Shifting Shadows

Outtake from NIGHT BROKEN

This is the second outtake, and it comes from Night Broken. Just after writing the very last scenes of Night Broken, I dreamed this scene. When I woke up, I tried to see if there was any way I could work it into the end. Frost Burned had had a whole chapter from Adam’s point of view, after all. But it was too short to be a full chapter. Even if it had been longer, and if I’d put a chapter from his viewpoint at the end, I’d have had to do the same thing at the beginning, or the book would have felt unbalanced to me. And there was no reason for Adam to have a chapter at the beginning. So, reluctantly, I tabled this scene.

When my husband asked for a happy scene for Samuel and Ariana in this book, I decided that meant there was room for another outtake, too. This bit comes at the very end of the book, so be aware that there are spoilers for Night Broken herein.

He joked with her, flirted a little, and teased. And when he could bear it no more, he excused himself to go down and get some food.

She had been dying.

It was supposed to have been him.

He walked down the hospital halls toward the cafeteria, seeing and hearing nothing. Samuel had showed him the X-rays. Her neck had been broken—nothing they could do. If she lived, she might be able to move her head a little. But she would not live through the night.

Samuel loved Mercy, too. But he’d ushered all the others out of Mercy’s room and left Adam to his deathwatch.

Adam had been prepared for her death. He’d kept his cool—mostly. When Coyote had come and curled up on the foot of her bed, he’d thought the old trickster was keeping watch, too. Samuel came back the next morning—and they’d taken new X-rays because Mercy was wiggling her toes.

Adam stopped and realized he’d made it all the way to the cafeteria. It was evening, near dinnertime, and there was a short line.

Someone bumped into him. Adam looked around and saw a Native American man with a familiar face. He wore a sky-blue tracksuit and had one of those pink frilly things girls use instead of rubber bands wound around the end of his braid. There was a little lamb on a chain suspended from the frilly thing.

“Here,” said Coyote, handing him a white paper bag that smelled of peppers, tomatoes, and sour cream. “Take this. It is better than what they are serving today.”

Adam took the bag, glanced in it, and said, “I’m going to get a couple of drinks, too. Do you want something?”

“Anything but orange juice,” Coyote said.

“Mercy doesn’t like orange juice, either,” Adam told him. He paid for three cranberry-apple juices and handed one to Coyote.

“Mercy is a smart cookie,” Coyote told him. “Except when she is not. She acts from her heart, and that leads her to danger. She needs a brave man to run with her. Are you such a man, Adam Hauptman?”

Shrewd eyes stared up into his, and Adam felt his wolf rise to answer the challenge.

Instead, Adam opened his juice and drank it all. “I don’t like it when she’s hurt—and she would have died if it hadn’t been for you.”

Coyote looked down modestly, then said, “She was doing my job when she was hurt, so I could help her live if she wanted to. I am an old, old coyote, Adam Hauptman, and the thought of challenging such a one?” He gave an exaggerated shiver. “No. No. Battles are for the young.” He opened his bottle and drank a sip, grimacing at the taste. “Too much corn syrup,” he said. “Don’t they know it will stunt my growth? Where was I? Ah yes. She almost died—that’s what life’s all about, you know. Death. Everyone dies.”

“Except you,” Adam felt obliged to point out. He put a firm lid on his growing irritation at the pontificating. Coyote had saved Mercy. If he wanted to lecture Adam, Adam would listen all day.

“Me?” Coyote eyed the bottle with little favor but took another drink anyway. “I die all the time. Mercy only gets this once. So I ask you again, are you brave enough?”

Adam drew a breath, turned away to toss his bottle in the recycling bin—and Coyote was gone.

“Stupid Coyote,” he said to the air. “Brave or cowardly, it doesn’t matter. Don’t you know that if it is a choice between having Mercy or giving her up, I will be whatever I have to be?”

He took Mercy’s juice and the white bag of take-out Mexican and walked briskly back to Mercy’s room. He opened the door and drew in a breath.

Mercy stood silhouetted in front of the window that let in the brilliant light of the setting sun. The red-and-orange rays lit up her hair, giving it rich red highlights and turning her skin to caramel. He could see the muscles in her arms and legs that were more defined than they had been a few months ago, now that he insisted she upgrade her self-defense techniques.

She looked for a moment like a pagan warrior goddess—a goddess clad in one of those ridiculous open-back hospital gowns with some silly bunny-and-duck pattern running in vertical lines from hem to shoulder. She looked over at him.

“Do I smell jalapeños?” she asked—and she overbalanced. The wheeled tripod that held her saline drip bag started to tip. He dropped the bag, kept the bottle, and caught her and everything else before disaster happened.

“Heyya, handsome,” she said in a smoky voice that told him she was still pretty stoned from the pain medications. “Where’ve you been all my life?”

“Right here,” he said. “Waiting for you.”

“That’s a good line,” she told him. “But you stole it from a song, so it doesn’t count.”

“And ‘Heyya, handsome. Where’ve you been all my life?’ is original?”

Something hard dug into his foot, and he looked down to see the silver end of the walking stick on the toe of his boot. The walking stick hadn’t been there when he’d left.

She saw his interest. “Look at what showed up late to the party,” she said, moving the stick up and waving it around. He ducked, caught her hand, and collected the walking stick in the hand that held the bottle.

He picked her up, hauled her and her equipment over to the bed, and sat her down. It took a few minutes to untangle blankets, sheets, and various tubes that ended in Mercy’s skin, attached by needles. But eventually he settled her in. By the time he finished, though, she was asleep, the walking stick lying protectively at her side.

He kissed her lips, smiling as she grumbled. Then he ate a burrito in the light of the setting sun and watched over his warrior mate.