Fire Touched (3 page)

I widened my eyes at him. “I just haven't wanted to hurt your feelings.”

“When I give you that little nudge, hmm?” His voice took on a considering air. “Come to think of it, I'm feeling a little nudge coming on right now.”

“Now?” I whispered in horrified tones. I looked up toward Jesse's room. “Think of the children.”

He tilted his head as if to listen, then shook it. “They won't hear anything from there.” He started slowly down the stairs.

“Think of Darryl, Zack, Lucia, and Joel,” I said earnestly. “They'll be scarred for life.”

“You know what they say about werewolves,” he told me gravely, stepping down to the ground.

I broke and ran—and he was right on my tail. Figuratively speaking, of course. I don't have a tail unless I'm in my coyote shape.

I dodged around the big dining table, but he put one hand on top and vaulted it, right over the top of Medea, who was taking a nap on top of the forbidden territory. She hissed at him, but he ignored her and kept coming after me. I dove under the table and out the other side, sprinted through the kitchen, and bolted down the stairs, laughing so hard I almost couldn't breathe.

He caught me in the big rec room, tripped me, and pinned me against the floor. He kissed my chin, my neck, my cheek, and the bridge of my nose before he touched my lips. He put our game right out of my mind (along with any ability to form a coherent thought), so when he said, “Nudge,” it took me a second or two to figure out what he was talking about.

I dragged my thoughts from my enervated and trembling body and thought about how many people would know what we were doing down here. “No?” I said hesitantly.

“What happened to not hurting my feelings?” he asked. Even though his body was evidently as excited as mine, and his breathing harder than our little chase merited, there was amusement in his eyes.

“Izzy, Jesse, Darryl, Zack, Lucia, and Joel happened,” I said. If my voice was husky, well, I think anyone in my situation would have had trouble keeping her voice steady.

He rolled off me but grabbed my hand as he did, so we lay side by side on our backs with our hands clasped. He started laughing first.

“At least,” he said finally, “being a werewolf means I never have to worry about jock itch.”

“Every cloud has a silver lining,” I agreed. “Even being a werewolf has its upside.”

I expected him to laugh again. But instead his hand tightened on mine and he sat up and looked at me. He pulled my hand to his lips, and said, “Yes.”

Of course, I had to kiss him again.

—

We went upstairs after that kiss, so I didn't end up embarrassing myself. Sure, there were sly grins from the peanut gallery, but since nothing happened, I was able to keep from blushing as Darryl and Zack got ready to leave. Adam and the others had apparently concluded their business while I was finishing up with Izzy's mother.

Darryl kissed my hand formally, and said, “You are endlessly entertaining.”

I raised my eyebrow and gave him a “who, me?” expression. Of course, that only made him laugh, his teeth flashing whitely in amusement. Darryl was a happy blend of his African father and Chinese mother, taking the best features of two races and combining them. A big man, he could do scary better than anyone in the pack, but with a grin on his face, he could charm kittens out of trees.

Zack gave me a hug good-bye. Our only submissive wolf, he had been really . . . skittish and worn when he first joined the pack a few months ago. But as he'd gotten used to us, he touched us all a lot. Some of the guys had been taken aback when he'd started,
though his touch had nothing to do with sex. But no one wanted him sad: a happy submissive wolf balanced the dominants and lowered tempers. So they'd learned to accept Zack's ways.

I returned Zack's hug, and he slipped something into my pocket that felt like one of the vials I'd just bought. He stepped back, looked me earnestly in the eye, and said, “To protect you from the nudge.”

Darryl high-fived him as he stepped out onto the porch. It made Adam laugh.

After I shut the door on the miscreants who
didn't
live here, I turned around to see Lucia, Joel at her side, standing in the doorway to the kitchen with her arms crossed and a big grin on her face.

I frowned at her.

“Don't worry,” she said earnestly. “I didn't hear the whole thing, but Zack courteously kept me apprised as it was happening, so I wouldn't feel left out. Why didn't you tell her to go away before she got started?”

“Because she's Izzy's mother—and that sort of thing can have repercussions for Jesse,” I told her.

“And because you didn't want to hurt her feelings,” said Adam. “Which is why multilevel marketing works. And you bought the oil because you want to see if there's real magic involved because you're worried about her,” said Adam.

I met his eyes solemnly. “No.” I patted my pocket. “I bought the orange oil for brownies, and I bought that other as a shield for the nudge attack.”

He raised an eyebrow. “So, do you wear it, or do I?” he asked.

I frowned at him. “I couldn't actually tell from her story, but I'm afraid it might be fatal for you.” Her manager's father had gotten a “God rest his soul” after his name when she was talking about him, after all. “I figure the way it works is that I put it on
me. Then I'll smell so strongly that you'll stay away until you are really desperate.”

