"Bra, bra, bra," I chanted as I pulled one out of the dirty-clothes basket and hooked it. I pulled the thing around so fast I wouldn't be surprised to discover I'd given myself a rug burn. "Shirt. Shirt." I ransacked my drawers and found and discarded two shirts. "Clean shirt, clean shirt."
"Mercy?" called Adam, sounding a little desperate - how well I knew that feeling.
"Mom, leave him alone!" I said. "I'll be right out."
Frustrated, I stared at my room. I had to have a clean shirt somewhere. I had just been wearing one - but it had disappeared in my search for a bra. Finally, I pulled on a shirt that said 1984:GOVERNMENT FOR DUMMIES on the back. It was clean, or at least it didn't stink too badly. The oil smudge on the shoulder looked permanent.
I took a deep breath and opened the door. I had to duck around Adam, who was leaning against the door frame.
"Hey, Mom," I said breezily. "I see you've met my - " What? Mate? I didn't think that was something my mother needed to hear. "I see you've met Adam."
"Mercedes Athena Thompson," snapped my mother. "Explain to me why I had to learn about what happened to you from a newspaper?"
I'd been avoiding meeting her gaze, but once she three-named me, I had no choice.
My mother is five-foot-nothing. She's only seventeen years older than me, which means she's not yet fifty and looks thirty. She can still wear the belt buckles she won barrel racing on their original belts. She's usually blond - I'm pretty sure it's her natural color - but the shade changes from year to year. This year it was strawberry gold. Her eyes are big and blue and innocent-looking, her nose slightly tip-tilted, and her mouth full and round.
With strangers, she sometimes plays a dumb blonde, batting her eyelashes and speaking in a breathy voice that anyone who watched old movies would recognize from Some Like It Hot or Bus Stop. My mother has never, to my knowledge, changed her own flat tire.
If the sharp anger in her voice hadn't been a cover for the bruised look in her eyes, I could have responded in kind. Instead, I shrugged.
"I don't know, Mom. After it happened... I stayed coyote for a couple of days." I had a half-hysterical vision of calling her, and saying, "By the way, Mom, guess what happened to me today..."
She looked me in the eyes, and I thought she saw more than I wanted her to. "Are you all right?"
I started to say yes, but a lifetime of living with creatures who could smell a lie had left me with a habit of honesty. "Mostly," I said, compromising. "It helps that he's dead." It was humiliating that my chest was getting tight. I'd given myself all the self-pity time I would allow.
Mom could cuddle her children like any of the best of parents, but I should have trusted her more. She knew all about the importance of standing on your own two feet. Her right hand was balled into a white-knuckled fist, but when she spoke, her voice was brisk.
"All right," she said, as if we'd covered everything she was going to ask. I knew better, but I also knew it would be later and private.
She turned her angelic blue eyes on Adam. "Who are you, and what are you doing in my daughter's house at eleven at night?"
"I'm not sixteen," I said in a voice even I could tell was sulky. "I can even have a man stay all night if I want to."
Mom and Adam both ignored me.
Adam had remained in position against my bedroom door frame, his body held a little more casually than usual. I thought he was trying to give my mother the impression that he was at home here: someone who had authority to keep her out of my room. He lifted an eyebrow and showed not even a touch of the panic I'd heard in his voice earlier. "I'm Adam Hauptman, I live on the other side of her back fence."
She scowled at him. "The Alpha? The divorced man with the teenage daughter?"
He gave her one of his sudden smiles, and I knew my mom had made yet another conquest: she's pretty cute when she scowls, and Adam didn't know many people gutsy enough to scowl at him. I had a sudden revelation. I'd been making a tactical error for the past few years if I'd really wanted him to quit flirting with me. I should have smiled and smirked and batted my eyelashes at him. Obviously, a woman snarling at him was something he enjoyed. He was too busy looking at my mom's scowl to see mine.
"That's right, ma'am." Adam quit leaning against the door and took a couple of steps into the room.
"Good to meet you at last, Margi. Mercy speaks of you often."
I didn't know what my mother would have said to that, doubtless something polite. But with a popping sound like eggs cracking on a cement floor, something appeared between Mom and Adam, a foot or so above the carpet. It was a human-sized something, black and crunchy. It dropped to the floor, reeking of char, old blood, and rotten corpses.
I stared at it for too long, my eyes failing to find a pattern that agreed with what my nose told me. Even knowing that only a few things could just appear in my living room without using the door couldn't make me acknowledge what it was. It was the green shirt, torn and stained, with the hindquarters of a familiar
Great Dane still visible, that forced me to admit that this black and shrunken thing was Stefan.
I dropped to my knees beside him and reached out before snatching my hand back, afraid to damage him more. He was obviously dead, but since he was a vampire, that wasn't as hopeless a thing as it might have been.
"Stefan?" I said.
I wasn't the only one who jumped when he grabbed my wrist. The skin on his hand was dry and crackled disconcertingly against my skin.
Stefan has been my friend since the first day I moved here to the Tri-Cities. He is charming, funny, and generous - if given to miscalculations on how forgiving I might be about innocent people he killed trying to protect me.
It was still all I could do not to jerk away and rub off the feel of his brittle skin on my arm. Ick. Ick. Ick.
And I had the horrible feeling that it was hurting him to hold on to me, that at any moment his skin would crack and fall off.
His eyes opened to slits, his irises crimson instead of brown. His mouth opened and shut twice without making any sound. Then his hand tightened on mine until I couldn't have pulled free if I had wanted to.
He sucked in a breath of air so he could talk, but he couldn't do it quite right, and I heard air hissing out of the side of his ribs, where it had no business escaping from.
"She knows." His voice didn't sound like his at all. It was rough and dry. As he pulled my hand slowly toward his face, with the last of the air from that breath, he said intently, "Run." And with those words, the person who was my friend disappeared under the fierce hunger in his face.