He nodded. "I stopped by his house before I came home. Much good as I did. Mostly I help people before they die. I'm not so helpful afterward."
"So what do you think?"
He shrugged. "He's doing whatever it is that vampires do during the day. Not sleeping, but something close to it. I expect he'll rest tonight and through tomorrow day. Which is what anyone of common sense would tell youand so Adam said. He declared me tired and useless, then sent me back over here to keep an eye on you in case Marsilia decides to try something else."
"'Tired and useless, " I said in mock sympathy. "And even that didn't get you out of a job."
He grinned. "Adam seems to think you've declared yourself his. But, given his record of doing that without consulting you, I thought I'd ask you myself."
I raised my hands in helpless surrender. "What can I say. My mother thinks he's hot. I have no choice but to take him. Besides, it's a terrible thing to see a man crawling begging."
He laughed. "I bet. Go to bed, Mercy. Morning comes early." He started down the hallway to his bedroom, then turned, walking backward. "I'm going to tell Adam that you said he begged you."
I raised an eyebrow. "Then I'll tell him that you accused him of lying."
He laughed. "Good night, Mercy."
I'd taken Adam for mine, chosen with my eyes and heart open. But Samuel's laugh still made me smile. I loved Samuel, too.
He worried me. Sometimes he seemed just like the old Samuel, funny and lighthearted. But I was pretty sure that a lot of the time he was just going through the motions, like an actor given a cue"Enter downstage left and smile happily."
He'd come here, to stay with me, to try to get betterwhich was a good sign, like an alcoholic who goes to his first A.A. meeting. But I wasn't sure if being here was helping him or not. He was old. Older than I'd known when I'd grown up in his father's pack. And though werewolves don't die of old age the
way humans do, it can kill them just as effectively.
Maybe if I could have loved Samuel differently. Maybe if Adam hadn't been there. If I had taken Samuel as my mate as he'd wanted me to when he'd moved himself into my home, maybe it would have fixed him.
He frowned at me. "What's wrong?"
But you can't marry someone to fix him, even if you love them. And I didn't love Samuel the way a woman should love her mate, the way I loved Adam. Samuel didn't love me that way either. Close, but not quite. And except in horseshoes and hand grenades, close doesn't count.
"I love you, you know," I told him.
His face went blank for a moment. He said, "Yes. I do know." His pupils contracted, and his gray eyes lightened to icy winter. Then he smiled, a sweet, warm thing. "I love you, too."
I went to bed with the distinct feeling that, this time, close might really be just enough to do the trick.
SAMUEL WAS RIGHTMORNING DID COME TOO EARLY I yawned as I turned my van onto the street where my shop wasand stopped dead in the middle of the road, all thoughts of sleep gone.
Someone had taken spray paint and had fun last night all over my place of business.
I took it all in, then drove slowly into the parking lot and parked next to Zee's old truck. He came out of the office and walked up to me as I got out and shut the van's door, a tallish, thinnish, graying man. He looked like he was in his late fifties or early sixties, but he was a lot older than that: never judge one of the fae by their outward appearance.
"Wow," I said. "You've got to admire their dedication. They must have been here for hours."
"And no one drove by?" Zee snapped. "No one called the polizei?"
"Umm, probably not. There's not a lot of traffic here at night." Reading the graffiti made me realize that there were themes and insights to be gained from the canvas that someone had made of my garage.
Green Paint, I was almost sure, was a young man whose thought patterns paralleled Ben's if the words he used were any indication.
"Look, he misspelled whore. I wonder if he did it on purpose? He spelled it right on the front window. I wonder which one he did first?"
"I have called your police friend Tony," Zee said, so angry his teeth clicked together as he spoke. "He was sleeping, but he will be here in a half hour." He might have been upset on my account, but mostly, I thought, it was the state of the garage. It had been his business long before I bought it from him. Last week I'd have been angry, too. But so much had happened since then that this ranked pretty low on my list of worries.
Red Paint had a more pressing agenda than Green Paint. Red had painted only two words: liar and murderer, over and over. Adam had installed security cameras so we'd know for sure, but I was betting Red Paint was Tim's cousin Courtney. Tim had killed his best friend before he attacked me, and there just weren't all that many people left who'd have gotten this worked up over his death.
