Fire Touched

6

Adam put on one of the suits he had for work, power suits designed to let people know who was in charge. That they looked spectacular on him was a bonus for me and a matter of indifference, if not embarrassment, for him. I’d chosen this one, so the colors were right—steel gray with faint chocolate stripes that brought out his eyes. The tie he wore with it was the same chocolate brown. He might not care about looking pretty, but he did care about the impression of power he made.

People who were impressed by him were not so likely to try to screw him over, in business or with fang and claw. He enjoyed fighting, though I didn’t think he’d ever admit it to anyone else. What he didn’t like was the way fights could spill over onto the people he was responsible for: the people, human and other, who worked for his security company as well as the pack. He preferred to stop trouble before it happened when he could—thus, the suits.

After some serious consideration, I put on a blue silk blouse, a pair of black slacks, and shoes I could run in. Next to Adam, I didn’t look underdressed, precisely—I looked like his assistant. But that was okay. Adam and I worked best together when he took point and I faded into the background. It suited our personalities. Adam was a “what you see is what you get” kind of guy, but I was happy to be sneaky.

We pulled into the Marriott parking lot, and I looked up at the balconies and sliding glass doors outside each room. The sky was still dark, but it wouldn’t be in an hour.

“Unusual hotel for a vampire,” I murmured as I got out of the car. The Marriott was covered with huge windows. Not that there was much choice; the Tri-Cities had mostly grown up during and after the Second World War, when the old hotels of small-windowed rooms, chandeliers, and ballrooms had given in to the practicality of the motel, efficient and graceless—with lots and lots of windows. Still, it seemed to me that the Marriott was awfully light and airy for a vampire to feel comfortable with.

I tucked my arm through Adam’s, and we started for the hotel. We hadn’t gotten three steps from the car before the sound of hard wheels on blacktop had us both turning to see a skinny teenager approaching us rapidly. Casually, I dropped Adam’s arm and stepped back. The kid hopped off the skateboard with a kick that threw the board up so he could catch it without bending down. He stowed it under one arm as he walked.

“Hey, man,” he said, his voice familiar from the early-morning call, but it was far more laid-back—less meth-head and more stoner. “I looked you up on the Internet to see why suddenly I’m dealing with the werewolves and not the vampires. Nice work on that troll.”

“Was it?” asked Adam. “There aren’t many trolls left, I am given to understand.”

The boy spat on the ground. “They can all rot for all I care. Nasty pieces of work, trolls—killing ’em ain’t no cause for tragedy. Now, I’d like to get paid and get out of here before someone wonders why I’m riding around on this toy at five in the morning.”

“What did the vampire look like?” I asked.

He shrugged, but there was something sly in his eyes when he said, “Weren’t me what saw him.” He held out his hand.

Adam handed him an envelope. The goblin in human guise dropped the skateboard back on the ground and hopped on the battered and scarred surface. He didn’t stop it when it started to drift backward. He gave Adam a salute with the hand that held the white envelope, dropped a toe, and spun his board around to speed off into the night.

Three cars down from where Adam had parked there was a white Subaru Forester with California plates. I remember cars, a hazard of my job. I tugged Adam to a stop and examined it more carefully.

Subaru Foresters weren’t uncommon—there were three others in the parking lot. But I’d followed this one for miles last winter. I sniffed at the driver’s-side door and smelled a familiar vampire.

“Thomas Hao,” I said. I’d fought beside Thomas a couple of months ago, and we’d helped Marsilia destroy a nasty vampire. I wondered if Marsilia had known who he was when she turned him over to us this morning. I considered the goblin’s half lie about not being the one who saw the vampire and decided she did.

“This should be interesting,” said Adam after a moment, but he’d relaxed a little, and so had I.

Thomas Hao was the Master of San Francisco. That’s all I’d known about him the last time we met. But it turned out that he was something of an enigma, even by vampire standards. Like Blackwood, the vampire I’d helped kill in Spokane, Hao ruled without other vampires in his city. Unlike Blackwood, Hao was the opposite of crazy. He’d never had a large seethe, but a couple of years ago he’d shooed the few vampires he controlled out to other seethes and remained in San Francisco alone. No one knew why, though there were lots of stories about Thomas Hao, about what happened when someone made a move against him. I’d seen him hold off two very powerful, very old monsters all by himself.

