"Mercy?" called Adam, sounding a little desperatehow well I knew that feeling.
"Mom, leave him alone!" I said. "I'll be right out."
Frustrated, I stared at my room. I had to have a clean shirt somewhere. I had just been wearing onebut it had disappeared in my search for a bra. Finally, I pulled on a shirt that said 1984:GOVERNMENT FOR DUMMIES on the back. It was clean, or at least it didn't stink too badly. The oil smudge on the shoulder looked permanent.
I took a deep breath and opened the door. I had to duck around Adam, who was leaning against the door frame.
"Hey, Mom," I said breezily. "I see you've met my" What? Mate? I didn't think that was something my mother needed to hear. "I see you've met Adam."
"Mercedes Athena Thompson," snapped my mother. "Explain to me why I had to learn about what happened to you from a newspaper?"
I'd been avoiding meeting her gaze, but once she three-named me, I had no choice.
My mother is five-foot-nothing. She's only seventeen years older than me, which means she's not yet fifty and looks thirty. She can still wear the belt buckles she won barrel racing on their original belts. She's usually blondI'm pretty sure it's her natural colorbut the shade changes from year to year. This year it was strawberry gold. Her eyes are big and blue and innocent-looking, her nose slightly tip-tilted, and her mouth full and round.
With strangers, she sometimes plays a dumb blonde, batting her eyelashes and speaking in a breathy voice that anyone who watched old movies would recognize from Some Like It Hot or Bus Stop. My mother has never, to my knowledge, changed her own flat tire.
If the sharp anger in her voice hadn't been a cover for the bruised look in her eyes, I could have responded in kind. Instead, I shrugged.
"I don't know, Mom. After it happened I stayed coyote for a couple of days." I had a half-hysterical vision of calling her, and saying, "By the way, Mom, guess what happened to me today"
She looked me in the eyes, and I thought she saw more than I wanted her to. "Are you all right?"
I started to say yes, but a lifetime of living with creatures who could smell a lie had left me with a habit of honesty. "Mostly," I said, compromising. "It helps that he's dead." It was humiliating that my chest was getting tight. I'd given myself all the self-pity time I would allow.
Mom could cuddle her children like any of the best of parents, but I should have trusted her more. She knew all about the importance of standing on your own two feet. Her right hand was balled into a white-knuckled fist, but when she spoke, her voice was brisk.
"All right," she said, as if we'd covered everything she was going to ask. I knew better, but I also knew it would be later and private.
She turned her angelic blue eyes on Adam. "Who are you, and what are you doing in my daughter's house at eleven at night?"
"I'm not sixteen," I said in a voice even I could tell was sulky. "I can even have a man stay all night if I want to."
Mom and Adam both ignored me.
Adam had remained in position against my bedroom door frame, his body held a little more casually than usual. I thought he was trying to give my mother the impression that he was at home here: someone who had authority to keep her out of my room. He lifted an eyebrow and showed not even a touch of the panic I'd heard in his voice earlier. "I'm Adam Hauptman, I live on the other side of her back fence."
She scowled at him. "The Alpha? The divorced man with the teenage daughter?"
He gave her one of his sudden smiles, and I knew my mom had made yet another conquest: she's pretty cute when she scowls, and Adam didn't know many people gutsy enough to scowl at him. I had a sudden revelation. I'd been making a tactical error for the past few years if I'd really wanted him to quit flirting with me. I should have smiled and smirked and batted my eyelashes at him. Obviously, a woman snarling at him was something he enjoyed. He was too busy looking at my mom's scowl to see mine.
"That's right, ma'am." Adam quit leaning against the door and took a couple of steps into the room.
"Good to meet you at last, Margi. Mercy speaks of you often."
I didn't know what my mother would have said to that, doubtless something polite. But with a popping sound like eggs cracking on a cement floor, something appeared between Mom and Adam, a foot or so above the carpet. It was a human-sized something, black and crunchy. It dropped to the floor, reeking of char, old blood, and rotten corpses.
I stared at it for too long, my eyes failing to find a pattern that agreed with what my nose told me. Even knowing that only a few things could just appear in my living room without using the door couldn't make me acknowledge what it was. It was the green shirt, torn and stained, with the hindquarters of a familiar
Great Dane still visible, that forced me to admit that this black and shrunken thing was Stefan.