I could hear a car approaching. An hour later, when traffic started to build up with people headed to work, I wouldn't have noticed. But it was quiet this early in the morning, so I heard my mother's approach.
"Zee," I said urgently. "Is there any way you could hide this" I waved my hands at the shop"for a few minutes?"
I didn't know much about what he could and couldn't dooutside of fixing cars and playing with metal, he didn't use magic much in front of me. But I'd seen his real face once, so I knew his personal glamour was good. If he could mask his face, surely he could hide a bunch of green and red paint.
He frowned at me in deep displeasure. You didn't ask for favors from the faenot only was it dangerous, but they tended to take offense. Zee might love me, might owe me for freeing him from a tight spot, but that would only take me so far.
"My mother is coming," I told him. "The vampires are after me, and I have to get her to leave. She won't do it if she knows I'm in danger." Then, because I was desperate, I played dirty. "Not after what happened with Tim."
His face stilled. Then he grabbed my wrist and pulled me with him so we were both standing closer to the garage.
He put his hand on the wall next to the door. "If it works, I won't be able to remove my hand without breaking the spell."
When Mom turned the corner, the graffiti was gone.
"You're the best," I told him.
"Make her leave soon," he said with a grimace. "This is not my sort of magic."
I nodded and had started to walk to where Mom was parking her car when I saw the door clearly.
Covered by red and green paint, it hadn't been as noticeable. Someone with some artistic skill had painted an X on the door. In case I didn't get the right idea, instead of two mere lines, the shape was formed by two bones. They were ivory with grayish shadows and just a faint blush of pinknot painted by a couple of self-righteous and irate kids with spray paint. All it was missing to keep it from Jolly Rogerhood was a skull.
"You'd better hide that," Zee said. "Magic won't."
I put my back against the door and folded my arms.
"So why don't you think it's running right?" I asked him as my mother walked over from her car, with Hotep on a leash.
"Because it is old," Zee told me, taking the cue I had given him. "Because it was not well designed in the first place. Because air-cooled engines need constant tinkering."
"I wasHey, Mom."
"Margaret," Zee said coolly.
"Mr. Adelbertsmiter." My mom didn't like Zee. She blamed him for my decision to stay in the Tri-Cities and fix cars instead of finding a teaching job, something much more in line with the kind of work she thought I should be doing. Politeness done, she turned back to me. "I thought I'd stop by before heading home." She couldn't get too close though, because as soon as he caught my scent, Hotep growled and lowered his head aggressively: protecting my mom from the bad coyote.
"I'll be fine," I told her, curling my lip at the Doberman. I actually like dogs, but not this one. "Give my love to Curt and the girls."
"Don't forget to work things out so you can come to Nan's wedding." Nan was my younger half sister, and she was getting married in six weeks. Luckily, I wasn't part of the wedding party, so all I had to do was sit and watch.
"I have it on the calendar," I promised. "Zee's going to take care of the shop for me."
She glanced at him, then back at me. "Fine, then." She started to give me a hug, then gave Hotep a rueful look. "You need to teach him to behave like you did Ringo."
"Ringo was a poodle, Mom. A fight between Hotep and me wouldn't end well for either of us. It's all right. Not his fault."
She sighed. "All right. You take care of yourself."
"Love you. Drive carefully," I told her.
"I always do. Love you."
Zee was sweating by the time the car was out of sight. He took his hand off the building and the paint returned. "I didn't do it for you," he grouched. "I just didn't want her hanging around longer than necessary."
We both stepped away from the door to look at the painting that was now mostly covered by a big, fat-lettered red "LIAR." The paint of the crossed bones was thicker than the spray paint, so even though I couldn't see most of the color, I could see the outline of it.
"The vampires dropped Stefan in my living room last night," I told him. "He was in pretty rough shape.
Peter one of Adam's wolves, thinks whoever did it was hoping Stefan would attack me and we'd both be out of the way. Stefan wasn't in any shape to talk much, but what he did manage to convey was that Marsilia found out I killed Andre."
