4
I’D HAVE LOVED TO STAY THERE FOREVER, BUT AFTER A
few minutes, I felt the cold sweat break out on my forehead and my
throat started to close down. I stepped back before I had to do
something more forceful in reaction to the aversion to touch that
Tim had left me with.
Only when I was no longer pressed against Adam did
I notice we were surrounded by pack.
Okay, four wolves doesn’t a pack make. But I hadn’t
heard them come, and, believe me, when there are five werewolves
(including Adam) about, you feel surrounded and overmatched.
Ben was there, a cheerful expression that looked
just wrong on his fine-featured face, which was more often angry or
bitter than happy. Warren, Adam’s third, looked like a cat in the
cream. Aurielle, Darryl’s mate, appeared neutral, but there was
something in her stance that told me she was pretty shaken up. The
fourth wolf was Paul, whom I didn’t know very well—but I didn’t
like what I did know.
Paul, the leader of the “I hate Warren because he’s
gay” faction of Adam’s pack, looked like he’d been sucker punched.
I thought I’d just given him a new most-hated person in the
pack.
Behind me, Adam laid his hands on my shoulders. “My
children,” he said formally, “I give you Mercedes Athena Thompson,
our newest member.”
Much awkwardness ensued.
IF I HADN’T FELT HIM EARLIER, I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT
Stefan was still unconscious or dead or whatever from the sun. He
lay stiffly on the bed in the cage, like a corpse on a bier.
I turned the light on so I could see him better.
Feeding had healed most of the visible damage, though there were
still red marks on his cheeks. He looked fifty pounds lighter than
he’d been the last time I’d seen him—too much like a concentration
camp victim for my peace of mind. He’d been given new clothes to
replace his filthy, torn, and stained ones, the ubiquitous
replacement clothing every wolf den had lying around—sweats. The
ones he wore were gray and hung off his bones.
Adam was conducting what was rapidly developing
into a full pack meeting in his living room upstairs. He’d looked
relieved when I’d excused myself to see Stefan—I thought he was
worried someone would say something that might hurt my feelings. In
that he underestimated the thickness of my hide. People I cared
about could hurt my feelings, but almost complete strangers? I
could care less about what they thought.
Wolf packs were dictatorships, but when you’re
dealing with a bunch of Americans brought up on the Bill of Rights,
you still had to step a little carefully. New members were
generally announced as prospective rather than as faits accomplis.
A little care would have been especially appropriate when he was
doing something as outrageous as bringing a nonwerewolf into the
pack.
I’d never heard of anyone doing that. Nonwerewolf
mates weren’t part of the pack, not really. They had status, as the
mates of wolves, but they weren’t pack. Couldn’t be made into pack
with fifty flesh-and-blood ceremonies—the magic just wouldn’t let a
human in. Apparently my coyoteness was close enough to wolf that
the pack magic was willing to let me in.
Probably Adam should have discussed bringing me in
with the Marrok, too.
Cars were pulling up in front of the house, more of
the pack. I could feel the weight of them, their unease and
confusion. Anger.
I rubbed my arms nervously.
“What’s wrong?” asked Stefan in a quiet, sane voice
that would have reassured me more if he’d moved or opened his
eyes.
“Besides Marsilia?” I asked him.
He looked at me then, his lips curving faintly.
“That’s enough, I suppose. But Marsilia isn’t the reason this house
is filling with werewolves.”
I sat on the thickly carpeted basement floor and
leaned my head against the bars of the cage. The door was shut and
locked, the key that sometimes hung on the wall across the hallway
gone. Adam would have it. It didn’t matter though. I was pretty
sure Stefan could leave anytime he chose—the same way he’d appeared
in my living room.
“Right.” I sighed. “Well that’s your fault, too, I
expect.”
He sat up and leaned forward. “What
happened?”
“When you jumped inside my head,” I told him, “Adam
took offense.” I didn’t tell him exactly how everything had played
out. Prudence suggested Adam wouldn’t be pleased with me if I
shared pack business with a vampire. “What he did—and you’ll have
to ask him, I think—brought the pack down on his head.”
He frowned in obvious puzzlement, then slow
comprehension dawned. “I am sorry, Mercy. You weren’t meant to ...
I didn’t mean to.” He turned his head away. “I’m not used to being
so alone. I was dreaming, and there you were, the only one left
with a tie of blood to me. I thought I dreamed that, too.”
“She really had them all killed?” I whispered it,
remembering some of what he’d given me while he’d been in my head.
“All of your ...” Sheep wasn’t really PC, and I didn’t want to tick
him off, even if sheep is what all the vampires called the mundane
humans they kept to feed off. “All of your people?”
I knew some of them, and liked one or two. For some
reason, though, rather than the faces of the people I’d met living,
it was the young vampire Danny I remembered, his ghost rocking in
the corner of Stefan’s kitchen. Stefan hadn’t been able to protect
him either.
Stefan gave me a sick look. “Disciplining me, she
said. But I think it was revenge as much as anything. And I can
feed off them from a distance. She wanted me starving when I landed
at your feet.”
“She wanted you to kill me.”
He nodded jerkily. “That’s right. And if you hadn’t
had half of Adam’s pack at your house, I would have.”
I thought of the obstinate look on his face. “I
think she underestimated you,” I told him.
