• • •
Ben stretched and glanced at the shreds of his pants. He’d managed to shed most of his clothes after Mel had rabbited into her bedroom, but the pants had stayed on and suffered the beast’s wrath. He shook himself and looked around for a place to wait for Mercy, who’d promised to hurry to Mel’s house as soon as he’d called, but she was all the way out in Finley, and it would take her a while to get here.
He took a step and his hip hit one of the kitchen chairs. He stepped back and bumped into the cabinets. The house was small, tiny even. There wasn’t any place he could see in Mel’s house big enough for him to sit down except the love seat—and even it would be iffy.
He hopped up, careful not to dig his claws into the faded, floral-print fabric. The arm made a nice chin rest.
Mel’s house was like her: small, not too bright, but warm and uncluttered. Safe. His secretary. His.
He snorted and wondered what the other DBAs would say if they realized that he thought of them as his people. He wiggled a little to get more comfortable while he waited for Mercy to pick him up.
• • •
Mel sat among the DBAs who had tried their best to get front row. They hadn’t succeeded because the security team had made it to the auditorium ahead of everyone else.
Lorna Winkler took the stage first, and all the men around Mel straightened in their chairs and brushed dandruff off their shoulders. Mel exchanged a rueful look with Amanda, one of the few women in the DBA division. Lorna might not be brilliant or even know much about computers, but she was able to get the IT department all aimed in the same direction when she needed to if only because all the men in IT would do anything she asked of them as long as she did it in her beautifully modulated voice. And the men outnumbered women in the IT department by better than three to one.
As Lorna spoke of how impressed she’d been with their performance last quarter, Mel imagined her practicing it in front of the mirror. There were bets about how often “world peace” would come up in the speech; the most in a previous speech had been six, though Mel hadn’t been there for that one. Rumor was that once she hadn’t said those two words together, but no one believed it. Mel was glad her mother had never sent her out to be scarred from too many beauty pageants at too young an age.
“I believe that we must, all of us, strive every day to become better people,” Lorna said, smiling so that everyone could see her perfectly capped white teeth. “Small steps lead to great ones, like world peace and liberty for all. In that vein, I have to tell you that it pleases me to encourage you by presenting one of your own who has overcome a very bad habit. He has agreed to speak to us today about how he accomplished that and how you might improve yourselves. I give you Ben Shaw”—she smiled—“IT’s favorite werewolf.”
A polite applause arose and stopped.
Ben got up and put an empty decanter of whiskey on the side of the podium.
“My speech,” he said, reading awkwardly from a sheet of paper in front of him, “is about how I broke my f**king habit of drinking shitty whiskey.”
By the time he’d finished, the audience was in stitches. He’d kept a serious demeanor the whole time, along with that awkward, serious voice that managed to counter the impression of intelligence Ben’s British accent encouraged. The contrast between his tone and the words he was using made Mel want to clear the wax out of her ears because the combination was just so wrong. And funny.
Ken Lincoln, sitting next to Mel, said, in awe, “I don’t think I’ve heard that many swearwords in such a short period in my life, and I was in the army. And the best part is that I don’t have to quit smoking.”
“What exactly is a pony-shagging, bitch-faced, ball buster?” asked Amanda, sounding strangled as she wiped her eyes.
Mel was watching Lorna Winkler’s face as one of the upper management, a grin on his face, shook her hand. She was pretty good at lip-reading, but he was faced half-away. She caught “comedy routine” and “not boring” and, as Lorna smiled graciously, “good idea.”
Ben smiled slyly at Mel, then joined Lorna and shook hands with Lorna’s bosses.
HOLLOW
There can’t be a collection of Mercyverse stories without a Mercy story, right?
I have always had vivid dreams. Those dreams are especially real when I am sick—sometimes it takes me a while to figure out which part was the dream and which the reality. This story is born from a nightmare about an old friend who was being haunted by his murdered wife. It is also about Mercy making peace with the changes in her life—which have been sea changes over the past few books. There are a few spoilers for Night Broken in this story.
The events in “Hollow” take place after the events in Night Broken.
The beginning: thirteen years ago, All Hallow’s Eve
Rick folded his father’s suit and set it in a box that was going to charity. The whole room was packed into boxes. A double row of donation items, boxes for auction, and two boxes of items he’d decided to keep.
The only thing left was his father’s bag of personal effects, then he could put his father’s presence behind him. A year ago, he’d have mourned, if for nothing but the lost opportunity for a change for the better. But he was a different man now at twenty-two than the boy he’d been at twenty-one. Losing both of his parents within months of each other would change anyone. Especially since his mother had committed suicide, and six months later, his father drove off a cliff. His death had been ruled an accident, but Rick was undecided: his father had been a very good driver.
But it wasn’t just his parents’ deaths that had changed him. Finding his wife’s dead body and then being charged with her murder had started the ball rolling. After he’d survived the trial with his freedom and sanity intact, or mostly intact, he’d become a man who could go through his father’s things without feeling either rage or sorrow.
He picked up the white plastic bag that held the contents of his father’s pockets and whatever happened to be on his body when he’d arrived at the hospital and spilled the contents out on the desk. His father’s wedding ring—why he wore one when he never had honored the vows it was supposed to represent, Rick had never been able to fathom. His wallet. A handful of change.
Rick opened the wallet. Someone at the hospital or the morgue had emptied the cash: his father would never have been driving around without cash. The credit cards seemed to be all there, though. He set those aside along with his father’s driver’s license to be shredded. There were two photos, battered and worn, in the wallet: Rick at six or seven with a softball bat over one shoulder and a determined look on his face, and Rick’s mother—one of the photos taken at their wedding.