Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(25)
The expression on his face was compassionate. “I expect that the jail has a web page with phone numbers of people who can help you figure out how to visit the guy you need to see.”
Coyote Ridge Corrections Center is a minimum- and medium-security facility just outside of Connell, which is about an hour’s drive north of the Tri-Cities. It’s a little town of about five thousand inhabitants, not including those who are incarcerated in the prison.
I didn’t go alone.
I glanced at my passenger and wondered if I’d made the right choice. Not that there were a lot of pack members who’d have been free to head out on short notice, especially now that Adam was keeping four wolves at our house all the time.
Honey had lost weight since her husband’s death, and she hadn’t been fat to begin with. She’d cut her honey-colored hair into a severe style that framed her face with its newly hollowed cheekbones. With that and her body reduced to muscle and bone, she should have looked hard, but instead she looked fragile.
She hadn’t said a word to me since I picked her up in my Vanagon. Not even to ask where we were going.
I’d told her I needed someone to come with me on an errand, and she hadn’t asked any questions. I’d decided it was a subtle defiance—following the letter of the law that said I was in charge without actually making an effort to be useful. But either driving or twenty minutes of distance from Christy cheered me to more optimistic possibilities. Maybe Honey just didn’t know what to say.
Or maybe she liked Christy more than she liked me, too.
“I had a fae artifact follow me home,” I told her. I couldn’t remember if she’d known about the walking stick. I’d tried not to talk about it too much. “It wouldn’t stay with any of the fae I tried to give it to. Which would have been fine except that it started to get bloodthirsty, so I found a safe place for it. Night before last, I was visited by a Gray Lord who informed me that it would be a good idea if I retrieved it and gave it back to him.”
“You gave the walking stick to Coyote,” she said. And when I looked at her, she raised a cool eyebrow. “You were raised among wolves. I’d think you’d know well enough how fast and thoroughly gossip travels in the pack.”
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t know how to get ahold of Coyote in a hurry. In my experience, he just shows up when he chooses. So I called around and got the name of another walker who might know how to find him before the fae decide to destroy the Tri-Cities in retribution.”
She looked at me, frowned, and sat up straighter. “You were trying to joke—but you really believe they might destroy the whole town.”
“Not they,” I said, remembering that instant when the glamour thinned, and he’d snarled at the cat. “He. And yes, I think the fae are capable of anything. I’d have given them the stupid walking stick a long time ago if it would have let me.”
“Was it Zee?”
I shook my head. “Zee’s not a Gray Lord. Close, I think, but not. This was Alistair Beauclaire, the man responsible for the fae retreat to the reservations.”
“Good,” she said. “I like Zee.”
She was quiet for a few miles. “Where are we going?”
“To Connell,” I told her. “To visit someone who might know how to find Coyote.”
She glanced down at the clothes she was wearing—rose slacks and a blue silk blouse. She buttoned the blouse another two buttons and began to shed jewelry. “They won’t let you bring a weapon on-site,” she said. “Not even in your car.”
Interesting that she knew the rules for visiting someone in prison.
“I left the gun in the safe at the shop,” I told her. “And they don’t need to know that you are a weapon.”
She smiled a little, and her eyes warmed.
The parking lot had a deserted feel. Coyote Ridge could hold nearly three thousand prisoners—apparently none of them had family or friends who were visiting today. Prison wasn’t like the hospital, I guess. Social obligation didn’t cover visiting friends and acquaintances in prison.
Like the Tri-Cities, Connell is in the heart of the desert. Not a pretty desert with sand strewn with cactus and interesting, thorn-covered plants, but shallow rolling hills that look like they needed a shave for the stubbled growth of sagebrush and cheatgrass.
Set firmly in that stark and unbeautiful desert canvas, the prison was a hostile collection of plain, rectangular buildings with cement walls and steel doors, chain-link fences topped with rolls of razor wire, and atmospheric hopelessness that lay like a weight over it all. We left everything in the van except our licenses and the keys I used to lock up.
The guards in the entrance building were professional and not unfriendly. They gave me a quarter to feed the locker where I put the keys to the Vanagon. They kept our driver’s licenses—the woman behind the counter did a double take at my name, but she didn’t otherwise say that she recognized it.
Honey and I carefully avoided looking at Nat, one of the pack members who was a guard here—there were two wolves on staff, but I saw no sign of Luke. We signed in, and Nat took the clipboard from me, frowning when he saw the name of the man we were visiting. I don’t think anyone else noticed.
We were escorted out of the building and into one of a series of parallel chain-link-enclosed paths into the prison itself. When the doors closed behind us, my pulse picked up, and Honey flinched. We showed our visitor badges to the guard behind the glass and walked into a room that looked like my high-school lunchroom.