Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(40)
The tablecloth tonight had been hurriedly purchased (Jesse had been sent out to the store earlier) because Christy’s favorite tablecloth, unearthed from the linen closet, had a stain on it—discovered just as I came in from work. She hadn’t looked at me, but the sad note in her voice had Auriele glaring at me and a few reproachful looks from everyone else, including Jesse. The other tablecloths were dirty, and there was no way we could eat at a table without a tablecloth.
I had not said a number of things—one of which was, if it was such a favorite of hers, then why hadn’t she taken it with her? Another unsaid comment was that if I’d known her grandmother had given it to her on her wedding day, I would have ripped it into shreds and used a paper tablecloth before I’d put it on the table for last Thanksgiving. Instead of saying anything, I’d ignored the whole dramatic show and gone upstairs to change my clothes from work, leaving Adam to listen to Christy try to decide if there was any way to salvage her grandmother’s tablecloth.
It had taken a pep talk with the mirror to get myself out of the bedroom and downstairs to eat with everyone else. Dinner had been served, the pack gossiped over, then Darryl asked me about the kill site the police had taken me to. I’d briefed Adam over the phone, but there hadn’t been time to really hash the matter out.
“I mean, Mercy,” Christy said, as if she hadn’t noticed the rise in tension when she interrupted me, “why don’t we hold off talk of dead bodies until after people are done with the food? I spent too long making this for it to go to waste.”
For tonight’s dinner, Christy had made lasagna (from scratch, including the noodles), and I’d been shuffling it around on my plate because knowing that she’d made the food made me not want to eat it. That it was pretty and smelled good wasn’t as much of an incentive to consuming it as I’d have thought it would be.
“It’s okay, Mom,” said Jesse with forced cheer, trying to defuse the situation. “Dinner is kind of when everything gets ironed out. Sometimes it’s hard to get everyone in the same room afterward.”
Ben, one of the four werewolf guards for the night, ate a big bite, swallowed, and said in a prissier-than-usual version of his British accent, “Mercy, when you say it gnawed on the bones, was it trying to get at the marrow or just cleaning its teeth?”
“Ben,” snarled Auriele. “Didn’t you hear Christy?”
Six months ago, Ben would have backed down. Auriele outranked him, both as Darryl’s mate and as herself. But he’d changed, grown stronger, so he just ate another bite and raised an eyebrow at me. Silent—but not very subservient.
“Playing, I think,” I said to attract Auriele’s ire. She wouldn’t attack me—and in her usual mode of Christy’s protector, she might do something to Ben. I’d decided the best way to deal with Christy’s interruption was to ignore her. “The bones weren’t cracked, just chewed on. At least on the body I got close to. No cracking means no marrow. And if it was just trying to clean its teeth, it would have chewed harder.”
I ate a bite of salad. It smelled like Christy because she’d washed the romaine herself. Swallowing it was an effort. Trying not to look like I was choking was an even bigger effort.
Auriele opened her mouth, but Darryl put his hand on top of hers, and she closed her lips without speaking, but not without giving him a hurt look.
Adam’s hand touched my shoulder and suddenly I could swallow again. I had allies here, and Adam had my back.
“The important thing,” he said, “is that we are careful. I don’t want any wolf to go out running alone until we know what made those kills.”
Darryl nodded. “I’ll see that word gets around.”
“Good,” Adam said. “I’ve got people out looking for Gary Laughingdog. Hopefully, we’ll find him before the police do—or he’ll find you, Mercy.”
“I’m pretty sure he wanted to talk to me,” I told him. “If so, he’ll find me before anyone finds him. I wouldn’t worry too much about the police finding him since he’s running around as a coyote.”
“Did you check if Bran had any insights into what it was that killed all those people?” Darryl asked.
Adam ate another bite of lasagna, paused to enjoy it, then gave me a slightly guilty look. I decided not to tell him it was okay if he liked Christy’s food. It was entirely understandable, but it was not okay, and I wouldn’t lie to him. I looked away.
To Darryl, Adam said, “I called Bran. Without checking out the site himself, Bran wasn’t able to pinpoint what could have done it. Taking the fae out of the picture leaves us with not much. Might even be a native creature. Bran said he once encountered a wendigo, and he believes that it was physically capable of killing this way. They smell oddly of magic, the way Mercy described them. But he didn’t think that it would have left canid paw prints—or left anything except bare bones. Their curse is that they hunger in a way that cannot ever be satisfied. Also, they tend to haunt the mountain passes, not the open shrub steppe. He’s having Charles do a little more research for us.”
“Charles who?” asked Christy.
“Bran’s son,” I told her, trying very hard not to be condescending and not succeeding. Maybe because I didn’t try that hard. She’d been Adam’s wife for over a decade, and she hadn’t bothered to learn anything if she didn’t know about the Marrok and his sons. “He’s half-Indian—Salish—and he has some people who will talk to him about things that are culturally sensitive—sacred things or stories they don’t want prettied up with all the original flavor lost so that it can be more effectively marketed as a genuine Native American story.”