“Did she?” He smiled, just a little, and shook his
head.
I leaned my head back against the wall. “I’m...”
Still angry with you didn’t cover it. He was a murderer of
innocents, and here I was talking to him, worried about him. I
didn’t know how to complete that thought, much less the sentence,
so I went on to something else.
“So Marsilia knows I killed Andre, and you and
Wulfe covered it up?”
He shook his head. “She knows something—she didn’t
talk much to me. It was only me she punished, so I don’t think she
knows about Wulfe. And maybe not me ...” He looked at me from under
the cover of his bangs, which had grown in the last day—I’d heard a
heavy feeding could cause that. “I got the feeling I was being
punished by association. I was the seethe’s contact with you. I was
the reason she went to you for help and gave you permission to kill
Andre’s pet. I was the reason you succeeded. You are my
fault.”
“She’s crazy.”
He shook his head. “You don’t know her. She’s
trying to do what is best for her people.”
The Tri-City seethe of vampires had mostly been in
the area before the towns were established. Marsilia had been sent
here as punishment for sleeping around with someone else’s
favorite. She’d been a person of influence, so had come here with
attendants—mostly, as far as I knew, Stefan, Andre—the second
vampire I’d killed—and a really creepy character named Wulfe.
Wulfe, who looked like a sixteen-year-old boy, had
been a witch or wizard as a human, and sometimes dressed like a
medieval peasant. I supposed he could be faking it, but I suspected
that he was older than Marsilia, who dated from the Renaissance, so
the clothes fit.
Marsilia had been sent here to die, but she hadn’t.
Instead, she’d seen to it that her people survived. As civilization
began to grow, life in the seethe became easier. The fight for
survival mostly a thing of the past, Marsilia had settled into a
decades-long period of apathy—I’d call it sulking. She had only
just begun to take an interest in things going on about her, and as
a result, the hierarchy of the seethe was restless. Stefan and
Andre had been loyal followers, but there were a couple of other
vamps who hadn’t been so happy to see Marsilia up and taking
charge. I’d met them: Estelle and Bernard, but I didn’t know enough
about vampires to figure out how much of a threat they were.
The first time I met Marsilia, I’d kind of admired
her ... at least until she’d enthralled Samuel. That had scared me.
Samuel’s the second-most-dominant wolf in North America, and she
and her vampires took him ... easily. That fear had grown with
every meeting.
“Not to be argumentative, Stefan,” I said. “But
she’s bug-nuts. She wanted to create another of those ... those
things that Andre made.”
His face closed down. “You don’t know what you are
talking about. You have no idea what she gave up when she came
here, or what she has done for us.”
“Maybe not, but I met that creature, and so did
you. Nothing good could ever come of making another one.” Demonic
possession isn’t a pretty thing. I inhaled and tried to control my
temper. I didn’t succeed. “But you are right. I don’t know what
makes her tick. I don’t know you, either.”
He just looked at me, expressionlessly. “You play
human very well, driving around like Shaggy in your Mystery
Machine. But the man I thought you were could never have killed
Andre’s victims like that.”
“Wulfe killed them.” He was making a point, not
defending himself. It made me angry; he should feel the need
to defend himself.
“You agreed to it. Two people who had already been
victimized enough, and you two snapped their necks as if they were
nothing more than chickens.”
About that time he got angry, too. “I did it for
you. Don’t you understand? She would have destroyed you if she’d
known. They were nothing, less than nothing. Street people who
would have died on their own anyway. And she would have
killed you!” He was on his feet when he finished.
“They were nothing? How do you know? It wasn’t like
you had a conversation with them.” I stood up, too.
“They would have had to die anyway. They knew about
us.”
“There we disagree,” I told him. “What about your
vaunted power over human minds?”
“It only works if the contact with us is very
short—a feeding, no more than that.”
“They were living, breathing people who were
murdered. By you.”
“How did you know that Mercy was at Andre’s?”
Warren’s calm voice broke between us like a wave of ice water as he
came down the stairs. He walked past me and used the key to open
the cage door. “I’ve been wondering about that for a while.”
“What do you mean?” asked Stefan.
“I mean that we knew she’d found Andre
because she told Ben, thinking he couldn’t tell anyone else because
he’d not changed back from his wolf in all the time since the
demon-possessed died. Ben changed so he could tell us, but we still
couldn’t go after her because we didn’t know where Andre was. You
had no way to know what she was doing. How did you know she was off
killing Andre, just in time to cover up the crime?”
Stefan made no move to come out of the cage. He
folded his arms and leaned a shoulder against the bars instead as
he considered Warren’s question.
“It was Wulfe, wasn’t it?” I said. “He knew what I
was doing because one of the homes I found was his.”
“Wulfe,” said Warren slowly, after Stefan didn’t
answer. “Is he the kind of man who would be outraged that Marsilia
would call down a demon to infest a vampire? Would he want it
stopped at the cost of Andre’s destruction? Go to you for help
doing it?”
Stefan closed his eyes. “He came to me. Told me
Mercy was in trouble and needed help. It was only later that I
wondered why he’d done it.”
“You’ve had these thoughts already,” Warren said.
“So what did you decide?”
“Does it matter?”
“It’s always a good thing to know your enemies,”
answered Warren in his lazy Texas drawl. “Who are yours?”
