Night Broken (Mercy Thompson 8)

A glance in the mirror had me unbraiding my hair. I ran a comb through it—braiding it when it was wet gave it a curl it didn’t have normally. Nothing was going to turn me into a girly girl, but the curls softened my appearance a little.

I was almost out the door, and Tad was back under the Beetle, when he said, “When Adam’s ex drives you into making sweet things with chocolate, just remember I like my brownies with lots of frosting but no nuts.”

I opened the front door to the smell of bacon and the sound of sizzling meat.

Adam, Jesse, and I shared kitchen duties, taking turns making dinner. Tonight was supposed to be Jesse’s night, but I wasn’t surprised that the only person in the kitchen was Christy. Her back was to me as she cooked in the kitchen she’d designed.

She’d been angry, her daughter had told me, that Adam had insisted on moving all the way out to Finley instead of building in one of the more prestigious neighborhoods in West Richland or Kennewick. He’d given her free rein in the house to make up for the fact that he’d wanted the house next to my trailer because Bran, who ruled all the weres in this part of the world, had told him to keep an eye on me. In addition to ruling hundreds and maybe thousands of werewolves, Bran had been the Alpha of the pack my foster father, Bryan, had belonged to. That had occasionally left Bran with delusions that he had a right to interfere with my life long after I’d left Montana and his pack behind.

Christy was shorter than me by a couple of inches, about the same size as Jesse. The body in the blouse and peasant skirt was softly curved, but not fat. Her hair, brown when I’d last seen her, was now blond-streaked and French-braided in a thick rope that hung to her hips.

“Could you find some paper towels, Jesse?” she asked without turning around. “They’ve been moved, and I have bacon ready to come out of the frying pan.”

I opened the cabinet that held the paper towels exactly where she probably had put them on the day she first moved in. I hadn’t changed the organization of the kitchen. Too many people were already using it, so it made more sense for me to learn where everything was than for me to reorganize it to my tastes.

So Christy’s kitchen was exactly as she’d left it—still hers in spirit if not in truth. Her presence in my kitchen felt like an invasion in a fashion that the Gray Lord who’d been here in the wee hours of the night had not, despite his intentions.

Christy knew I wasn’t Jesse, I could smell her tension—which was sort of cheating, so I didn’t call her on it. Also, accusing her of lying right off the bat didn’t seem like a good way to make peace with her.

“Paper towels,” I said as peaceably as I could manage, setting them down on the counter beside the stove.

She turned to look at me, and I saw her face.

“Holy Hannah,” I said before she could say anything, distracted entirely from my territorial irritation. “Tell me you shot him or hit him with a two-by-four.” She didn’t just have a shiner. Half her face was black with that greenish brown around the edges that told you it hadn’t happened in the last twenty-four hours.

She gave me a half smile, probably the half that didn’t hurt. “Would a frying pan be okay? Not as effective as a baseball bat, but it was hot.”

“I would accept a frying pan,” I agreed. “This”—I indicated the side of my face that corresponded to her damaged cheek with my fingers—“from the guy you’re running from?”

“It wasn’t my aunt Sally,” she said tartly.

“You go to a doctor with that?” I asked.

She nodded. “Adam made me go. The doctor said it would heal okay. He gave me a prescription for pain meds, but I don’t like to take prescriptions. Maybe tonight if I can’t sleep.”

The front door opened, and I didn’t have to back out of the kitchen to see who it was; Adam had a presence I could feel from anywhere in the house.

“Hey, honey,” said Christy. “I’ve got BLTs going on the stove. They’ll be done in about ten minutes if you want to go upstairs and get cleaned up.” She glanced at me, and said, “Oops. Sorry, just habit.”

“No worries,” I said pleasantly, as if she hadn’t bothered me at all when she’d called my husband by an endearment—then could have shot myself because I saw the satisfaction in her face. My reaction had been too controlled to be real, and she’d caught it.

“Maybe you could set the table?” she asked lightly.

As if it was still her kitchen, her house to rule.

“I need to get out of these clothes,” I said. “You should ask Jesse to set the table since you took over her job tonight. We might have one more for dinner—a new wolf in town.”

I left before she could reply and rounded the corner for the stairs to see Adam. He walked with me up the stairs.

“Any luck hunting down the guy who hit her?” I asked, stripping off my clothes once we were in our bedroom. Even though my overalls absorbed most of the mess of mechanicking, the clothes I wore under them reeked of oil and sweat.

“No. It’s not that we can’t find people named Juan Flores, it’s that there are too many Juan Floreses,” he told me. “John Smith would be easier, though it helps that he doesn’t look like most Juan Floreses. He’s around six feet tall with blond hair; she said his English was good. He has an accent, but she doesn’t think it was Mexican or Spanish, despite his name.”

“She met him in Eugene?”

He shook his head. “Reno. She was out partying with some friends. He was a friend of a friend. Rich—with cash—not just credit cards. He talked about Europe like he was very familiar with it, but he didn’t tell her if he was living there or if he just traveled there a lot.”

“Cash means real money,” I said. “Not just someone pretending to be wealthy.”

“Probably,” Adam agreed.

“Did she call the police when he hit her?”

“She called them before he broke into her apartment and started hitting her. He left when he heard the sirens, though it might have been the frying pan she hit him with.” There was admiration in his voice, and I did my best not to flinch. Of course he was proud of her. It takes guts to fight back effectively after a hard hit to the head. “The police didn’t have any better luck than I’m having running the name he gave her.”

Adam stripped off his tie and unbuttoned the cuffs of his dress shirt impatiently. “Later that night, someone mugged the man she went out with after she returned to Eugene. Broke his neck and took off with his wallet. She’s sure it was Flores, that stealing his wallet was just a cover. The police are undecided but told her that she might find somewhere else to be while they ran down leads.”