I dropped to my knees beside him and reached out before snatching my hand back, afraid to damage him more. He was obviously dead, but since he was a vampire, that wasn't as hopeless a thing as it might have been.
"Stefan?" I said.
I wasn't the only one who jumped when he grabbed my wrist. The skin on his hand was dry and crackled disconcertingly against my skin.
Stefan has been my friend since the first day I moved here to the Tri-Cities. He is charming, funny, and generousif given to miscalculations on how forgiving I might be about innocent people he killed trying to protect me.
It was still all I could do not to jerk away and rub off the feel of his brittle skin on my arm. Ick. Ick. Ick.
And I had the horrible feeling that it was hurting him to hold on to me, that at any moment his skin would crack and fall off.
His eyes opened to slits, his irises crimson instead of brown. His mouth opened and shut twice without making any sound. Then his hand tightened on mine until I couldn't have pulled free if I had wanted to.
He sucked in a breath of air so he could talk, but he couldn't do it quite right, and I heard air hissing out of the side of his ribs, where it had no business escaping from.
"She knows." His voice didn't sound like his at all. It was rough and dry. As he pulled my hand slowly toward his face, with the last of the air from that breath, he said intently, "Run." And with those words, the person who was my friend disappeared under the fierce hunger in his face.
Looking into his mad eyes, I thought his advice was worth takingtoo bad I wasn't going to be able to break free to follow it. He was slow, but he had me, and I wasn't a werewolf or vampire with supernatural strength to help myself out.
I heard the distinctive clack of a bullet chambering, and a quick glance showed me my mother with a wicked-looking Glock out and pointed at Stefan. It was pink and blacktrust my mom to have a Barbie gun, cute but deadly.
"It's all right," I told her hastilymy mother wouldn't hesitate to fire if she thought he was going to hurt me. Normally I wouldn't worry about someone shooting at Stefan, vampires not being that vulnerable to guns, but he was in bad shape. "He's on our side." Hard to sound convincing when he was pulling me toward him, but I did my best.
Adam grabbed Stefan's wrist and held it, so instead of Stefan pulling me toward him, the vampire was slowly raising his own head off the floor. As he came closer to my arm, Stefan opened his mouth and scraps of burnt skin fell on my tan carpet. His fangs were white and lethal-looking, and also a lot bigger than I remembered them being.
My breathing picked up, but I didn't jerk back and whine, "Get it off! Get it off!" full points to me.
Instead, I leaned over Stefan and put my head into Adam's shoulder. It put my neck at risk, but the smell of werewolf and Adam helped mask the stench of what had been done to Stefan. If Stefan needed blood to survive, I'd donate to him.
"It's all right, Adam," I said. "Let him go."
"Don't put down the gun," Adam told my mother. "Mercy, if this doesn't work, you call my house and tell Darryl to collect whoever is there and bring them here."
And, in an act of bravery that was completely in character, Adam put his wrist in front of Stefan's face.
The vampire didn't appear to notice, still pulling himself up by his grip on my arm. He wasn't breathing, so he couldn't scent Adam, and I didn't think he was focusing any too well either.
I should have tried to stop AdamI'd fed Stefan before without any ill effects that I knew of, and I was pretty sure that Stefan cared whether I lived or died. I wasn't so sure how he felt about Adam. But I was remembering Stefan telling me that there "shouldn't" be any problems because it had only been the once, and I'd met a few of Stefan's band of sheepthe people who served as his breakfast, dinner, and lunch. They were all completely devoted to him. Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy for a vampirebut I somehow doubted that those people, mostly women, could live together devoted to one man without some sort of vampire mesmerism at work. And I'd sort of had my fill of magical compulsion for the year.
Any protest I made to Adam would be an exercise in futility anyway. He was feeling especially protective of me at that momentand all I would do was stir up tempers, his, mine, and my mother's.
Adam pressed his wrist against Stefan's mouth, and the vampire paused his incremental closing of the distance between my arm and his fangs. He seemed confused for a momentthen he drew air in through his nose.
Stefan's teeth sank into Adam's wrist, his free hand shot up to grab Adam's arm, and his eyes closedall so fast it looked like the motion of a cheaply drawn cartoon.
