Besides, if the police showed up to find Adam naked, they were going to have some sort of strong reaction—and Adam needed everyone to be as calm as possible.

He hesitated.

“I’m okay,” I told him. “Really I am.” I tried to move, then rethought what I’d said. “Okay. I hurt, and I think my leg is broken. And maybe my hand. But I’m not going to bleed to death, and I think we’ll have an easier time with the police and the FBI and whoever else is about to descend upon us if you are wearing jeans.”

“I don’t want to leave you here,” he said. “And I’m not moving you without a more careful look.”

“If you can’t put jeans on and be back here in under a minute, I’d be surprised,” I told him. Then I had a bright idea. “I don’t want anyone but me seeing you naked,” I told him, a little surprised that it was the truth. “Not when I can’t defend my claim.” It was stupid, and I knew it—but I also knew he’d understand.

“Damn it, Mercy,” he said—and then he was running.

I found myself smiling as I heard the door of the trailer open and realized I was smiling into the face of the otterkin whose eyes were clouded with death and whose blood made the ground sticky under my face. Tomorrow, I’d have nightmares about that, maybe. But tonight, he was dead, and I wasn’t. That was good enough for me.

It was a good thing the otterkin apparently turned back into otters when they died. If the police had come here and found six human bodies, we might have had a lot of trouble. The walking stick dug into my ribs, and I tugged it out from under me, regarding it soberly.

I’d figure out what I’d done to the walking stick in time. How bad could it be? The oakman had used it to kill a vampire, and it hadn’t changed. Whatever the walking stick had become, it couldn’t be as bad as the river devil.

THE REST OF THAT NIGHT WAS KIND OF FUZZY.

Adam, dressed only in a pair of jeans, examined me carefully to make sure I hadn’t damaged anything that moving would make worse. Then he picked me up and carried me over to the camp chairs, where he’d laid out one of the blankets to bundle me up in. He called his office and had them remotely open the gate and let in the cops—who were gathered outside the gate like hornets at their nest.

He was cleaning my face, very gently, when the police came in and all sorts of official cars drove to us.

Adam did the talking, implying a lot of not-quite-true things without ever lying. Everyone got pretty tense when Adam introduced himself as the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack. But they seemed to find it perfectly acceptable to hear that a few people believed that the recent spate of deaths by the river were not the work of a human serial killer but of a real monster.