Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(13)

Da tried to stand up, but the fae lord’s knife was still embedded in his hip. I nudged him ungently, telling him to quit moving.

Then I began my change to human. It should have been harder as I had changed earlier that day, but it wasn’t. The pain was still there, but not so much of it, and the actual change felt . . . natural. Good.

In human skin again, I knelt beside my father. It had taken too long to change, and he’d already begun healing around the knife blade—just the flesh so far and not the bone, which would have been more complicated and more painful to fix.

“Quick, then,” I told him, and held him down with one hand and jerked the blade free with the other.

He panted with the pain but made no other sound. He would heal now—and he wouldn’t thank me for hovering. He didn’t like being watched while he was in pain. None of my medical knowledge had ever done the werewolves much good—they either lived or they died. My experience told me that my father would live. Probably.

A crow had landed on Dafydd, and I drove it off. In response to my growl, the fae woman made a faint, pained noise.

I’d forgotten about her. I knew nothing of her but the taste of her blood in my mouth. I had not seen her face or heard her voice. She was nothing to me.

Nothing but my victim.

I did not know how long my freedom from the witch would last. Maybe if Da and I ran fast enough, we’d escape her entirely. I didn’t believe that, but it was a faint possibility. But Da had to heal—and maybe in the meantime I could be of use to someone.

There was a fae creature of a kind I’d never seen beside the woman’s body. She was maybe half the size of a human woman, no taller than my waist. Where her dress, which was silvery blue of a fine weave, did not cover, her body was covered with a coarse green-and-gray hair that thickened on the top of her head. She should have looked grotesque, but there was a rightness, a naturalness to her form that made her oddly beautiful. She smelled female with a strong hint of power and growing things.

Her face was human enough for me to find expression on it, but it reminded me more of a fox’s than a woman’s, an impression not dispelled by triangular ears, now half-flattened along her skull. Her eyes were overly large, and she squinted like a being more used to shadows than light, wrinkling her nose and panting half in fear and half in desperation as I approached.

She hissed and bared sharp, weasel-like teeth and put herself between the wounded woman and me.

“I mean no harm, little one,” I told her. “I have some training. Let me help.”

“You would help my lady? You who hurt her?” The words were clear, if oddly accented.

“Before I was a monster, I was a healer,” I told her. “This hurt I and my—” My what? Fellow monsters? It had been a long, long time since I’d talked to anyone but my da. It felt odd to put my thoughts into words, especially as I was distracted. “My pack. We were under duress and would not have hurt her otherwise.” A lie. I did not lie. Once, it had been a matter of pride to me. So I amended my statement to make it truth. “I would not have hurt her otherwise.”

She looked at me. Glanced over at my da, whose hip was scabbed over. I noticed that he was changing to human himself, and I stepped a little sideways, between her and Da. He was less able to protect himself effectively when changing.

She settled a little, as if my action had reassured her, and stepped aside.

I stripped the fae woman’s body free of the rags of clothing our attack had left her. Her skin was darker than anything I’d seen on a human, a warm shade like a doe’s summer coat. But the ridged scars that crossed and recrossed themselves like a macabre braid were white. Some looked as though they were put on her body with a whip, but more were the result of wounds very similar to the freshly open ones we’d given her.

In addition to the wounds from this day, there were a number of healing wounds. Bite wounds. Doubtless from the hounds that the forest lord had lost control of.

“Will she live?” The little creature crouched beside me and reached out to pet the wounded woman’s arm.

“I don’t know fae,” I told her. “But she’s lived through worse.”

“She should be healing faster than this,” the little creature said. “She always has before.”

I thought of Adda and his festering wounds, and said nothing. The forest lord’s body had gone to earth, but his clothing remained. I went to where he had died and appropriated his fine cloak, a bronze eating knife, and a flask filled with bracata—wort fermented with honey. I had found such alcohol good for cleaning wounds.

Returning to the woman, I cut the cloak into strips and used them to bind up the worst of the wounds.

“These should properly be stitched,” I told the little creature. “But I don’t have needles or thread. Without that, they will leave scars behind—like the other wounds have.” I frowned at a nasty mass of scars on her ribs. “Why did he do this?” I asked.

She bowed her head. “She is two-natured, like you and her father, though not two-formed. This aspect, her sidhe aspect, is impervious to her father’s commands. But her other self is closer to the natural world and must obey him. It rises to protect her from danger or harm. Her father needed her obedience to build a thing—a powerful and bad thing. She would not do it, so he tortured her with fear and pain until the other part of her rose.”