Stefan gave him the look of a baited bear, all
frustration and ferocity. “I don’t know.” He gritted out.
Warren smiled coolly, his eyes sharp. “Oh, I think
you do. You aren’t stupid; you aren’t a child. You know how these
things work.”
“Wulfe used me to get to you,” I said. “Then he
told Marsilia what you’d done.”
Stefan just looked at me.
“With you and Andre out of the way, there is Wulfe,
Bernard, and Estelle.” I rubbed my hands together and wondered if
knowing what had happened would do Stefan any good. It wouldn’t
change things, and knowing that he’d fallen into Wulfe’s trap
wasn’t going to help Stefan now. Still, as Warren had said, it is a
good thing to know your enemies. “And Bernard and Estelle, Marsilia
already doesn’t trust them, right?”
Stefan nodded. “They work against her where they
can, and she knows it. They are of another’s making, given as gifts
by a vampire not easily refused. She must take care of them, as she
would any such gifts—but that doesn’t mean she has to trust them.
Wulfe ... Wulfe is a mystery even to himself, I think. You believe
Wulfe engineered this as a rise to power?” He looked away and
didn’t speak for a minute, obviously thinking about what I’d
said.
Finally, he wrapped his hands around the bars of
the open cage. “Wulfe already has power ... if he wanted more, it
was his for the asking. But it looks like he had a part in my
downfall for whatever reason suited him.”
“If Marsilia knows that you helped when Mercy
killed Andre, why isn’t Mercy dead?” Warren asked.
“She was supposed to be,” Stefan said savagely.
“Why do you think Marsilia starved me until I was no more than a
ravening beast, then dropped me into Mercy’s living room? You
didn’t think I did it myself, did you?”
I nodded. “So she thought she’d get it all without
cost to her or the seethe? If you’d killed me, she could have
claimed you’d escaped while she was punishing you. Too bad you
showed up in my house and killed me. But she underestimated
you.”
“She did not underestimate me,” said Stefan. “She
knows me.” He gave me a look that let me know that my earlier dig
about not knowing him had stung. “She just did not plan on you
having the Alpha werewolf in your home to spoil her plans.”
I’d been there—and I didn’t think he would have
done it.
Stefan sneered at me when he saw my face. “Don’t
waste your time on romantic notions about me. I am
vampire, and I would have killed you.”
“He’s cute when he’s mad,” observed Warren
dryly.
Stefan turned his back on us both.
“She’s all by herself, and she doesn’t even know
it,” he said in soft anguish.
He wasn’t talking about me.
He’d been hurt a lot recently, and I thought he
deserved a rest. So I turned to Warren, and asked, “Why aren’t you
upstairs at the meeting?”
Warren shrugged, his eyes veiled. “The boss will do
better without me to rock the boat.”
“Paul hates me more than he hates you,” I told him
smugly.
He threw his head back and laughed—which is what
I’d intended. “Wanna bet? I kicked his ass from here to Seattle and
back. He’s not happy with me.”
“You’re a wolf. I’m a coyote—there’s no
comparison.”
“Hey,” said Warren in mock offense. “You’re no
threat to his masculinity.”
“I’m polluting the pack,” I told him. “You’re just
an aberration.”
“That’s because you called him a ... Stefan?”
I looked around, but the vampire was gone. I hadn’t
gotten a chance to ask him about the crossed bones on my
door.
“Shee-it,” exclaimed Warren. “Shee-it.”
“DID YOU CALL BRAN?” I ASKED ADAM THE NEXT EVENING
, tugging down the short skirt of my favorite green-blue dress
until it was as good a barrier between Adam’s SUV’s leather seats
and my naked skin as it was going to be.
He hadn’t told me where we were going on our date,
but Jesse had called me as soon as he left and described what he
was wearing—so I knew I’d need the big guns. Though we share a back
fence, the distance by car is significantly longer, and I’d had
time to skim into the correct dress before he pulled up at my
door.
Adam does suits. He wears suits to work, to pack
meetings, to political meetings. Since his hours are about the same
as mine, that means six days a week. Still there was a difference
between his usual work suits and the one he was wearing tonight.
The first were made to announce that this was the man in charge.
This one said, “And he’s sexy, too.” And he was.
“There’s no need to call Bran,” he told me
irritably as he swung the big vehicle onto the highway. “Half the
pack probably called Bran as soon as they got home. He’ll call me
when he’s ready.”
He was probably right. I hadn’t asked, but his grim
face when Warren and I emerged from the basement last night—after
everyone had left except for Samuel—had told its own story.
Samuel had kissed me on the lips to irritate Adam
and ruffled my hair, “There you are, Little Wolf. Still naturally
talented at causing trouble, I see.”
That was unfair. It had been Stefan and Adam who’d
caused this. I informed Samuel of that, but only after he’d
escorted me back home.
Adam called me once, earlier in the afternoon, to
make sure I remembered he was taking me out. I’d promptly called
Jesse with orders to let me know what her father was wearing. I
owed her five bucks, but it was worth it to see Adam smiling when I
hopped into his SUV.
But my mouth had soon taken care of that. His
Explorer still had a heck of a dent on the fender from where one of
the wolves had hit it—after being thrown by an angry fae. My fault.
So I’d asked him if he had an estimate yet, and he’d growled at me.