There was no question that Thomas was a very dangerous vampire. But he was also a man of principle and logic, not driven by ambition. It wasn’t just me who thought so. As vampires went, Hao was almost a good man. I liked him.

It didn’t take long to find his room. We got on the elevator that smelled of him and hit every button on the way up. His room was on the top floor. We followed Thomas’s scent down the hall.

“There is a fae here, too,” I whispered. I’d first scented her downstairs, and her track followed Hao’s too closely for coincidence.

Adam nodded and knocked softly at the door where Thomas’s scent had led us. No need to bother the neighbors, and a vampire would hear us.

“A moment,” said Thomas’s voice. It would not have carried to human ears, so he wasn’t expecting room service.

The vampire opened the door and regarded us for a moment. He was dressed in a brown silk button-down shirt and black jeans. His feet were bare, and his hair was damp. I never had been able to read his face, but I could read his body language. Whoever he’d been expecting, it had not been us.

He was not a big man, but in vampires, that didn’t mean much. His hair was cut short and expensively. He smelled of the fae woman whose scent trail had paralleled his, as if he might have been touching her just before he answered the door.

He stepped back and gestured us in, closing the door behind us when we accepted his wordless invitation. His room was a suite with a pair of chairs and a couch in the living area and a view that, in the daylight, would be of the Columbia River. There was a door toward the back of the room, and it was shut.

“Please,” he said to us, “take a seat. May I get you some refreshments? If you do not enjoy alcohol, there is soda, I believe, as well as water.”

Polite vampire. It was a good thing that Adam and I had come, that we hadn’t sent a pair of werewolves who could have misread Thomas and tried to issue threats—assuming Thomas would have been polite to other werewolves.

“Water,” Adam said. “Thank you.”

Thomas looked at me. “Water is good for me, too,” I said. “Thank you.” We all had good manners here, yes, we did.

He served us the water and took a glass and filled it from an already opened bottle of red wine. He took a sip of wine and smiled politely. “To what do I owe this visit?”

“I’m afraid that is our question,” Adam replied.

“You were expecting Marsilia or Wulfe, right?” I asked.

“I called them when we got in,” he said. “And Wulfe assured me that someone would be over before long. I did not expect to see the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack and his wife running errands.”

Marsilia had known who was here all right.

“Errands,” said Adam thoughtfully.

None of us had taken a seat, I realized.

“Marsilia can’t send us on errands,” I told Thomas. “We inherited this job.” I thought about that. “‘Inherited’ is the wrong word. Co-opted. Not quite the right word, either. Had it dumped on us unexpectedly.”

Thomas frowned thoughtfully. “I saw a news program earlier,” he said. “You killed a troll and proclaimed the Tri-Cities your territory.”

He was looking at me. I cleared my throat. “I didn’t kill the troll. That was Adam and some of the pack. And, technically speaking, the whole of the Tri-Cities has always been our territory.”

I caught something in Thomas’s gaze, and I realized that he was highly amused—though it didn’t show on his face except for a quirk of his eyebrow. But I was positive I was right.

“As you saw”—I was going to have to find the news clip myself so I would know exactly what people knew about it—“I made a true but unpolitic declaration on the bridge yesterday. The fallout of that is still settling.” I pinched the bridge of my nose hard to distract myself from that thought. No need to panic in front of a vampire. Adam’s hand touched the small of my back.

“So when one of the vampire’s snitches called us to tell us there was a vampire visiting,” I continued. Adam was letting me do a lot of the talking, and I wondered why. “We contacted the seethe. Wulfe indicated that Marsilia was ceding the job of policing stray vampires to us. He didn’t say you had called them, just that his minions had found a strange vampire who’d checked into this hotel.”

“We’ll have to discuss that with him,” murmured Adam.

Hao laughed then, showing his fangs in a manner that might have been accidental if he’d been a new vampire or someone less subtle. I’d noticed before that the vampire only laughed or smiled for effect rather than because he was actually amused or happy. I was pretty sure that happy and he were seldom in the same room at the same time. He stopped abruptly.

“What do you need to feel that you have successfully defended your territory?” he asked.

