I raised my chin. “How old will I get?”
He opened his mouth, then shook his head. “It’s not that kind of foresight. I don’t get dates, just possibilities. And if I did know, I don’t hate you enough to tell you.”
“She doesn’t know any other coyote walkers,” said Honey. “She is married to a man who will be young a hundred years from now. She wants to know that she is not going to leave him tied to a woman who will slowly die on him.”
Laughingdog looked at me. “I don’t know. Most walkers age like humans—most are mostly human anyway these days. Coyote doesn’t walk this ground much anymore.” He smiled a little, but it wasn’t aimed at me. “Most of Coyote’s children don’t have to worry about a long life, anyway. A fool and his life are soon parted, you know.”
“I’m only half-human,” I told him, mouth dry. I’d never said it before, even to myself. But Laughingdog needed to know it all so he could give me an accurate answer. “Coyote is my father. Sort of my father. He was wearing the skin of a rodeo cowboy who didn’t know that he was Coyote at the time.”
Gary Laughingdog tilted his face toward me. “Really?” He grinned. “Exactly half sister in truth, then.” He let out a huff of air and shrugged. “You are the only real sibling I’ve met—but those of us closer to the magic in our heritage tend to live longer.”
I sat back in my chair, feeling light-headed.
“Death could find you tomorrow, though,” Laughingdog said. “So don’t get overconfident. Knew a boy who was Raven’s child, and he died from measles when he was six years old.” He watched me, glanced at Honey, and his eyes gleamed gold from a stray glint of light off the overhead fluorescent tubes. “But you didn’t come here to ask me that.”
“I need to talk to Coyote,” I told him.
He scooted his chair back from the table abruptly, as if to get away from my words. Both guards came to alert, and Luke had his hand on his weapon.
“No one needs that kind of trouble,” the man who apparently was sort of my half brother said.
Startled by his extreme reaction I said, slowly, “I’ve talked to him before without the world being destroyed.”
“Has he tried to kill you yet?” he asked.
I started to say “no” before realizing it wasn’t true. “Not deliberately,” I said instead. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t deliberate.” I paused. “Either time.”
Honey stared at me.
Laughingdog sucked in a breath. “Ye gods, woman. Why would you want to invite Him into your life?”
“Because I gave him a fae artifact, and if I don’t get it back, the fae who came to visit me in the middle of the night might turn the Tri-Cities into a barren graveyard.”
Laughingdog made a funny, high noise, then coughed. He waved off the guards and managed to tell them that he’d just swallowed wrong, and his choking became chortles while he was still trying to catch his breath.
When he could breathe without laughing again, he said, “What did you do that for?”
“Which?” I asked.
“Give Coyote an artifact some freaking fae wants,” he said.
“Because at that moment it was the best thing to do,” Honey said coolly. “Sometimes the only action you can take leads to more trouble. But she would have considered that when she did it. Mercy is no fool, no matter what her heritage. It is not for you to judge. Can you contact Coyote or tell Mercy how to?”
He looked at her. “Mercy isn’t the only one who protects her own here, is she?” He shook his head, and to me he said, “Spent all my life trying to make sure He didn’t visit me. Why would I want to know how to call Him? To say, ‘Hi, Father, could you fuck up my life any more than I already have? Gee, thanks. I think that will work’?”
Stress made his voice sound thinner, and he glanced around the depressing room before he said, “Not that He didn’t come anyway and screw with me. But at least I didn’t invite Him in, you know?”
This meeting had been useful, if in an entirely different way than I’d intended. But if Laughingdog didn’t know how to call Coyote, then no one did. If Beauclaire killed me, it wouldn’t matter how fast I aged.
“When did he come to you?” I heard Honey ask through my despair. “Was there any pattern? Did he say anything to you about why he came?” Funny how clearly that capital letter disappeared when Honey talked about Coyote.
Laughingdog closed his eyes. “The last time—He stopped in long enough to make sure that I’d spend a few years here in prison instead of getting safely back to my apartment when I left the bar at closing time. I was walking down the sidewalk, and there He was. He said He was pleased I was about to become interesting again.” The expression on his face was suddenly horrified, and I felt a wave of the same magic that had sent me sneezing. “Don’t do that,” he told me as the pupils in his eyes widened until the brown was a narrow ring around it.
“Don’t do what?” asked Honey.
But I knew.
“Don’t ‘be interesting,’” I said. “Thank you for talking to me.”
He shook his head, his face bleak. “Don’t thank me for that.”
I reached out and touched his hand. It didn’t seem too forward an action when he was my almost half brother.
“Don’t worry so much,” I murmured. “I have support.”
He gave a bitter laugh and stood up, signaling the guards that the visit was over. “Nothing will protect you from Coyote. From…” His voice changed, deepened, and he said something in a language I’d never heard before. He stopped, then began again, “He is coming and his children cry his name into the world.” He threw his head back and howled, the high, whining cry of a coyote. As the guards broke into a run, he said something that sounded like Coyote’s name, but not quite, three times. It was oddly accented, making the first consonant a guttural sound and the final softer. “Guayota, Guayota, Guayota,” he repeated again in a soft chant that gave me goose bumps. “His children howl his name and hunger for blood until the night is broken with their cries.”