Then I’d asked about Bran.
So far our date was working out just spiffy.
I went back to playing with my skirt.
“Mercy,” Adam said, his voice even more growly than
it had been.
“What?” If I snapped at him, it was his own fault
for getting grumpy at me first.
“If you don’t stop playing with that dress, I’m
going to rip it right off you, and we won’t be heading for
dinner.”
I looked at him. He was watching the road, and both
hands were on the wheel ... but once I paid attention, I could see
what I’d done to him. Me. With remnants of grease under my
fingernails and stitches in my chin.
Maybe I hadn’t screwed up the date as badly as all
of that. I smoothed the skirt back down, successfully resisting the
urge to pull it up farther only because I wasn’t sure I could
handle what might happen. I thought Adam was joking, but ... I
turned my head toward my side window and tried to keep the grin off
my face.
He drove us to a restaurant that had just opened in
the boom-town that was forming in West Pasco. Just a couple of
years ago it had been barren desert, but now there were
restaurants, a theater, a Lowe’s and ... a hugeyenormous (Jesse’s
word) giant-sized Wal-Mart.
“I hope you like Thai.” He parked us out in the
middle of west nowhere in the parking lot. Paranoia has odd
manifestations. It gave me panic attacks and made him park where he
could manage a quick getaway. Shared paranoia—could a
happily-ever-after be far off for us?
I hopped out of the front seat and said in suitably
resolute tones, “I’m sure they have hamburgers.”
I shut the door on his appalled face. The locks
clicked, and there he was, one arm on either side of me ...
grinning.
“You like Thai,” he said. “Admit it.”
I folded my arms and ignored the gibbering idiot
who kept shrieking “he’s got me trapped, trapped” in the back of my
head. It helped that Adam up close is even better than half a car
away. And Adam with a grin ... well. He has a dimple, just one.
That’s all he needs.
“Jesse told you, didn’t she?” I said grumpily.
“Next time I see her, I’m going to expose her for the
secret-sharing kid she is. See if I don’t.”
He laughed ... and dropped his arms and backed
away, proving he’d seen my erstwhile panic. I grabbed his arm to
prove I wasn’t scared and towed him around the Explorer toward the
restaurant.
The food was excellent. As I pointed out to Adam,
they did have hamburgers. Neither of us ordered them, though
doubtless they would have been good, too. I could have been eating
seaweed and dust, though, and I still would have enjoyed it.
We talked about cars—and how I thought his Explorer
was a pile of junk and he thought I was stuck in the seventies in
my preference for cars. I pointed out that my Rabbit was a
respectable eighties model, as was my Vanagon—and the chances of
his SUV being around in thirty years was nil. Especially if his
wolves kept getting thrown at it.
We talked about movies and books. He liked
biographies, of all things. The only biography I’d ever liked was
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, which I’d read in seventh grade. He
didn’t read fiction.
We got in an argument about Yeats. Not about his
poetry, but about his obsession with the occult. Adam thought it
was ridiculous ... I thought it was funny that a werewolf would
think it so and baited him until he caught me at it.
“Mercy,” he said—and his phone rang.
I drank a sip of water and prepared to listen in to
his conversation. But, as it turned out, it was very short.
“Hauptman,” he answered shortly.
“You’d better get over here, wolf,” said an
unfamiliar voice and hung up.
He looked down at the number and frowned. I got up
and walked around the table so I could look over his
shoulder.
“It’s someone from Uncle Mike’s,” I told him,
having memorized the number.
Adam threw some money on the table and we trotted
out the door. Grim-faced, he threaded the Explorer through the
traffic at something more than the speed limit. We had just gotten
on the interstate when something happened.... I felt a flash of
rage and horror, and someone died. One of the pack.
I put my hand on Adam’s leg, digging in with my
nails at the roiling sorrow and rage that spun through the pack. He
put his foot down and slid through the evening traffic like an eel.
Neither of us said a word during the five minutes it took us to
reach Uncle Mike’s.
The parking lot was full of big SUVs and trucks,
the kind most of the fae drive. Adam didn’t bother parking, just
drove right up until he was near the door and stopped. He didn’t
wait for me—but he didn’t have to. I was right behind him when he
brushed by the bouncer who guarded the door.
The bouncer didn’t even protest.
Uncle Mike’s smelled like beer, hot wings, and
popcorn, which would have made it smell like every other bar in the
Tri-Cities except that it also smelled like fae. I don’t know that
they organize themselves that way, but fae usually smell to me like
the four elements that the old philosophers proposed: earth, air,
fire, and water, with a healthy dose of magic.
None of those smells bothered me ... only the
blood.
Uncle Mike’s commanding voice was backing people up
and tightening the crowd until Adam and I were blocked in. That’s
when Adam lost it and began tossing people around.
Not really a safe thing to do at Uncle Mike’s. Most
of the fae I’ve met are no match for a werewolf ... but there are
ogres and other things that look just like everyone else until they
get ticked off.
Even so, it wasn’t until Adam began to change,
ripping his charcoal suit, that I realized something more was
happening than him losing his temper.
“Adam!” It was no use, my voice was lost in the
noise of the crowd. I put a hand on his back so I didn’t lose him,
and I felt it.
Magic.