He threw his head back and laughed. Adam . . . Adam tried to downplay it with a military haircut and clothes that were subtly the wrong color—I'd just figured that one out—but he was beautiful. Like magazine-model beautiful. I didn't always see it anymore, the inside being more interesting than the outer package, but with his eyes sparkling and his dimple flashing . . .

I cleared my throat. “Nudge?” I said.

Lucia laughed and turned back toward the kitchen. “Get a room,” she said over her shoulder.

Adam? He took a predatory step toward me, and his phone rang.

So did mine.

I checked the number on my phone, intending to let the voice mail catch it, but when I saw who was calling, I answered it instead.

“Tony?” I asked, walking away from Adam so my conversation wouldn't get mixed up in his. Adam was talking to Darryl, whose voice sounded urgent.

“I don't know if you and Adam can help us,” Tony said rapidly. In the background, sirens were doing their best to drown out his voice. “But we have a situation here. There is something, a freaking-big something, on the Cable Bridge, and it is eating cars.”

“You and Adam” was short for “please bring a pack of werewolves out to take care of the car-eating monster.” If they were asking for the pack, they must be desperate.

“Mercy,” said Adam, who, unlike me, apparently had no trouble keeping track of two conversations at the same time, “tell him we're on our way. Darryl and Zack are almost on-site.”

I repeated Adam's words, then said, “We'll be right there.”

I hung up and started out the door. The Cable Bridge, which had another name no one remembered, was about a ten-minute drive from our house.

“Mercy,” said Adam tightly. The last time we'd faced down a monster, I'd almost died. It had taken me six weeks to stand on my own two feet, and it hadn't been the first time I'd been hurt. The werewolves were two-hundred-plus pounds of fang and claw who mostly healed nearly as quickly as they could be hurt. I was as vulnerable as any human. My superpower consisted of changing into a thirty-five-pound coyote.

He still had nightmares.

I looked at him. “You're going to be a werewolf. Darryl is going to be a werewolf, and I'm assuming Joel is going to be a monstrous tibicena, spitting lava and looking scary. I think you need someone on the ground with the ability to shout things like ‘Stop shooting, those are the good guys.'” I took a deep breath. “I won't promise not to get hurt. I won't lie to you. But I do promise not to be stupid.”

His cheeks whitened as he clenched his jaw. His eyes shadowed, he nodded slowly. That was the deal we had, the thing that allowed me to give up my independence and trust him. He had to let me be who I was—and not some princess wrapped in cotton wool and kept on a shelf.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” Unself-consciously, he stripped out of his clothes because it would be easier to do that here than in the car. “Joel? Are you coming?”

The big black dog, who already looked a little bigger, padded out of the kitchen. I wasn't certain how much control Joel had about what shape he wore except that it wasn't much. We needed to get to the bridge before he started melting things in the car—the tibicena was a creature born in the heart of a volcano.

I opened the door, stopped, and ran up the stairs. I opened Jesse's door without knocking.

“Monster on the Cable Bridge,” I said. “Police are requesting assistance. Stay home. Stay safe. We love you.”

I didn't give her time to say anything, just bolted back down the stairs to Adam's black SUV, where the others waited.

We were going to fight
monsters.

Adam had not quite changed all the way when the traffic on the highway to town bogged down. A traffic jam on this road was unusual, but then so was a monster that destroyed cars. I suspected there was a connection. Sometimes, I'm observant like that.

I slowed until the cars ahead stopped moving altogether. Then I put the SUV into four-wheel drive and pulled onto the shoulder of the road, driving on the sidewalk when I had to in order to get around the parking lot the highway had become.

At the old metals-recycling center, I pulled into their abandoned parking lot and stopped. From here it would be faster to go on foot. As soon as I opened the door, I could hear the sirens.

Joel hopped out of the backseat into the driver's seat. He flowed out of the car and it rocked, because he was denser in tibicena form than a real animal could be. He waited until all four feet were on
the ground before igniting the fire inside him. His skin cracked and broke, revealing something that glowed fiercely even in the daylight.

Adam, all wolf now, exited after Joel. He shook himself once, then set off for the bridge. Joel and I followed him.

Even on two feet, I was fast, though the coyote would have been quicker. But I needed to have clothes on when talking to the police—for some reason, I suspected the police wouldn't take me as seriously if I were naked. So I stayed human and ran with the silver-and-black wolf who was Adam on one side of me and Joel, who no longer could be mistaken for a dog, on the other.

We garnered attention. Pack magic operates passively to make it difficult for mundane people to notice werewolves. Adam could run down the interstate at high noon and only one or two people would see anything but a stray dog. We'd discovered that wasn't true of Joel, even though he was a member of the pack. It was as if something in his magic fought to be seen.