Before the guards touched him, he fell off the chair, body writhing for a moment, then every muscle in his body seized. His back arched off the floor, and his eyes rolled back in his head. I dropped to the floor and pulled his head into my lap so it wouldn’t slap the floor a second time. Honey protected his tongue by putting her fingers in his mouth. She didn’t flinch when he bit down.
When he lapsed into total unconsciousness, it was so sudden that it was more frightening than his sudden fit.
Luke crouched beside me. “We’ve called for help. You need to leave now.”
Honey and I were escorted out of the room with more speed than gentleness, but when we retrieved our IDs, Luke found us again.
“He has these fits, sometimes,” Luke told us. “The doctor thinks it’s the result of doing hallucinogenic drugs when he was young.”
Luke didn’t, quite, ask me what I’d been doing there—but only because Honey growled at him.
“Thank you,” I said. “He was helpful. Treat him kindly when you can.” Something in me rebelled at leaving him here, caged like a zoo animal. My half brother, he’d said. Coyote’s children. I shivered and hoped that his last words were hallucinogenic remnants, but it had felt, had smelled, like magic to me. It had smelled like Coyote.
Luke nodded at me, lips disapproving, but went back to his job obediently enough.
“Some of the pack like to forget who you are when Adam isn’t around,” Honey said softly. “I’ll have a discussion with Luke.”
I gave her a sharp look she didn’t see because she was watching Luke. Honey didn’t like being dominant—she avoided situations in which her natural temperament showed through. I’d thought Honey didn’t like me at all. So why had she just decided, out loud, to squelch Luke?
I opened the locker and collected the Vanagon’s keys. I walked out the prison door a free woman, but it wasn’t until I turned the van out onto the freeway that I really relaxed.
“So
all you have to do to summon Coyote is be interesting,” Honey mused. “Shouldn’t take you long.”
“You could stake me out naked in the desert near an anthill,” I suggested.
She shook her head. “I don’t do clichés. Besides, Adam might object.”
My phone rang.
“Could you see who that is?” I asked.
She picked it up off the floor between our seats and, after a glance at the readout, answered it. “Adam, it’s Honey,” she said. “Mercy is driving.”
“Why hasn’t she picked up her phone for the past hour?” he asked.
She held the phone my direction and raised one eyebrow in inquiry.
“I’ve been in prison,” I said in a sad voice. And left it at that. Honey flashed a grin at me, the expression startling because I was so used to the reserve she’d been carrying around with her.
There was a brief silence. “Okay,” Adam said. “Was your undoubtedly brief sojourn the cause of your phone call earlier today? Christy said you didn’t leave a message.”
“Christy answered your cell phone, and you thought Mercy should leave a message?” Honey’s voice let everyone know exactly what she thought of that.
“No,” said Adam with gently emphasized patience. “I thought that she should have told Christy to give me the phone.”
“You were unavailable,” I told him.
Silence followed. Unhappy silence. And then I remembered who the enemy was and what she wanted to do to Adam and me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I let her get to me. But not to the point I did something stupid, I promise. I called Honey, and she came with me to see a man about summoning Coyote. Hank gave me his name. It was safe enough.”
Adam made a man sound that could have meant anything, but I took it to mean that we were okay again. When he used actual words, the subject wasn’t Christy anymore. “What did you learn from Hank’s contact?”
A lot. Important things I didn’t want to talk about on the phone. So I gave him the least of it. “He doesn’t summon Coyote because he’s pretty sure that’s the stupidest thing anyone could do. But apparently Coyote has a habit of showing up when he finds one of us—his descendants—interesting.”
Adam laughed ruefully. “Shouldn’t take you long, then.”
“That’s what I told her,” Honey said.
“Any word on the fire?” I asked.
“Arson is confirmed,” Adam said, “though there seems to be some confusion about the accelerant used. Whatever it was, it got really hot, really fast.”
“Do you think he’s done this kind of thing before?” I asked.
“The fire investigator seemed to think so. We’re looking for suspicious fires tied to an overzealous lover. We’re also looking at the European angle. There’s another trail, too. Warren got descriptions of this man’s dogs out of Christy. Looks like they are some sort of mastiff. She said they were valuable and difficult for anyone except Juan—her stalker—to handle.”
“That doesn’t sound like a mastiff,” I told him. “There’s a guy in the Montana pack who was breeding all sorts of big dogs. The mastiffs were mostly big sweeties.”
“I’m not sure she’d know a poodle from a sheepdog. But Juan Flores apparently took special pleasure in pointing out that both of his dogs outweighed Christy, who is a hundred and ten pounds.”
Hah. Christy was at least twenty pounds heavier than that.
“Hah.” Honey snorted with derision. “Christy is at least one thirty or one thirty-five.”
“Big dog,” I said.
Adam laughed. “I’ll let you know if there is anything new, and Mercy?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t do anything too interesting.”
He disconnected before I could reply.
“Don’t underestimate Christy,” Honey said. “She’s not nearly as helpless as she pretends to be.”
“I know that,” I said. I glanced at Honey, then looked back at the road. “I thought you liked her.”
