River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)

River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6) Page 9

THE WATER WAS ICY AND CLOSED OVER MY HEAD, encasing me in silence and darkness. For a moment the shock of the fall, of the cold, and of sheer surprise froze my muscles, and I couldn't move. Then my feet hit the riverbed, and the motion somehow woke up every nerve into screaming urgency. I pushed off and up, coming to the surface and sucking in air.

I could hear him laughing.

Son of a bitch. I would kill him. I didn't care if he was Coyote or the son of Satan. He was a dead man walking.

I struck out for the swimming hole even though it meant fighting the river. But for the next mile downstream or so, the riverbank was cliff face, and I didn't want to stay in the river that long: there was a monster out here somewhere.

A toddler walking along the bank could have beat me, for all the forward progress I made. I was only a fair swimmer, strength without technique. It was enough to beat the slow flow of the Columbia, but not by much.

Two otter heads poked up beside me, and I growled at them. Somehow knowing they were fae made them less of a threat than real river otters though I expect the opposite was actually true. I was too busy fighting the river to worry about adjusting my beliefs in accordance to reality.

They disappeared under the water for a few minutes before one popped up again, watching my slow progress with cool appraisal.

"I'd swim faster if I were you," observed Coyote.

Rage fueled my strokes, and I finally made it around the bend and into the shallower, slower water. I swam until the water was waist-deep and staggered toward shore on my feet. Coyote waded in knee-deep and stopped to watch me.

"What did you find out?" he asked.

"That you are a jerk," I told him, my voice vibrating involuntarily with the chill. "What in--"

Something wrapped around my waist and jerked me off my feet, and my head was underwater again. I fought, digging my feet in deep, but it pulled me slowly back out toward the deeper water. I managed to get my face out of the river and gasped for breath. As soon as I got oxygen in my lungs, I screamed Adam's name with a volume that would have done credit to a B- movie actress in a horror film.

Coyote grabbed my wrists, then shifted his grip until his arms were wrapped around my torso. He began to pull me back toward shore, and the strands around my waist tightened until I couldn't breathe.

"Let's see what we caught," he murmured breathlessly in my ear. "It should be interesting."

I didn't hear Adam. He was just suddenly there, a shadow of fur and fang. He closed his mouth on something just below the surface of the water, and his weight on the thing that wrapped around me jerked Coyote and me off our feet and back down into the river. The too-tight bands released me, then Coyote grabbed my arm and hauled me up.

"Run," he said.

But I looked around for Adam. I wasn't leaving him in the river with the monster. The wolf bumped my hip, safe and sound, so I let Coyote pull me out of the river and ran with him as fast as I could up the bank to the steep ridge that separated the swimming beach from the rest of the campground, Adam keeping pace with us. Coyote kept us running about four long strides on the grass before turning around.

The river lay quiet and black, the surface hiding anything that lay beneath.

Beside me, Adam roared a challenge that would have done credit to a grizzly bear. Coyote joined in with a high-pitched cry that hurt my ears, his face exuberant and laughing.

Something wet and squishy rolled down my leg and fell on my bare foot. It looked like a chunk of limp fire hose, if that fire hose was made from the stuff they make gummy worms from and covered with short, silver hair that glittered in the moonlight. One end was all jagged, where Adam had severed it, and the other narrowed, then widened in a ball about the size of a softball.

Something else, neither wolf nor coyote, bellowed like an enraged bull. And the river devil revealed itself . . . herself, if I could believe Coyote. Up and up she rose, like a snake charmer's cobra. Though her body resembled a giant snake's, the overall impression I had was, as it had been looking at the petroglyph, of a Chinese dragon. A huge, ginormous, towering, and ticked-off Chinese dragon.

Her head could certainly have inspired the petroglyph. It was triangular like a fox's, with huge green eyes. Encircling her head at the base of her skull, like a ruff of snakes or petals of a flower, long tentacles twisted and writhed like a wave, not precisely in unison, but not independently, either.

On the very top of her head were two shiny black horns, twisted and rolled back, like a mountain sheep's. From the front, it looked very much like she had a pair of ears.

