She dropped her gaze away from his and knelt to examine his hips, humming softly as she moved closer.
She didn't stink of fear, was all he could think. Everyone feared him. Everyone. Even Him, even the one who searched. She smelled of horse, sweat, and something sweet. No fear.
He snarled, and she wrapped one hand over his muzzle. Sheer astonishment stopped his growls. Just how stupid was she?
"Shh." Her voice blended into the music she was making, and he realized that her humming was pulling magic out of the ground around and beneath them. "Let me look."
He was as surprised at himself as he was at her when he let her do just that. He could have torn out her throat or broken her neck while she examined every inch of him. But he didn't - and he wasn't quite certain why not.
It wasn't that killing her would bother him. He'd killed a lot of people. But that was before. He didn't want to do that anymore. So perhaps that was part of it.
He knew she was trying to help him - but he didn't want help. He wanted to die.
Her magic swept over and around him, cushioning him. The wolf whined softly and relaxed, leaving the mage in him fully in charge for the first time since the illness had hit. Maybe even longer ago than that.
Her magic didn't work on the mage because he knew what it was - and, he admitted to himself, because it wasn't coercive magic. He was mage enough to read her intent. She didn't want the wolf to become a lapdog but only to relax.
But the woman's helpful intent wasn't why he didn't kill her. Not the real reason. He hadn't been interested in anything in longer than he could remember, but she made him curious. He'd only ever met a practitioner of green magic, wild magic, once before. They hid from the humans in the land - if there were any still left. But here was one wearing the clothes of a mercenary.
She could pick him up - which surprised him because she didn't weigh much more than he did. But she couldn't hoist him high enough to reach the edge of the trap, so she set him down again.
"Going to need some help," she told him, and clambered to the top. She almost didn't make it out of the pit herself; if it had been round, she wouldn't have.
When she departed and took her magic with her, it left him bereaved - as if someone had covered him with a blanket, then removed it. And only when she left did he realize that her music had deadened his pain and soothed him, despite his being a mage on his guard against it.
He heard the horse move and the sound of leather and something heavy hitting the ground. The horse approached the pit and stopped.
When the mercenary who could do green magic hopped back into his almost grave, she had a rope in her hand.
He waited for the wolf to stir as she tied him in a makeshift harness that somehow managed to brace his bad leg. But the wolf waited as meekly as a lamb while she worked. When he was trussed up to her satisfaction, she climbed back out.
"Come on, Sheen," she told someone. Possibly, he thought, it was the horse.
The trip out of the hole was not pleasant. He closed his eyes and let the pain take him where it would. When he lay on the ground at last, she untied him.
Freed at last, he lay where he had fallen, too weak to run. Maybe too curious as well.
Chapter One
"You should have brought the van," said my stepdaughter. She sounded like herself, though the expression on her face was still a little tight.
"I shouldn't have brought anything, including us," I muttered, shoving harder on the hatch. My Rabbit had a lot of cargo space for a little car. We'd only been here twenty minutes. I shop at Walmart all the time, and I never come out with this much stuff. We'd even left before the big midnight reveal. And still - I had all this stuff. Most of which had not been on sale. Who does that?
"Oh, come on," she scoffed, determinedly cheerful. "It's Black Friday. Everyone shops Black Friday."
I looked up from the stubborn lid of my poor beleaguered car and glanced around the parking lot of Home Depot. "Obviously," I muttered.
Home Depot wasn't open at midnight on Black Friday, but the parking lot was huge and was doing a good job of absorbing the overflow from Walmart. A bicycle couldn't have parked in the Walmart lot. I wouldn't have believed there were this many people in the Tri-Cities - and this was only one of three Walmarts, the one we'd decided would be the least busy.
"We should go to Target next," Jesse said, her thoughtful voice sending chills down my spine. "They have the new Instant Spoils: The Dread Pirate's Booty Four game on sale for half off the usual price, and it was set for release tonight at midnight. There were rumors that problems in production meant before-Christmas shortages."
Codpieces and Golden Corsets: The Dread Pirate's Booty Three, better known as CAGCTDPBT - I kid you not; if you couldn't say the letters ten times in a row without stumbling, you weren't a Real Player - was the game of choice for the pack. Twice a month, they brought their laptops and a few desktops and set them up in the meeting room and played until dawn. Vicious, nasty werewolves playing pirate games on the Internet - it was pretty intense, and I was a little surprised that we hadn't had any bodies. Yet.