“The usual,” drawled Adam. “What are you doing here and how long are you staying? Restrict your feeding to nonfatal and non-publicity-gathering ways. Be a good guest.”

Thomas nodded. “Fair enough. It’s no more than I told Marsilia. I am here as escort for a friend traveling to Walla Walla. I will stand at her back while she tells the Gray Lords where they can stick their decrees.”

Apparently, we weren’t going to pretend that he didn’t have a fae in his bedroom.

“Marsilia,” Thomas Hao continued, “owes me on several fronts, which made the Tri-Cities seem safer to rest in than Walla Walla.” He paused.

“I have no quarrel with you,” said Adam.

Thomas inclined his head. “We’ll stay here all day and one more day, then return home the following evening. I have no need to hunt at this time. If that changes, I will kill no one under your protection who has not harmed me or mine.”

“Thomas.” The door to the bedroom opened, and a woman came out. She walked steadily with the help of a pair of crutches, the kind that wrap around the forearm instead of the ones that fit under the armpit. “You sound like a fae driving a bargain.” She didn’t sound as if she were complimenting him, even though she was fae herself.

The social temperature in the room dropped to well below zero. Thomas Hao lost his humanity, a very dangerous predator, with a half-empty glass of wine in his hand.

They weren’t lovers, I didn’t think. The body language and scent were wrong for that. The scents of lovers tend to blend rather than lie on top of each other. His fierce protectiveness told me that whatever their relationship was—he would kill to protect her, and he was ready to do so right now.

Like Hao, she was dressed in silk, an opaque shift that covered her from shoulders to midcalf. The gown was simple and might have been plain if it weren’t for the color, which was white for the first few inches, then a yellow that deepened all the way down the garment to a rich, bitter orange at the hem.

Also like Hao, she was barefoot. Her eyes, as they met mine, were crystal-clear gray. Her hair was very close to the fiery color of the hem of her gown. With that hair and the milk-white skin, she should have had freckles, but I saw no sign of them—of course, she was fae. If she had freckles and didn’t like them, she could have hidden them. But I suspected she just didn’t have them, because she’d made no effort to disguise more egregious barriers to the out-and-out beauty that I suspected was hers by nature.

She was so thin that I could see both bones in her forearms. Huge red scars wrapped around her wrists and ankles as if she’d been bound and all but ripped off her extremities trying to get free.

“Introduce me, please,” she said. Adam glanced from the vampire to the fae. He took a step back. He reached out and grabbed my hand so that when he sat down on the overstuffed couch, he pulled me down as well. He settled back, letting the couch half swallow him. I sank down next to him, and he wrapped one arm around my shoulder. Even so, Thomas stared at Adam for a count of three until the fae woman made it to his side.

“Manners,” she said without reproof, though she repeated, “You should introduce us, Thomas.”

“Margaret Flanagan,” said Thomas, pulling his gaze from Adam’s with an effort, “may I make you known to Adam Hauptman, Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack, and his mate, Mercedes Thompson Hauptman. Adam and Mercy, may I make known to you my friend, Margaret Flanagan.” His voice was thick as he fought for control.

The fae woman inclined her head in a motion that reminded me forcefully of Thomas’s gestures. “I have heard Thomas speak of you, Ms. Hauptman. He said you fought well—high praise from him.”

She sounded cool and gracious, not to mention very Irish. Thomas smiled at Adam and me in clear warning. He was marking his territory.

“I should have stayed in the other room,” she told us, but she was watching Thomas with . . . some odd combination of affection and worry. “Doubtless, Thomas will scold when you have left. He chooses to forget that though my body is still weak, my power is not. I appreciate that you gave him the courtesy of removing yourself as a threat, Mr. Hauptman. I am in your debt.”

The vampire whirled on her. “No. You should know better than that, Sunshine,” he growled. “The last time you owed someone, it turned out badly.”

“Did it?” she asked. He stared at her. “I don’t think it did, Thomas.”

“No debt necessary,” said Adam. “Just common courtesy—and I know what it is to try to protect someone who insists on putting themselves at risk.” He didn’t look at me, but he didn’t need to.

“Nonetheless,” she insisted, “Thomas is important to me, and he would regret your deaths.”