Joel's eyes were hot coals that glowed like those of a hellish demon out of a comic book. He was bigger than Adam, and he left oily black marks on the ground wherever his feet touched. People noticed. Once they noticed him, they noticed Adam.

Adam was a public figure, and though he didn't often appear in his wolf form on the national news, locally, even in his werewolf shape, he was a celebrity. A smallish-town hero, if only because he was sort of famous.

“Hey, Mercy,” came a shout from the double line of cars. “What's up? When you gonna reopen the shop? Sheba has an electrical problem I can't find.”

“Shop phone still gets me, Nick,” I called, waving vaguely without looking around. I didn't need to see him to recognize him. Nick's Sheba was a VW bug that broke down with a regularity
that was almost supernatural. “Gotta go help the police with a car-eating monster on the bridge right now.”

“What's on the bridge?” he called, but I just waved again because I was already too far to yell loudly enough for him to hear me.

But a woman stuck her head out of a car as I passed, and yelled, “Is it werewolf trouble, Mercy?”

I didn't know the voice, but I'd been bathing in the reflected glory of Adam long enough that I wasn't anonymous anymore, either.

“Nope,” I told her. “Fae monster, I think.”

I was sure that Tony wouldn't have approved: I was informing the public without talking to him. But I figured that in this era of cell phone cameras, whatever was on the bridge was already due to be famous on YouTube anyway.

The bridge was visible from a long way off on both sides of the river. Something big enough to be “eating cars” was certain to attract people with cameras and cell phones. There would be no covering this up.

Up ahead, the Lampson Building came into view, as did the blue and red flashing lights of dozens of police cars. Lampson International builds the world's largest cranes, and they'd built their headquarters right at the base of the Cable Bridge. Four stories tall, the glass-and-steel structure was distinctively odd. It looked very much as though some giant had picked up a pyramid, turned it upside down, and squished it back into the ground.

The police had set up two barricades. The first was at the last intersection before the bridge, to keep cars away from it. There were several uniformed policemen directing traffic there. The second barricade was closer to the bridge, just past the entrance to the Vietnam Memorial, which was on the edge and up the hill from the parking lot of the Lampson Building.

We ran past the first barricade without any of the police trying to stop us, though we drew sharp looks. Probably they were too busy with traffic, but it also takes real moxie to try to stop someone who is running with a tibicena and a werewolf. Maybe they recognized Adam.

The land rose gently to meet the beginning of the suspension bridge. I looked away from the police and the stalled traffic to peer at the bridge.

It arced gracefully over the river, more or less a mile across, the most beautiful of the three Tri-Cities bridges over the Columbia, and the only one that was not a highway or interstate. Drapes of thick white cable descended from both sides of the two towers on either side of the center of the bridge.

From the Kennewick shore, I could only see to the top of the arc, halfway across the bridge, about a half mile off. There were a few cars with their noses pointed (mostly) toward us in the Kennewick-bound lane, stopped and apparently empty. The nearest car, a red Buick, rested on its roof, one of the rear tires missing. It looked, to my educated eye, like something had grabbed the tire and ripped it off the car.

The Pasco-bound lane on the right side of the bridge was clear until about halfway to the center. The rest of it looked as though a five-year-old playing with his toy cars had had a temper tantrum. The illusion was enhanced by the distance that made the cars look smaller than they were, tiny and abandoned. It was a false picture of harmlessness: all of those cars had been carrying people. I've seen enough wrecks to know which cars might hold bodies, waiting in endless patience for us to deal with whatever had done this before we took care of the dead.

I ran into Adam, who'd turned broadside to me. In wolf form,
he was tall enough that I didn't fall when I hit and big enough that I didn't knock him over. He waited until I recovered, then looked at the police off to our left. They'd seen us, but, except for Tony, who trotted toward us, didn't approach. There were a few of them who looked battered, and I could smell blood from here. Theirs or the victims' I couldn't tell, but it smelled fresh.

“Okay,” I told Tony. “You should have two other werewolves here already. Adam's called in the rest of the pack, but it might take a half hour or more to get anyone else here. What do you need?”

“Can you kill this thing? Failing that, we need to keep it on the bridge until the National Guard gets here—about two hours at last check,” Tony said grimly.

He leveled an opaque look at Joel. This was Joel's first public appearance as a member of the pack. To Tony's credit, a black dog that looked as though he'd been half formed out of burning charcoal didn't seem to faze him long. He barely even paused before he continued to speak.

“It doesn't seem to be inclined to leave the bridge, thankfully. At least here it's contained, but it has amply demonstrated that it's staying on the bridge because it wants to be there. Nothing we've been able to do does much more than annoy it.”

Adam gave me a sharp look.

“I've got this,” I agreed. “You and Joel can go find whatever's playing Matchbox cars on the bridge.”

