Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(47)

“I will trade information for cookie dough,” Ben bargained—so it wasn’t anything bad that had kept him.

I got a clean spoon from the silverware drawer, dipped it into the dough, then held it out toward him. When he reached to take it, his long sleeve slipped down to reveal two small red marks on his wrist. And from those two marks, faint wisps of smoke emerged. Aiden had identified our foe from the smoke that had, apparently, emerged from my wounds after the rabbit had bitten me. At the time, I’d been too busy trying not to die to pay attention to much of anything else.

I now understood what Aiden had been talking about. My heart stopped. Ben had been bitten by the smoke beast.

I pretended not to see the marks, hoping that my sudden terror went unnoticed, blended as it was with the adrenaline already racing in my veins after the sight of a naked Wulfe on the roof of my old Rabbit.

I didn’t know enough to save Ben. Not nearly enough. I knew the smoke beast took over its victims’ bodies and piloted them. I knew that it used those victims to kill others to gain power—and that it then killed its puppet and could shape itself into a copy of that person. I had no idea what it wanted or why. I had no idea how to save someone bitten by the beast—and if I couldn’t figure it out, Ben was lost. And I didn’t know that I could bear a world without our foul-mouthed wolf.

First problems first, I decided. First problem was to survive the next few minutes. Ben was a werewolf. That meant he was stronger than I was—and he outweighed me. Unlike George, Ben was significantly slower than I was. Maybe I could get him to chase me into the river.

I heard Adam’s footsteps on the porch, but Ben, licking the spoon clean, seemed oblivious. I gave a hard, panicked tug on my mating bond and the sound of Adam’s approach stopped. I had to hope that he had understood that there was something wrong.

“Want some with chocolate chips?” I asked.

He handed the spoon back to me. I dumped in a bag of chips and stirred with my bigger spoon before dipping his teaspoon in the mix—ignoring sanitary issues in favor of keeping him distracted.

Adam hadn’t just come in through the door, so I had a reasonable hope that I’d warned him enough. But what would allow him to connect my warning to Ben?

Ben closed his eyes, absorbing the buttery-sweetness-and-bitter-chocolate combination. Was there a difference in his expression? Or was it just that I knew that someone else might be home inside Ben’s head that made me think so?

Could I be mistaken? Was this Ben?

“So what’s the information you owe me?” I asked when his eyes opened again.

He took a step closer to me and I had to fight my instincts that would have sent me scuttling to the far side of the kitchen.

“What do you want to know?” he asked, his voice flirty. The British accent was the same, but the rhythm of speech was wrong. And there were no swear words for me to edit out.

“Was Wulfe actually naked?” I asked.

“Wolves are usually naked,” he said as if he were joking.

“For sure,” I agreed easily.

Upstairs a soft shshing of a window sliding up. I knew it was Jesse’s window, but if someone wasn’t familiar with the sounds of the house, maybe it would just blend into the various creaks and groans that were the normal sounds of any house. I didn’t know if Ben would know what that sound meant. I didn’t know how much of Ben’s memories the beast who had bitten him would have.

Jesse’s window was accessible from the porch roof—which was a security concern, but it was also an escape path if something bad was happening in the house. Adam had decided that risk and benefit balanced out. I listened, but no further noise emerged from upstairs. Either Adam had managed not to wake Jesse up, or she had realized that there was something going on.

Ben held out the spoon to me again. I scooped up more dough and held it out. But this time he grabbed my wrist.

“I have a secret,” he said.

He wasn’t hurting me. I let my wrist lie limp in his grip.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I let you see the marks,” he told me. “I even made sure to mark this body when I was wearing the rabbit so that you would know what you were looking at.”

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

Was there a squeak on the stairs? I took a deep breath and smelled the smoke beast’s magic. It filled my lungs and I couldn’t smell anything else over it.

“I wanted to see what you would do,” he said. “Why can’t I take you? I can kill you—I almost did the other night. But I am supposed to be able to take any but the most powerful of the lords of the fae. You are not fae at all. What are you?”

“Chaos,” I told him.

His eyebrows furrowed and his eyes narrowed with the beginnings of anger. He would have said something more. But quick footsteps came up from the basement and Aiden bounded into the kitchen.

The beast’s magic surged. Visions of that semi tractor melded with the concrete of the Pasco tunnel’s safety rail danced in my head. I didn’t know that he could do that to a living being—life affects magic. We might be just carbon compounds, but there was something about the state of living that was magical.

But if the beast was amassing magic at the sight of Aiden, I wasn’t willing to wait to see what it could do. While he was distracted by Aiden, I twisted my wrist, grabbed his wrist with mine, and swiveled my hips to pull him off balance. At the same time, I kicked his knee as hard as I could. He grunted as his knee popped audibly and he released me involuntarily, and I let go and jumped back.