Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs, now you can read online.
1
THE STARTER COMPLAINED AS IT TURNED OVER THE old Buick's heavy engine.
I felt a lot of sympathy for it since fighting outside my weight class was something I was intimately familiar with.
I'm a coyote shapeshifter playing in a world of werewolves and vampires--outmatched is an understatement.
"One more time," I told Gabriel, my seventeen-year-old office manager, who was sitting in the driver's seat of his mother's Buick.
I sniffed and dried my nose on the shoulder of my work overalls.
Runny noses are part and parcel of working in the winter.
I love being a mechanic, runny nose, greasy hands, and all.
It's a life full of frustration and barked knuckles, followed by brief moments of triumph that make all the rest worthwhile.
I find it a refuge from the chaos my life has been lately: no one is likely to die if I can't fix his car.
Not even if it is his mother's car.
It had been a short day at school, and Gabriel had used his free time to try to fix his mother's car.
He'd taken it from running badly to not at all, then had a friend tow it to the shop to see if I could fix it.
The Buick made a few more unhealthy noises.
I stepped back from the open engine compartment.
Fuel, fire, and air make the engine run--providing that the engine in question isn't toast.
"It's not catching, Mercy," said Gabriel, as if I hadn't noticed.
He gripped the steering wheel with elegant but work- roughened hands.
There was a smear of grease on his cheekbone, and one eye was red because he hadn't put on safety glasses when he'd crawled under the car.
He'd been rewarded with a big chunk of crud--rusty metal and grease-- in his eye.
Even though my big heaters were keeping the edge off the cold, we both wore jackets.
There is no way to keep a shop truly warm when you are running garage doors up and down all day.
"Mercy, my mam? has to be at work in an hour." "The good news is that I don't think it's anything you did." I stepped away from the engine compartment and met his frantic eyes.
"The bad news is that it's not going to be running in an hour.
Jury's out on whether it will be back on the road at all." He slid out of the car and leaned under the hood to stare at the Little Engine That Couldn't as if he might find some wire I hadn't noticed that would miraculously make it run.
I left him to his brooding and went through the hall to my office.
Behind the counter was a grubby, used-to-be-white board with hooks where I put the keys of cars I was working on--and a half dozen mystery keys that predated my tenure.
I pulled a set of keys attached to a rainbow peace-sign keychain, then trotted back to the garage.
Gabriel was back to sitting behind the wheel of his mother's Buick and looking sick.
I handed him the keys through the open window.