Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson #9)(69)

Yep. It had been a real circus when I got here.

“How much can you drop that arm down?” Thorson asked.

“All the way to the ground,” Marley said. “We’d have already done it, but it doesn’t happen instantaneously, and if he wanted to jump off and kill himself, he’d have plenty of time to do it. Seemed to me that we’d be putting pressure on him to do that very thing.”

“How high is that?” Thorson asked.

Marley smiled like a proud father. “She’s 560 feet tall and she can lift six million pounds. Six million.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how he managed to climb all the way up there with one leg—that boom isn’t exactly equipped with a ladder.”

“He’s a werewolf,” I groused. “They are hardwired to do dumb stuff.” Maybe I wasn’t being fair to Sherwood, whom I didn’t know well, but, since it looked like I was going to have to follow him up there, I was entitled to be judgmental. I bent down to make sure my shoes were tied. I didn’t want to have to tie them while 560 feet in the air, though I supposed since the boom wasn’t at a ninety-degree angle, more like a sixty-five, it wouldn’t really be that high. Probably only like 400 or something. My long-ago unlamented geometry class was too far in the past to be of much help. I straightened up and started for the crane.

“What are you doing?” Marley asked in the tone of someone used to getting answers. “Stop.” But I didn’t work for him.

“Someone’s got to talk him down, and he didn’t bring his cell phone,” I told him, and hopped the chain that blocked off the metal stairway on the side of the crawler. Once I started moving, I moved fast; I was up and on top of the two-story-tall crawler before they’d considered doing anything but talking. By then it was too late to stop me because they were human, and no one who was just human could catch me unless I wanted them to. I heard Marley swear, but it didn’t feel like he was emotionally involved—his voice had a frustrated sound rather than honest anger. He wasn’t coming after me.

The boom was built of scaffolding-like bars that crossed and crisscrossed the heavy outer beams that were the corner supports of the boom. Everything was size huge. There was a catwalk along the left edge of boom that ran all the way to the top. It would have been easy to use if the boom had been flat. As it was, I was forced to scale the thing, clinging to the top rail like Batman in the old sixties TV series.

I don’t have a problem with heights, generally speaking. But, I decided, clinging to my perch and fighting an attack of vertigo, when cars started to look like they belonged in a Matchbox set, that was too freaking high. No more looking down.


Jaw clenched and sweating, as soon as the dizziness subsided, I climbed and climbed some more. My shoulders and arms ached, but my hands took the worst of it. I wished I’d brought a pair of driving gloves. My palms grew blisters that burst. My fingers were sore from grabbing the rail.

“What do you think you’re doing?” said a man’s voice. He sounded pretty close, and it startled me.

I froze, then wrapped myself around the bar I was climbing on before I looked up. Just a car length from me, Sherwood sat on the last, highest rung of the boom, his leg and prosthetic both dangling off the side. He wasn’t holding on.

Reflexively, I looked down before I remembered how bad an idea it was. I put my forehead against the cool metal and swallowed until I knew I wasn’t going to throw up. I looked up at him again.

His words had been pretty aggressive, especially for a wolf addressing his Alpha’s mate, but the tone was soft and relaxed. I answered the tone, not the words.

“I’m climbing up after you,” I told him.

He turned around—balanced on his rump until he could get all the way around—so he could see me easily. I was going to take a wild guess that the height didn’t bother him at all.

Bastard.

“That’s dumb,” he said. “Where’s one of the werewolves? If they fall, they might be able to catch themselves. What’s Adam thinking to send you up here?”

I growled at him. “Adam is otherwise occupied. Next time you decide to kill yourself, wait until he’s home and can climb up here himself. If I have to do this again, I might just push you off myself.” It probably wasn’t what I should have said to someone sitting five hundred feet—more or less—in the air, but my hands hurt, and I had made it up here by concentrating on how mad I was at the stupid werewolf who made me do it. Also, I have a problem with suicide, and have ever since my foster father had left me alone at fourteen because he couldn’t bear to live without his wife. I couldn’t take my anger out at him, so I let Sherwood be the scapegoat.

He laughed.

“And yes, I agree with you,” I said. “Climbing up here is very, very dumb. I know why I did it. Why did you?”

He sighed and spun around again, making me cling more tightly to my bar. “I’m a useless freak,” he said, gesturing at his leg. “It’s hard to kill a werewolf, but I’m pretty sure that drop would do it.”

Me, too. But that wasn’t a productive thing to say, so I found something else. “Marley was going to fire you for climbing up here until the other Lampson guy told him who you were. Apparently you are too useful to them to fire.”

He snorted, and I had a thought. He’d been working here since the third day he’d come to the Tri-Cities.