Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)(12)

I smiled at him and gave him a salute. “A few years ago, and that would have been the pot calling the kettle black, Mr. Drummond.”

Zack Drummond didn’t show up at five fifteen. Five thirty saw me fretting because the Beetle wasn’t done, and I’d promised it would be finished at eight the next morning.

“Go home, Mercy,” said Tad, who was on his back working on the undercarriage of the Beetle. “Another hour, and I’ll have it buttoned up and done.”

“If I stayed, it would shave fifteen minutes off,” I told him.

One of his booted feet waggled at me. “Go home. Don’t let that bitch steal your man without a fight.”

“You don’t even know her.”

He slid back out from under the car, his face more oil-colored than not. Ears sticking out a little, his face just this side of homely—by his choice. His father was Siebold Adelbertsmiter. Tad’s mother had been human, but his father’s blood had gifted him with glamour and, from things he’d said, a fair bit of power.

“I know you,” he told me. “I’m betting on you. Go home, Mercy. I’ll get it done.”

He’d been working in this shop when he was just a kid. He might be thirteen years younger than me, but he was at least as good a mechanic.

“Okay,” I said.

In the oversized bathroom, I stripped out of my overalls and scrubbed up. The harsh soaps that cut through the grease and dirt have never bothered my skin—which is good because I use them a lot. Not even industrial soap could get out all the ingrained dirt I had on my hands, but my skin tones hid most of that.

A glance in the mirror had me unbraiding my hair. I ran a comb through it—braiding it when it was wet gave it a curl it didn’t have normally. Nothing was going to turn me into a girly girl, but the curls softened my appearance a little.

I was almost out the door, and Tad was back under the Beetle, when he said, “When Adam’s ex drives you into making sweet things with chocolate, just remember I like my brownies with lots of frosting but no nuts.”

I opened the front door to the smell of bacon and the sound of sizzling meat.

Adam, Jesse, and I shared kitchen duties, taking turns making dinner. Tonight was supposed to be Jesse’s night, but I wasn’t surprised that the only person in the kitchen was Christy. Her back was to me as she cooked in the kitchen she’d designed.

She’d been angry, her daughter had told me, that Adam had insisted on moving all the way out to Finley instead of building in one of the more prestigious neighborhoods in West Richland or Kennewick. He’d given her free rein in the house to make up for the fact that he’d wanted the house next to my trailer because Bran, who ruled all the weres in this part of the world, had told him to keep an eye on me. In addition to ruling hundreds and maybe thousands of werewolves, Bran had been the Alpha of the pack my foster father, Bryan, had belonged to. That had occasionally left Bran with delusions that he had a right to interfere with my life long after I’d left Montana and his pack behind.

Christy was shorter than me by a couple of inches, about the same size as Jesse. The body in the blouse and peasant skirt was softly curved, but not fat. Her hair, brown when I’d last seen her, was now blond-streaked and French-braided in a thick rope that hung to her hips.

“Could you find some paper towels, Jesse?” she asked without turning around. “They’ve been moved, and I have bacon ready to come out of the frying pan.”

I opened the cabinet that held the paper towels exactly where she probably had put them on the day she first moved in. I hadn’t changed the organization of the kitchen. Too many people were already using it, so it made more sense for me to learn where everything was than for me to reorganize it to my tastes.

So Christy’s kitchen was exactly as she’d left it—still hers in spirit if not in truth. Her presence in my kitchen felt like an invasion in a fashion that the Gray Lord who’d been here in the wee hours of the night had not, despite his intentions.

Christy knew I wasn’t Jesse, I could smell her tension—which was sort of cheating, so I didn’t call her on it. Also, accusing her of lying right off the bat didn’t seem like a good way to make peace with her.

“Paper towels,” I said as peaceably as I could manage, setting them down on the counter beside the stove.

She turned to look at me, and I saw her face.

“Holy Hannah,” I said before she could say anything, distracted entirely from my territorial irritation. “Tell me you shot him or hit him with a two-by-four.” She didn’t just have a shiner. Half her face was black with that greenish brown around the edges that told you it hadn’t happened in the last twenty-four hours.

She gave me a half smile, probably the half that didn’t hurt. “Would a frying pan be okay? Not as effective as a baseball bat, but it was hot.”

“I would accept a frying pan,” I agreed. “This”—I indicated the side of my face that corresponded to her damaged cheek with my fingers—“from the guy you’re running from?”

“It wasn’t my aunt Sally,” she said tartly.

“You go to a doctor with that?” I asked.

She nodded. “Adam made me go. The doctor said it would heal okay. He gave me a prescription for pain meds, but I don’t like to take prescriptions. Maybe tonight if I can’t sleep.”