The full impact of her coloring was muted by the moonlight, and though I could see here and there a hint of green or gold, mostly she just looked silver and black.

She opened her mouth and let out a second angry roar. Unmuffled by the water, it dwarfed Adam's howl, just as her bulk dwarfed the three of us. But it wasn't the sound that scared me.

The front of her mouth was littered with long, spiky teeth--like the petroglyph's had been. Teeth designed to spear and hold her prey. Her back teeth were just as nasty. Not grinders but huge spade-shaped sawing teeth. Teeth that could slice off a man's foot, and she wouldn't even notice until she swallowed.

She threw herself at us, and her head landed with an impact that almost knocked me off my feet again. Tentacles stretched forward--

"The land is mine," said Coyote. "Here you do not reign. Not yet, and not ever." He stepped between us and her, long, saw-toothed knives suddenly in his hands. "Just you try it. Just you try it."

Head in the dirt, she jerked her tentacles back and screamed at him, a wicked, high-pitched sound, while she gave us an up-close and personal view of sharp teeth. Abruptly, she jerked her head back into the river, faster than such a large thing should have been able to move, and disappeared into water that roiled and drove great waves onto the shoreline.

Coyote turned to me. "That big."

I opened my mouth. I was cold and wet, my middle burned where the river devil had grabbed me--and I had nothing to say. He waited for me to find some words, then shrugged and walked down to the indentation she'd left on the ground about fifteen feet from us.

"About six feet from one side of her jaw to the other," he commented. "Nine feet from where her head started until the end of her nose. More or less."

Adam watched him with pinned ears, then sniffed me over carefully. When he was satisfied I wasn't too badly damaged, he grumbled at me.

"It wasn't my idea," I protested. "He threw me in."

The grumble turned into a full-throated growl, and Adam took a step toward Coyote, head lowered and muzzle displaying his generous- sized ivory teeth. I hadn't intended to send Adam after Coyote with my response. I hadn't had a chance to let Adam know just who we were dealing with, not that it would matter to him anyway. I caught Adam by the ruff on the back of his neck in a mute request for restraint.

"Simmer down, wolf," Coyote said absently, making the "wolf" sound like an insult. "I wouldn't have let the creature hurt her."

"Really?" I asked doubtfully. "What could you have done about it if she'd caught me a little faster?"

"Something," he said airily. "Look at all the information we've managed to gather. Hey, did you see those otters? I've never seen otters that look like that."

"They're fae," I said.

He grunted. "Never a good idea to plunk down introduced species without knowing what you're doing."

And he resumed pacing off distances, walking right out into the water. I couldn't have gone that close to the river right then even if my life depended upon it.

"Assuming," Coyote said, "that she strikes like a snake, we can estimate that she struck with half her body length." He held up a finger as if to forestall an imaginary protest. "Yes, I know that a third is probably more accurate, but I believe in erring on the side of caution. Surprising as that might be to some people."

He stopped knee-deep in the water and counted again on the way back to us. "That's not good," he muttered. "That's bigger than I remember. I suppose she might have grown--or my memory is faulty." He pursed his lips and frowned at the indented soil.

"Thirty-two feet from where I stopped to here," he said. "That means between sixty-four and ninety-six feet long. Pretty big."

His eyes traveled down my wet and bedraggled self and landed on the chunk of slimy fire hose at my feet.

"Hah!" he said, trotting over to me. "Good. I thought we might have lost that in the river." He reached down and picked up the piece of the river devil.

"I feel like I'm lost in an anime movie," I said, as Coyote picked the thing up. "One of the tentacle- monster ones." Most of them were X-rated and ended up with a lot of dead people.

Coyote rubbed the thing he held with his fingers, then pulled my shirt up with one hand, ignoring Adam's growl and my "Hey."

Sure enough, there was a swirl of damaged flesh all the way around my waist twice. I'd been afraid to look because these wounds seriously hurt. They looked like acid burns, I decided.

