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A little coyote grew up surrounded by the dead. Few realize how traumatizing that can be.
Mercy’s foster father committed suicide shortly after his wife died. To most of Mercy’s friends that is the end of the story. To her it is not. No one knows that Brian came back to her to watch over her for that first stressful week of being alone. They don’t know what it's like to wake up one morning and see your dead parent sitting in their favorite chair gazing mournfully out into the dawn. People, normal people, can’t understand how it feels to see a dead man fade. They don’t know how horrifying it is to watch as repetitive patterns fade out as the ghost becomes an echo.
Most of all they don’t know how it feels to ask someone why they killed themselves and actually get an answer.
When Mercy runs from Aspen Creek (Samuel) she runs to a family that didn’t know she existed and a mother somehow forgot to mention her. They open their arms in welcome while Margi explains the existence of her first (other) child. Mercy finishes growing in that house, but always feels like a dirty secret. The looks of shock on her new family’s faces after learning of her existence will stay with her for a lifetime.
The ghost wandering the halls doesn’t help much.
She never tells her mother’s new family that the reason she can’t relax is as much the fear of being unwanted as it is the crone wandering the halls calling her an interloper. She is either the mother or grandmother of Margi’s new husband and she makes her opinion of having a ‘filthy indian’ in her home quite clear. The whispered poison of her words soon becomes a familiar noise in the young coyotes life.
Margi doesn’t know about this talent of her child, and Mercy hopes she never will. The coyote is different enough without adding the dead into the mix
Still, the words of that dead woman will stick with Mercy for years after she leaves her mother’s new abode for college. She never fit in at Aspen Creek because a coyote was not wolf enough to be pack, but she never fits in at her mother’s home because she is inhuman to ever block out the ghosts. Too little for one and too much for the other: Mercy’s life is a collage of almosts and not not-quites that blur into a mishmash of always-a-little-off.
A girl hung herself from the balcony of their dorm common room. The others tell the tale as some grand story of something so strange that it is almost unthinkable. Mercy stares at the silent swinging corpse and the small relieved smile on a bloated face before shivering. She tells her roommates that she doesn’t like talk of suicide because her foster father killed himself. In reality she simply can’t stand how speaking of her makes the dead girl’s eyes follow them.
Not all ghosts are fully visible. One, who exists on the corner of her property, can only make itself known through grasping hands and soft giggles. Mercy knows though, that this is what's left of a young autistic boy who was tasered to death by the police. When no one is looking she takes his hands and twirls with him to try and give him some happiness. She swears he gives her a hug afterwards and leaves with a sad smile on her face.
Another exists only as the scent of sweat, terror, and pain in her sensei’s dojo. The remnants of a student who suffered a surprise heart attack nearly a year before she joined. Mercy knows there is nothing she can do for this one to help him move on.
Mac lived a hard life after his change. He died a harder death. Still, he always had a smile for her during the four months he haunted her front porch. It made her feel a little less responsible for his death, and a little more guilty for wishing him away.
She hoped he knew she was sorry it ended like that for him.
Bran knows she sees the dead, but he doesn’t quite stop to ponder what that might do to his little coyote. It isn’t until after he secretly checks in on her that he sees it. He has recently sent one of his alphas (Adam: fair, controlled, and dependable) to watch over her. The order was worded as an offer for more territory, but the alpha is wise. He hears the order to protect hidden in those words.
In the years to come Bran is often torn over whether he regrets that decision or not. It isn’t until he gives her away at her wedding that he decides that answer.
But we’re here about ghosts.
Bran begins to understand about Mercy’s ghost when he drops in to see how Adam is dealing with her. He went alone and in secret, so no one is expecting his visit. It’s because of that fact that he manages to see Mercy’s unguarded interactions with two of her ghosts.
The first, Mrs. Hanna, she greets like an old friend. Mercy chats with thin air in front of Bran’s hiding spot. He ponders what the ghost is saying back. The conversation is easy and light. It makes Mercy smile. Bran is pleased with his (adopted) pup’s happiness so does not interfere.