“Why didn’t you go to the reservations when all of the rest of the fae had to?” I asked, to change the topic before Adam could respond to that.

“I am the Flanagan, Mercy,” she said without arrogance. “As was my father, the Dragon Under the Hill. They have not the authority to tell me where to go or what to do. The courts of the fae are long gone, but my father was king, and that means power of the like many have forgotten. He saved the world, and they let him die while they sat congratulating themselves on how well the fae were blending in with the humans in this new land. They let him die because they were afraid of him. He died very, very slowly, and there are some on the reservation here to whom I would extend that same courtesy if I am given the opportunity.”

Adam and Thomas had fallen silent while she talked, her voice as pleasant as if she’d been discussing the weather. If someone had asked me at that moment who was the most dangerous person in the room—the werewolf alpha, the powerful vampire, or the skinny and broken fae—I wouldn’t have hesitated to name her. I didn’t know what her mojo was—her talk of courts, kings, and dragons went largely over my head—but she was certain that she could take out the Gray Lords. I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

“Good to know,” I said.

She smoothed her skirt. “I am the Flanagan, and that means they asked me to come. I have decided that it would be better to make some things clear in person.” Her gray eyes were chilly.

“He’s in love with her,” said Adam. “Poor fool.”

The sun was sneaking out to greet the day as we drove home. I twisted around until I could see his face.

“A blind man could see that,” I said. “Why ‘poor fool’?”

“Because he hasn’t made a move on her,” he said. “I recognize that half-crazed desire to say, ‘Mine, mine, mine,’ tempered by love that would never do that without a permission that will never come.”

“Yours came,” I told him.

He snorted.

“Hey,” I said, holding up the chain on my neck where my wedding ring held court next to one of his dog tags and my lamb charm.

“Nudge?” he said.

I looked at the cars traveling beside us as we trekked down the interstate. “Here? Seriously?”

“Permission that will never come,” he said.

“That’s not funny,” I said.

He took my hand and gently tugged it away from my necklace and kissed it. “Yes, it is.” He winked at me. “But yes, it only seemed like forever before you gave in. It left me with sympathy for other guys in that situation.”

I thought about how the fae woman had put herself in our debt, something not lightly done by any fae, because Adam had backed down and allowed Thomas space.

“She’s not uninterested,” I said, settling back in my seat. “Did you parse what she said about her place in the power structure of the fae? It didn’t sound like the Elphame court of the fairy queen.” I’d met a fairy queen: a fae with the rare ability to make anyone with less power than she had into a follower—a form of magical slavery.

Adam shook his head. “No. It’s a real court system. I’ve only heard a little of the fae courts. They were gone before the fae traveled to this continent. Nothing to impress the Gray Lords—except that it is a measure of the power her father and, evidently, she holds. They wouldn’t be asking her to join them; they’d be issuing orders if they weren’t convinced of her power.”

“Like Ariana,” I said.

“For different reasons,” Adam agreed. “Ariana made herself unwelcome because of what she held. No Gray Lord is going to want to be around something that can siphon his magic away—or any fae who could have created it. Thomas’s fae is powerful. Did you smell what I did?”

“Fire,” I agreed. “Like Aiden—only more so. We’re sure knee-deep in fiery things right now.”

“You think it’s more than coincidence?” asked Adam. It is a mark of how much he loved me that his voice was merely bland, not cutting. Adam believed in God all right, and they were not best buddies.

“Mmmm,” I said. “Karma or coincidence, or something, maybe. Doesn’t really matter.”

We pulled into the driveway, and I examined the silver Accord parked in Adam’s usual spot and managed not to growl. What was Adam’s ex-wife doing here this early? In two more weeks, she was supposedly moving back to Oregon, where she had a new condo and her old job waiting for her. I would celebrate when she actually left and not a moment before then.

I hopped out of the SUV and noticed that a lot of the cars and trucks that had been parked here when Adam and I left were gone. It took me a moment to remember that this morning was a Monday.

Adam would work from home, as he often did, but most of our pack had more mundane employment that involved schedules. Before my shop was trashed, I’d had a place to be and a reason to remember what day of the week it was, too.

Adam paused by Christy’s car. He looked tired.