"Mmm," he said, dropping my cold, wet shirt back down over the burns--which didn't help, even though the cold should have worked as an anesthetic.

He took the tentacle in both hands and held it up, comparing it to me--and I saw what he had noticed. The chunk he held was about two feet long and it had wrapped twice around my waist.

"Must be elastic." He started with two fists together and pulled it until he had both arms outstretched. "Yes. Stretchy, all right. What else do we need to know?"

He pulled a knife out of the pocket of his jeans --a smaller, less-threatening knife than the ones he'd pulled on the monster. "Werewolf teeth evidently are sharp enough to make an impression," he murmured. "But steel?" The blade bounced off the rubbery, gummy thing.

"Here," he said. "You hold this end on the ground here." And he grabbed my hand and had me kneel and hold one end of the tentacle while he stretched it out. With tension and the solid earth beneath it, he managed to stick the end of the knife through the flesh.

"Okay. Steel isn't a good weapon," he said. "Good to know."

The small knife went away to be replaced by one of the larger jaggedy knives. Like Gordon's, the knife was obsidian. It wasn't as big as I'd first thought, but it wasn't small, either. It sliced into the tough skin just fine.

"Ah," he said. "Inconvenient because these things are a pain, and they break. But at least they still work."

He looked at me. "How are your hands?"

I looked down at them. "Cold. Wet. Fine?" He grunted and stood up, tucking the piece of tentacle into his belt. "As I thought. Whatever makes that burn stopped as soon as Adam bit through it--otherwise, he'd be feeling it by now. Means it's magic rather than poison or acid or something. Good for you and Adam, bad for us, I'm afraid."

"Why?" Adam let me use him to lever myself to my feet. His ears were pinned back, and he'd kept his eyes on Coyote in a way that made me a little nervous.

"Because I can do this." Coyote pulled my shirt up and set one hand against my bare stomach.

Icy chill spread from his hands--and the burns disappeared, leaving only my pawprint tattoo. He bent down to take a good look at my midriff and grinned at me. "Coyote. Cool tattoo."

"It's a wolf pawprint," I said coolly, jerking my shirt down over it.

"Still mad about the unexpected swim, huh?" he said, whining a little, a noise that would have been more at home coming from a canine throat. "All in the name of information."

"So why is the magic component bad for us?" I asked.

He looked at me like I was an idiot. "Because we have a sixty-four- to ninety-six-foot monster to kill --and it uses magic."

I had a thought. "Can you fix Hank like this?" He shook his head. "No. He's not one of mine. But I know someone who can. We're going to need help here, kids."

He pursed his lips and tapped his toes impatiently. "I know. We need Jim Alvin and his sidekick, that Calvin kid, to meet us at the Stonehenge at midnight tomorrow. Tell him to bring Hank. I'll tell him what he needs to do, but he's not going to believe in me. Sad that a medicine man will believe in werewolves, ghosts, and vampires and won't believe in Coyote, but that's what it is these days."

"I don't have his number."

"Where's your cell phone?"

"In the trailer."

He grabbed my hand and pulled a felt-tipped pen out of an empty pocket and wrote a phone number on my hand. "Here. Call him in the morning. If you don't, he'll think I'm just a dream."

He patted me on the head, ignoring Adam's low growl. "Go in and get warmed up." He wiggled his eyebrows at Adam. "I bet you know how to warm her up, eh?"

Adam had very nice big white teeth, and he showed most of them to Coyote.

Coyote veiled his eyes and showed his teeth in return. "Go ahead. Just try it. You're out of your league."

I touched Adam's nose and frowned at Coyote. "You stop baiting him--or I'll call my mom."

Coyote froze, his face blank, and I almost felt bad--except that he'd been threatening Adam. After a moment, he inhaled.

"I'll see you at Stonehenge," he said, and walked off without a look back.

We were most of the way to the trailer when I saw what Adam had done.

"Wow," I said.

A rocket bursting out of the window wouldn't have done more damage. The window and its frame were toast, and a little of the outside skin had been bent up.

