Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)(29)

Before the guards touched him, he fell off the chair, body writhing for a moment, then every muscle in his body seized. His back arched off the floor, and his eyes rolled back in his head. I dropped to the floor and pulled his head into my lap so it wouldn’t slap the floor a second time. Honey protected his tongue by putting her fingers in his mouth. She didn’t flinch when he bit down.

When he lapsed into total unconsciousness, it was so sudden that it was more frightening than his sudden fit.

Luke crouched beside me. “We’ve called for help. You need to leave now.”

Honey and I were escorted out of the room with more speed than gentleness, but when we retrieved our IDs, Luke found us again.

“He has these fits, sometimes,” Luke told us. “The doctor thinks it’s the result of doing hallucinogenic drugs when he was young.”

Luke didn’t, quite, ask me what I’d been doing there—but only because Honey growled at him.

“Thank you,” I said. “He was helpful. Treat him kindly when you can.” Something in me rebelled at leaving him here, caged like a zoo animal. My half brother, he’d said. Coyote’s children. I shivered and hoped that his last words were hallucinogenic remnants, but it had felt, had smelled, like magic to me. It had smelled like Coyote.

Luke nodded at me, lips disapproving, but went back to his job obediently enough.

“Some of the pack like to forget who you are when Adam isn’t around,” Honey said softly. “I’ll have a discussion with Luke.”

I gave her a sharp look she didn’t see because she was watching Luke. Honey didn’t like being dominant—she avoided situations in which her natural temperament showed through. I’d thought Honey didn’t like me at all. So why had she just decided, out loud, to squelch Luke?

I opened the locker and collected the Vanagon’s keys. I walked out the prison door a free woman, but it wasn’t until I turned the van out onto the freeway that I really relaxed.

“So all you have to do to summon Coyote is be interesting,” Honey mused. “Shouldn’t take you long.”

“You could stake me out naked in the desert near an anthill,” I suggested.

She shook her head. “I don’t do clichés. Besides, Adam might object.”

My phone rang.

“Could you see who that is?” I asked.

She picked it up off the floor between our seats and, after a glance at the readout, answered it. “Adam, it’s Honey,” she said. “Mercy is driving.”

“Why hasn’t she picked up her phone for the past hour?” he asked.

She held the phone my direction and raised one eyebrow in inquiry.

“I’ve been in prison,” I said in a sad voice. And left it at that. Honey flashed a grin at me, the expression startling because I was so used to the reserve she’d been carrying around with her.

There was a brief silence. “Okay,” Adam said. “Was your undoubtedly brief sojourn the cause of your phone call earlier today? Christy said you didn’t leave a message.”

“Christy answered your cell phone, and you thought Mercy should leave a message?” Honey’s voice let everyone know exactly what she thought of that.

“No,” said Adam with gently emphasized patience. “I thought that she should have told Christy to give me the phone.”

“You were unavailable,” I told him.

Silence followed. Unhappy silence. And then I remembered who the enemy was and what she wanted to do to Adam and me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I let her get to me. But not to the point I did something stupid, I promise. I called Honey, and she came with me to see a man about summoning Coyote. Hank gave me his name. It was safe enough.”

Adam made a man sound that could have meant anything, but I took it to mean that we were okay again. When he used actual words, the subject wasn’t Christy anymore. “What did you learn from Hank’s contact?”

A lot. Important things I didn’t want to talk about on the phone. So I gave him the least of it. “He doesn’t summon Coyote because he’s pretty sure that’s the stupidest thing anyone could do. But apparently Coyote has a habit of showing up when he finds one of us—his descendants—interesting.”

Adam laughed ruefully. “Shouldn’t take you long, then.”

“That’s what I told her,” Honey said.

“Any word on the fire?” I asked.

“Arson is confirmed,” Adam said, “though there seems to be some confusion about the accelerant used. Whatever it was, it got really hot, really fast.”

“Do you think he’s done this kind of thing before?” I asked.

“The fire investigator seemed to think so. We’re looking for suspicious fires tied to an overzealous lover. We’re also looking at the European angle. There’s another trail, too. Warren got descriptions of this man’s dogs out of Christy. Looks like they are some sort of mastiff. She said they were valuable and difficult for anyone except Juan—her stalker—to handle.”

“That doesn’t sound like a mastiff,” I told him. “There’s a guy in the Montana pack who was breeding all sorts of big dogs. The mastiffs were mostly big sweeties.”

“I’m not sure she’d know a poodle from a sheepdog. But Juan Flores apparently took special pleasure in pointing out that both of his dogs outweighed Christy, who is a hundred and ten pounds.”