Burn Bright

Anna considered that solemnly. “There’s a lot of talent here, no question. But I’ve been a part of performances with kids. Heck, I’ve been a kid in performances. I bet some of those nights were longer than others, especially if none of those kids were yours.”

Charles grinned. “Mercy thought so, too. As soon as she hit eight or nine, she rounded up the littles—the youngest, the ones who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket and the kids who made the mistake of looking at her too long—and made them do a ‘special performance.’”

He shook his head. “Some of them were really memorable. Not always musical, but memorable. The first benefit was that those evenings got a lot shorter because we got through most of the kids—and all of the ones who were really bad—at once. But after a while, she got the hang of it. I think Samuel helped her in secret because I recognized a few of the songs as his. But she started competing with Bran for best performance—invited the audience in to judge for themselves. He loved it.”

“Bran?”

“My da, for all of his faults, has very little ego. He is dominant, not competitive.” Anna made a noise, so he had to correct himself. “All right. I give that to you. He’s competitive enough. Let me say, then, that he doesn’t feel that he has to wipe the floor with a group of children in order to feel like an Alpha. He took pride in her efforts and encouraged her—the way he does. Blink and you miss it—just like this road to our left. Turn here.”

She did, and the truck slowed because although the road was paved, it was only just.

“Then she found out that Bran knew about Leah’s attacks,” Anna said thoughtfully.

“Right. Let me just say that Mercy is fiendish with her punishments. Never get on her bad side. She’ll figure out the thing that will irk you the most.”

“What did she do?”

“She played the first movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata.”

“Number Eight,” said Anna. “Opus 13?”

He nodded. “For a whole year, she played it every music night.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Anna asked. “It’s a beautiful piece.”

Charles grinned. “You’d think that. And it is. But I hear it in my nightmares, and I imagine Da does, too. You can’t play a tuned piano out of tune, but that’s the only thing she didn’t do to that poor piece of music.

“Every performance was something new. Once she performed with a blindfold. Once she set a metronome up and never once played at the speed of the metronome. Once she played it at a quarter speed and added the other two movements.” He laughed at the memory. “People would think she was done, start to clap, and she’d play another note. A very slow note. It felt like it went on forever. But she never quite tipped my da into anything but white-lipped anger.” He closed his eyes, remembering, the smile dying down. “It’s not often when Da does the wrong thing—and most of those moments in the last thirty years have revolved around Mercy.”

“He’s funny around her,” Anna said, deadpan.

He opened her eyes to give her a mock glare, but she was paying too much attention to the road.

“Yes,” he said. “Funny. Anyway, these were real performances. Boys wore ties and white shirts, girls wore dresses. For what was to be her final performance, Mercy came dressed in cutoffs and a T-shirt with paint on it. The T-shirt was emblazoned with Mickey Mouse giving the world the middle finger.” He sighed.

“What did he do?”

“My da knows how to fight dirty, Anna, he just usually chooses not to. He turned to Mercy’s foster mother—a shy, sweet mouse of a woman who had just been diagnosed with some horrific human disease—and ripped into her in front of everyone for not seeing to it that Mercy had clothing fit to wear. She cried. Bryan wasn’t there—I like to think that my da forgot that he had sent Bryan off on some task that night—but he might have planned his actions that far in advance. Mercy didn’t say anything. She got up off the piano bench, took Evelyn by the hand, and led her out of the room.”

Anna considered it a moment. “Bran attacked a sick woman who couldn’t defend herself in front of the whole pack? Wow.”

“Don’t let my da fool you, Anna,” he said. “Push comes to shove, he is a mean bastard.”

“What did Mercy do?” Anna asked. “The Mercy I know wouldn’t have just let that stand.”

“No,” he said. “Of course not. She peanut-buttered the seat of my father’s new Mercedes and tricked him into sitting in it.”

“Hah!” Anna’s voice was satisfied. “Good for her. I’d have paid to see it.”

Charles wondered why the memory made him feel melancholy. Probably because he’d liked Evelyn—and watching his father brutalize her, even with words, had been gut-wrenching. And he, like the rest of the pack, had just stood there and watched. Only Mercy had defied the Marrok.

He and Brother Wolf had long ago conceded that they had been wrong not to do something, too.

“The peanut butter,” Charles said, “reminded my father that he’d been doing battle with a child. Someone he’d sworn to protect. And because he had felt he was losing that war, he’d hit someone who couldn’t defend herself. My da is not humbled very often, but Mercy managed it that time. He brought flowers for Evelyn and apologized in person, then in public. To her, to Bryan—to Mercy, too. After that, Mercy would come to the evenings in that same outfit every time. She would sit at the piano for five minutes with her hands folded in her lap. My father would thank her gravely for her performance, she would bow her head like a Samurai warrior, and they were done. It lasted until Evelyn died—about two years, I think—then Mercy sat in the audience, and my father quit asking her to play.”

“Is that why he ended the evenings?” Anna asked.

He shook his head. “It was when he sent her away.”

Anna knew the story, so he didn’t repeat it. His brother had decided that a sixteen-year-old coyote-shifter Mercy might be a way for him to have children who survived and set about courting her. Bran had intervened before Samuel had done irreparable damage to her—or to himself. But it had cost them all anyway.

“We had a couple more musical nights after she went to live with her biological mother. At the second one, Bran concluded by saying that they had served their purpose, and it was time to move on.”

“Without Mercy to battle, it wasn’t fun anymore,” said Anna.

“That’s what I think,” Charles said. “No one ever had the nerve to ask my da.”

“No wonder Leah thinks reestablishing that tradition would be bad news,” Anna said thoughtfully. “Maybe we should make this barbecue a onetime event.”

“This event Leah thinks you don’t want,” Charles said, unable to hide his amusement. “She’s probably ready to make it a daily thing at this point.”

“I can’t cancel it altogether,” Anna told him after a moment. “If I switch sides again, even Leah will know that I’m playing her. But I think I can get her to make me do all the work for it. I can make it as different from those nights as possible. Maybe no children.” She paused. “Or if we never want to repeat it—only children.”

Anna was pretty good at getting people to do what she wanted. Once in a while, she stepped on toes when she did so because the instinctive deference that most wolves felt for the more dominant was just missing in her. She was getting much better at dancing around the dominance thing, though.

Leah wasn’t smart, but she’d been around a long time. And if she’d trained Mercy—well, Mercy had trained her back. She might see through what Anna was doing because of that. But if Leah made a fuss, he’d take care of it. Brother Wolf liked that idea.

“Stop it,” Anna said firmly. “I can take care of myself.”

“Of course you can,” he said, surprised. “That doesn’t mean I can’t do it, too.”

She shook her head at him, but he knew she was laughing inwardly because Brother Wolf told him so.