At least all the glass was on the outside. "Be careful you don't step on the shrapnel," I told him, taking the long way around the trailer to keep him away from it. My tennis shoes might be wet, but they were proof against a few shards of glass.

In the trailer, I stripped out of my wet clothes and put them in the sack with the bloody clothes from earlier.

"I'm going to need clothes," I said, sorting through my suitcase. When I looked over, Adam had started to shift back to human, so I grabbed clean underwear and a T-shirt and gave him some room.

After I dressed, I found a towel big enough to cover the broken window frame and taped it up using some of the first-aid tape from the kits because I couldn't find any duct tape. I keep a couple of rolls of duct tape in all of my cars. The first-aid tape wasn't the wussy kind, though. This was the stuff that needed WD-40 to get off skin once it was taped down. I hoped the repair people would be able to get it off without damaging the trailer further.

If this kept up, I thought, noticing where a spot of blood had dropped on the carpet--it could have come from any number of things in the past forty-eight hours--we might just be buying a trailer soon. While I was staring at the stain, Adam spoke.

"You could have died." His voice was rough from the change.

"So could you have when Hank shot you," I said, trying not to sound defensive when he hadn't yelled at me. Yet. Adam wasn't the only one who had to learn not to get mad about something that hadn't happened.

He wasn't completely human yet. He knelt on the carpeted floor on the far side of the trailer, his head bowed as he waited for the last of the change.

Even when he was finished, he stayed there, his back to me. "I cannot . . ." he began, then tried again. "When I heard you scream, I thought I'd be too late."

"You came," I told him in a low voice. "You came, and I am fine. When you were shot, I would have killed the man who took your life and not cared. Not even knowing it was not his fault would have made me feel bad about it." I took a deep breath. "And when I knew you'd be okay, I wanted to yell at you for not moving faster, for not being invincible."

"What in hell were you doing in that river?" He still wasn't looking at me, and his voice had dropped even further.

"Trying to get out of it as fast as I could," I assured him fervently. I could feel his emotion, a huge tangle I couldn't decipher except to sense the atavistic power of it. "Adam, I can't promise not to get into trouble. I managed it for most of my life, but these last couple of years have more than made up for it. Trouble seems to follow me around, waiting to club me with a tire iron. But I'm not stupid."

He nodded. "Okay. Okay. I can deal with not stupid." But he still didn't turn around. And then he added in a quiet voice, "Or I hope so."

After a moment, he said, "I was not tracking straight through most of this. That was Coyote? The Coyote?"

"That's what he said--and I'm inclined to believe him." I paused. "It also appears that he is . . . or some aspect of him was . . . my father. It was complicated. I understood it, mostly, but I had to think a little sideways to do it."

Adam laughed. It wasn't a big laugh, but it was a real one. "I bet."

Adam was trying to come down from the wolf's anger. I tried to find something to say that didn't hurt me and wouldn't make him mad.

"I guess Coyote playing at being human is why I am a walker, even though Mom's not Indian," I said.

"Your father's not dead," he said. "Your mom is going to be . . ."

"Yeah," I agreed, clearing my throat and trying to sound casual. My father wasn't dead--and he was. Had I really even had a father? Better to think about my mother.

"As much as I have this pressing urge to get back at Mom for orchestrating our wedding without consulting me, I can't do that to her," I said, looking at my bare feet. They'd been inside the wet shoes long enough to gain that wrinkled look and corpselike color. "She really loved Joe Old Coyote and . . . Curt is wonderful. But Joe, he rescued her, he treasured her."

I thought of Coyote's voice as he talked about my mother, and added, "I'm not sure that Curt could compete with the man she remembers-- maybe even Joe couldn't. And Joe is dead, really dead." I cleared my throat. "He wasn't really Coyote, just a suit Coyote wore for a while. Real to himself and everyone around him, but in the end he was a construct, and Coyote . . . Mom would figure it out eventually. But by the time she did, Curt might not be waiting around."

Adam stood up then and came over to me. He put both arms around me. He didn't say anything, just held me.

