River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(58)

"You came," I told him in a low voice. "You came, and I am fine. When you were shot, I would have killed the man who took your life and not cared. Not even knowing it was not his fault would have made me feel bad about it." I took a deep breath. "And when I knew you'd be okay, I wanted to yell at you for not moving faster, for not being invincible."

"What in hell were you doing in that river?" He still wasn't looking at me, and his voice had dropped even further.

"Trying to get out of it as fast as I could," I assured him fervently. I could feel his emotion, a huge tangle I couldn't decipher except to sense the atavistic power of it. "Adam, I can't promise not to get into trouble. I managed it for most of my life, but these last couple of years have more than made up for it. Trouble seems to follow me around, waiting to club me with a tire iron. But I'm not stupid."

He nodded. "Okay. Okay. I can deal with not stupid." But he still didn't turn around. And then he added in a quiet voice, "Or I hope so."

After a moment, he said, "I was not tracking straight through most of this. That was Coyote? The Coyote?"

"That's what he said--and I'm inclined to believe him." I paused. "It also appears that he is . . . or some aspect of him was . . . my father. It was complicated. I understood it, mostly, but I had to think a little sideways to do it."

Adam laughed. It wasn't a big laugh, but it was a real one. "I bet."

Adam was trying to come down from the wolf's anger. I tried to find something to say that didn't hurt me and wouldn't make him mad.

"I guess Coyote playing at being human is why I am a walker, even though Mom's not Indian," I said.

"Your father's not dead," he said. "Your mom is going to be . . ."

"Yeah," I agreed, clearing my throat and trying to sound casual. My father wasn't dead--and he was. Had I really even had a father? Better to think about my mother.

"As much as I have this pressing urge to get back at Mom for orchestrating our wedding without consulting me, I can't do that to her," I said, looking at my bare feet. They'd been inside the wet shoes long enough to gain that wrinkled look and corpselike color. "She really loved Joe Old Coyote and . . . Curt is wonderful. But Joe, he rescued her, he treasured her."

I thought of Coyote's voice as he talked about my mother, and added, "I'm not sure that Curt could compete with the man she remembers-- maybe even Joe couldn't. And Joe is dead, really dead." I cleared my throat. "He wasn't really Coyote, just a suit Coyote wore for a while. Real to himself and everyone around him, but in the end he was a construct, and Coyote . . . Mom would figure it out eventually. But by the time she did, Curt might not be waiting around."

Adam stood up then and came over to me. He put both arms around me. He didn't say anything, just held me.

"My life used to be normal," I told his shoulder. "I got up. Went to work. Fixed a few cars, paid a few bills, and no one tried to kill me. My father was dead; my mother was six hours away by car--I could even manage to make that trip last eight or nine hours if I worked at it."

"Argued with your back-fence neighbor," Adam said, his voice very gentle.

"And watched him when he wasn't looking," I agreed. "Because every once in a while, especially after a full moon hunt, he'd forget that I could see in the dark, and he'd run around naked in the backyard."

He laughed silently. "I never forgot you could see in the dark," he admitted.

"Oh." I thought about it for a while. "That's pretty good. Not quite up to my slowly eroding Rabbit, but you get points for that."

Adam was a neat and tidy person, the kind of man who walks into a room and straightens the paintings. For years I used the junker car in my backyard to exact revenge for high-handed orders I had to follow. Had to follow because they weren't just high-handed--they were smart. When I was particularly annoyed, I'd remove tires-- never all four--and leave the trunk open or one of the doors, just to bother him.

He, evidently, had run around naked to bother me. I thought about that a moment more.

"Thank you for the years of entertainment," I said.

"No trouble," he responded in a serious voice. "Now that we're married, are you finally going to do something with that car? Like tow it away or store it somewhere out of sight?"

I took a deep breath--and my lungs seemed to be working just fine with the awful my-father-who- wasn't-my father lump in my stomach gone.

"I'll think about it," I told him. "Maybe you should put it on your What I Want for Christmas List?"

"You okay now?" he asked.

"Okay."

He tightened his arms and lifted me off my feet. "Mercy?" he growled into my ear.

I wrapped my legs around his waist. "Yeah," I said. "Me, too."

Adam could have died last night. I could have died twenty minutes ago. I wasn't willing to waste a moment more.

At some point in the night he kissed my pawprint tattoo and laughed. "Did you really tell Coyote this was a wolf print?"

"To you, it is a coyote print," I said firmly. "For him, it is a wolf print. Only I and my tattoo artist know for sure."

I WOKE IN THE MORNING TO THE SOUND OF ADAM'S stomach growling under my ear.