Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)(53)

It lasted less than a second, and it left the cement floor of my shop buckled, car parts and boxes of car parts strewn all over. The high-pitched wail of the office smoke detector went off. It went off with some frequency when I showered too long, or someone cooked bacon in the microwave, but it had ignored all the smoke and fires in the garage. Apparently, it had decided that enough was enough.

Adam dropped his hold on Tad and me, grabbed his ears, and snarled. I knew exactly how he felt—and I knew what to do. I dashed into the office, hopped onto the counter, and snagged the stool as I jumped. I set the stool on the counter and climbed on top with speed and balance hard won with practice. Reaching up to the ceiling, I popped the battery out of the alarm.

Blessed silence fell. Relative silence, broken by things that were still rolling onto the floor and the sirens that were closer now. In the parking lot, a car engine purred to life, then revved hard as someone drove off with a squeal of rubber on asphalt. I looked out the window and saw Juan Flores’s rental car speeding away.

Tad was swearing in German. Some of the words I recognized, but even the ones I didn’t echoed my own sentiment exactly.

“Stupid,” he said to me, his eyes horror-struck. “I am so stupid. Er war Erd und Feuer.”

“English,” murmured Adam.

“Earth and fire,” said Tad without pause. “Earth and fire—and I trapped him and forgot what he was.”

Earth.

Tad clenched his fist and pulled at something invisible with enough force that it caused his muscles to stand out on his arms. With an almost-human shriek, the aluminum that had encased Flores peeled back, revealing a cavernous hole where the cement floor of my garage had once been.

Adam’s head came up, and he measured the sound of the sirens. “Stay here,” he said, and hopped down into the hole. He was gone less than a minute before he was back.

He looked at Tad. “You need to be out of here before those sirens get close. Can you change your appearance so no one will recognize you?”

Tad nodded.

“Change shape, then,” Adam said. “You understand that it won’t just be the police coming here. Even the dumbest cop is going to see that there was magic afoot here. We’re going to have government agents, and if they get a glimpse of what you can do, they are going to want you. You are too powerful for anyone to let you run around loose: human, shapeshifter, or fae. No one but your dad knows exactly how powerful you are—let’s leave it like that.”

Tad changed like I do—between one breath and the next. He was a little taller than usual and a lot handsomer. He looked clean-cut and real. I wondered if he’d stolen the appearance from someone or if he practiced in front of a mirror.

“That’s good,” said Adam. “Go.”

“Thank you,” I told him.

He grinned, and Tad’s grin looked odd on the stranger’s face. “You aren’t supposed to thank the fae, Mercy. You’re just lucky I like you.” Then he strolled casually outside and away.

Adam pulled out his cell phone. “Jim. Get rid of all copies of the feed to Mercy’s garage after I hit Flores with the engine. Blur or get rid of anything that shows Mercy’s assistant after he left when she closed up.”

“Got it.”

He hung up the phone and looked at me. He’d seen it faster than I had. Tad was incredibly powerful to do what he’d done. He was also young, and with his father locked away in Fairyland (the Ronald Wilson Reagan Fae Reservation’s less respectful nickname), he was vulnerable: no one but family could know what he was. I looked at the sheet of aluminum, now crumpled and torn aside. It could have been an airplane or a tank or … We needed to keep him safe.

“The hole goes underground out to the parking lot.”

“He told me his name was Guayota,” I said—and that’s when I saw the naked dead man lying on the floor where a dead dog should have been.

I blinked twice, and he was still there, belly down, but his head turned to the side so I could see the single bullet hole in his forehead. My bullet hole.

“Adam?” I said, and my voice was a little high.

He turned his head and saw the man, too. “Who is that?”

“I think,” I said slowly, “I think that’s the dog I shot.” I remembered that too-intelligent, ancient gaze.

“I saw it on my laptop on the way over,” Adam said. “You shot a dog.”

“It wasn’t a dog.” I gave a half-hysterical hiccough. “They’ll arrest me for murder.”

“No,” Adam said.

“Are you sure?” I sounded a little more pathetic than usual. My face hurt. My garage was in ruins that would make my insurance company run to find their “Acts of God not covered” clause. I’d killed a dog that had turned into a naked dead guy, and someone had thrown a finger at me.

“Flores essentially ate your gun, so no weapon for ballistics,” Adam said. “And you were attacked in your garage.” He didn’t say any more out loud, but I heard what he left unspoken. There wasn’t a member of the local police department who hadn’t seen or at least heard of the recording of what had happened to me in this garage before, if only because the imagery of Adam’s ripping apart the body of my assailant left a big impression.

His arms closed around me, and we both looked at the dead man. He looked like someone’s uncle, someone’s father. His body was spare and muscled in a way that looked familiar. Werewolves don’t have extra fat on their bodies, either. They burn calories in the change from human to wolf and back, and they burn calories moving because a werewolf doesn’t have the proper temperament to be a couch potato.