"My life used to be normal," I told his shoulder. "I got up. Went to work. Fixed a few cars, paid a few bills, and no one tried to kill me. My father was dead; my mother was six hours away by car--I could even manage to make that trip last eight or nine hours if I worked at it."

"Argued with your back-fence neighbor," Adam said, his voice very gentle.

"And watched him when he wasn't looking," I agreed. "Because every once in a while, especially after a full moon hunt, he'd forget that I could see in the dark, and he'd run around naked in the backyard."

He laughed silently. "I never forgot you could see in the dark," he admitted.

"Oh." I thought about it for a while. "That's pretty good. Not quite up to my slowly eroding Rabbit, but you get points for that."

Adam was a neat and tidy person, the kind of man who walks into a room and straightens the paintings. For years I used the junker car in my backyard to exact revenge for high-handed orders I had to follow. Had to follow because they weren't just high-handed--they were smart. When I was particularly annoyed, I'd remove tires-- never all four--and leave the trunk open or one of the doors, just to bother him.

He, evidently, had run around naked to bother me. I thought about that a moment more.

"Thank you for the years of entertainment," I said.

"No trouble," he responded in a serious voice. "Now that we're married, are you finally going to do something with that car? Like tow it away or store it somewhere out of sight?"

I took a deep breath--and my lungs seemed to be working just fine with the awful my-father-who- wasn't-my father lump in my stomach gone.

"I'll think about it," I told him. "Maybe you should put it on your What I Want for Christmas List?"

"You okay now?" he asked.

"Okay."

He tightened his arms and lifted me off my feet. "Mercy?" he growled into my ear.

I wrapped my legs around his waist. "Yeah," I said. "Me, too."

Adam could have died last night. I could have died twenty minutes ago. I wasn't willing to waste a moment more.

At some point in the night he kissed my pawprint tattoo and laughed. "Did you really tell Coyote this was a wolf print?"

"To you, it is a coyote print," I said firmly. "For him, it is a wolf print. Only I and my tattoo artist know for sure."

I WOKE IN THE MORNING TO THE SOUND OF ADAM'S stomach growling under my ear.

"Sorry," he said. "Too many changes and not enough food."

I patted his hard belly and kissed it. "Poor thing," I told it. "Doesn't Adam treat you right? No worries. I'll go feed you."

My head bounced when Adam laughed.

"Let's go find someplace to eat breakfast and get some groceries." And then he proved that even when he was distracted, he still listened to me. "And some clothes for you."

WHILE I WAS DRESSING, I NOTICED THE NUMBER WRITTEN on the palm of my hand and remembered I was supposed to make a phone call.

"Yes?" Jim's voice was wary.

"Coyote told me to call you," I told him. "He said that you wouldn't believe that he was real unless I did."

The man on the other side of the phone didn't even breathe.

Adam grinned at me as he buttoned up his shirt.

"How is your husband?" Jim asked politely.

"He's fine." Even the red mark was gone. How fast a wound healed varied from wolf to wolf and wound to wound. As Alpha, Adam tended to heal even faster than most. I'd expected that to change since we were so far from the pack, but evidently it hadn't.

"How are Hank's head and Benny's foot?" I asked.

"Hank is okay. Once we got him away from you, he seemed to recover a bit. Though he has a concussion, it's not a bad one." He cleared his throat. "Fred told the doctor Hank took a fall. The doctor seemed to think it might involve a pipe or tire iron, but Hank told him it was a fall, too. Fred is keeping an eye on him. Benny has been tranquilized ever since he tried to get up and leave the second time. He seems perfectly happy."

"So we're meeting you at Stonehenge? Coyote seemed pretty sure something could be done for Hank."

"You are very casual about meeting Coyote," he said. "Maybe we both just had a dream."

"You're the medicine man," I told him. "You should know better than that--and be casual, too." Maybe that wasn't fair. "Eventually, anyway. I'm married to a werewolf, and I've met Baba Yaga. At least Coyote doesn't fly around in a giant mortar."

