Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(14)

“It smelled a little like Underhill—but not like Underhill,” I told him. “I suppose it could be something that came through her door. But it also smelled a little like that vampire who was also a sorcerer. More that than Underhill. It didn’t smell fae to me.”

“He was bitten,” said Anna, walking beside us.

“Bitten by what?” I asked her. “Was it the rabbit?” I was going to end up with my house haunted. Maybe I could make that a feature and rent it out as an Airbnb.

Adam didn’t ask me who I was talking to—he’d gotten used to it. Instead he said, “You’re going to end up with Anna haunting you if you aren’t more careful.”

“Most of them haunt places, not people,” I said uneasily. Because I knew of at least one case in which a person was haunted. That one had had some fae magic thrown in to help the weirdness along, but there was magic afoot here, too.

Anna hadn’t answered me. She was scuffing her shoes in the dirt and squinting up at the sky. “Looks like rain,” she said.

The skies were clear. Maybe they looked different if you were dead.

“Smoke.” Dennis’s voice in my ear made me jump.

I turned around, but he wasn’t visible. And Anna was gone, too.

“What?” asked Adam.

I shrugged, but unease left over from that whispering voice in my ears made me look around.

“I think I’m going out hunting a jackrabbit tonight,” I told him. Finding the rabbit would make me feel better. I was still pretty sure it was just an ordinary rabbit—but I wanted to make certain. I thought I would have noticed something that could pour that kind of magic into Dennis, notice it with more than the mild interest my coyote self had evinced. But then I hadn’t sensed the magic in Dennis’s body until I’d touched it.

“Did you get a reply?” asked Adam. “About what bit Dennis? I assume it was Dennis who was bitten.”

I nodded. “I don’t know that he was answering me. He just said, ‘Smoke.’ They are both gone now—not that ghosts are good at communication.”

“How can you be bitten by smoke?” asked Adam. “And why would that mean that you need to go hunting jackrabbits?”

I explained about the rabbit I’d seen and how the marks on Dennis’s wrist looked like a rabbit bite. We had reached the porch of my little house by the time I finished. Adam opened the door I’d left unlocked without saying anything about it.

“Anna told me, ‘He was bitten.’ I am assuming she was talking about Dennis—especially since I saw the bite myself. But that might not have anything at all to do with her death, just a leftover thought. It was Dennis who said, ‘Smoke.’ Then they both left. I don’t know if one had to do with the other.”

Adam closed the door behind us but didn’t step farther into the house. He bowed his head for a moment before meeting my eyes.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I know I hurt you today. I have been angry and short-tempered and I took it out on you. On you and Jesse.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about this. What is up with you? Why the shutdown of our bond? Why no time together? Why no—” I was trying to keep my voice clinical, but if I’d said “no making love,” I would have had trouble doing it. So I said, “—sex?” And my voice wobbled a little anyway.

He nodded, as if he’d been waiting for those questions.

“The short answer is that I don’t know,” he said. “But something is wrong.” He thumped his chest.

I frowned at him. “With your wolf?”

He shook his head, but then said, “Maybe? It doesn’t feel like that—though the wolf is part of it.”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“See?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense out loud.”

“Is it me?”

He huffed out a humorless laugh. “I promise that this is not an ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech.” His eyes brightened to gold. “I won’t let you go.”

“Not your choice,” I told him. “But as it happens, you’d have a hard time shaking me off. You are mine, and I’m pretty stubborn about things like that.”

His whole body relaxed with an odd shudder. He closed his eyes. My stomach settled for the first time in a few days. We could work this out.

And then he said, in a voice that was not his own, “You’d leave if you knew what was inside me.”

The wolf, I thought, after a weird moment. It was just Adam’s wolf. We’d spoken a time or two. But it hadn’t sounded quite right for the wolf.

“Nope,” I told him—wolf and man. “Not happening.”

“You should leave.” This time I was sure it was the wolf who spoke. “It would be safer for you.” And then Adam’s yellow eyes opened, but he gave a half laugh. “Yes, I know, that just guaranteed you are going to stick around until bodies start dropping.”

“Are bodies going to start dropping?” I asked.

“Mercy,” he said. “I don’t trust myself. I’ve been a werewolf for longer than you’ve been alive, and it’s been decades since I’ve had trouble with it. But now I wake up and I’m in my wolf’s shape—without remembering how I got there.”