Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(67)

“You get hurt a lot,” he said softly.

I couldn’t read his body language or his tone, which was unusual. But where he was standing was oddly shadowed, the strong light from the window obscuring the lower half of his face.

“This was my choice,” I told him. “Me or Makaya. My nose or her life—it wasn’t even a difficult decision.”

Adam grunted and disappeared into the bays, where he’d hidden the real controls to the surveillance system. Good to know that if I wanted to shut the system down, I’d have to go looking for the secondary controls . . .

I wanted to say something more to him. Something that would feel better than that last exchange did. Still, Adam was pretty good at communication—better than I was. Maybe I just needed to give him some space. Resolutely I turned my attention to the files.

We fixed maybe fifteen cars on a good day with all three of us working. That didn’t count the parts we sold, but it wasn’t an insurmountable number. It took me about ten minutes to find the right bill, but only because we hadn’t put the year and model of the car in the computer.

But the notes jibed with what I remembered.


Generator not charging, does not respond to polarizing. Recommend new generator. Customer agrees.



The bill was complete with address and phone number. He’d paid with a credit card in the name of John Leeman, his address was out in north Richland near the Uptown Mall, an area with a lot of apartments, and looked suspiciously like the false address that had been used to register the plates on the truck. But the phone number could be useful.

“Got it,” I said, and told Adam the date of the bill. “Time stamp on the charge is eleven twenty-eight.”

Adam grunted.

He sounded odd.

“Adam?”

“What did you want to talk to me about, Mercy? That we couldn’t talk about at home?” He was speaking so softly I could barely make out his words—and my hearing was coyote-good.

“I have a few insights I wanted to share about the werewolves we are facing,” I told him cautiously.

There was a long pause. I didn’t want to conduct a serious discussion with him in there and me out in the office. I set the keyboard on top of the counter and bent to heft the monitor.

“I thought you might want to discuss last night.”

The monitor skidded on the counter as I set it back where it belonged, so I thought I might have misheard him. “Last night?”

Locking up Ben? But he made it sound as if something had happened that needed discussion. Something personal. Oh.

“Are you talking about the reason you made me an apology breakfast sandwich? Thank you, by the way.” I had everything put away in the office. I could have headed into the bays to talk to him, but I hesitated, my instincts keeping me right where I was.

“I put you in danger,” he said.

I loved Adam and trusted him in a way I’d never trusted anyone. I had never been afraid of him. Not really. Okay. He was a werewolf—but this was different. It was the way his voice was traveling out of the darkness. My heartbeat picked up.

“I put myself in danger,” I told him. “You certainly had nothing to do with my broken nose today.”

He didn’t answer. Aching cold shivered through me like a blade drawn through my chest—and it wasn’t an emotion, it was my mating bond, our mating bond. I reached out for it in that place where I could see the ties that bound me.

I understood that no one else in the pack had a place like that they could go. I supposed my place, my otherness, had something to do with the fact that the first time I beheld the pack bonds was when a fairy queen locked me into my own head while she held me imprisoned. The Marrok, possibly with the help of a rogue fae walking stick, used the bonds to locate me. In the process, he pulled me someplace where he could show me the spiritual and magical ties I bore. Over time, I had learned how to get there on my own. Mostly this otherness had a dreamlike quality in that it was changeable and responsive to my subconscious. But in some ways, it was more real than any other place I had ever been.

The pack bonds were still there. This time there were no lights, but they were still bright-colored and festive Christmas garlands strung in all directions as if they were part of a giant spider’s web. Sometimes I perceived the wolves in the pack as rocks or bricks. Once, they were flowers, and I never did figure out why. But this time the bonds just stretched out into the darkness. If I’d needed to know which was which, I could have grabbed one and yanked on it, but for now, none of those were the bond I was looking for.

The bond I usually tried not to pay too much attention to was there as well. Visually that one changed a lot more than the other bonds. Even so, another time it would worry me that the tie that existed between me and Stefan was a gossamer black weaving that looked as though a good wind would blow it away. Not that I enjoyed being bound to a vampire, even Stefan—but that frailty didn’t say good things about my friend and his battle with the smoke weaver.

Sometimes the most important thing I looked for, here in the otherness, was the last thing I found. The bond between Adam and me was wrapped securely around my waist—where it burned me with its cold. The cord itself had changed from the thick red cord I’d last seen to something like a flexible cable made of ice.

I blinked that image away and stood once more in my garage office, feeling neither enlightened nor reassured. Having our bond turn to ice, even if only in the imagery of my other place, could not possibly be a good thing.