"Baba Yaga? No. I don't want to know." Jim sighed. "Maybe I should go back to teaching school about crazy people instead of being one. Yes. I'll see you and your husband at Stonehenge at midnight. The memorial is supposed to be closed after dark, but I have a few contacts. Indian sacred ceremonies usually works, but I have a few more tricks up my sleeve if I need them."

ADAM DIDN'T APPROVE OF WAL-MART.

"There is a department store back in The Dalles," he said with a touch of grimness as we walked through the doors into the warehouselike building.

"Do they still call them department stores?" I wondered aloud, then shrugged it off. "Doesn't matter. Wal-Mart is the Happy Shopping Grounds for the financially challenged. And those who ruin clothing on a daily basis. I don't care about ripping up five-dollar T-shirts. And destroying twenty-dollar jeans hurts less than eighty-dollar jeans."

He growled, and I really looked at him.

The bright lights over our heads flickered and gave his skin a slightly green cast. That was the fault of the cheap bulbs, but the tension in his neck and the hunted expression were different. Too many strangers, too many smells, way too many sounds. A paranoid person--or an Alpha wolf--might feel like he couldn't make sure no one blindsided him in a place like Wal-Mart.

"Hey," I said, coming to a stop. "How about I shop here, and you head over to the grocery store and grab some food. I'll shop in peace, and you can pick me up in forty-five minutes?"

He shook his head. "I'm not leaving you here alone."

"The only thing that wants to kill me is in the river," I told him, trying to keep my voice down, but the woman pushing a cart past us gave me an odd look. "I've been shopping at Wal-Marts for most of my life, and I've never been assaulted in one." I narrowed my gaze at him though I kept it focused on his chin. "As long as it's not demons, fae, or sea monsters, I can also take care of myself pretty well. I'm not helpless." And suddenly it mattered very much that he not treat me like some ninny who needed to be protected at all times, someone who would stand around waiting to be rescued.

He saw it in my face, I think, because he took a deep breath and looked around. "Okay. Okay."

I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek. "Thank you."

He kissed me back. Not on the cheek. By the time I'd recovered enough to process information, he was striding out the door, and everyone in view was staring at me.

I flushed. "We just got married," I announced, then felt even stupider, so I hurried to escape in the aisles.

The Wal-Mart in Hood River wasn't as big as any of the three in the Tri-Cities. But it had jeans and shirts, and that was all I was worried about.

I grabbed four dark-colored T-shirts and three pairs of jeans in the proper size and headed for the dressing rooms. I didn't need to try on the T- shirts, but I never buy jeans without putting them on first. It doesn't matter what size they say they are--some of them are shaped differently than others.

The lady working the dressing rooms gave me a bored look, handed me a plastic "6" and a "1," and sent me in. Apparently, they were out of "7"s.

The only other occupant of the rooms was a harried mother and her teenage daughter arguing about how tight the girl's jeans were. They stood in the larger area in the center of two rows of small rooms in front of the big mirror.

"They are fine, Mom," the girl said in the long- suffering tones used by put-upon teens everywhere, probably back to the dawn of time.

"You'll sit down and the seat will split, just like happened to your aunt Sherry when we were in high school. She has never gotten over it."

"Aunt Sherry is a . . . Well, anyway, I am not Aunt Sherry. These are mostly Lycra, Mom. They're supposed to fit tight. Look."

I squeezed past the girl, who was doing deep knee bends.

I found an empty room, then tuned them out. I don't know about normal folks, but if I wanted to, I could have listened in on the conversations of everyone in the store. I'd had to learn early to ignore them or I'd have gone crazy. Adam paid attention to all that noise because he worried about safety, but I wasn't worried enough to put up with the discomfort.

The first pair of jeans had a puzzling bulge halfway down my thigh on the left leg. I tried turning around to see if it was just my imagination, but the left-leg bulge stayed where it was.

The teenager and her mother had left the changing rooms when I went out to look in the bigger mirror, so I had the whole thing to myself. Unless I'd mysteriously gained a lump on the side of my thigh, there was a problem with these jeans.