Zee traced his fingers over the bones and shook his head. "This might be vampire work. But, Mercy, you've been putting your little nose so many places it doesn't belong; it could almost be anyone. I'll talk to Uncle Mikebut I expect your best bet for information about it is Stefan, because it doesn't feel like fae magic. How badly is Stefan hurt?"
"If he were a werewolf, I think he'd be dead. You think this is magic?" It felt like that to me, but I was hoping I was wrong.
Zee frowned. "For an evil bloodsucker, he's not a bad sort." High praise from Zee. "And yes, there is magic here, but nothing I'm familiar with."
"Samuel thinks Stefan will be all right."
Tony turned the corner in his unmarked car, which was discreetly police modified with extra mirrors, a few extra antennae, and a bar of lights along the back window, hidden from the casual eye by extra-dark glass. He slowed when he caught sight of the damage. He pulled up next to us and opened the door.
"You decorating for Christmas early, Mercy?" Tony could blend in even better than I did. Today he looked like a Hispanic cop like the poster child for Hispanic cops, handsome and clean-cut. When he was playing drug dealer, he did it better than the real thing. I'd first met him playing a homeless man.
There was nothing magic or supernatural about him, but the man was a chameleon.
I glanced at the building again. He was right. If you didn't pay any attention to the words, it had a sort of Christmasy look to it. The green paint tended to be short top to bottom but long front side to side. The red paint was fat and closed up. It looked sort of like garlands with red balls hanging down.
There was even "Ho, ho, ho," if you skipped around a little and deleted an «e» on the last "ho." Our green painter had a limited vocabulary and occasionally mixed up a professional working woman with a garden implement.
"Not really Christmasy thoughts," I told Tony. "But the colors are right. Actually, if the white wasn't so dingy, it would almost look festivelike that little Mexican restaurant in Pascothe one with the really hot salsa." The fresh colors made the original paint job look tired.
"Your boyfriend still got surveillance video going?"
"Yes, but I don't know how to run it."
"I do," said Zee. "Let's go take a look."
I glanced at him. Vampires, remember? We don't want the nice human cops to see the vampires.
He gave me a bland look that clearly said, If the vampires were clumsy enough to get caught by thecameras, that was their problem. I couldn't object out loud, but if the vampires made themselves obvious, it would be Tony who was in danger.
Well, I thought as I led the way into the office, at least vampires looked like everyone else. As long as they didn't display their fangs for the cameraor throw a car aroundit was unlikely they'd be spotted for what they were. And if it was obvious Tony wasn't stupid. He knew a lot about how the fae and the werewolves worked, and I knew he suspected that there were a lot more nasties still keeping quiet about themselves.
While Zee played with the electronics, Tony looked at me.
"How are you?" He smelled of worry, with a little of the metallic scent of protective anger.
"Really tired of answering that question," I replied blandly. "How about you?"
He flashed his pearly whites at me. "Good for you. Do you think Bright Future did this?"
If our minds kept working this much in sync, I'd pity poor Tony.
"Sort of. I think this is Tim's cousin's work," I told him. "She's a member of Bright Future, but she didn't do this under their banner. Everything was directed at menot the fae."
"You want to press charges?"
I sighed. "I'll call my insurance company. I'm afraid they might force me to press charges in order to be reimbursed. I can't afford to hire someone to repaint it unless I use my insurance, and I can't take the time off work to repaint it myself." I still had other things to pay forthe damage a fae who wanted to eat me had done to Adam's house and car, for instance. And Zee had told me he was collecting the rest of what I owed him on the business. Fae cannot lie, and we hadn't had time to work that out.
"How about Gabriel's family," Tony suggested. "There are enough of them, and they could work after school. It would be cheaper than hiring professionals and I think they need the money."
Gabriel Sandoval was my man Friday, a high school student who came in weekends and late afternoons to do paperwork, answer phones, and do whatever else needed doing.
I had a sudden vision of the shop being overrun with little Sandovals hanging from ladders and ropes. I'd let them loose in the office for cleaning, and it was almost hard to recognize the placefor a bunch of kids they were amazingly industrious. "That's a good idea. I'll have Gabriel call his mom as soon as he gets here."
