Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson) - Softcover

Patricia Briggs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0356500624 ISBN 13: 9780356500621

Publisher: Orbit, 2011

Synopsis

Silver Borne

About this title

About the Author:

Patricia Briggs lives in Montana with her husband, children, and six horses.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

 

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Titles by Patricia Briggs

 

The Mercy Thompson Novels

MOON CALLED
BLOOD BOUND
IRON KISSED
BONE CROSSED
SILVER BORNE

 

The Alpha and Omega Novels

ON THE PROWL

(with Eileen Wilks, Karen Chance, and Sunny)

CRY WOLF
HUNTING GROUND

 

MASQUES
STEAL THE DRAGON
WHEN DEMONS WALK

 

THE HOB’S BARGAIN

 

DRAGON BONES
DRAGON BLOOD

 

RAVEN’S SHADOW
RAVEN’S STRIKE

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This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

Copyright © 2010 by Hurog, Inc.

Map illustration by Michael Enzweiler.

 

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Briggs, Patricia.

ISBN: 9781101186114

1. Thompson, Mercy (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Automobile mechanics—Fiction.

3. Werewolves—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.R53165S56 2010

813’.6—dc22 2010001113

 

 

To Long-Suffering Editors who never lose their cool, Husbands
who feed horses, Children who drive themselves and fix their own
meals, to Vets who take panicked phone calls at all hours, and to
all of you who give of your time, talents, and energy to help
others and to be there when you are needed. My thanks.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people who helped with this book. Thank you to Michael and Susann Boch, my friends in Germany who fix my German and provided Zee with his magic. Thank you to the two women who work at KGH and helped me find a safe space for Samuel. My apologies for losing the scrap of paper I wrote your names down on. If you catch me again, I will include your names in the next book. Thank you to Sylvia Cornish and the ladies of the book club who answered my questions about warrants. My thanks also go to Sgt. Kim Lattin of the Kennewick Police Department, who answered a number of urgent questions for me. To my awe-some husband, who choreographed many of the fight scenes (in this and other books). To Tom Lentz, who has a Kel-Tec and with Kaye and Kyle Roberson gave me excellent gun advice. As always, a very grateful author acknowledges the editing talents of the people who read, critiqued, commented, and argued along the way: Mike Briggs, Collin Briggs, Michael Enzweiler, Debbie Lentz, Ann Peters, Kaye and Kyle Roberson, Sara and Bob Schwager, and Anne Sowards.

As always, any and all errors in this book are the responsibility of the author.

1

THE STARTER COMPLAINED AS IT TURNED OVER THE old Buick’s heavy engine. I felt a lot of sympathy for it since fighting outside my weight class was something I was intimately familiar with. I’m a coyote shapeshifter playing in a world of werewolves and vampires—outmatched is an understatement.

“One more time,” I told Gabriel, my seventeen-year-old office manager, who was sitting in the driver’s seat of his mother’s Buick. I sniffed and dried my nose on the shoulder of my work overalls. Runny noses are part and parcel of working in the winter.

I love being a mechanic, runny nose, greasy hands, and all.

It’s a life full of frustration and barked knuckles, followed by brief moments of triumph that make all the rest worthwhile. I find it a refuge from the chaos my life has been lately: no one is likely to die if I can’t fix his car.

Not even if it is his mother’s car. It had been a short day at school, and Gabriel had used his free time to try to fix his mother’s car. He’d taken it from running badly to not at all, then had a friend tow it to the shop to see if I could fix it.

The Buick made a few more unhealthy noises. I stepped back from the open engine compartment. Fuel, fire, and air make the engine run—providing that the engine in question isn’t toast.

“It’s not catching, Mercy,” said Gabriel, as if I hadn’t noticed.

He gripped the steering wheel with elegant but work-roughened hands. There was a smear of grease on his cheekbone, and one eye was red because he hadn’t put on safety glasses when he’d crawled under the car. He’d been rewarded with a big chunk of crud—rusty metal and grease—in his eye.