“Why don’t you get started arranging guards for Hao,” I said. “I’ll go see why Christy came over today.”

We’d discovered that if he wasn’t standing there, Christy and I could come to a meeting of minds. There would be snark and snarling, but in the end we could deal with each other. Mostly, I suspected, because without Adam’s presence to remind her that I’d won the prize she’d tossed away, she remembered to be afraid of what I might do if she made my life too unpleasant. It was a pretty good return for a box of blue dye, if I did say so myself.

“She’s not your problem,” he said.

She couldn’t hurt me, but she could hurt Adam. She’d had years of practice to develop her aim. “It’s no trouble,” I said.

He smiled. “That’s a lie.”

“It is my privilege,” I said carefully, trying not to tweak his pride, “to do those things that are easier for me than for you. You do the same for me. Let me deal with her.”

That was the truth.

Adam hesitated. It was in his nature to protect the people around him. I’d been working on him to let me do the same for him.

“If she’s here for you, there’s nothing I can do,” I told him. “But if she’s just here for Jesse, keeping you out of the picture might keep the nastiness quotient down a fair bit—and that will make things easier for Jesse.”

He leaned forward and kissed me. “You know the magic words,” he said.

I bounced on my heels and grinned.

Adam headed for his office as soon as we came in, and I headed for the kitchen, where I could smell breakfast. I’d gotten a few steps farther when I realized that it wasn’t just bacon I could smell cooking. Then I noticed that there was a funny sort of silence in the air.

There were four people in my kitchen. Jesse was plastered against the counter with the same “someone’s gonna die today” look I’d seen on her father’s face a time or two. Adam’s ex-wife Christy stood in front of Jesse with a damp dishcloth in her hand. Aiden was pressed tightly against the refrigerator with his feet about a foot off the floor because one of Darryl’s very large hands was wrapped around his throat. Darryl’s hand was smoking, and his eyes were glowing bright yellow.

All righty.

“Drop the munchkin, Darryl,” I said in as relaxed a voice as I could find. There were too many fragile humans in here to allow this to break out into a real fight. “We promised not to let him get killed for twenty-four hours, right?”

Darryl took a step back, but his hand was still wrapped around Aiden’s throat. Then Darryl shook his hand, and Aiden dropped to his feet, lost his balance, and fell on his rump, a feral snarl on his face as he scrambled out of the vulnerable position.

“If you do what you’re thinking about doing, Aiden,” I said, “I’ll let Darryl loose.”

“Then he’ll die,” said Aiden, who’d managed to find his feet and stood in an angry crouch.

“Mmmhmmm,” I said. I wasn’t sure Aiden wasn’t right, but it’s never good to show fear in front of your enemies. I really, really wished I had some idea of just how powerful Aiden was.

There was a cardboard box of doughnuts on the counter: ah, Spudnuts. Probably Christy had brought them, but I took one out to eat anyway, as it was unlikely she’d poisoned them: she wouldn’t have known which one I’d eat.

I like most doughnuts, especially Spudnut doughnuts—but the glazed one I ended up with, covered with pink sprinkles, was not one of my favorites. But the point of eating was to give everyone time and reason to cool off.

“You kill Darryl, and I don’t think you’re going to walk out of here alive,” I said, conversationally, around a bite of glazed-with-sprinkles doughnut. I ignored Darryl’s indignant grunt when I agreed that Aiden might actually accomplish his death.

“I’ve faced creatures that would kill every living thing in this house without an effort, and I’m still alive,” he said grimly. “Try me.”

“Good doughnuts, Christy,” I said. Jesse put her finger to her lips when her mother would have said something. I licked my fingers—a waste of time until I finished the doughnut. “Look, Aiden, you are counting on our being enough that the Gray Lords back off, right? If the Gray Lords are afraid of us, don’t you think you should at least consider being afraid enough to back down from outright aggression into a position where negotiation can take place? If you aren’t worried about us, I might point out that the Dark Smith of Drontheim is upstairs.”

The tile under Aiden’s feet cracked with a loud pop, but he stood up from his defensive crouch. The tiles surrounding the cracked tile were discolored by the heat he was generating. It was ceramic tile. I wasn’t sure how much heat was required to crack ceramic tile, though I rather suspected that it was less heat than was needed to burn a house to the ground. We all stared at it a moment—even Aiden.

