Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(91)

In any case, so far, air continued to flow easily in and out of my lungs.

“You do not look like much,” the weaver said finally, his voice gravelly and rough.

“Nor do you,” I answered. “Not in this form, anyway. What are you waiting for?”

“For the smoke to do its work,” he told me, and I saw that his small beady eyes, mostly hidden under those eyebrows, looked identical to the sky-blue gemstone eyes that he had in his serpentine form.

I glanced down at my wounds and saw that the mists of smoke emerging from the breaks in my skin were thicker, as if I had smoke in my veins instead of blood. There was a viscosity to the smoke that I didn’t like. The bite continued to burn painfully.

“What are you waiting for?” asked Adam—asked me, even though he was echoing my words to the smoke weaver. This was where I had planned to call upon the power of the pack.

Cheating is an honored part of any fae bargain—but you can’t cheat by breaking your word. To test your power against mine, I’d said. I realized that I was hesitating because I was worried about breaking my word.

The pack was a part of my power. I fixed that idea in my head and believed it. It seemed like a very good idea that when dealing with fae bargains, I should be very clear in my own mind why the way I was cheating was not breaking my word.

And it was true that each member of the pack enjoyed the strength of the whole—and I was pack. With that thought in my mind, I called to the ties that bound me to the pack. Some instinct pushed me beyond that, though, and I called upon the mating bond and the bond with Stefan, though I knew that both were compromised. Damaged bonds still belonged to me.

Something else stirred, too, but it wasn’t unfriendly so I let that be for now. I had other things to worry about.

I did not pull magic, or even power, from my bonds with the pack: I pulled will. We, the Columbia Basin Pack, called no one our master. We lived and died by the will of our Alpha and no other.

As sometimes happened, especially when I had been spending so much time there recently, I found myself standing in the otherness without meaning to. This time, as soon as I stood in that place, the bite from the smoke weaver flared up from slow burn to hot coal and I couldn’t help but cry out at the agony of it.

Sweat beaded on my forehead and I had to work to keep my feet, balancing myself by pulling on the garlands I held fisted in my right hand—the pack bonds.

And at that moment, when my balance was fragile and the pain off the scale, I felt another’s will press down upon me with suffocating force. Unexpected force.

When I’d brought Stefan here, the weaver had not been able to follow him. One of my contingency plans, should I not be able to resist the weaver’s bite using the pack, had been to come here and see if I had other options to fight him with.

The power and unexpectedness of the attack made me stumble sideways and I knew, with absolute conviction, that falling would mean something a great deal worse than a mere scraped knee. In my spiritual place, things like falls could have symbolic consequences that had nothing to do with forces like gravity. Sometimes that was a good thing—but my instincts told me that falling while my body was filling with smoke would be a Very Bad Idea.

Knowing doom was coming and preventing it were two different things.

Fortunately, I was not all alone. Something tightened around my waist and lit my spine with a shiver of strength. I looked down and saw my mate bond. It was still red and rough and closed to me, but it was thicker than it had been when last I saw it. My right ankle had a creamy lace cuff, Stefan’s bond, that helped my right foot find balance when my left foot threatened to slip, despite the steadying effect of my tie to Adam.

Once I was solid on my feet, the pressure of that other mind didn’t feel so overwhelming. I took a deep breath and realized that the otherness I stood in was different.

Not that my otherness was ever exactly the same place twice, but usually it was based on a forest. Sometimes that forest was pretty weird—like diamond-encrusted trees that wept or grass that was knitting needles.

But this time, I stood in a great cave—a cave that was filling with smoke—and the smoke felt very wrong. It did not belong here—and it was boiling out of the wounds in my chest.

What is this place? asked the smoke, swirling in delight. I do like this. This has so many possibilities.

The pressure in my head lightened, the burning of the wounds fading as the smoke poured out of me and into my spiritual home. I had a feeling that wasn’t really an improvement, even though the surcease of pain was welcome.

The smoke ran down the glittery garlands of my pack bonds. As it touched them, the bonds sparked with alien magic, revealing the wolves on the other side of those bonds. They stood unmoving, like life-sized glass figures. I was all too aware that those figures were hollow—like blown glass. So fragile.

Long strands of graceful red garland wrapped precisely around Auriele and Darryl, binding them together. That red garland formed a braid as it stretched from them toward me.

Ben stood with his head bowed, leaning forward as if bracing himself against something I couldn’t perceive. His glass was not clear, and was instead the bright blue of the weaver’s serpent eyes. But his white garland, his pack bond, was solid.

Honey stood strong and resolute. Her right hand was held up and forward, extending the green-and-silver garland toward me. Her left arm was held a little behind her, and that hand held a few strands of tarnished tinsel that drifted limply in the light breeze that filled the cave.