River Marked

“You don’t get a choice.” His voice was oh-so-calm, but I could feel the huge storm that lay behind all that control.

“I killed the nasty monster. I think I should get to say no,” I told him. To my embarrassment, tears welled in my eyes. I had to blink fast to make them go away. I was done, no reserves left at all. I just couldn’t bear any more tonight.

“You are in shock,” he said grimly. “You need stitches in half a dozen places, and your leg is broken. Where do you think you should be going?”

“Home?”

He sighed, leaned forward, and rested his forehead on mine for a moment.“I’ll take you home tomorrow,” he promised. “Tonight, you’re going to the emergency room.” *

THEY CUT MY OLD SWIMMING SUIT OFF ME AT THE hospital, where a tired-eyed female doctor and a pair of nurses (one of them a man) scrubbed, stitched, stapled, and otherwise abused my body. I made them leave Adam’s dog tags on my neck. The doctorand both nurses flirted shamelessly with Adam even though he was now wearing a shirt and shoes with his jeans. But Adam didn’t seem to notice, so that was okay.

By the time the sun rose, I had a bright pink cast on my leg and orders to have it checked over by an orthopedic doctor ASAP. The tibia was certainly broken, so was my kneecap, and the X-rays also showed a suspicious-looking shadow on my ankle. I had more stitches than a Raggedy A

Once I quit hurting, Adam lost the soft edge in his voice that worried me so much, and his eyes darkened until they approached their usual color. Of course, once I quit hurting, I also quit worrying about Adam losing control and killing someone he’d feel bad about later.

“Hey,” I asked Adam, as he took the paperwork the nurse handed him, “is this the hospital they took Be

So Adam rolled me through the hospital in a wheelchair to go visit Be

One of the wheels on the chair had a squeak; it caught Calvin’s attention. He turned his head, then darn near fell off the window.

“What happened to you?” he asked. Then, his expression lightening, he said fiercely, “Did you do it?”

“We are minus one monster,” I said, accidentally waking the woman in the chair—and Be

“Pain meds,” murmured Adam in explanation of something. I think it was the giggling. “As you can see, taking out the monster was a close-run thing.”

“Tell me,” said Be

So I did. At some point—near where I was trying to climb up the river devil, I think—Adam sat on the floor next to the chair and leaned his forehead against my thigh. There was another chair in the room, so I wasn’t quite sure why he was sitting on the floor. The drugs had fuzzed our bond, so it took me a moment tofeel the sick fear that racked him.

“Walking stick?” asked Calvin, distracting me from Adam’s distress.

I blinked at him. I couldn’t remember if the walking stick was supposed to be a secret or not.

“It’s an old fae artifact that attached itself to her while she was risking her neck to save a fae she knows,” Adam muttered, and I could tell he wasn’t happy about remembering me trying to save Zee, either.

“He was a friend,” I reminded him.

“She does stuff like this all the time?” asked Calvin, looking at Adam with respect.

Adam lifted his head, and his eyes were yellow again—but his voice was only a little rough. “To be fair, it’s usually not her fault. She doesn’t start things.”

“But it looks like she finishes them,” said the woman holding Be

“He saved himself,” I said in surprise. “Didn’t someone tell you the story? He was smart.”

“And lucky,” said Be

I leaned forward.“Did they tell you what your sister said to me?”

“Jim did,” said Calvin.

“Did she want me to put flowers from her to Mom on the grave, or from me to Fai … to my sister?” Be

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe you should do both.”

“Would you finish the story?” Calvin asked, a little plaintively. “You’d just dropped the last knife and stabbed the river devil with a fae artifact that turned into a spear.”

“Right.” So I told them how its heart had turned to ice, and the walking stick burned my hand. “And then I swam back to shore.”

“With a broken leg?” asked Adam.

“Pretty neat trick, huh,” I said smugly.

“Really good drugs.” Calvin’s voice was dry.

Adam’s face was hidden against my leg again. This time he had one hand wrapped around my good ankle. The other hand dug into the tile on the floor. The tile cracked with a pop.

“You’re going to cut yourself,” I chided him.

He lifted his head.“You are going to be the death of me.”

I sucked in my breath. The sudden surge of fear I felt at that thought broke through the happy glaze I’d been enjoying. “Don’t say that. Adam, don’t let me do that.”

“Shh,” he said. “I’m sorry. Don’t cry. It’s all right.” He rose to kneel beside me, wiping my cheeks with his thumbs. “Werewolves are tough, Mercy. I’m not the one who almost died tonight.” He sucked in a breath. “Don’t you do that ever again.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I wailed miserably. “I didn’t want to almost die.”

“It’s the drugs,” said Be

“So what happened to the—what did you call them?—otterkin?” asked Calvin.

Since I’d already told them about the walking stick, I told them about what it had done to the otterkin and what the otterkin had said about it.

“You can ask Zee what he thinks.” Adam had regained enough control that his eyes were his usual chocolate brown. He regarded me a moment, and added, “Later, when you are not quite so happy. He might not understand about the good drugs.”

“He might not understand about me killing one of the last six otterkin. There were supposed to be seven, but I think the river devil ate one of them when she woke up.” I yawned. “I don’t think killing them was quite what Uncle Mike had in mind when he told us to check up on them.”

“I don’t know,” said Adam. “Uncle Mike can be pretty oblique when he wants to.”

“The Gray Lords might come after me.” I frowned at Adam. “That might come back to bite the pack. The Gray Lords aren’t always very precise about where they aim their wrath.”

“If the wrath of the Gray Lords lands on the pack, I’m happy to claim the credit for it. You killed one of them, and I killed the rest.” Fierce satisfaction sizzled in his voice.

I touched the curve of his jaw with my broken hand.“Good. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the body count that’s going to be attributed to the monster is actually theirs. It sounded like they’d been eating people anyway.” She had been feeding them, the otterkin had told me. And they had been feeding her. A lot of the fae had at one timeor another eaten human flesh. I suspected that the otterkin were the people-eating kind of fae. “They were bound not to hurt anyone in the swimming area of that campground—and they moved away from there.”