Even though my big heaters were keeping the edge off the cold, we both wore jackets. There is no way to keep a shop truly warm when you are running garage doors up and down all day.

“Mercy, my mamá has to be at work in an hour.”

“The good news is that I don’t think it’s anything you did.” I stepped away from the engine compartment and met his frantic eyes. “The bad news is that it’s not going to be running in an hour. Jury’s out on whether it will be back on the road at all.”

He slid out of the car and leaned under the hood to stare at the Little Engine That Couldn’t as if he might find some wire I hadn’t noticed that would miraculously make it run. I left him to his brooding and went through the hall to my office.

Behind the counter was a grubby, used-to-be-white board with hooks where I put the keys of cars I was working on—and a half dozen mystery keys that predated my tenure. I pulled a set of keys attached to a rainbow peace-sign keychain, then trotted back to the garage. Gabriel was back to sitting behind the wheel of his mother’s Buick and looking sick. I handed him the keys through the open window.

“Take the Bug,” I told him. “Tell your mom that the turn signals don’t blink, so she’ll have to use hand signals. And tell her not to pull back on the steering wheel too hard or it will come off.”

His face got stubborn.

“Look,” I said before he could refuse, “it’s not going to cost me anything. It won’t hold all the kids”—not that the Buick did; there were a lot of kids—“and it doesn’t have much of a heater. But it runs, and I’m not using it. We’ll work on the Buick after hours until it’s done, and you can owe me that many hours.”

I was pretty sure the engine had gone to the great junkyard in the sky—and I knew that Sylvia, Gabriel’s mother, couldn’t afford to buy a new engine, any more than she could buy a newer car. So I’d call upon Zee, my old mentor, to work his magic on it. Literal magic—there was not much figurative about Zee. He was a fae, a gremlin whose natural element was metal.

“The Bug’s your project car, Mercy.” Gabriel’s protest was weak.

My last project car, a Karmann Ghia, had sold. My take of the profits, shared with a terrific bodyman and an upholsterer, had purchased a ’71 Beetle and a ’65 VW Bus with a little left over. The Bus was beautiful and didn’t run; the Bug had the opposite problem.

“I’ll work on the Bus first. Take the keys.”

The expression on his face was older than it should have been. “Only if you’ll let the girls come over and clean on Saturdays until we get the Bug back to you.”

I’m not dumb. His little sisters knew how to work—I was getting the better of the bargain.

“Deal,” I said before he could take it back. I shoved the keys into his hand. “Go take the car to Sylvia before she’s late.”

“I’ll come back afterward.”

“It’s late. I’m going home. Just come at the usual time tomorrow.”

Tomorrow was Saturday. Officially, I was closed on the weekends, but recent excursions to fight vampires had cut into my bottom line. So I’d been staying open later and working on the weekend to make a little extra money.

There is no cash in battling evil: just the opposite in my experience. Hopefully, I was done with vampires—the last incident had nearly gotten me killed, and my luck was due to run out; a woman whose best talent was changing into a coyote had no business in the big leagues.

I sent Gabriel on his way and started the process of closing up. Garage doors down, heat turned to sixty, lights off. Till drawer in the safe, my purse out. Just as I reached for the final light switch, my cell phone rang.

“Mercy?” It was Zee’s son, Tad, who was going to an Ivy League college back East on full scholarship. The fae were considered a minority, so his official status as half-fae and his grades had gotten him in—hard work was keeping him there.

“Hey, Tad. What’s up?”

“I got an odd message on my cell phone last night. Did Phin give you something?”

“Phin?”

“Phineas Brewster, the guy I sent you to when the police had Dad up on murder charges and you needed some information about the fae to find out who really killed that man.”