Then Mercy stops at an alley just a block from her work and smiles sadly at one corner. There is police tape blocking it off, but no one is around to watch the coyote standing there with pity and sadness wrapped into a smile. She tells the ghost to move on and that her attacker has been arrested. She assures it (her?) that she can be safe now. There are tears gathering in her eyes as she tells the ghost that it is safe now.
Bran remembers the violent beating a prostitute received from her pimp and how she crawled into an alley to die. He remembers that the only reason it made the new was three twelve year old girls stumbled across the corpse and panicked. His mind returns to how he read the story online and then forgot about it after deeming it not a threat to his coyote no matter how close to her shop it happened.
He is sure of who is cowering in that alley now.
It is then that Bran’s memories take him back to Mercy’s childhood. She’d grown up rather alone, an interloper in the townsfolk’s eyes, but she had never seemed to mind. She’d simply retreated to her imaginary friends. Imaginary friends who, when she described them to him in her childish way, reminded Bran far to much of lost friends.
Ghosts are most often born of violent deaths. There are a lot of violent deaths in a werewolf filled town like Aspen Creek.
He wonders what will happen to her, his little coyote. The girl who spent her life as an outsider to both the living and the dead. A part of him worries about how a girl who grew up closer to the dead than the living will cope with the world. The rest of him knows that the damage is already long done and cannot be healed. He returns unnoticed to Aspen Creek, but vows to be more careful with the dead. It’s the least he can do for those old friends who watched his stray grow up from halfway to the other side.
Mrs. Hanna fades away after gifting Mercy the drawing and Mercy hosts a one person, bodiless funeral. She cries as she wishes the old woman well and remembers all those warnings about getting attached to the dead. She knows now why that is a bad idea.
Adam knows almost from the beginning that Mercy sees the dead. The Marrok tells him so as they finalize the details of his move. it takes him years to understand what that truly means.
His awakening begins when Mercy uses ghosts to first track down vampires and then to help her gather evidence to clear Zee. The dead is as much her domain as the living, and Adam is man enough to admit that scares him. People who play with the dead have a habit of joining them.
It isn’t until the necromancer Frost that Adam truly begins to understand though. Mercy can both call and control the dead if she wishes. She has an undetectable network of spies at her fingertips that she never chooses to use. He can’t help but love that she’s too kindhearted and good to do that. His Mercy is a hero; even to the dead.
It is Jesse who understands best in the end.
A little girl is accidentally run down outfront their house by speeding teens one afternoon. Mercy is visiting her mother at the time and does not return until a week later. When she does Jesse runs out to meet her, and sees the shock and horror spreading on her step-mother’s face.
Jesse watches Mercy’s eyes trace the flight path of the little girl’s corpse just after impact and knows in that second that Mercy is watching it happen. She knows that the young body is going limp and spilling red or grey matter across the road for her new parent to watch over and over again.
She leads a shocked Mercy into the house and shoos the pack members currently inside it back to their homes. Her father thunders down the steps as she does it; drawn by the distress of his mate. Jesse shoos him away to make Mercy hot cocoa instead.
In a soft voice she tells Mercy of how she witnessed the accident from the front window. She speaks of how the spill of blood and crainianal fluid has soaked into her dreams lately and the guilt of not being fast enough to call out a warning. They talk about death with quiet voices. When they’re done Jesse gives Mercy a hug and shoves her off to bed.
Then she walks into the living room and meets their eyes of every werewolf that gathered there to listen into their conversation. Her father is the only one who doesn’t drop their eyes.
Jesse smiles, cold a brittle, before making a sweeping hand gesture. “We all dance with our own personal monsters, whether those be hungry wolves or angry ghosts.” She reminds them. “We’re all monstrous inside.”
Mercy grew up seeing ghosts. Some people saw them with her.