She growled. “Helpless bitch had the whole pack—Adam included—hopping to her tune. Couldn’t mow the lawn, change a tire, or carry her own laundry up the stairs. Even Peter fell for it, and he usually had better sense. She didn’t like Warren—I thought at the time she was worried he was going to make a play for Adam, but mostly, I think, he didn’t fall over himself to be her slave. Darryl’s helpless against her, but at least he knows it. All that might not have been too bad, but she played them all off each other. I had my own private celebration when she left Adam.”
Her lips twisted. “I don’t like you,” she told me, but there was a lie in her voice, and she stopped talking, looking almost surprised. She started again, her tones softer than they had been. “I don’t enjoy change,” she said. “And you are change, Mercy. I am comfortable with the old ways, and you are tossing them aside whenever they don’t suit you, while Adam looks on with satisfaction. But one thing I’ve always known is that you were trying your best to make things better. Christy, she looked out for herself first. I don’t imagine that has changed. Only a fool would say the same about you—though I frequently disagree with your methods and goals.”
I cleared my throat. “So. Do you want to see a man about some dogs?”
5
I pulled into Joel’s driveway, and our presence was announced by a chorus of barking fit to wake the dead. Joel might work in the vineyards and fix cars as a hobby, but dogs were his passion. He and his wife bred, showed, and trained dogs. I figured that he might be able to help us figure out what kind of dogs Christy’s stalker had. It was a shot in the dark, but I was willing to do anything to shorten Christy’s time in my house. I’d called Joel, and he’d told me to meet him at home.
Mostly, the dogs barking at us were just excited, but I heard the true anger of a dog whose territory is breached in at least one bass voice.
“Maybe I should wait,” Honey said. “Dogs are afraid of me.”
I shook my head. “Most dogs get over their fear of werewolves pretty fast, given a chance.”
I hopped down out of the Vanagon. While I waited for Honey to come around the vehicle, the front door opened, and a small woman came out of the door with a leashless dog that was nonetheless at heel. The dog was white, female, and looked to be a purebred Staffordshire terrier. The woman greeted me in Spanish.
I get mistaken for Hispanic a lot.
I shook my head, but didn’t bother objecting to her assumption. “Sorry. No hablo Español. ¿Esta Joel aqui?”
She stopped when she was about ten feet away, and the dog sat as soon as she quit moving. All of the dog’s attention was on the woman.
“No,” the woman said, then paused. Maybe she’d had to take a moment to switch languages. “You must be Mercy. Joel called and told me what you wanted. I told him to stay at work because I know the dogs as well as he does.” Her English was good, with only a touch of accent.
She gave Honey a slightly wary look, and the dog focused on her, too. “I am his wife, Lucia. Joel tells me that you are the Mercy who keeps him in parts for his old cars. Come into my house, and I will help you as much as I can.”
Her house, when she ushered us in, was not fancy or large, but it was clean enough that I would have eaten off any surface. We sat on an old leather couch while Lucia retreated to her kitchen.
The big white dog who’d accompanied her outside followed her into the kitchen, leaving us under the watchful care of the three lesser dogs who were occupying the living room. All of the living-room dogs were male and all the same brindle tan. One of them ignored us entirely as he tried to destroy a hard rubber bone. One sat across the room and stared at us. I fought the urge to stare him down and nudged Honey when she started to do just that.
“We’re guests,” I reminded her. “Neutral territory.”
The third dog, the biggest of the three, sat on my foot and put his chin on my knee. I rubbed him gently behind the ears. He closed his eyes and made snuffly-content noises. The dog wh
o’d been staring at us heaved a disgusted sigh and wiggled around until his back was to us, not happy about the intruders but too well trained to object.
None of the dogs seemed to have an issue with having a werewolf in the house.
There was not a lot of furniture, but what there was was good. Some of it handcrafted, so maybe Joel did some woodworking. Maybe Lucia did the woodworking. On the wall across from me was a framed Texas state flag flanked by good amateur paintings of dogs. One of them could have been the big white dog that followed Joel’s wife around, and the other was a yellow Lab with a Frisbee in its mouth. There was a case with a display of championship ribbons. On a bookcase were a number of trophies, some of which had dogs on the top of them.
The dogs Joel bred were expensive, well trained, and obtainable only when he was certain the person buying them was capable of taking good care of them. They were good dogs—better, he’d told me seriously, than most people he knew. He had no use for idiots who didn’t respect the damage dogs could do when left untrained or put in situations where they felt they had to defend themselves.
In addition to breeding, he and his wife rehabbed the “aggressive” dogs that were brought to the local shelters that would otherwise have just put the dogs down. Joel had scars on his arms and a huge one on his leg from a terrified, half-grown Rottweiler who now, Joel had assured me, lived happily with a huge family. Mostly, they had success, he’d told me, but a few were too badly damaged to ever be safe in human company.
The Marrok took damaged werewolves into his pack, where he could control the conditions under which they interacted with the rest of the world. Joel had told me with tears in his eyes about a battered pit-survivor he’d had to put down a few months ago. He was as passionate in his desire to save his dogs as the Marrok was to save his wolves.