"Here," said Zee. He turned on the little security monitor and flipped a switch. The system that Adam had installed was slick and expensive. It ran on motion sensors, so we only had to watch it when there was something moving. Something first moved at 10:15; we watched a half-grown rabbit bop unhurriedly across the pavement out of sight. At midnight someone appeared at the door of the garage. It wasn't two people with spray paint, so I was pretty sure it was whoever painted a pair of crossed bones on my door.
His image was oddly shadowed, unrecognizable. The miscreant kept his face out of camera rangeimpressive since there was a camera placed just in front of the door to catch the face of anyone breaking in.
The only thing the camera got a clear shot of was the gloves he worethe old-fashioned kind: white with little buttons on the wrist. There were odd glitches in the pictures, jumps where the camera turned off because there was no movement for it to follow. By the timers, it took him forty-five minutes to paint the bones on my doorof which the cameras caught about ten minutes. Part of the missing time covered how the painter got there and how he left.
I didn't think he knew the cameras were there, and he still avoided them. Some supernatural creatures just don't film well: by tradition, vampires are among them. The height was right for Wulfe, who would be my first choice in any vampire magicking. Since Wulfe was the vampire who knew for certain that I'd killed Andre, he was also my top suspect for the informer who had told Marsilia about my crimes.
The camera caught movement again.
"Stop it," Tony said.
Two figures, still indistinct, froze on the edge of the lights of my parking lot, and the little numbers on the lower right of the screen read 2:08 A.M. Time had jumped almost a half hour from when the bone painter had last been there.
"What was that all about?" he asked. "The person at your door?"
"I don't know," I told him. I almost said that his guess was as good as mine, but it wasn't. "Maybe someone was trying to break in, but didn't make it." Impossible to tell what he'd been doing from the camera shot. "It doesn't matter, though, because he obviously wasn't the one who graffitied all over."
Tony stared at me. Cops were almost as good as werewolves at sensing lies. He turned abruptly and opened the door to examine it. Like Zee, he traced the crossed bones with a light finger.
"Who have you been ticking off besides Bright Future? This looks almost like something the old Mob might doclassy, but designed to frighten the hell out of whoever received it."
I sighed, shrugged. "No one wanted me to get Zee out of the murder rap. But it's not the kind of thing a fae would dotoo visible. And a werewolf who was ticked off that badly would just attack. I've got some people who'll look into it for me better than the police can."
Frowning, Tony made an irritated noise. "Is this another one of your 'It's too dangerous for you mere human cops? "
I rubbed my arms, but I wasn't cold, just chilled. I was under no illusions. Marsilia could have just killed me, but she was playing. But no matter how playful the cat is, the mouse is just as dead in the end. And the end would be whenever she decided. The only question was how many peoplehow many of my friendsshe decided to take down with me.
Maybe I was panicking prematurely. Maybe she would settle for a punishment. Stefan was hers, there was no reason for the gut-deep feeling that he wouldn't be the last to suffer for my sins. I didn't know Marsilia well enough to make that kind of prediction.
"Mercy?"
"I don't know what the crossed bones mean." Other than bad news. "Zee tells me it is magical but probably not fae magic." Zee was out, anyone who cared to would know that he was fae, which was the reason that the garage was mine now, instead of his. There was a lot of prejudice against the fae. "He has a few contacts who'll take a look at it for me. I know a few other people I can ask, too." Adam had a witch on the pack's payroll for cleanup. She was good, but it would cost me a lot to hire her if Uncle Mike and Stefan didn't know what it was. This was shaping up into a real macaroni-and-cheese month.
"However, none of them will come within a hundred miles of a police investigation. Do you have anyone on the KPD who is an expert in magic?"
Tony held my gaze for a minute before giving up with a sigh. "Hell no, Mercy. You should have seen the brass's faces when they watched that video" He stopped and gave me a guilty look. It was a video of me killing Tim and all the stuff before that. He shrugged nervously and looked away. "There are a few who know something about fae or werewolves, but if they know anything more, they keep it quiet for fear of losing their jobs."
