Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(3)

Sometimes the job of protecting the TriCities was more glamorous than others. The livestock call, in addition to being musically commemorated, had actually been something of a PR coup: photos of werewolves herding small lost calves back home had gone viral on Facebook.

The clerk took the card as if it were going to bite him. “Okay,” he lied.

I couldn’t do any better than that, so I left with my cookie-making ingredients. I hopped into the SUV and set the bag on the passenger seat as I backed out of the parking space. Frowning, I wondered if his strong reaction might be due to something that had happened to him—a personal incident. I looked both ways before heading out onto the road. Maybe I should go talk to him again.

I was still worrying about the clerk when there was a loud noise that stole my breath. The bag with the eggs in it flew off the seat, and something hit me with a loud bang and a foul smell—and then there was a sharp pain, followed by . . . nothing.

—

I THINK I WOKE UP SEVERAL TIMES, FOR NO MORE THAN a few minutes that ended abruptly when I moved. I heard people talking, mostly the voices of unfamiliar men, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Magic shimmered and itched. Then a warm breath of spring air drifted through the pain and took it all away. I slept, more tired than I ever remembered being.

When I finally roused, awake and aware for real, I couldn’t see anything. I might not have been a werewolf, but a shapeshifting coyote could still see okay in very dim light. Either I was blind, or wherever I was had no light at all.

My head hurt, my nose hurt, and my left shoulder felt bruised. My mouth was dry and tasted bad, as if I’d gone for a week without brushing my teeth. It felt like I’d just been hit by a troll—though the left-shoulder pain was more of a seat-belt-in-a-car thing. But I couldn’t remember . . . even as that thought started to trigger some panic, memories came trickling back.

I’d been taking a run to our local Stop and Rob—the same all-night gas station slash convenience store where I’d first met lone and gay werewolf Warren all those years ago. Warren had worked out rather well for the pack . . . I gathered my wandering thoughts and herded them down a track that might do some good. The difficulty I had doing that—and the nasty headache—made me think I might have a concussion.

I considered the loud bang and the eggs and realized that it hadn’t been the eggs that had exploded and smelled bad, but the SUV’s air bags. I was a mechanic. I knew what blown air bags smelled like. I didn’t know what odd effect of shock made me think it might have been the eggs. The suddenness of the accident had combined the related events of the groceries’ hitting me and the air bag’s hitting me into a cause and effect that didn’t exist.

As my thoughts slowly achieved clarity, I realized that the SUV had been struck from the side, struck at speed to have activated the air bags.

With that information, I reevaluated my situation without moving. My face was sore—a separate and lesser pain than the headache—and I diagnosed the situation as my having been hit with an air bag or two that hadn’t quite saved me from a concussion or its near cousin. The sore left shoulder wasn’t serious, nor was the general ache and horrible weariness.

Probably all of my pain was from the accident . . . car wreck, I supposed, because I was pretty sure it hadn’t been an accident. The vehicle that hit me hadn’t had its headlights on—I would have remembered headlights. And if it had been a real accident, I’d be in the hospital instead of wherever I was. Under the circumstances, I wasn’t too badly damaged . . . but that wasn’t right.

I had a sudden flash of seeing my own rib—but though I was sore, my chest rose and fell without complication. I pushed that memory back, something to be dealt with after I figured out where I was and why.

My body was convinced that my current location was in a room-sized space despite the pitch-darkness. The floor was . . . odd. Cool—almost cold—and smooth under my cheek. The coolness felt good on my sore face, but it was robbing my body of warmth. Metal. It didn’t smell familiar—didn’t smell strongly of anything or anybody, as if it had been a long time since it was put to use, or it was new.

A door popped open. A light clicked on, making all of my speculations moot, because illumination was suddenly effortless. I was in a room that looked for all the world like a walk-in freezer—all shiny, silvery surfaces. I’d jerked when the door opened, so it was no good trying to pretend to be unconscious. The next-best thing would be facing whoever it was on my own two feet.

I rolled over in preparation for doing that very thing, but before I could do more, I had a sudden and unexpected bout of dry heaves that did my head no good at all. When I lifted my head and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, I noted that there were two men standing in the doorway, frowning at me. Neither had made any move to help or—at least that I noticed—reacted at all.

I dry-heaved a couple of extra times to give myself a chance to examine the invaders of my walk-in-freezer cell.

The nearest man was tuxedo-model beautiful, with dark, curling hair, liquid-brown eyes, and a thousand-dollar suit that managed to show off the muscles beneath without doing anything so crass as being tight anywhere. There was something predatory in his gaze, and he had that spark that made one man more dominant than another without a word being said.

I’d been raised by werewolves. I knew an Alpha personality when I was in its presence.