Soul Taken by Patricia Briggs

Author:Patricia Briggs [Briggs, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

9

adam

Adam led Zee, George, and Tony to the Benton County Coroner’s Office, a small building set in the corner of the massive criminal justice center. Technically the grocery store murder victim’s body should have gone to the Franklin County Coroner’s Office, but Benton County had a specialist for supernatural crimes, so both the boy’s body and the witch’s body had been taken there.

“You okay?” George asked.

Adam nodded. It was as close to lying as he allowed himself. His wolf was very unhappy leaving Mercy behind in the SUV.

After she’d returned to her human shape, his mate had been unusually quiet and wracked with shivers. Normally he’d have said she was in shock—but normal went out the window when dealing with Mercy. She’d refused his offer to get food for her, and with the others in the car, he hadn’t pressed. When she’d proposed that she stay in the car because her feet hurt, he’d trusted her to know best how to take care of herself.

That had been a hard-fought battle. It was his nature, man and beast, to take care of the people around him. When he was courting Mercy, he’d come to the reluctant understanding that taking control of her life—even and maybe especially for her own good—was the opposite of care. Experimentally, he’d applied that understanding to his pack, and he’d seen it become healthier, stronger. Larry the goblin king had not been wrong when he said that Mercy was changing Adam and the pack.

Still, knowing that leaving Mercy when she asked him to was the right thing to do didn’t make it any easier.

Before abandoning her in the car, he’d wrapped Mercy in his coat because she was still shivering as if the SUV heater wasn’t blowing hot enough to boil water. He’d given her a look to let her know that he expected her to tell him what was going on as soon as she could. She’d nodded. And that unspoken promise had allowed him to shut her door and leave her behind.

Shivering.

There were a lot of reasons that she could be shivering like that. All the easy ones would have been something she could talk about in front of everyone. He frowned darkly.

Neither he nor his wolf was happy with her alone in the SUV. Something more bestial than his wolf stirred to life and brought a growl rising to his lips. He stopped that before it became audible.

Mercy still believed that Elizaveta the witch had called the malformed beast into being. Mercy had thought that when she broke the witch’s curse, the evil creature—who only resembled his wolf as a tank resembled Mercy’s beloved and deceased Rabbit—should have gone away. When it lingered, she had decided it would just need time to fade.

Adam knew better.

Elizaveta might have given it form, but that beast had been his for longer than Mercy had been alive, born when a God-fearing boy, who’d thought the world was mostly a good place peopled with mostly good folk, met a war in Southeast Asia.

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