Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(7)

Now there was a door to Underhill in our backyard.

At another time, I would have run back into the house. But the thought of all those hostile faces . . . of Adam’s hostile face was too much for me. My stomach churned and my heart hurt. Let Adam, Darryl, and Auriele deal with Underhill.

I hopped over the old barbed-wire fence, which continued where the stone wall left off, and strode through the field of sagebrush and dead cheatgrass toward my old house—or at least the house that stood where my old place had been.

A jackrabbit jumped out from somewhere, and my inner coyote took notice. There must have been something off about the rabbit for the coyote to be so excited by it when I wasn’t hungry at all.

I glanced at it again as it ran away. There was a ragged edge to the rhythm of its movement—not quite lame, just oddly awkward. But jacks are pretty fast, even sick ones, so it was out of sight before I could pin down what was wrong.

I stopped by the old VW Rabbit I’d originally placed just so to get back at Adam when he overstepped his bounds, back when we were nothing more to each other than neighbors. Adam was one of those people who walk around straightening paintings in museums. The old parts car with its various missing pieces had been nicely calculated to drive him crazy.

I thought about doing something else to it—but the Rabbit was part of the play-fighting that Adam and I did now. I wasn’t mad at Adam, wasn’t fighting with him—I would be mad tomorrow, maybe, when my heart didn’t ache. Today, I was just bewildered and sad. The old car couldn’t help me there, so I walked on.

I was pretty sure that Adam’s withdrawal from me had something to do with the witches, I reminded myself.

He’d seemed all right for the first few weeks after we killed all the witches. He’d had nightmares, but so had I.

I didn’t know when he’d decided to keep our mating bond closed because, to my shame, I didn’t notice at first.

I was bound to my mate, to my pack, and to a vampire. And if I thought about any of them too hard, I understood why animals caught in the jaws of iron traps sometimes gnawed their own limbs off to get free. Of the three bonds, the one with Adam bothered me the least. And when, a short time ago, it had been obstructed—I found out that I had become . . . completed by that bond.

Still, I had made very little effort to learn how it worked, leaving that to Adam. It was usually open only a little, just enough to let me know that Adam was okay and tell him the same about me. Sometimes he left it open wide—usually when we were making love, which was both amazing and overwhelming.

We weren’t living in each other’s heads, but I generally knew when he was having a good day—or a bad one, though only strong emotions made it through. I could tell where he was and if he was in pain or not. And he could tell the same about me. But his keeping it tightened down left us both some privacy. That way, he told me, I wouldn’t try to chew off my foot to get free.

Sometime after the witches, he had closed it tight and I hadn’t noticed until a few days ago. Once I noticed, then I could look back and realize it had been weeks since I’d felt much from our bond. The way it was now, I could not tell anything except that he was alive.

He had been working long hours—and so had I, my business freshly reopened and requiring more time than usual because of it. How little time we were spending together hadn’t seemed abnormal until I stopped to think about it. He had been spending a lot of hours at work, but he’d still had time to take care of pack business, and the problems of various pack members. But our time, the space he and I carved from our days and weeks, had disappeared.

I didn’t know when, exactly, it had happened or why, but I had been sure it was some kind of aftermath from the witches, from Elizaveta’s death. But tonight, his reaction, his willingness to believe I’d urge Jesse to change her plans without telling him, left me thinking that maybe the problem was me.

Was he finally tired of the trouble I caused? Or at least seemed to be surrounded by?

We hadn’t made love in weeks. My husband was a twice-a-night man unless one or the other of us was too beaten up. I found that with him, I was a twice-a-night woman, so it worked out well.

I leaned down to pat the old VW and then continued my walk. I didn’t want to think anymore, and movement seemed the right thing to do. I had no particular destination in mind other than away.

I stopped by the pole barn I had used as a secondary base of operations the whole time my garage was being rebuilt and glanced inside. It looked oddly empty, most of the tools moved back to the garage in town. The main occupant of the building was my old Vanagon.

I’d put a white tarp down and driven the van on top to see if I could find the leak in the coolant lines that ran from the radiator in the front of the van to the engine fourteen feet away. It was a last-ditch effort to find the leak before pulling all the lines and replacing them with new ones. I wasn’t hopeful, but I really wasn’t looking forward to taking the whole van apart.

I closed the door without checking the tarp and walked to the little manufactured home that had replaced my old trailer. The yard was in better condition than it had been when I’d lived there, Adam having installed an automatic watering system and added my house to his yard man’s routine.

The oak tree, a gift of an oakman, had escaped the fire that destroyed my old home. It had grown since I last paid attention to it, a lot more than it should have, I thought—though I was no gardener or botanist. Its trunk was wider around than both of my hands could span.