I jerked my hand back. It didn’t feel like fae
magic. I looked around for someone who was concentrating just a
little too much on Adam but couldn’t spot anyone over the
crowd.
I did, however, see a little canvas bag hanging
from the rafters just behind us. About the same place Adam started
using physical force to move through the crowd. The ceilings in
Uncle Mike’s are about fourteen feet in the air. I wasn’t going to
reach that bag without a ladder—and I wasn’t going to be able to
find a ladder anytime soon.
A slender, almost effeminate man walked under the
bag as I watched. He jerked to a halt, then threw back his head and
roared. A sound so huge that it drowned out all of the noise in the
building, shaking the rafters. His glamour, the illusion that made
him look human, shattered, and I swear I could almost see a pile of
sparkling dust spread out from him.
He was huge, an unearthly mass of gray and blue,
still vaguely human-shaped, but his face looked like it had melted,
leaving only vague bumps where his nose should have been. His mouth
was pretty easy to spot—it would be hard to miss all those big
teeth. Silvery eyes, too small for that huge face, glared out from
under sparkly blue eyebrows. He shook himself, and the sparkly dust
scattered again, melting as it touched warmer surfaces. He was
shedding snow.
In the silence that followed, a small cranky voice
said, “Freakin’ snow elf.” I couldn’t see the speaker, but it
sounded like it was coming from somewhere right next to the newly
emerged monster.
He roared again and reached down, hauling a woman
up by the hair. She was more angry than scared and pulled a weapon
out of somewhere and cut her own hair, dropping down and out of my
sight again. The thing—I’d never heard of a snow elf—shook the hair
he held and threw it behind him.
I glanced back at Adam, but in the short moments
since I’d last looked, he’d disappeared, leaving behind only a
trail of bloody bodies, most of them still standing and ticked off.
I looked at the snow elf and the bag above his head.
No one was watching me, not with a rampaging
werewolf and an abominable snowman in the room. I stripped off the
dress and bra, stepped out of my shoes and underwear as fast as I
could. I’m not a werewolf; my coyote shape comes between one breath
and the next, and brings exhilaration and not pain. The snow elf
was still standing underneath the bag when I jumped up, landed on
someone’s shoulders, and looked for him.
The crowd was so tight it was like being at a
Metallica concert, and I had a road of heads and shoulders right to
the snow elf—who was ten feet tall at the very least and stuck up a
whole person’s worth over the rest of the people.
He saw me coming and grabbed for me, but I’m fast
and he missed. Actually, he probably missed because he didn’t know
I was going to jump on his shoulder and launch myself at the little
bag, rather than because of any speed or dexterity on my part. That
damned mountain of a fae was fast, too.
The magic buzzed angrily at me as I snatched the
bag in my jaws. I dangled for a moment before the string that held
it broke. I fell and waited for the giant hands of the snow elf to
crush me, but it was Uncle Mike himself who snatched me out of the
air and tossed me toward the door.
As soon as I grabbed the bag, I knew I was right
about it being some sort of vicious spell aimed at the wolves. I
didn’t know how Uncle Mike knew it, too, but he snarled, “Take that
thing out of here,” before he melted back into the crowd.
Like a Dr. Seuss poem, I scrambled under, around,
and through before I got out the door. I’d have felt better if I
hadn’t known that someone I knew—because I knew most of Adam’s pack
at least by face—was dead. I’d have felt better if I had known Adam
was all right. I’d have settled for just not having the towering
mountain of enraged ... snow elf following me at full speed.
I’d never met anyone who called himself an elf, so
I supposed my view was skewed by Peter Jackson’s version of
Tolkien’s fair folk. The thing following me like a freight train
didn’t fit my understanding of the word at all.
Later, if I survived, I might derive some amusement
from the face of the bouncer, who suddenly realized what was coming
at him—just before he broke and ran. I passed him as we both jumped
the short step to the pavement outside the door. He ran with me a
couple of steps before he figured out who the snow elf was chasing
and took a sharp right.
The doorway slowed the monster down. He hit it with
his shoulder, taking the whole entryway wall with him as he left
the building. He threw the chunk of wall at me, but I hopped
through the half-open doorway a second time, just before it hit the
ground. I crossed the street at full speed and narrowly missed
being hit by a semi on its way to the industrial district just past
Uncle Mike’s. Safe on the far side, I glanced behind me, then
stopped.
The man the snow elf had been was on his knees at
the edge of the parking lot, shaking his head as if he was slightly
dazed. He looked up at me. The silvery eyes were the same.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Sorry, so sorry. I
haven’t felt like that since ... since my last battle. I didn’t
hurt you, did I?” His gaze caught on the chunks of wall and door
that were left from when his missile had missed me.
The effects of the little bag were evidently
limited by distance.
I dropped the bag on the ground and shook myself
and gave him an “all’s well” yip. I wasn’t sure he got the message,
but he didn’t try to cross the road after me. I’d have changed
back, but my clothes—my favorite dress, a pair of expensive (even
at half-off) Italian sandals, and my underwear—were still in the
bar somewhere. I’m not modest, but the snow elf and I didn’t know
each other well enough for me to want be naked in front of
him.
He was dazedly trying to pick up the mess he’d made
when people started leaving. One of Uncle Mike’s people, easily
distinguished from the patrons by the distinctive green doublet,
stood on the edge of the parking lot and waved his hands at me in a
pushing motion. I thought it was the bouncer who’d been at the
door, but I’d have to have seen his face frozen in terror again to
be certain of it.
