River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(57)

"Okay. Steel isn't a good weapon," he said. "Good to know."

The small knife went away to be replaced by one of the larger jaggedy knives. Like Gordon's, the knife was obsidian. It wasn't as big as I'd first thought, but it wasn't small, either. It sliced into the tough skin just fine.

"Ah," he said. "Inconvenient because these things are a pain, and they break. But at least they still work."

He looked at me. "How are your hands?"

I looked down at them. "Cold. Wet. Fine?" He grunted and stood up, tucking the piece of tentacle into his belt. "As I thought. Whatever makes that burn stopped as soon as Adam bit through it--otherwise, he'd be feeling it by now. Means it's magic rather than poison or acid or something. Good for you and Adam, bad for us, I'm afraid."

"Why?" Adam let me use him to lever myself to my feet. His ears were pinned back, and he'd kept his eyes on Coyote in a way that made me a little nervous.

"Because I can do this." Coyote pulled my shirt up and set one hand against my bare stomach.

Icy chill spread from his hands--and the burns disappeared, leaving only my pawprint tattoo. He bent down to take a good look at my midriff and grinned at me. "Coyote. Cool tattoo."

"It's a wolf pawprint," I said coolly, jerking my shirt down over it.

"Still mad about the unexpected swim, huh?" he said, whining a little, a noise that would have been more at home coming from a canine throat. "All in the name of information."

"So why is the magic component bad for us?" I asked.

He looked at me like I was an idiot. "Because we have a sixty-four- to ninety-six-foot monster to kill --and it uses magic."

I had a thought. "Can you fix Hank like this?" He shook his head. "No. He's not one of mine. But I know someone who can. We're going to need help here, kids."

He pursed his lips and tapped his toes impatiently. "I know. We need Jim Alvin and his sidekick, that Calvin kid, to meet us at the Stonehenge at midnight tomorrow. Tell him to bring Hank. I'll tell him what he needs to do, but he's not going to believe in me. Sad that a medicine man will believe in werewolves, ghosts, and vampires and won't believe in Coyote, but that's what it is these days."

"I don't have his number."

"Where's your cell phone?"

"In the trailer."

He grabbed my hand and pulled a felt-tipped pen out of an empty pocket and wrote a phone number on my hand. "Here. Call him in the morning. If you don't, he'll think I'm just a dream."

He patted me on the head, ignoring Adam's low growl. "Go in and get warmed up." He wiggled his eyebrows at Adam. "I bet you know how to warm her up, eh?"

Adam had very nice big white teeth, and he showed most of them to Coyote.

Coyote veiled his eyes and showed his teeth in return. "Go ahead. Just try it. You're out of your league."

I touched Adam's nose and frowned at Coyote. "You stop baiting him--or I'll call my mom."

Coyote froze, his face blank, and I almost felt bad--except that he'd been threatening Adam. After a moment, he inhaled.

"I'll see you at Stonehenge," he said, and walked off without a look back.

We were most of the way to the trailer when I saw what Adam had done.

"Wow," I said.

A rocket bursting out of the window wouldn't have done more damage. The window and its frame were toast, and a little of the outside skin had been bent up.

At least all the glass was on the outside. "Be careful you don't step on the shrapnel," I told him, taking the long way around the trailer to keep him away from it. My tennis shoes might be wet, but they were proof against a few shards of glass.

In the trailer, I stripped out of my wet clothes and put them in the sack with the bloody clothes from earlier.

"I'm going to need clothes," I said, sorting through my suitcase. When I looked over, Adam had started to shift back to human, so I grabbed clean underwear and a T-shirt and gave him some room.

After I dressed, I found a towel big enough to cover the broken window frame and taped it up using some of the first-aid tape from the kits because I couldn't find any duct tape. I keep a couple of rolls of duct tape in all of my cars. The first-aid tape wasn't the wussy kind, though. This was the stuff that needed WD-40 to get off skin once it was taped down. I hoped the repair people would be able to get it off without damaging the trailer further.

If this kept up, I thought, noticing where a spot of blood had dropped on the carpet--it could have come from any number of things in the past forty-eight hours--we might just be buying a trailer soon. While I was staring at the stain, Adam spoke.

"You could have died." His voice was rough from the change.

"So could you have when Hank shot you," I said, trying not to sound defensive when he hadn't yelled at me. Yet. Adam wasn't the only one who had to learn not to get mad about something that hadn't happened.

He wasn't completely human yet. He knelt on the carpeted floor on the far side of the trailer, his head bowed as he waited for the last of the change.

Even when he was finished, he stayed there, his back to me. "I cannot . . ." he began, then tried again. "When I heard you scream, I thought I'd be too late."