“My floor,” gasped Christy.

Yes. She had picked out the tiles in the kitchen, hadn’t she? I regarded Aiden with a little more favor than I’d felt before.

“Information first,” I said. “Does anyone want to tell me what happened?”

“I was watching the bacon,” Jesse said coolly. “And the next thing I know, the little creep was grabbing my butt.”

I trust I caught my instinctive clench of teeth before anyone saw it. No one touches my daughter without her permission—since Darryl had already made that clear, there was no need for me to come unhinged. Adam, whom I could sense listening from his office—he must have left his door open—apparently felt the same way, because Aiden was still breathing and Adam wasn’t in the kitchen. Yet. I started a countdown in my head.

“They were treating me like a child,” Aiden said.

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Children are victims—I am neither child nor victim, despite what I look like. It was necessary that I do something to remind everyone that I might be in a child’s form, yet I own more years than anyone here.”

I blinked at him, so totally nonplussed that I was robbed of anger. That was an excuse I’d never heard before.

“So,” Jesse said in the same cool voice, evidently not as distractible as I was, “not regarding him as a child, I smacked his face with the spatula.”

That was my Jesse. She’d hit him hard, too, because, now that the flush of color he’d acquired while Darryl was strangling him had faded, I could see the rectangular red mark on his face.

“Mom had just come in with doughnuts, and we were talking, or I’d have seen him sneaking up on me.” She paused her story to answer the question on my face. “I don’t know why she’s here, Mercy, she hasn’t had a chance to say. She yelled at him—and that brought Darryl.”

Succinct, I thought, a little out of order, but with all the essential information.

“Grab my daughter’s butt again, and you draw back a stump,” growled Adam as he strode into the room two seconds after I expected him. He thanked Darryl with a nod but never took his eyes off the fae. “And I don’t care what you were trying to prove.”

“She’s your daughter?” The anger drained away from Aiden, leaving him looking like we’d just pulled the rug out from under him. “She was making food,” he said. “And I saw her carrying food and drink yesterday. I thought her but a servant.” He looked around, and indignation replaced his look of helpless confusion. “She called that woman ‘Mother,’ and I knew you were mated to this woman.” He gestured toward me. “How was I to know that you had two wives?”

Whiny, yes, I thought, wrong on many fronts, but also truthful. He was upset, not because he’d grabbed Jesse’s rump without permission but because it had been Adam’s daughter’s rump. Not a stellar individual, I thought, finishing off the doughnut, but look how he was raised. Feral didn’t begin to describe the likely result of being human and raised by . . . Underhill? The fairies? But he might still be salvageable.

I took the damp cloth from Christy’s hand and wiped my fingers with it. Salvageable by someone else. He was only going to be with us for another six hours or so.

Darryl flexed his hand, and bits of burnt flesh dropped to the floor, leaving his skin raw-looking but no longer charred. “Little man,” he growled, “you don’t touch unless you are invited. Not in this house—and if you are a gentleman, not ever. Servant, slave, or lady of the house.”

“I’ve broken my word,” Aiden said, gathering his dignity around himself. “I’ll leave.”

I almost let him go. But Zee had asked me—in the only way Zee would ask such a thing. I owed Zee.

“I knew I missed something,” I said. “I should have put in a clause about protecting yourself, right? Grandstanding is a very bad way to make bargains—it’s too easy to leave things out. But I can do that now. Let’s see.” I cleared my throat. “I declare that you can use the minimum force necessary to protect yourself until misunderstandings are cleared up—as long as you apologize right now and don’t do it again.”

Darryl gave me a look. Adam did, too. It was probably a very good thing that Aiden looked like a ten-year-old.

“Are you hurt, Darryl?” I asked.

He rubbed his hands together. “Not anymore,” he said.

“Darryl’s job is to make sure people are safe,” I said. “Did you disobey him?”

Aiden screwed up his face. “You are very strange,” he said. “I insulted your . . . stepdaughter, yes? Then I hurt the man who stood up for her honor.”

Jesse made a growling noise. “I stood up for myself, you little perv.”

Aiden looked at her.