Adam started out, then hesitated and turned back, Joel attentive at his side. My mate looked me in the eyes, his own golden and clear.

“I know,” I said, feeling his emotions sing to me through our mating bond. He should be able to feel mine, too, but sometimes words matter. “I love you, too.”

He turned and ran, the efficient lope of the beginning of a hunt rather than a racing stride. Joel kept pace at his hip.

Tony cupped his hand under my elbow and tugged me over to the gathered police officers, some in uniform, some in business casual, and some in whatever they happened to be wearing when they got the call. I recognized a few faces, recognized more scents, and Detective Willis, who was regarding me with an expression I couldn't read.

“Don't shoot the werewolves and the tibicena,” I told him—because that was the main purpose of my coming with Adam. “They're the good guys.”

“Tibicena?” Detective Willis tasted the unfamiliar word, but that wasn't enough to hold his attention for long. He turned to look at the bridge, not at Adam and Joel, who had slowed to take advantage of the cover provided by the strewn-about cars. “What can you tell us about the thing on the bridge? Why can't we shoot it? Bullets don't seem to do anything to it.”

“I don't know what your monster is,” I told him. “I haven't had a chance to see it yet. The tibicena is the scary black doglike creature running beside Adam. Adam is the werewolf, and the tibicena is a friend. Please tell everyone not to shoot them, okay?”

Willis gave a quick look at Adam and Joel, then frowned and narrowed his eyes, as if he'd finally realized that Joel wasn't just a weird werewolf. “That thing is a tibicena? What the hell is a tibicena?”

“My friend,” I said coolly. “Who is risking
his
life to help out.”

Willis grimaced at me. “Don't take offense where none is meant, Mercy Hauptman.” He put a hand to his face and pressed a button I couldn't see because he said, “Do not, I repeat, do not shoot the scary black dog . . . doglike creature. Don't shoot the werewolves, either. They are on our side, people.”

Tony, who'd followed me over to Willis, said, presumably to me, “We have a couple of SWAT snipers up on top of the Lampson Building and a couple more on top of the Crow's Nest on Clover Island—for all the good that's doing us.”

Clover Island was a boating and tourist mecca just west of the bridge, lots of boats, lots of docks, and, on the tiny island itself, a hotel, the Coast Guard office, and a few restaurants. The Crow's Nest was the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel. “They can't get a shot, the wind is too high.” His voice was cool and controlled. “Pasco's got a couple of marksmen up on their side of the river, too. At this rate, we're more likely to shoot each other than whatever that thing is. And given how effective our bullets have been, it wouldn't matter anyway.”

“It's over the hump, and I haven't been able to see it,” I said. “What's it look like?”

“King Kong,” said one of the officers I didn't know. “If King Kong were green and covered in moss with a nose set higher than his eyes. And it is well and truly a him because that part isn't green.”

“Like Christmastime,” agreed a woman I'd seen before but hadn't been introduced to. “Red and green.”

“That's more than I saw,” said a guy in sweats with a long streak of dried blood on the sleeve. “I was too busy getting out of there with my battered civilians.”

“What's it doing?” I asked. “I mean, why is it still on the bridge and not somewhere else? Have the werewolves been keeping it on the bridge?”

“If it wanted off the bridge,” said an officer grimly, “it would be off the bridge.”

“Adam's people are doing a fine job of keeping it occupied,” said Tony. “According to the Pasco police, they've been distracting
it whenever it seems to be thinking about heading off. But it really doesn't seem to want off.”

The guy in the bloody sweatshirt spoke up. “One of the victims I escorted out said it just stopped and ran back to the middle of the bridge. It's been back on our side a couple of times, Pasco, too—but mostly seems to be hanging out in the center section.” He looked at me. “That thing was coming right for me, and this big black guy ran past and hit it with a baseball bat. I figure I've played baseball most of my life, and I never saw a human swing a bat like that. Broke the bat, which I have seen, but not like that. He saved my life and the lives of the four people I was helping off the bridge, too. Is he one of your guys?”

Darryl. Darryl carried a baseball bat in his car, a baseball bat and a baseball. In Washington, it was illegal to carry
only
a baseball bat in your car. Darryl wasn't out as a werewolf at his work. I suppose that cat would be out of the bag after today.

“Probably,” I said.

“Then why wasn't he sprouting fangs and hair?” growled someone else.

I opened my mouth to snap something back, but then I located the voice. She had a compression bandage on her arm, which was in a sling, and a rosy flush that would be black-and-blue tomorrow covered half her face.

“No time,” I told her. “Most werewolves take a while to change—ten minutes or even fifteen or twenty. My friends—the two werewolves who beat us here—were driving by when they realized what was going on. They called us, then dove in to help.”

“Thank goodness for that,” one of the patrolmen said. I didn't think I was supposed to hear him because he said it under his breath.