I picked up the bag and backed away from the road a
dozen yards, until my butt hit the side of an old warehouse fifty
yards from the road.
Uncle Mike’s parking lot gradually emptied, with
Uncle Mike’s minions directing traffic and helping the snow elf
with his cleanup efforts. Adam’s car sat in lonely splendor.
So did Mary Jo’s Jeep. The one I’d given a free
tune-up to when she’d taken her shift at guard-the-wimpy-coyote
duty. I like Mary Jo. She’s a firefighter,
five-foot-three-and-a-half of solid muscle and solider nerve.
One of the pack was dead. In the sudden quiet of
the night, I could feel the wave of mourning spreading through the
pack as the others acknowledged the absence of one of their own.
They knew who it was, but I wasn’t familiar enough with the pack
magic to be certain. I only had Mary Jo’s car.
There were just six cars left in the patron’s
parking lot when Uncle Mike strode out of the hole that used to be
a door. He clapped a hand on the snow elf’s shoulder and patted him
before hopping over a cement parking curb and crossing the street
toward me. He had my dress in his hands.
I changed and grabbed the dress and pulled it on.
No bra, no underwear, but at least I wasn’t naked. I kicked the bag
toward Uncle Mike. “What happened?”
He bent and picked up the bag. His face tightened,
and he made a low, huffing sound ... rather more like a lion or big
cat of some kind than anything I’d ever heard out of him
before.
“Cobweb,” he said, “come throw this nasty bit of
magic in the river for me, would you?”
Something small and bright, about the size of a
lightning bug (there are none in the Tri-Cities) hovered over the
bag for a moment, then it, and the bag, disappeared.
“It affected you, too?” I asked.
I don’t know what kind of a fae Uncle Mike is.
Something powerful enough to control a tavern full of drunken fae
seven nights a week.
“No,” he said. “Just that it was put in my
territory, and I did not sense it.”
He dusted off his hands, and his face regained its
usual cheerful mien, but I’d seen beneath that facade a few times
so his mask of affable tavern keeper didn’t reassure me the way it
once would have. You have to remember never to believe what you see
with the fae.
“Smart coyote,” he told me. “I didn’t even check to
see if there was a cause for their snarling, just assumed they were
being nasty-tempered, the way werewolves are—and left it too late
before I waded in.”
“What happened?” I asked again, but when he didn’t
answer immediately, I gave him an impatient flick of my hand and
ran bare-footed back across the street, through the parking lot,
and into the bar.
Inside, with the missing section of wall behind me,
it didn’t look so bad: a big, empty tavern after a couple of
football teams had gotten drunk and partied all night. Teams with
really big players, I thought, looking at the beam that the snow
elf had taken out with his head—elephants, maybe.
Adam, fully in human form again, sat with his back
against the stage riser on the far side of the room, his arms
folded over his chest. Somone had found him a pair of cutoffs to
wear. Not like he was angry ... just closed-up.
Next to him were two of his other wolves, Paul and
one of Paul’s cronies. Paul looked sick, and the other man, whose
name escaped me, was curled around a very still form.
I couldn’t see who it was, but I knew. Mary Jo’s
car in the parking lot told me. There was blood all over all of
them. Adam’s hands were covered, as was Paul’s shirt. The other man
was drenched in it.
The wolves weren’t the only ones bleeding. There
seemed to be a triage of sorts going on at the opposite end of the
building. I recognized the woman who had cut her hair to free
herself, but she seemed to be one of the aid-givers rather than a
victim.
Adam looked up and saw me, his face very
bleak.
There was glass on the floor, and my feet were
bare—but it would have taken more than that to keep me from
them.
Paul’s friend was sobbing. “I didn’t mean to. I
didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry.” He was rocking the body he held,
Mary Jo’s body, as he apologized over and over again.
I couldn’t get close to Adam without wading between
Paul and his friend. I stopped while still out of reach. It didn’t
seem like a really good idea to give Paul an easy target just
yet.
Uncle Mike had followed me in, but he’d gone to the
other huddle of beings in that too-empty room first, and when he
came over to us, he had the shorn woman in tow. Like me, he stopped
before he intruded on their space.
“My apologies, Alpha,” he said. “My guests are
entitled to an evening of safety, and someone broke hospitality to
bespell your wolves. Will you let us repair the damage if we can?”
He waved at Mary Jo.
Adam’s face changed from grim to intent in about
half a breath. He stood up and took Mary Jo from the wolf who held
her. “Paul,” he said, when the man wouldn’t let go.
Paul stirred and took his friend’s hands, pulling
them away. The man ... Stan, I thought, though it might have been
Sean, jerked once, then collapsed against Paul.
In the meantime, the woman was protesting in a
rapid flow of Russian. I couldn’t understand the words, but I heard
her refusal clearly in her face and body language.
“Who are they going to tell?” Uncle Mike snapped.
“They’re werewolves. If they go to the press and reveal that
there’s a fae who can heal mortal wounds, we can go to the press
and tell the interested humans just how much of the horrors of the
werewolf have been carefully hidden from them.”
She turned to look at the wolves, a snarl on her
face—and then she just stopped when she saw me. Her pupils dilated
until the whole of her eyes were black.