I went back into my room and pulled them off. Then I checked in the smaller mirror to make sure that I hadn't suddenly mutated. To my relief, without the jeans, my thighs looked like a matched pair. The river mark was still curled around my calf--I'd have to remember to ask Coyote if he could get rid of that one, too.

The second fit better, no odd bulges, and my butt didn't look bigger than it ought to in them-- but it had fake pockets on the front. I use my pockets. No-pocket jeans are only slightly less irritating than thong underwear.

The third pair didn't fit as well as the second one had, but they had pockets that worked. I could live with them. If they bothered me too much, I'd just wear them to work until they were ripped and greasy enough I didn't feel bad throwing them away.

I had fifteen minutes to pay and get out to the parking lot. I hung up the rejects and pulled my own pants on. I buttoned them just as something dropped onto my shoulders, knocking me to my knees. I caught a glimpse of a blade in the mirror and grabbed the hand that held it even as I fell.

I jerked my head back hard and pulled the hand forward at the same time--connecting with some body part that was also hard, a chin, I thought, though I couldn't be sure. Her chin, because it was a woman's body that had hit me. I slammed her wrist on the wooden bench along the back wall, and the brass-bladed knife fell out of her hand.

I dropped my hold on her, grabbed the knife, and tossed it back up through the hole in the ceiling she'd come from: I didn't want to be caught with a knife in Wal-Mart. I was the wife of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack--knife fighting was not an acceptable activity. If she tried to crawl back up there and get it, I'd use the time to run out to the main store, where cameras could catch me defending myself against an armed foe.

"You leave her be," she said. "Finders, keepers. She belongs to us."

The river devil? I thought, but I had no chance to ask her.

She ignored the knife and threw herself at me. I let her momentum pull me to my feet and carry us into the larger area between the changing rooms. The big mirror showed me her face--it was the odd woman who'd been staring at Adam and me the day before yesterday at the restaurant. I'd been right. She had been fae--more specifically water-type fae, because she smelled of it. Dollars to doughnuts, she was one of the otterkin.

She fought like an otter, too. Coming in close-- inner circle--fast and furious, trying for my throat with fingernails and teeth. Fortunately for me, we were not in the water, and she was not an otter but a fae--though she smelled like both.

Glamour has never made sense to me. It is a kind of magic the fae use to change their appearance. According to Zee, the ability to use glamour is what makes a fae a fae instead of some other kind of thing that uses magic. Glamour is an illusion--but not. Because with glamour, a twenty- five-pound otter is a hundred-and-forty-pound woman.

Tactics that work really well for an otter don't work as well for a human, not even a human with a knife--particularly since I have a brown belt in karate. I was not helpless. The thought that Adam would never again let me out without a keeper if I got hurt made me determined to win this fight.

In the couple of minutes we engaged, I ended up with a bunch of bruises--including what was going to be an awesome shiner from where she ran me into a doorknob--a split lip, and a bloody nose. On the other hand, I broke her nose, and while she grabbed it, I got a really good kick into her ribs. If she didn't have a broken rib out of it, she had one or two cracked ones, which should slow her down some.

I heard the footsteps behind me and the flushed face of the formerly bored changing-room lady appeared. At the sight of us, she exclaimed, "What's going on here?"

The otterkin woman screamed--not in terror but in anger. Then she turned into an otter and ran up the wall into the ceiling and was gone.

As the fae woman's scent faded from here to was here, I turned to the clerk. Her mouth was opened unattractively as she stared up at the ceiling.

"You don't get paid enough to deal with this," I told her firmly. I didn't borrow authority from Adam for fear that it would worry him, but I know how it sounds and can imitate it when I have to.

"She's gone and won't be back." I looked around, and except for a dent in the drywall where her knee had hit the wall, there wasn't any extra damage. There was blood all over, but I was betting that Wal-Mart had cleaners to get all sorts of things out of their carpets.

I grabbed the jeans I wanted as well as the T- shirts. I put the darkest T-shirt up to wipe my nose. It hadn't been a hard hit, and it had mostly stopped bleeding. "I'll just go pay for this," I said. "You can put those other jeans back where they go, then call someone in to clean up."

