Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(100)

I pressed my lips against it to warm it. And I told it the same thing I had told the wolf when I fed him the amethyst.

“I love you,” I said.

This was a place where words were powerful things, and feelings even more so. What I imbued that diamond with was more than the words I spoke—it was the huge ball of emotion that those words invoked in me: all the memories, the laughter, the joy.

When I took my mouth away and looked at the gemstone again, it glowed with every color I could imagine. I cupped it in both of my hands and told it sternly, “I am going to feed you into my mating bond—and you are going to blow it wide open for me.”

The pearl had been a soft thing; the diamond was a more suitable weapon. I used the pointed end—which was sharper than any reputable gem cutter would have left—to widen one of the damaged places in the mating bond. When I had a hole big enough, I shoved the gemstone inside. The slick green slime acted as lubricant, making my job easier. When the gemstone was entirely covered, I rubbed the poor bond apologetically as the green slime hardened, sealing the wound.

“Not your fault,” I told it. “We’ll fix this.”

I waited for a long time, watching the bump that was the gemstone slide toward Adam’s side of our bond. When it felt like the right time, I said, “Now.”

And the world went white.



* * *



? ? ?

I expected to wake up back in the garage, but that’s not what happened.

I woke up lying on a stone table in a small . . . What was the proper term for a building that had a floor and ceiling but no walls, just archways that held up the roof? It had the form of a temple—though there was no sense of worship here.

The floor and archways—and the stone table I occupied—were hewn from a tawny sandstone the color of a lion’s pelt. The whole building sparkled a little in the afternoon sun.

I sat up. I was wearing something that looked very much like the toga I may or may not have worn to a toga party in my dorm when I was a freshman in college. It was the same color as the sandstone right down to the sparkle.

I found that my hands and arms were bedecked with jewels. And there were gemstones on the sandals I wore, too. I stood up and walked over to the edge of the building, and a beautifully carved waist-high barrier appeared in front of me—as if it had always been there and I just hadn’t noticed it.

The air was sweet-smelling and the temperature perfect. In the corner of the room on a small table was food and drink. Music began to play, something catchy from the big band era that Adam was still secretly fond of.

“This is ridiculous, Adam,” I said.

Because I was in Adam’s otherness—on the far side of our bond. I had no real way to be sure of it—I hadn’t thought that anyone else even had this weird place they could go to. But my instincts had never steered me wrong, and in the otherness, instincts were strong enough to feel like a guide through the weirdness. I was in Adam’s space and, even here, he was trying to protect me.

Below the hill I was on, I could hear mortar fire. I’d never been on a battlefield—not an official battlefield—but I’d seen the movies. I knew what mortar fire sounded like.

I kicked off the shoes, hitched a hip on the barricade, and landed on the hill beyond. The big band music accompanied me as I walked for about a mile on a path that kept trying to take me back up to the top of the hill.

Finally, I stood still, put my hands on my hips, and said, “Adam, that’s enough.”

Then I stepped off the path and began wading through the dense foliage. About four paces into the woods, the music quieted and a path formed under my bare feet. This path took me down into a valley filled with dead bodies.

I picked my way through them. Some of them I knew. Paul. Mac. Peter. Others I’d seen pictures of. People from Adam’s military past. People who had worked for him. There was a whole section of people in Vietnam-era US military uniforms; some of them were missing body parts—and some of those had the parts they were missing stacked at their feet. Another section was filled with people I was pretty sure were Vietnamese—though that was not an ethnicity I had much experience with. Some of these were in uniform; some of them were not. Every face was unique. I had absolutely no doubt that every body corresponded to a person that Adam had killed—or he felt responsible for their death in some way. Adam organized his guilt in neat rows.

And then there was the field of children—maybe twenty in all. Some of these had faces, but some were featureless, as if there was a blanket of skin hiding who they were.

“That’s because I didn’t see all of their faces,” Adam told me. “The Vietcong used children—so did the South Vietnamese, for that matter. I don’t keep the adults whose faces I never saw—but the children were different.” He pointed to one faceless body. “That one was up in a tree, keeping us pinned down for two days. I shot him, but Christiansen was the one who found the body and told me our sniper had been a kid. I never saw his body—but I should have gone to find him myself. I was the one who killed him.” He gazed out at the row after row of his dead and said, “I owed it to that boy to look at what I had done, but I chose not to.”

I reached out to hold Adam’s hand, but he stepped away from me. When I turned to face him, I was back on the top of the hill, in the building without walls, but this time there was no sunlight. A rainstorm thundered all around and I was not alone.