Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(12)

I have never had difficulty understanding the rules of living as a human. Nor had I had difficulty understanding the rules the werewolves who had raised me lived by—or the supernatural community as a whole. Granted, I did a better job of living by human rules, but I’d been older when I started—and I didn’t have Bran Cornick, the überking of the werewolves, trying to shove the rules down my throat.

What I understood for the first time, contemplating that bloody tarp, was that I seldom had to deal with both sets of rules at the same time. It had made sense, by werewolf rules, that the renegade goblin should die. Even if we had apprehended him, I don’t think any jail would have held him for long. And what he would have done to the population of prisoners in the meantime didn’t bear thinking on.

There was no doubt of his guilt. He had confessed, eventually and sideways, to killing a child as well as killing the police officer. Justice had been unholy swift, maybe, but it had been his king who had carried out the sentence. All a little medieval, but that was the way of the fae and of werewolves.

It had made sense, from a werewolf perspective, to take the head back to the police because they had jurisdiction over the crime the goblin had committed. Werewolves were all about order and authority. Moreover, the goblin king, who was de facto responsible for the miscreant goblin because they were the same species, had told me to do it. He had the right and the authority to determine that since the goblin had sinned against the humans, the humans should have the evidence that justice had been served, to wit, the head.

Larry meant to use the dead goblin as a political gambit, a statement of power combined with a declaration that he was on the side of justice, if not the law. That he considered the murder of humans to be wrong. And all of that was well and good.

But now I was standing near the heart of human justice—the courthouse. And from that human perspective . . . I frowned at the bloody tarp. Nothing of what I’d done made sense from a human perspective. Killing someone was a crime, even if the one you killed deserved it.

I may not have killed the goblin—but . . . I wasn’t sure I could prove it. I’d bet a million bucks that Larry the goblin king would not be recognizable on the video feed from the barn. In fact, as I considered it, I was pretty sure that the cameras would have quit working the moment he was aware of them. It had been pretty dark about then—it was still pretty dark. If he had shown up at all, then he would have been little more than a shadowy figure.

Only the four of us—Larry, Ben, Mary Jo, and I—knew that it hadn’t been I who’d killed the goblin. No one could prove it was, either . . . but oddly I didn’t trust human justice as much as I trusted the werewolves. Justice is easier when the judge, jury, and executioner can tell if the accused tells a lie.

“Are you making friends with him?” growled Mary Jo from the sidewalk. “He’s probably not going to be a good conversationalist.”

“I’m trying to figure out how I end up at work this morning,” I told her. “Instead of in jail.”

Because I had done everything wrong. I should have called the sheriff’s office from the barn. I’d have liked to believe that the goblin king had magicked me into following orders. But I had just been caught up in what was right and proper on the magical side and forgotten that human law enforcement wasn’t going to think highly of this.

She grunted. Then she squinted at the head a moment herself.

“Well, damn,” she said in the voice of someone who has suddenly realized something. “Look what a stupid thing you did.”

I looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

She lifted her hands, palms up. “You’re the boss here, Mercy. I assumed you knew what you were doing.”

I gave her a look and she broke down and laughed.

“I know,” she said. “Me, too. He’s just got that kingly thing going. And maybe I was distracted trying to figure out if he is actually going to go cannibal or if he’s going to take the body back for some sort of ritual funeral or something. And . . . well, I guess I just don’t get fussed about dead people . . . dead anything, anymore. I forgot that our human counterparts aren’t going to feel the same way.”

She looked around and sighed. She pulled out her phone and pressed some numbers on it.

“What?” a groggy and grumpy voice said. Then, irritably, “I’m off today, Carter, not late again. Go screw yourself.”

“This is Mary Jo,” she told him. “I need your official help.”

There was a three-beat pause.

“Mary Jo,” he said, sounding much more awake—but his voice was raw. “We’re done, you said. No more. Well, done is done.” And he disconnected.

“Ex-boyfriend,” Mary Jo told me. “Renny’s a good guy, but he started to get too serious. I don’t do serious with the humans. Doesn’t seem fair.” She tried to sound hard and did a fair to middling job of it, so I guessed it had hurt her, too.

She pressed the numbers again.

“Go away,” he said.

“Official, Renny. I’m standing outside your place of work with Mercy Hauptman. We have a dead goblin’s head in the backseat of her car. We’d like to donate it to the coroner’s office through official channels. Since the head was made bodiless in Mesa, I kind of figured that might be up your alley.”

He disconnected.