He sighed and came back into the shop. "Go ahead," he told Zee. "Let's watch Tim's cousin paint the shop."
Once the two shadowy people moved fully onto the parking lot, Courtney was unmistakable. Instead of watching the whole process, Zee fast-forwarded it until the pair walked off with bags of empty spray-paint cans almost two hours later. He stopped the images when Courtney was close to the camera and impossible to mistake, her pretty, rounded face hard and angry. Zee flipped back and forth a little until we got a clear view of her companion's face, too.
The security system hadn't been in place long, but Zee loved gadgets. He must have spent some time playing with this one.
"It's Courtney all right I don't remember her last name," I told Tony. "I don't recognize the man at all.
If it were Bright Future, there'd have been more people."
"It's personal," Tony agreed grimly. "You are going to want to give me those disks and file charges so we can give her some time to cool off. She's not going to stop harassing you anytime soon unless someone heads her off at the pass. It's safer for everyone if it's the police and not the werewolves or the fae."
Zee ejected the disk and handed it to Tony.
Tony frowned at it a moment. "I'm not worried about the kids, Mercy. But there's something about those bones and that guy that is sending my old radar into fits. If that's not a death threat, I'll be a monkey's uncle. You stick close to that werewolf boyfriend of yours for a while."
I gave him a martyred sigh. "Why do you think Zee is still here? I suspect I'm not going to get a moment to myself for the next year, at least."
"Yeah," he said, a smile lighting his eyes. "It's tough when people care about you."
Zee made a sound that might have been a laugh. He covered it by saying sourly, "Not that she makes it easy on them to watch over her. You just wait. All she's going to do for the next few weeks is complain, complain, complain."
CHAPTER 3
WORD HAD GOTTEN OUT THAT I WAS BACK IN THE SHOP and my regular customers started stopping in to express their sympathy and support. The graffiti only made things worse. By nine I was hiding in the garage, with the big overhead doors shut, even though that meant that the garage was hot and stuffy, and my electric bill was going to suffer.
I left Zee to handle the customers, poor customers. Zee is not a people person. Years ago, when I first came to work here, his nine-year-old son was in charge of the front desk and everyone was properly grateful.
I spent most of the morning trying to figure out the troubles of a twenty-year-old Jetta. Nothing more fun than sorting through intermittent electrical problems, as long as you have a year or two to waste. The owner got off her job at three in the morning and twice had gone to start her car and found the battery drained though the lights were off.
There was nothing wrong with the battery. Or the alternator. I was upside-down in the driver's seat, with my head up the Jetta's dash, when a sudden thought came to me. I rolled over and looked at the shiny new CD player in the ancient car, which had held only a cassette player when it had last visited here. When Zee came in, I was using Power Words to describe service techs who didn't know how to tie their own shoes but felt free and easy meddling in one of my cars. I'd been taking care of this Jetta for as long as I'd been working on cars, and felt a special affection for it.
Zee blinked at me a couple of times to hide his amusement. "We could give your bill to the place that put her stereo in."
"Would they pay for it?" I asked.
Zee smiled. "They would if I took it in." Zee took a personal interest in our customers' cars, too.
We locked up for lunch and went to our favorite taco wagon for authentic Mexican tacos. That meant no cheese or iceberg lettuce, but cilantro, lime, and radishes insteada more-than-fair trade in my view.
The wagon was parked in a lot next to a Mexican bakery just across the cable bridge over the Columbia River, putting it in Pasco, but just barely. Some wagons are step vans, but this one was a small trailer laden with whiteboards that listed the menu with prices.
The sweet-faced woman who worked there spoke barely enough English to take orderswhich probably didn't matter because there were very few English-only speakers among her patrons. She said something and patted my hand when I paidand when I checked the bag to make sure the little plastic cups of salsa were there, I saw she'd added a couple of extra of my favorite tacos in our bag. Which proved that everyone, even people who couldn't read the newspaper, knew about me.