“You,” she said. Then she laughed, a cackling sound
that made the skin on the back of my neck crawl. “Of course it
would be you.”
For some reason the sight of me seemed to stop her
protests. She walked to Mary Jo, who hung limply from Adam’s curled
arms. Like the snow elf had before her, the fae shed her glamour,
but hers dripped from her head and down to her feet, where it
puddled for a moment, as if it were made of liquid instead of
magic.
She was tall, taller than Adam, taller than Uncle
Mike, but her arms were reed-thin, and the fingers that touched
Mary Jo were odd. It took me a moment to see that each one had an
extra joint and a small pad on the underside, like a gecko’s.
Her face ... was ugly. As the glamour faded, her
eyes shrank and her nose grew and hung over her narrow-lipped mouth
like the gnarled limb of an old oak.
From her body, as the glamour cleared away, a soft
violet light gathered and flowed upward from her feet to her
shoulders, then down her arms to her hands. Her padded fingers
turned Mary Jo’s head and touched her under the chin where someone
(probably Paul’s repentant friend) had ripped out her throat.
The light never touched me ... but I felt it
anyway. Like the first light of the morning, or the spray of the
salt sea on my face, it delighted my skin. I heard Adam draw in a
sharp breath, but he didn’t look away from Mary Jo. After a few
minutes, Mary Jo’s tank top started glowing white in the pale
purple light of the fae’s magic. The blood that had made it look
dark in the dimmed lights of the bar was gone.
The fae jerked her hands away. “It is done,” she
told Adam. “I have healed her body, but you must give her pulse and
breath. Only if she has not yet gone on will she return—I am no god
to be giving life and death.”
“CPR,” translated Uncle Mike laconically.
Adam dropped to his knees, set Mary Jo on the
ground, and tilted her head back and began.
“What about brain damage?” I asked.
The fae turned to me. “I healed her body. If they
inspire her heart and lungs soon, there will be no damage to
her.”
Paul’s friend was sitting at Adam’s side, but Paul
got up and opened his mouth.
“Don’t,” I said urgently.
His eyes flashed at being given an order by me. I
should have just let Paul do it, but I was part of the pack now,
willy-nilly—and that meant keeping the pack safe.
“You can’t thank fae,” I told him. “Unless you want
to live the rest of your very long life in servitude to
them.”
“Spoilsport,” said the fae woman.
“Mary Jo is precious to our pack,” I told her,
bowing my head. “Her loss would have left a wound for many months
to come. Your healing is a rare and marvelous gift.”
Mary Jo gasped, and Paul forgot he was angry with
me. He wasn’t anything special to her or she to him. She was sweet
on a very nice wolf named Henry, and Paul was married to a human
I’d never met. But Mary Jo was pack.
I would have turned to her, too, but the fae held
my eyes. Her thin-lipped mouth curved into a cold smile. “This is
the one, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” agreed Uncle Mike cautiously. He was a
friend, usually. His caution told me two things. This fae might
hurt me, and Uncle Mike, even in the center of his power, his
tavern, didn’t think he could stop her.
She looked me up and down with the air of an
experienced cook at Saturday Market, examining tomatoes for
blemishes. “I thought there would not be another coyote so rash as
to climb the snow elf. You owe me nothing for this, Green
Man.”
I’d heard Uncle Mike called Green Man before. I
still wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.
And when the fae reached those long fingers out and
touched me, I wasn’t worried about much other than my own furry
hide.
“I did it because of you, coyote. Do you know how
much chaos you have caused? The Morrigan says that is your gift.
Rash, quick, and lucky, just like Coyote himself. But that old
Trickster dies in his adventures—but you won’t be able to put
yourself back together with the dawn.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d thought her to be just
another of the Tri-Cities fae, denizens (mostly) of Fairyland, the
fae reservation just outside of Walla Walla, built either to keep
us safe from the fae, or the fae safe from the rest of us. Her
healing Mary Jo had given me a clue—healing with magic is no common
or weak gift among the fae.
Uncle Mike’s caution told me she was scary
powerful.
“We’ll have more words at a later date, Green Man.”
She looked back at me. “Who are you, little coyote, to cause the
Great Ones such consternation? You broke our laws, yet your
defiance of our ruling has been greatly to our benefit. Siebold
Adlebertsmiter is innocent and all the trouble was caused by
humans. You must be punished—and rewarded.”
She laughed as if I was pretty amusing. “Consider
yourself rewarded.”
The light that had continued to swirl around her
feet uneasily stirred and darkened until it was a dark stone circle
about three feet around and six inches thick. It solidified under
her feet, lifting her half a foot in the air like Aladdin’s carpet.
The sides curved upward and formed a dish—the memory of an old
story supplied the rest. Not a dish but a mortar. A giant
mortar.
And she was gone. Not the way that Stefan could go,
but just so swiftly my eyes couldn’t follow her. I’d seen a fae fly
through solid matter before, so it wasn’t a surprise that she did
so. Which was good, because I’d just had one terrible surprise, I
didn’t need any more.
The first rule about the fae is that you don’t want
to attract their attention—but they don’t tell you what to do once
you have.
“I thought Baba Yaga was a witch,” I told Uncle
Mike hollowly. Who else would be flying around in a giant
mortar?
