Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(101)

Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya stood with one hand on the stone barrier, the other holding an apple from the plate on the little table. She, like me, was wearing a toga, but hers was burgundy. Most of the time that I had known her, she’d been an old woman. Here, as on the day she had died, she was young and beautiful.

“He doesn’t keep me in his garden of failures,” she told me. “I wonder why that is.”

“Because he does not regret your death,” I told her, but I knew as soon as I said it that it wasn’t quite right.

“No,” she said. “Because you absolved him of my death.”

“You think I am perfect,” said Adam’s voice behind me. “Beautiful, even. I need to be perfect for you.”

“Or she won’t love you,” said Elizaveta, and here in the otherness her voice had a power that tried to seep into my bones. “She needs you to be her hero, Adam. As beautiful and perfect as your face. You don’t want to hurt her with your darkness, do you, Adam? And you carry so much ugly darkness inside you, don’t you?”

“Buddy,” I said, turning my back to Elizaveta to face Adam, though leaving her behind me made my skin crawl. “If you think I believe that you are perfect, you’ve got another think coming.”

He stood on the other side of the room, and I noticed that that corner of the building was falling apart. The roof was not even sufficient to keep the rain off him.

Off the monster.

He was bound—as I had been bound—to a metal chair, larger than the one in my garage to accommodate his size. And the bindings weren’t handcuffs and nylon leg cuffs; they were vines of thorns that smelled of black magic.

“Don’t free me,” Adam said urgently. “I will destroy you; I destroy everything I touch.” He looked away from me. In a low voice he said, “I didn’t want you to see me like this.”

Elizaveta walked behind him and bent down to whisper in his ear. I couldn’t hear what she said, but Adam looked at me and spoke. “You are so perfect, so strong, my Mercy. I don’t deserve you.”

“Perfect?” I asked. I looked down at myself and realized that I was missing a few things.

“Ahem,” I said, addressing neither Adam nor Elizaveta, but the otherness that made this confrontation possible. “I survived the wounds that gave me my scars; I would like them back, please.”

It felt as though a finger touched my skin with sparkly pain that faded quickly but left the marks of my life behind. When it was finished—and I deliberately chose not to hear the faint laughing cry that might have belonged to a coyote—I peeled off my toga and displayed my imperfect self to Adam.

“I jump into things before I think about how it will affect other people,” I told him. “I am prickly and overreact when you try to protect me because I don’t want to trust anyone to have my back. I dislike your ex-wife and won’t make an effort to get along with her anymore—no matter how much easier that would make everyone’s life.”

I took a deep breath. “I hurt you because sometimes I need to walk out on my own.” I frowned at him. “And I’m not going to change any of it—though it would make your life better.”

“And you like to make me mad,” Adam said in a whisper. “Even though you know I’m dangerous when I’m mad.”

I smiled at him and nodded. “Yes. That’s your fault, though. I wouldn’t do it if you weren’t so sexy when you’re mad. And I love the knowledge that no matter how angry you are, you would never hurt me.”

Elizaveta bent to whisper in his ear again, but I took the walking stick in my hand. I noticed that it had made itself into a spear, as it sometimes did when I needed a sharp weapon. I thrust it into her, forcing her away from Adam. The spear sank deep, and blood the color of her toga bubbled out of the wound. I shoved her into the balustrade.

“You are dead,” I told her. “Go away.”

She tried to say something, and a viper fell out from between her lips followed by two asps, and then she faded away. The spear had no trouble killing the snakes. I liked snakes. If these hadn’t come from Elizaveta, I’d have let them be. But I didn’t want to leave anything of Elizaveta’s free to roam about in Adam’s otherness.

I turned to Adam again—and the vines and the chair were gone, the smell of black magic replaced by pine with a hint of mint. But Adam still wore the monster’s guise, wounds weeping where the thorns of Elizaveta’s vines had dug in.

“I am ugly inside,” he told me.

“Me, too,” I said. “And I’m not as pretty as you are on the outside, either.”

“I’m jealous and spiteful,” he said. “I don’t like it when men call you. When Bran calls you—or Beauclaire.”

I nodded. “I’m jealous, too. And I think I outmatch you for spite. I hate that Christy was your wife and is Jesse’s mother.” I looked around and then grabbed his horrible hand and dragged him to the balustrade, still stained with Elizaveta’s blood.

I climbed on top of it, and the blood disappeared before it could touch my dirty bare feet. Balanced on top of the stone, with his big hand making sure I did not fall, I leaned over and kissed him.

“I pick you,” I said—and the world dissolved around me.