"Shortage rumors carefully leaked to the press just in time for Black Friday," I groused.
She grinned, her cheeks flushed with the cold November wind and her good cheer not as forced as it had been since her mother called to cancel Christmas plans during Thanksgiving dinner earlier this evening. "Cynic. You've been hanging around Dad too much."
So, in search of pirate booty, we drove across the street to the Target parking lot, which looked a lot like the Walmart parking lot had. Unlike Walmart, Target hadn't stayed open. There was a line four people deep waiting for the doors to be unlocked at midnight, which, according to my watch, was about two minutes from now. The line started at Target, wrapped around the shoe store and giant pet store, and disappeared around the corner of the strip mall into darkness.
"They're not open yet." I did not want to go where that line of people was going. I wondered if this was how Civil War soldiers felt, looking over a ridge and seeing the other side's combatants, grim and poised for battle. This line of people was pushing baby strollers instead of cannons, but they still looked dangerous to me.
Jesse looked at my face and snickered.
I pointed at her. "You can just stop that right now, missy. This is all your fault."
She blinked innocently at me. "My fault? All I said was it might be fun to go out and hit the Black Friday sales."
I'd thought it would be a good way to distract her from her mother's patented brand of guilt trip leavened with broken promises. I hadn't realized that going shopping on Black Friday (Thursday still, according to my watch, for the next minute) was akin to throwing myself on a grenade. I'd still have done it - I love Jesse, and the diversion was starting to work - but it might have been nice to know how bad it was going to be.
We drove slowly behind a host of cars also looking for parking places, eventually drifting right by the front of the store where the shoppers lurked, hunched and ready to attack the sales. Inside the store, a young man in the sadly appropriate red Target shirt walked very slowly to the locked door that was all that protected him from the horde.
"He's going to die." Jesse sounded a little worried.
The crowd started undulating, like a Chinese New Year dragon, as he reached up slowly to turn the key.
"I wouldn't want to be in his shoes," I agreed, as the boy, mission completed, turned to run back into the store, the crowd of salivating shoppers hot on his trail.
"I'm not going in there," I stated firmly, as an old woman elbowed another old woman who had tried to slip in through the doors ahead of her.
"We could always go to the mall," Jesse said after a moment.
"The mall?" I raised my eyebrows at her incredulously. "You want to go to the mall?" There are a herd of strip malls in the Tri-Cities as well as a factory outlet mall, but when one speaks of "the Mall," they mean the big one in Kennewick. The one that everyone shopping on Black Friday was planning to hit first.
Jesse laughed. "Seriously, though, Mercy. Five-quart kitchen mixers are on sale, a hundred dollars off. Darryl's broke when my friends and I made brownies with it. With babysitting money, I have just enough to replace it for Christmas if I can find it for a hundred dollars off. If we get the mixer, I'm okay with calling this experiment finished." She gave me a rueful look. "I really am okay, Mercy. I know my mother; I was expecting her to cancel. Anyway, it'll be more fun spending Christmas with Dad and you."
"Well, if that's the case," I said, "why don't I give you a hundred dollars, and we can skip the mall?"
She shook her head. "Nope. I know you haven't been part of this family long, so you don't know all the rules. When you break someone else's toy, you have to pay for it yourself. To the mall."
I sighed loudly and pulled out of the frying pan of the Target parking lot and headed toward the fire of the Columbia Center Mall. "Into the breach, then. Against mobs of middle-aged moms and frightening harridans we shall prevail."
She nodded sharply, raising an invisible sword. "And damned be he - she - who cries, 'Hold, enough!'"
"Misquote Shakespeare in front of Samuel, I dare you," I told her, and she laughed.
I was new at being a stepmother. It was like walking a tightrope sometimes - a greased tightrope. As much as Jesse and I liked each other, we'd had our moments. Hearing her laugh with genuine cheer made me optimistic about our chances.
The car in front of me stopped suddenly, and I locked up the Rabbit's brakes. The Rabbit was a relic from my teenage years (long past) that I kept running because I loved it - and because I was a mechanic, and keeping an old, cheap car like the Rabbit running was the best form of advertisement. The brakes worked just fine, and she stopped with room to spare - about four inches of room.
"I'm not the first person to misuse Macbeth," Jesse said, sounding a bit breathless - but then, she didn't know I'd just redone the brakes last week when I had some time.