“Witches aren’t immortal,” he told me. “Of course
she’s not a witch.”
Baba Yaga is featured in the stories of a dozen
countries scattered around Eastern Europe. She’s not the hero in
most of them. She eats children.
I glanced over at Adam, but he was still focused on
Mary Jo. She was shaking like someone on the verge of hypothermia,
but seemed to be alive still.
“What about that bag,” I asked. “What if someone
picks it up from the river?”
“A few minutes of running water will remove any
magic from a spell set in fabric,” Uncle Mike told me.
“It was a trap for the wolves,” I told him. I knew
that because it had tasted like vampire. “No one else except for
the mobile mountain was affected ... Why him and none of the rest?
And what in the world is a snow elf? I’ve never heard of one.” As
far as I’d ever known, “elf” was one of those generic terms coined
by mundanes as a way to refer to the fae.
“The government,” said Uncle Mike, after a moment
to consider what he wanted to tell me (getting the fae to share
information is harder than getting a drop of water from a stone),
“requires us to register and tell them what kind of fae we are. So
we chose something that appeals to us. For some it is an old title
or name, for others ... we make it up, just like the humans have
made up names for us for centuries. My favorite is the infamous
‘Jack-Be-Nimble.’ I don’t know what that is, but we have at least a
dozen in our reservation.”
I couldn’t help but grin. Our government didn’t
know they had a tiger by the tail—and the tiger wasn’t going to
tell them anytime soon. “So he made up the snow elf bit?”
“Are you going to argue with him? As to why the bag
aimed at the wolf worked—”
“I have another true form,” said a soft,
Norse-accented voice behind me. There weren’t very many people who
could sneak up on me—my coyote senses keep me pretty aware of my
environment—but I sure hadn’t heard him.
It was the snow elf, or whatever he was, of course.
He was a couple of inches shorter than me—which he could have fixed
as easily as Zee could have gotten rid of his bald spot. I supposed
someone whose true form—at least one of them—was ten feet tall
didn’t mind being short.
He looked at me and bowed, one of those abrupt and
stiff movements of head and neck that brings to mind martial
artists. “I’m glad you are fast,” he said.
I shook the hand he held out to me, which was cool
and dry. “I’m glad I’m fast, too,” I told him with honest
sincerity.
He looked at Uncle Mike. “Do you know who set it?
And if it was aimed at the werewolves or at me?”
Adam was listening to the conversation. I wasn’t
sure how I knew, because it looked like he was totally involved
with his battered wolves. But there was something in the tension of
his shoulders.
Uncle Mike shook his head. “I was too concerned
with getting it away from you. Berserker wolves are bad enough, but
a berserker snow elf loose in downtown Pasco is something I don’t
want to see.”
I knew. The bag had smelled of
vampire.
The snow elf knelt beside Mary Jo and touched her
shoulder. Adam pulled her gently away, setting her in Paul’s lap,
and put himself between her and the snow elf.
“Mine,” he said.
The elf raised his hands and smiled mildly, but
there was a bite to his words. “No harm, Alpha. I meant no trouble.
My days of roaming the mountains with a wolf pack at my beck and
call are long over.”
Adam nodded, keeping his eyes on the enemy. “That
may be. But she is one of mine. And I am not one of yours.”
“Enough,” said Uncle Mike. “One fight a night is
good enough. Go home, Ymir.”
The kneeling elf looked at Uncle Mike, and the skin
grew tight around his eyes for a moment before he smiled brightly.
I noticed that his teeth were very white, if a little crooked. He
stood up, using just the muscles of his thighs, like a martial
artist. “It has been a long night.” He made a slow turn that
encompassed not just Uncle Mike, the wolves, and me, but everyone
else in the room—who I just realized were all watching us ... or
maybe they were watching the snow elf. “Of course it is time to go.
I’ll see you all.”
No one said anything until he was out of the
building.
“Well,” said Uncle Mike, sounding more Irish than
usual. “Such a night.”
MARY JO WAS MOVING BUT STILL DAZED WHEN WE GOT her
outside. So Adam instructed Paul and his friend (whose name, as it
happened, was Alec and not Sean or Stan at all) to take her to
Adam’s house. Paul packed Mary Jo in the back of her car with Alec
and started to get in.
He looked at my feet. “You shouldn’t be out here
barefoot,” he told the ground. Then he shut the car door, turned
the key as he turned on the lights, and left.
“He meant thank you,” said Adam. “I’ll say it, too.
I can think of a lot of things I’d rather do than try to defend
Paul from Baba Yaga.”
“I should have let her have him,” I told Adam. “It
would have made your life easier.”
He grinned, then stretched his neck. “This could
have been a very, very bad night.”
I was looking over his shoulder at his SUV. “Would
you settle for just a little bad? Your insurance doesn’t have an
exception for snow elves, right?”
It had looked all right at first, then I thought it
just had a flat tire. But now I could see the right rear tire was
bent up at a forty-five-degree angle.
Adam pulled out his cell phone. “That doesn’t even
register on my scale of bad tonight,” he told me. He put his free
arm around my shoulder, pulling me against him as his daughter
answered the phone. He wasn’t wearing a shirt.
“Hey, Jesse,” he said. “It’s been a wild night, and
we need you to come pick us up at Uncle Mike’s.”