Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(72)

“Wrong number or something,” I told Adam. I had more interesting things to think about than a crank caller. “First-string wouldn’t be Bran. Bran’s not part of the team. Bran would be . . . I don’t know. Coach, maybe. Or the franchise owner. First-string—that’s Charles all the way.”

“Agreed,” Adam said.

I nodded. “Okay, that’s good. He’ll be okay if Charles has his back.”

“And he knows he can come to us,” he said.

“And I can check with Charles to make sure that there really isn’t anything we can do.”

“Yes.”

It started to rain. Out of habit I checked the temperature, but we were a few degrees too warm to have to worry about freezing rain. This rain would only get us wet.

“What do you think is so bad that it has Samuel on the run?” I asked, my voice sounding small in my own ears.

“I have no idea,” said Adam.

He put his hand on my knee and gave it a squeeze. For absolutely no rational reason at all, that helped.



* * *



—

Jesse and Tad were doing homework on the kitchen table when we got home.

“Glad you’re alive,” Jesse said. “There’s pizza in the fridge—we saved you some. Kind of nice just having the three of us plus one in the house. When you put something in the fridge, it doesn’t magically disappear.”

“Glad you’re alive, too,” I said with maybe a bit too much emphasis.

Both Tad and Jesse looked up.

“I thought that your death had been indefinitely postponed, Dad.” Jesse sounded worried.

“It was,” Adam said. “But since we never want boredom to be a thing in this household, today it’s Mercy’s turn to have a killer on her tail.”

Tad and Jesse both looked at me.

“The Harvester is out to get me,” I said with perfect truthfulness. Almost perfect truthfulness. “We think.”

There was no way to be sure that the Soul Taker was after me just because I was connected to it. But Zee and Adam had both decided that probably I was in its sights, metaphorically speaking.

Jesse rolled her eyes, but Tad, who could hear the truth in my answer—or at least knew a little bit more about the story of the Harvester than he had last night—stiffened. He looked at Adam, who nodded once.

Jesse missed that exchange. She had other things on her mind.

“Dad, you’ve been to Southeast Asia. Have you been to South Korea?”

“Yes?” he said cautiously.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “How long ago?”

“Ten years?”

She pointed at the seat next to her. “Sit down, right here. I need you. You will be my primary source.”

She looked at me and waved her hands. “You. Stepmother. Eat your pizza somewhere else while I quiz your man about the way women were treated ten years ago in South Korea.”

With a grin, I loaded a plate with a couple of pieces of kitchen-sink pizza, a third piece with pineapple and what looked like poblano peppers, and started for the back door.

Tad hopped up and opened the door for me. “If you have a killer out hunting you, maybe I should come out with you.”

“Don’t you have a paper to write?” I asked.

But he was right, I needed to be more careful. When he followed me out the door, I didn’t object.

Normally I’d have said our house was the safest place for me to be. But normally there were three or four werewolves here as well as a demon dog. We’d sent them all away.

It was chilly outside, but I’d recovered from my earlier shivers. I’d given Adam back his coat, but I’d kept my own on. Tad only had a sweater on, but he didn’t look cold.

Tad and I had worked together for years. I felt no need to make conversation as I walked out to one of the picnic tables and put my plate on top of it.

Rather than use the bench, I climbed onto the table and sat cross-legged, facing the house. Tad sat on the other half of the table, facing the opposite direction—toward the gate to Underhill and also toward my old house, the one he was moving into in a couple of days.

Before I started eating, I took out my phone and looked up “snow in Africa.” Apparently the Atlas Mountains in Morocco regularly got dusted in snow. I switched to my weather app. It wouldn’t have Aspen Creek on it—or at least it hadn’t last time I checked. But Troy, Montana, was close. They had a winter storm warning until Saturday noon. The area expected high winds and snow accumulation up to eighteen inches in the next twenty-four hours, as much as three feet of snow in the mountains.

“You okay?” Tad asked.

“No,” I said. “Worried about a friend.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Nope,” I told him. “Me, neither.”

“That sucks,” he said.

“For sure.”

The pepper on the pizza wasn’t poblano but something a lot hotter, though it went with the acid-sweetness of the pineapple in a way I wouldn’t have predicted.

I looked up at the moon, which made a C shape, and smiled. A long time ago I’d sat on top of a picnic table while Samuel told me about the science of the moon’s phases. I’d told him that the way I could tell a waning moon was that it looked like a cookie monster had bitten into it and left a “C” in its place. I’d sung him the “C Is for Cookie” song. It was the first time he kissed me.