Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)(96)

I wiped my hands over my face to cover whatever expression might have crossed it. She wasn’t trying to shut me out, she was trying to save Adam and the rest.

“If I had married a doctor, like my mother told me to, then I wouldn’t have Joel to grieve over,” Lucia said unexpectedly. She was good at being quiet and unobtrusive. “And that would be a waste. If you had stayed here, this might not have happened, but maybe you’d have gotten in a car wreck and died.” She shrugged. “It does no good to play with what-ifs.”

“Well said,” Auriele told her. “‘Play the hand you have,’ my papa liked to say.”

I left them to their conversation and trotted up the stairs, where I could hear a movie running quietly. Darryl sat on one side of the couch nearest to the TV and Jesse on the other.

I sat down in the middle. “So,” I said to Darryl, “do you think Korra is going to be as good an avatar as Aang?”

“Who’s Aang?” he asked.

“You started him with Korra?” I accused Jesse. “That’s not okay. It’s like reading the last chapter of the book first.”

“Honey doesn’t have The Last Airbender series,” Jesse said in a low voice. “It was Korra or bust.”

“I think I should check on the cooks,” Darryl said. He left with cowardly haste.

I reached over and turned up the volume of the show until I was pretty sure we had privacy.

“I like Korra,” Jesse told me in a melancholy voice. “She’s not perfect, but she tries hard.”

“Like your mom,” I said.

She nodded. “I love her.”

“And she loves you back,” I said.

She nodded. “She does. She’s not perfect, but she’s my mom, you know?”

“You’ve met my mother,” I told her, and she laughed. I loved my mom, too, but I was very glad she lived in Portland.

“I’m glad I have you and Dad,” she said. “That way, it’s okay that Mom is…”

Flaky? Selfish? Horrible?

“Mom,” she concluded.

We watched Korra for a while longer. Darryl rejoined us as soon as we turned the volume back down.

“I am not wanted in the kitchen,” he said. Darryl loved to cook. “Christy says that men can’t cook.”

“You’re a great cook,” Jesse told him.

He smiled at her, a gentle smile he saved for Auriele and Jesse. “I know. I’m better than any of them, but they won’t listen to me.”

“I think I like Korra better than Aang,” I said after we’d watched another five minutes. “She gets to go do things instead of waiting around for other people.”

“I hear you,” agreed Darryl.

“I think I’m going to go check on Medea,” I said.

With Lucia’s big dog in the house, we’d shut Medea in the tack room out in the stables. The horses in the pasture whinnied at me when I walked by. I threw them a couple of flakes of alfalfa hay, though there was plenty of grass in the pasture. A couple of extra flakes wouldn’t hurt them.

Medea greeted me with frantic purrs. I sat down on the wooden floor next to her and petted her, trying not to think.

There were two Western saddles bedecked with silver on wooden saddle racks and another pair that were more everyday trail saddles. Blue ribbons and big, oversized awards plastered one wall. Everything was covered with dust, as if, like the horses, they had not been used since Peter died.

Eventually, Darryl came out to talk.

“Hey, girl,” he said from the doorway.

“Hey.”

“Jesse was summoned as taster in the kitchen,” he told me. “They should be over at the house by now, in the middle of changing.” Adam’s plan had been to find a quiet spot near Guayota’s place so that all the wolves could change. Then they would wait until the small hours of the night and take what advantage surprise might offer them.

I’d been keeping track of the time, too. “I’ll let you know if our mating bond tells me anything,” I told him, my attention firmly on the way Medea’s rabbit-soft coat rippled under my fingers.

“We’ll all feel it if anyone dies,” Darryl told me after a very long moment. “Why don’t you come into the house? I’ll keep Christy in line.”

I looked at him and raised my eyebrows. He smiled sheepishly. “Okay. But I expect she’ll behave in front of everyone, anyway.”

“It’s not Christy,” I assured him. “I just don’t have any comfort for anyone left in me, Darryl. And if someone even looks at me with sympathy … no. I’ll wait here for a while more.”

He hesitated. “I told him I would look after you.” His voice was soft, as soft as I’d ever heard it.

I wiped my eyes angrily but managed a half laugh. “Shut up. Samuel told me not to mourn until I had something to mourn about.”

“Yeah,” Darryl said softly. “Yeah.”

He leaned against the doorframe and kept me company for a few minutes before returning to the house. It would be hours before we knew anything, anything at all. Tibicenas could be killed, temporarily, if they caught them in dog form. They were going to try to take them out as early in the fight as they could, and if that didn’t destroy Guayota or send him back where he came from, they would then concentrate on Guayota. Seven werewolves and a walker against a god.