Adam sucked in his breath, but I couldn't tell if it was because it hurt him or because it felt good. When Stefan had fed from me, I'd been in pretty rough shape. I didn't remember much about it.
It was strangely intimate, Stefan holding me as he drank from Adam's wrist, and Adam leaning harder into me as Stefan fed. Intimate with an audience. I turned my head to see that my mother still held her gun in a steady two-handed grip, pointed at Stefan's head. Her face as calm as if she saw burnt bodies appear out of nowhere, then rise from the dead to sink fangs into whoever was closest to them all the time, though I knew that wasn't true. I wasn't sure she'd ever even seen one of the werewolves in wolf form.
"Mom," I said, "the vampire is Stefan, he's a friend of mine."
"I should put the gun away? Are you sure? He doesn't look like a friend."
I looked at Stefan, who was looking better, though I still wouldn't have recognized him without my nose.
"Truthfully, I'm not sure how much good it would do anyway. Bullets, if they are silver, may work on werewolves, but I don't think any bullets do much to vampires."
She tucked the Glock, hot, into the holster inside the waistline of the back of her jeans. "So what do you do to vampires?"
Someone knocked on the door. I hadn't heard anyone drive up, but I'd been a little distracted.
"Don't let them in your home in the first place," suggested Adam.
Mom, who'd been on the way to the door, stopped. "Is this likely to be a vampire?"
"Better let me get it," I said. I wiggled my arm, and Stefan released me and took a better grip on Adam.
"Are you all right, Adam?"
"He's too weak to feed fast," Adam commented. "I'm good for a while yet. If you'll get my phone out for me and hit the speed dial, I'll call for some more wolves, though. I doubt one feeding will be enough."
With Mom watching, I behaved myself while I dug his phone out of the holder on his belt. Instead of taking the time to sort through his contacts, I just punched in his house number and handed him the ringing phone. Whoever was outside was growing impatient.
I straightened my shirt and took a quick look at myself to make sure there wasn't anything that said, "Hey, I have a vampire in my house."
I was going to have a bruise on my forearm, but it wasn't too noticeable yet. I slipped past Mom and opened the door about six inches.
The woman standing on the porch didn't look familiar. She was about my height and age. Her dark hair had been highlighted with a lighter shade (or her light brown hair had been striped with a darker color).
She wore so much foundation that I could smell it over the perfume that a purely human nose might find light and attractive. Her grooming was immaculate, like a purebred dog ready to be shownor a very expensive call girl.
Not a person you'd expect to find on the porch of an old mobile home out in the boonies of Eastern Washington at night.
"Mercy?"
If she hadn't spoken, I'd never have recognized her because my nose was full of perfume and she didn't look anything like the girl I'd gone to college with. "Amber?"
Amber had been my college roommate Charla's best friend. She'd been studying to be a veterinarian, but I'd heard she'd dropped out her first year in vet school. I hadn't heard from her since I'd graduated.
When I'd last seen Amber she'd been wearing a Mohawk and had had a ring in her nose (which had been bigger) and a small tattooed hummingbird at the corner of her eye. She and Charla had been best friends in high school. Though it had been Charla who had decided they shouldn't room together, Amber had always blamed me for it. We had been acquaintances rather than friends.
Amber laughed, doubtless at the bewildered look on my face. There was something brittle in the sound, not that I was in any position to be picky. My manner was stiffer than usual, too. I had a vampire feeding from a werewolf behind me; I wondered what she was hiding.
"It's been a long time," she said, after a short, awkward silence.
I joined her out on the porch and shut the door behind me, trying not to look like I was keeping her out.
"What brings you here?"
She folded her arms over her chest and turned to gaze at my scraggly-looking field where a rusty VW Rabbit rested on three tires. From where we stood, the graffiti, the missing door, and the cracked windshield weren't visible, but it looked junky anyway. The old wreck was a joke between Adam and me, and I wasn't going to apologize for it.
"I read about you in the paper," she said.
"You live in the Tri-Cities?"
She shook her head. "Spokane. It made CNN, too, didn't you know? The fae, werewolves, death how could they resist?" For a moment there was a flash of humor in her voice, though her face stayed disconcertingly blank.