He padded up to me and touched his muzzle behind my ear. I didn’t have to sink submissively to be lower than he, but I hunched down anyway. He took my nose between his fangs and released it, a welcome and a gentle chiding all in one—though I wasn’t certain what he was chiding me for.
Once he released me, he stalked past Samuel and stared down at his wife, still lying in the snow. She whined anxiously and he bared his teeth, unappeased. It seemed that even though he’d once asked me to leave, I wasn’t to be viewed as fair game.
Bran turned his back on her to look at Charles, who had completed his transformation and stood tall and human. Charles’s features were pure Salish, as if the only thing that he’d gotten from his father was the ability to change.
I’ve been told that the Native Americans were shy about their bodies. It was certainly true of Charles. He’d used his magic to clothe himself and stood garbed in fur-lined buckskins that looked as if they had come out of another century.
I, like most shapeshifters, was nearly as comfortable naked as clothed—except in the middle of November, high up in the Rockies of Montana with a chill Canadian wind blowing from the northwest and the temperature beginning to drop as the snow quit falling at last. And as soon as Charles started to speak, I was going to have to become human so I could talk to him.
“My father bids you welcome to the territory of the Marrok,” Charles said, his voice carrying the flat tones of his mother’s people with just a hint of the Welsh lilt Bran no longer spoke with unless he was really angry. “He wonders, however, why you have chosen now to come.”
I took human form, quickly kicked snow away from me, then knelt to keep myself lower than Bran. I sucked in my breath at the chill of the wind and the snow under my shins. Samuel moved between me and the worst of the wind. It helped, but not enough.
“I came on pack business,” I told them.
Charles raised his eyebrows. “You come smelling of blood and death.” Charles had always had a good nose.
I nodded. “I brought the Columbia Basin Alpha here. He’s been badly wounded. I also brought the body of another wolf, hoping someone here could tell me how he died and who killed him.”
Bran made a soft sound, and Charles nodded. “Tell us what is necessary now. You can give us the details later.”
So I told them what I knew, as succinctly as possible, beginning with Mac’s story, as he had told it to me, and ending with Mac’s death, Adam’s wounds, and Jesse’s kidnapping. By the time I was finished, my teeth were chattering, and I could barely understand myself. Even when I shifted back into coyote form, I couldn’t quite warm up.
Bran glanced at Samuel, who gave a woof and took off at a dead run.
“Bran will finish the hunt with the new ones,” Charles told me. “It is their first hunt, and should not be interrupted. Samuel is going back to take care of Adam—He’ll take a shorter route than the automobiles can manage, so he’ll be there before us. I’ll ride back with you and take care of your dead.”
On the tail end of Charles’s words, Bran trotted off into the forest without looking at me again. Leah rose from her submissive pose, growled at me—like it was my fault she’d gotten herself in trouble—and followed Bran.
Charles, still in human form, strode off in the direction of the cars. He wasn’t talkative at the best of times and, with me still four-footed and mute, he didn’t bother to say anything at all. He waited politely on the passenger side of the van while I transformed again and dove into my clothes.
He didn’t object to my driving as Samuel would have. I’d never seen Charles drive a car; he preferred to ride horseback or run as a wolf. He climbed into the passenger seat and glanced once behind him at the tarped body. Without commenting, he belted himself in.
When we got back to the motel, I pulled in at the office door. Carl was in the office with a red-eyed young woman who must be the missing Marlie, though I couldn’t see the six-year-old I’d known.
“Mercedes needs a room,” Charles told them.
Carl didn’t question him, just handed me a key. “This is on the side away from the road, as far from #1 as we get.”
I looked down at the #18 stamped on the key. “Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to put the room number on the key anymore?” I asked.
“We don’t have much trouble with burglary,” Carl said, smiling. “Besides, I know you spent a couple of years working here. Except for number one, there are only three different locks for all the rooms.”
I smiled at him and tossed the key up once and caught it. “True enough.”
Charles opened the door for me as we left. “If you’ll get your luggage and give me your car keys, I’ll take care of the body.”
I must have looked surprised.
“Don’t worry,” he told me dryly. “I’ll have Carl drive.”
“No luggage,” I told him. I pulled out my keys and gave them to him, but caught his hand before he pulled away. “Mac was a good man,” I told him. I don’t know why I said it.
Charles didn’t touch anyone casually. I had always thought he rather despised me, though he treated me with the same remote courtesy he used with everyone else. But he put his free hand on the back of my head and pulled my forehead briefly against his shoulder.
“I’ll take care of him,” he promised as he stepped back.
“His full name was Alan MacKenzie Frazier.”
He nodded. “I’ll see that he is treated well.”
“Thank you,” I told him, then turned and walked toward my room before I could start to cry again.
Chapter 6
There was a pile of National Geographics and a paperback mystery stacked neatly on the nightstand. As I recall, the reading material was put there originally to make up for the absence of a TV. When I’d cleaned rooms here, you couldn’t get reception so far in the mountains. Now there was a dish on top of the motel and a small TV positioned so you could watch it either from the bed or the small table in the kitchenette.
I wasn’t interested in watching old reruns or soap operas so I flipped desultorily through the magazines. They looked familiar. Maybe they were the same stack that had been here when I’d last cleaned this room: the newest one was dated May of 1976, so it was possible. Or maybe random stacks of National Geographics have a certain sameness gained from years of appearing in waiting rooms.
I wondered if Jesse were lying in a hospital somewhere. My mind flashed to a morgue, but I brought it back under control. Panic wouldn’t help anyone. I was doing the best that I could.
I picked up the lone book and sat on the bed. The cover was not prepossessing, being a line drawing of a Wisconsin-style barn, but I opened it anyway and started reading. I closed it before I’d read more than the first sentence. I couldn’t bear sitting here alone, doing nothing.
I left the room. It was colder than it had been, and all I had was my T-shirt, so I ran to number one. I had the key in the pocket of my jeans, but when I tried the door, it opened.
Adam lay on top of the bed on his side, his muzzle wrapped with a businesslike strap. Samuel was bent over him wearing a pair of jeans, plastic gloves, and nothing else. It was a measure of my concern for Adam that my eyes didn’t linger. Charles, leaning against the wall, glanced at me but said nothing.
“Shut the door,” Samuel snapped, without looking up. “Damn it, Mercy, you should have set the break before you threw him in the car and drove all day—you of all people know how fast we heal. I’ll have to rebreak his leg.”