Zee drove us to the park on the Kennewick side of the river, where there were waterfront picnic tables for us to eat at. I sighed as we walked along the river's edge between the parking lot and the tables. "I wish it hadn't made the papers. How long before everyone forgets, and I don't get any more pitying looks?"
Zee grinned wolfishly at me. "I've told you before; you need to learn Spanish. She congratulated you on killing him. And she knows a few other men who could benefit from your efforts." He picked a table and sat down.
I sat down across from him and set the bag between us. "She did not." I don't speak Spanish, but everyone who lives in the Tri-Cities for long picks up a few wordsbesides she hadn't said very much, even in Spanish.
"Maybe not the last part of it," agreed Zee, pulling out a chicken taco and squeezing one of the lime segments over it. "Though I saw it in her face. But she did say, 'Bien hecho. "
I knew the first word, but he made me ask for the last, waiting until curiosity forced the words out of my mouth. "Which means? Good"
"Good job." His white teeth sank into the tortilla.
Stupid. It was stupid to let other people's opinions matter, but having someone else who didn't view me as a victim cheered me up immensely. After pouring green hot sauce over my goat taco, I ate with a renewed appetite.
"I think," I told Zee, "that I'll go to the dojo tonight after I get done with work." I'd already missed Saturday's early-morning session.
"It should be interesting to watch," Zee said, which was as close as he could come to lying. He had no desire to watch a bunch of people working themselves up into a noxious puddle of sweat and fatigue (his words). He must have been elected to be my bodyguard for a little longer than just the workday.
SOMEONE HAD TALKED TO THEM ALL. I COULD SEE IT IN the casual way they greeted me as I walked into the dojo. Muscles in Sensei Johanson's jaw twitched when he first saw me, but he led us through the opening exercises and stretches with his usual sadistic thoroughness. By the time we started sparring, the muscles in my lower back, which had been tense for the last week, were loose and moving well. After the first two bouts, I was relaxed and settled into my usual love-hate relationship with my third opponent, the devastatingly powerful brown belt who was the bully of the dojo.
He was careful, oh so careful that Sensei never saw him do it, but he liked to hurt people women. In addition to the full-contact part of Sensei's chosen form, Lee Holland was the other reason I was the only woman in the advanced class. Lee wasn't married, for which I was glad. No woman deserved to have to live with him.
I actually liked to spar with him because I never felt guilty about leaving bruises behind. I also enjoyed the frustrated look in his eyes as his skilled moves (his brown belt justly outranked my own purple) constantly failed to connect as well as they should.
Today there was something else in his eyes when he looked at the stitches on my chin, a hot edge of desire that seriously creeped me out. He was turned on that I had been raped. Either that or that I'd killed someone. I preferred the latter but, knowing Lee, it was probably the former.
"You are weak," he told me, whispering so no one else could hear.
I'd been right about what had excited his interest.
"I killed the last person who thought that," I said, and front kicked him hard in the chest. Usually, I tempered my speed to something more humanly possible. But his eyes made me quit playing human. I'm not supernaturally strong, but in the martial arts, speed counts, too.
I was moving at full tilt when I stepped around him while he was still off balance. Tournament martial arts have two opponents facing each other, but our style encourages us to strike from the back or the sidekeeping the enemies' weapons facing the wrong way. I stepped hard on the back of his knee, forcing him to drop to the floor. Before he could respond, I hopped back three feet to give him a chance to get up, this being only sparring and not a death match.
Our dojo did some grappling, but not much. Shi Sei Kai Kan is all about putting your opponent down fast and moving on to the next guy. It was developed for warfare, when a soldier might be facing multiple opponents. Grappling left you vulnerable to attack from another opponent. And I had no desire to get up close and personal with Lee.
He roared with humiliation-charged rage and came for me. Block and block, twist and dodge, I kept him from contacting me.
Someone called out sharply, "Sensei! Check out Lee's fight."
"Enough, Lee," Sensei called from the far side of the dojo, where he'd been working with someone.
"That's enough."
Lee didn't appear to hear him. If I hadn't been so much faster than him, I'd have been hurt already. As it was, I made sure he couldn't connect any of his hits. For a while, at least, until I got cocky and overconfident.