It took me a second. “The bookstore guy? He loaned me a book.” I’d been meaning to return it for a while. Just . . . how often do you get a chance to read a book about the mysterious fae, written by the fae? It was handwritten and tough to decipher, slow going—and Phin hadn’t seemed anxious to get it back when he’d loaned it to me. “Tell him I’m sorry, and I’ll return it to him tonight. I have a date later on, but I can get it to him before that.”

There was a little pause. “Actually, he was a little unclear as to whether he wanted it back or not. He just said, ‘Tell Mercy to take care of that thing I gave her.’ Now I can’t get through to him; his phone is shut off. That’s why I called you instead.” He made a frustrated noise. “Thing is, Mercy, he never turns that damn phone off. He likes to make sure his grandmother can get in touch with him.”

Grandmother? Maybe Phin was younger than I’d thought.

“You are worried,” I said.

He made a self-deprecating noise. “I know, I know. I’m paranoid.”

“No trouble,” I said. “I ought to get it back to him anyway. Unless he keeps long hours, he won’t be at the store by the time I can get there. Do you have a home address for him?”

He did. I wrote it down and let him go with reassurances. As I locked the door and set the security alarm, I glanced up at the hidden camera. Adam would probably not be watching—unless someone triggered an alarm, mostly the cameras ran all by themselves and simply sent pictures to be recorded. Still . . . as I started for my car, I kissed my hand and blew it to the tiny lens that watched my every move, then mouthed, “See you tonight.”

My lover was worried about how well a coyote could play with the wolves, too. Being an Alpha werewolf made him a little overbearing about his concern—and being the CEO of a security contracting firm for various government agencies gave him access to lots of tools to indulge his protective instincts. I’d been mad about the cameras when he’d first had them installed, but I found them reassuring now. A coyote adapts; that’s how she survives.

PHINEAS BREWSTER LIVED ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF one of the new condo complexes in West Pasco. It didn’t seem like the sort of place where a collector of old books would live—but maybe he got his fill of dust, mold, and mildew at work and didn’t need it in his home.

I was halfway between my car and the building when I realized that I hadn’t brought the book when I got out of the car. I hesitated, but decided to leave it where it was, wrapped in a towel on the backseat of the Rabbit. The towel was to protect the book—in case I hadn’t gotten all the grease off my hands—but it worked okay to disguise it from would-be thieves, which seemed unlikely here anyway.

I climbed up two sets of stairs and knocked on the door marked 3B. After a count of ten, I rang the doorbell. Nothing. I rang the doorbell one more time, and the door at 3A opened up.

“He’s not there,” said a gruff voice.

I turned to see a skinny old man, neatly dressed in old boots, new jeans, a button-down Western shirt, and a bolo tie. All he was missing was a cowboy hat. Something—I think it was the boots—smelled faintly of horse. And fae.

“He isn’t?”

Officially, all the fae are out to the public and have been for a long time. But the truth is that the Gray Lords who rule the fae have been very selective about which of them the public gets to know about and which ones might upset the public—or are more useful posing as human. There are, for instance, a few senators who are fae in hiding. There is nothing in the Constitution that makes it illegal for a fae to be a senator, and the Gray Lords want to keep it that way.

This fae was working pretty hard at passing for human; he wouldn’t appreciate me pointing out that he wasn’t. So I kept my discovery to myself.

There was a twinkle in the faded eyes as he shook his head. “Nope, he hasn’t been home all day.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Phin?” The old man laughed, displaying teeth so even and white they looked false. Maybe they were. “Well, now. He spends most of his time at his store. Nights, too, sometimes.”

“Was he here last night?” I asked.

He looked at me and grinned. “Nope. Not him. Maybe he bought up some estate’s library and is staying at the store while he catalogs it. He does that sometimes.” Phin’s neighbor glanced up at the sky, judging the time. “He won’t answer the door after hours. Closes himself in the basement and can’t hear anyone. Best wait and go check at the sho...

About this edition

• Publisher: Orbit
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0356500624
• ISBN 13: 9780356500621
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368