Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(69)

But the most disturbing thing was his eyes. They were entirely human, entirely Adam’s eyes, trapped within the monster. And that was just wrong, because when a werewolf takes his wolf form, the first thing to change is his eyes.

Ugly. He was ugly.

I stood frozen, my hand on the light switch.

He ducked and twisted his head impossibly and let out a sound that was part scream and part wail, impossibly high-pitched with a bass rumble that followed behind and sent my hindbrain into fits. He took an aggressive step toward me and then two slow steps backward.

“After,” he said—and his voice was oddly clear, emerging from that mouth. Werewolves couldn’t talk in their wolf form. Like the eyes, his ability to speak just made this form more wrong. “Go to Bran. Follow his advice.”

And my stunned brain remembered why I’d been so worried about Adam having a gun.

I had a bare moment to figure out what to do. He was a soldier. That gun was going to go off and he would be dead. No hesitation, no fumble.

Worse than useless to wish that I’d been clearer when I told Bran that Adam and I were having troubles. Hard to get good advice from him when he didn’t have all the information.

Blow up the mating bond, Bran had said. Without those words, and if I hadn’t just inspected our bond, maybe I’d have tried something different. Maybe if there had been time to actually think about what to do, I’d have formed a clever plan. But all I had were my instincts. I needed time.

I stepped back into the otherness, where such a thing might be possible. Ever since this place had proven to be useful when I was lost in Europe, I’d been practicing. It was sort of like lucid dreaming, in that I could influence, both on purpose and by accident, what I found there—though that was not to say that I was in control. In this instance, needing time, I imagined a pocket of existence where time moved while no time passed in the real world.

As soon as I entered, I knew that I’d only been partially successful. This gift of time was not infinite. Adam’s gun was still moving and I had only bought myself a little grace to do something about it.

I could see our bond, still frozen, though this time I could see that there were deep fractures in the structure, awaiting just one hard hit to shatter into nothingness. It made me reluctant to move for fear I would shatter it. Bran had not said “shatter” or “cut,” either, for that matter. He had told me to blow it up.

I just needed a bomb.

I’d been reading a lot of fairy tales since I’d put the pack in the place of peacekeeper of the TriCities. Fairy tales weren’t factual, for the most part. But there was a surprising amount of information to be gleaned from them.

Since our Underhill escapee had started killing people, I’d read and reread a few more. The last fairy tale I’d read was the Perrault story “Diamonds and Toads,” where a girl is kind to an old woman at a well, and as a consequence, beautiful and valuable items spilled from her mouth every time she talked.

In the otherness, as in dreams, what I perceived was influenced with apparent randomness by the things that I’d been doing or thinking about.

Blow up the bond.

I opened my mouth and took out the golf-ball-sized pearl that emerged. It wasn’t exactly a bomb, for all that it was round. How was I going to blow up our bond with it? The pearl was luminous, the color a reminder that white was not colorlessness—in being white, the pearl reflected all colors. It struck me as something hopeful, that pearl.

Words are powerful things.

I don’t know where that thought came from. Maybe something I’d read, or something someone had told me. Maybe it was just a universal truth that came to me in that moment.

I brought the pearl up to my mouth and spoke to it. Then I took it and smashed it against the icy bond that stretched from my waist into the dark mist surrounding the little clearing I stood in. When the pearl hit, the bond cracked around it like the safety glass on my Jetta. I shoved the pearl inside and folded the cracked sheet of glass back around the hole. I wrapped my hands over where I’d damaged the bond, and it re-formed beneath my skin, becoming first smooth and then so cold I had to jerk my hands away.

What did you say?

I looked over and saw that a wolf whose gray coat, lighter on his back and darker on his face and feet, shimmered in the odd sourceless light of the otherness. He was curled up in the hollow of a tree growing on the edge of the mist. His tail wrapped around his body and draped over the top of his nose.

He was too small, too thin, and I’d never seen him hide from anything—but I knew him for Adam’s wolf.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him. This was my otherness and I had not summoned him—or Adam—here.

I’ve been driven out by the monster, he said, closing his eyes and starting to fade from my sight.

“Wolf!” I said, desperate to keep him with me. I was deathly afraid that when he disappeared, I would never see him again.

Do you have a question for me? he asked.

I opened my mouth to ask him something, anything to keep him here with me. And the words that came out of my mouth were: “What did the witch do?”

Ah, he said, lifting up his head. That is a good question.

Between us, separating us, a stage the size of a Manhattan apartment kitchen table rose until it was waist high. Mist from the edges of the clearing drifted to the top of the table and solidified until the witch Elizaveta and Adam stood facing each other upon the stage, both naked.