Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(129)

He snorted at his own fancy. “Don’t anthropomorphize,” he advised himself. “It’s a piece of jewelry.”

But he put the chain around his neck anyway and didn’t feel as alone with the pendant warm in the hollow of his throat.

Mercy

Present day

I walked up to the remains of my garage with the paperwork the insurance adjustor had given me and the paperwork Adam’s choice of contractor had given me. Spring was old and summer just around the corner, and the garage where I’d spent the better part of the last thirteen years looked beyond resurrection.

Adam’s friend the contractor was of the impression it would be much more economical to bulldoze the remains of the structure and start over because the fixes that the insurance adjustor had approved payment for weren’t adequate, in the contractor’s opinion.

And, in fact, the day after the insurance adjustor’s report had come—which had been three days after the county had allowed us in to clear all of my inventory—half of the garage had collapsed. Apparently when the volcano god tunneled under the building, he’d weakened some of the surrounding soil substructure. Or something like that. I was just glad that no one had been hurt.

We’d had the contractor set up a ten-foot-high chain-link fence around the whole place in an effort to keep neighborhood kids out while I healed up and made up my mind what to do with the garage.

It was my life, the life I’d built for myself after I’d realized I didn’t fit anywhere, so I’d have to make my own place. And I’d done it. Found a place to belong—and when Zee, the grumpy old fae who owned it, had been forced to admit what he was and move to the fae reservation, I’d made it my own.

And here it was, lying in wreckage at my feet. I knew that the right thing to do was to squeeze more money out of the insurance company, bulldoze the remnants, and sell the lot for what I could get.

Any car built in the last decade needed plug-in parts-changers, not mechanics. Most of the cars I fixed were older than I was, owned by people who could barely afford their forty-year-old cars. There wasn’t enough money to be made in the business to justify dumping in more.

Adam’s contractor thought we’d need to throw in fifty or sixty thousand dollars more after the insurance money kicked in to rebuild because there were so many things that would have to be brought up to the current building code. Most years I was lucky if I cleared fifteen thousand, and that only because of the cars we rebuilt for the collector’s market and because my right-hand man, Tad, worked for freaking peanuts.

I’d come here today to say good-bye when Adam wasn’t here to see me do it. If I’d come here with him, he’d know how much this battered building mattered to me, and he’d rebuild it himself if he had to do it using nothing but the rubble lying around.

It wasn’t worth that. Wasn’t worth a moment of Adam’s worry—I’d given him enough pain the past year or so. He didn’t know that I knew he woke up in the middle of the night and put his head against my chest to hear my heart beat. Didn’t know I knew he had nightmares that Coyote hadn’t come in time to fix me.

Being important to someone, to anyone, was something I’d hungered for most of my life. Adam was the lodestone of my life, and I didn’t like it when I hurt him.

An unfamiliar car pulled up beside me. I turned around to see a gold Chevy Tahoe that had seen better days. It bore a graceful stencil “Simon Landscaping and Lawn Care,” complete with address, phone, and contractor license number.

The driver’s side window rolled down next to me, and a woman I’d never met before said, “Please tell me that you’re Mercedes Thompson, who is now married with a different last name that no one can remember. Because this is the third time I’ve driven past here in the vain hope that I’d run into you.”

She was human. I blinked at her, pulling on my professional self—I was at work, even if my garage was in rubble. “Yes?”

“Yes?” she repeated with the same questioning inflection I’d given it.

“Yes. I’m Mercedes,” I told her with a smile. Professionalism allowed me to bottle up all the angst until I wasn’t in the presence of a possible customer. I was very grateful to this stranger for allowing me that retreat. “And it’s Hauptman.”

Her jaw dropped. “Hauptman the Alpha werewolf of the Tri-fricking-Cities? That Hauptman?”

I nodded, and she banged her forehead into her steering wheel. “How could they have forgotten that? Her husband’s a werewolf, she said. I almost called him, you know? Probably would have if I hadn’t run into you here.”

I cleared my throat, wondering how to pull her up without offending her. “You needed to talk to me?”

“You probably think I’m a freaking idiot,” she told the steering wheel. “This is why I send out my assistant to talk to people.”

I found myself smiling at the remnants of my garage. “No worries,” I told her. Life goes on. What was it Coyote had told me once? Change is neither good nor bad. It’s just change. Frightening, but survivable. I’d survived a lot worse than the destruction of my garage—and I’d learned a lot along the way.

“What can I help you with?” I asked her.

She took a deep breath, glanced at me from under her bangs, and said, “I’m in love.” Then she looked horrified and surprised, and red swept up from her jaw to her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to say that. He doesn’t know.” She looked at me, this woman whose name I didn’t have, with total urgency. “You can’t tell him, okay? Not a word.”