Page 2 of Winter Lost

Zee, back to tinkering in the engine compartment, grunted.

“Not that purple is a bad color for a bug,” I said. “And two eyes might even be cute—if they were soft and happy. But one crazytown eye on the hood is just creepy.”

“Shameful thing to do to a nice old car,” he agreed. “Did you see the plates?”

There was something in his voice that sent me back out into the cold to check the vanity plates on the bug.

PPLEATR

It took me a moment to work it out.

I went back into the garage and went to work. After about twenty minutes, I said, “Does it eat flying purple people? Or purple people? Or just people?”

“Now you’ve done it,” Zee grumbled. “Be silent if you can’t be useful.”

I grinned and went back to work.

Zee broke first. By lunchtime, though, we were both humming the stupid song. An hour later, to change things up, I sang the first line of “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini,” and our earworm grew by one.

The phone rang as Zee was fighting back with “It’s a Small World,” which was cheating.

“Mercy’s Garage,” I answered.

“It’s Mary Jo. I—” She paused. “I really need to talk to someone about something and I think you are the right someone.”

Mary Jo wanted to talk to me. Maybe the Purple People Eater had changed the orbit of the planet, or hell had truly frozen over.

—

In December at six p.m., even with the streetlights, it was dark. I was running a little late because I’d stopped at home to change.

The overhead clouds blocked the stars and left the waning but still nearly full moon a faint glow in the sky. Snow drifted down in the giant fat flakes that only happened when the temperature was just perfect, snowman-building snow. The kind, in fact, that stuck to my wipers so they both squeaked and also left water splotches on my windshield.

Mary Jo had asked me to meet her. As I drove through the accumulating snow, I had the same triumphant feeling in my belly that I did at the end of a difficult but successful hunt.

Mary Jo and I had been not friends but certainly friendly until her Alpha had pulled me into the werewolf pack as his mate. She wasn’t the only wolf who had resented him bringing in someone who turned into a coyote, but Mary Jo had been the central player in the anti-coyote faction of the pack.

At first I’d tried ignoring their dislike of me. The pack was Adam’s problem, and they seemed to run better when I kept my head down. He’d put a stop to any active harassment, and what various of the werewolves had thought about me hadn’t mattered.

But things were different now. Our pack was responsible for the safety of anyone in our territory, thanks to yours truly. As an added bit of icing on the cake, we had to do it as a lone pack.

The Marrok who ruled the werewolves in this part of the world was worried that our actions could draw them all into a real war. So he’d cut us off. If we were unaffiliated (what a pedestrian word for the blood-and-flesh bonds that bound the werewolves together), then the worst that would happen is that the fae would wipe out our pack. Or the humans would kill us all. Or the witches. Or the vampires. Or some unknown nasty we hadn’t run into yet. But the damage would be local and not an interspecies war.

We were on our own and in over our heads. That meant we didn’t have time for petty rivalries or stupid games within our pack—we were too busy running to put out one figurative fire before another started. I had to fix the damage bringing me into the pack had done.

As Adam’s mate, I’d taken my share of organizing the defense of our territory. I had made a point of taking on the worst of the resultant jobs myself—and I’d made sure to bring Mary Jo with me. Every time we went out, she was a little less unhappy with me. Two days ago, we fought a fishy-something-with-teeth that decided to take up residence on one of the small islands in the middle of the river.

When Mary Jo killed it, the unidentifiable giant river monster thingy had exploded into a mass of inch-long versions of the giant thing. My legs still had bite marks. But Mary Jo had given me a high five when we’d hunted the last of them down.

Mary Jo wasn’t the only recalcitrant wolf I brought with me to awful jobs. She had just been the most resistant. There was nothing like shared misery to build relationships. Adam said that he’d felt the pack bonds settling in tighter since I’d started my campaign.

As I headed to the meeting with Mary Jo, I thought that just possibly I could start giving some of the worst jobs to people other than me. That would be nice.

My cell phone rang as Columbia Drive swung west on its trip to the Blue Bridge. The suspension bridge would have made the journey a lot shorter, but a troll fight had damaged it, then a fae lord demolished it. Reconstruction was set to finish, barring delays, in the spring, and in the meantime the Blue Bridge, already overcrowded, had become the main artery between Kennewick and Pasco.

I’d taken my Vanagon tonight. Built in the last century, it had a CD player but no Bluetooth. As a small business owner and the mate of the Alpha of a werewolf pack, I needed to answer my phone. I’d solved the problem with a Bluetooth earpiece.

My stepdaughter, Jesse, rolled her eyes when I first put it on. “The time-share call center called, and they want their headset back. Get some earbuds, Mercy, you’ll thank me later.”

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