I walked out like I knew what I was doing and paid for the clothes--with cash so there was no awkward name-left-behind-at-the-scene-of-the- crime thing. The clerk was too occupied looking at my split lip to notice that one of the shirts was bloody. As I took the receipt, I noticed a general migration toward the changing room on the part of the employees. At least one of them looked old enough to be a person of authority.

I smiled at the clerk and tried to look innocent, grab my bags, and make a quick getaway.

"Honey," said the cashier, who was half my age. "You get rid of that man. You don't have to put up with being a punching bag."

"It was a woman," I told her. "And you are absolutely right."

I walked briskly out of the store and kept going across the parking lot as I called Adam. "I saw a sandwich shop in the little mall above Wal-Mart," I told him. "I'll meet you there."

"It's a little early for lunch," he said. We'd eaten breakfast just before he'd dropped me off at Wal- Mart.

"You're a wolf," I informed him. "You can eat anytime."

"What did you do?" I heard a siren and hoped that it wasn't someone coming looking for me. I made my brisk walk a little brisker. "Got in a fight with my girlfriend, apparently." I hung up before he could ask me anything else.

The nice lady at the sandwich shop had been happy to fill a plastic bag with ice and accepted my story about a jealous girlfriend with a sympathetic ear (I kept my wedding ring hidden). She made me two large chicken sandwiches, and I paid for them and a pair of juices.

When Adam drove up, I was watching the police cars at Wal-Mart--it must have been a slow day-- with the ice bag wrapped in my new bloodstained black T-shirt. Bloodstains on a new black shirt were more a matter of texture and smell than color.

"I think we ought to go back to the camp," I told him.

He pulled the ice down from my eye and took a good look before he let me put it back up again. Then he examined my hands, and brought my free hand up to his lips so he could kiss the bruises. He led me to the truck and buckled me in.

It was a good thing that there weren't many cars in the parking lot, or he'd never have gotten the big truck back out of it. I never had that problem with my Rabbit.

He didn't say anything, just drove the quarter of a mile toward the highway on-ramp in silence. I made it mostly to The Dalles before I broke.

"I didn't know anyone wanted to kill me when I made you leave me alone."

"I smelled fae," he said neutrally--the sneak. That was why he'd kissed my knuckles.

"She jumped me in the changing room," I told him reluctantly. I'd known after the doorknob hit my eye that I wasn't going to be able to hide the fight from Adam. Not that I'd really been planning on keeping the attack secret; it had just been an option I'd wanted to keep open if I could. "I think it was one of the otterkin--and she was the weird lady from lunch the day before yesterday."

"Did you leave the body?" he asked.

"No body," I told him. "I wasn't trying to kill her. And once I got rid of the knife, I was pretty sure she couldn't kill me. She wasn't any stronger than a normal human." I thought a moment. "I don't think so, anyway. As soon as the clerk came in, she glamoured back to otterkin and left through the ceiling. She might have used magic to get up there, but otters are pretty agile."

He squeezed his nose. Then he laughed. "I guess you proved your point," he told me. "You can take care of yourself."

"I wonder why the otterkin are trying to kill me?" I said.

"I don't think that we'll call in the fae to help us against the river devil," said Adam. "I think the chances are that they may come down on the wrong side."

"You were thinking of asking the fae for help?" I squeaked. Help was even worse than a favor.

He gave me an exasperated look. "I said I wasn't."

"It sounded like you might have been before I was attacked."

"You're trying to distract me," he said. "You don't need to. I'm not going to yell at you because you were attacked--especially since you won the fight."

"She ran away," I said.

"Without accomplishing her purpose. That's losing in my book. Especially since you got rid of her knife before she stuck it in you."

I gave him a wary look, but he honestly didn't appear upset.

"Mercy," he said, "in a fair fight between near equals, I'll back you every time. It's the demons, vampires, and river devils I worry about, and I'm working on that."

I could live with that if he could.