She glared back.

“Okay, then,” I said. “Aiden, it is good manners to apologize when you offend someone. In your case, it means that you can continue to enjoy the protection of the pack for a few more hours.”

He turned to Adam, and said, sincerely, “Please accept my apologies for importuning your daughter.”

He turned to Jesse’s mother. “I am also sorry that I distressed you in any manner.” He bowed to Darryl. “I sincerely apologize for burning you. You weren’t hurting me, just scaring me. There was no cause.”

Jesse cleared her throat. He looked at her, and they eyed each other with mutual loathing. His lip curled. “I’m very sorry you don’t appreciate the honor I did you,” he said. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

He was lucky she didn’t hit him a second time, I thought.

“I’m very sorry,” Jesse said sincerely, “that I didn’t have a kitchen knife in my hand instead of a spatula. Next time, maybe I’ll be more careful.”

“Jesse,” I said, “your eggs are burning.”

I looked at Adam. “You take Aiden, and I’ll take Christy?” I mouthed.

“I’d like to speak to Adam,” Christy said, her tone making it clear she’d seen me. No help for it once she asked.

I shrugged. “Aiden, step outside with me.”

Darryl smiled. “I’ll go check the perimeter. It’ll let me keep an eye on you.”

“You could stay with Jesse,” I said because I didn’t trust that smile: it was a little too eager. “Help her with breakfast or something.”

“I can cook eggs,” said Jesse, scraping the blackened remnants into the garbage disposal, “assuming I don’t have to teach some ancient punk kid how to keep his hands to himself. Yuck.” She left it to her audience to decide where that last word was directed.

Aiden turned back and narrowed his eyes at her.

“Aiden,” I said.

He stiffened but followed me out to the backyard, where he stood, his arms wrapped around himself in hostile rejection . . . or possibly fear. Darryl trailed after us, then broke into a jog and headed for the river side of the property.

“What happened in there was all about power,” I said thoughtfully after Darryl was a sufficient distance away.

Aiden didn’t say anything.

I thought about power, about how Adam had sat in the soft hotel sofa to make Thomas Hao feel more at ease. So I sat down on the grass. The seat of my pants was immediately wet and cold—evidently the lawn had just been watered. At least my slacks wouldn’t show the water stain the way my usual jeans would have. Aiden looked at me, frowned, then took a seat on the nearest lawn chair.

“You felt it was dangerous for us to consider you a child,” I said, “because in your world, children are vulnerable, and the fae like to prey upon them.” I pushed my fingers into the soil. “Werewolves are not fae. For the pack, children are fragile, and the wolves, most of them anyway, see them as a charge, someone to be protected from all harm.”

“I would be safer, here, pretending to be the age that my body appears?” he asked warily.

I sighed and shook my head. For all that we both spoke English, we were alien, weren’t we?

“No,” I said. “Pretending is a lie—and wolves can tell if you lie. But you didn’t have to make a big deal of your real age in order to be safe. But I was talking about power, not specifically about you.” I looked up at the sky and thought about how to explain twenty-first-century manners and morals to someone who had last been human before Europeans had set foot on this continent.

“Touch,” I said, “is basic to the human condition. Mothers touch their babies to bond with them. Touch brings comfort or pain. Touch is important. The most powerful person in a room is the one who can touch anyone else—and no one can touch him back without permission.” The Romans would have substituted “sex” for “touch,” but I thought I didn’t have to go that crude. Sometimes, when dealing with very old creatures, my history degree was unexpectedly useful.

“Lady,” Aiden said sincerely, “you are strange. You are saying that I am less powerful than the girl.” He held out his hand and showed me the fire he held. “I do not think so.”

“Think about what happened in there,” I said. “Who ended up winning that encounter?”

“She hit me,” he said, “but I could have killed her—or hurt her so she never would have tried to hit me again.”

“But Darryl stopped you,” I told him. “Because he is more powerful, and his job is to take care of Jesse. To make sure no one touches her without permission.”

“I could have killed him, too,” said Aiden.

I shrugged. “Yes. But he has those who protect him, too. And you are not stronger than Zee—the Dark Smith.”

Silence.

I nodded. “So what is power for, Aiden?”

“To be safe,” Aiden said without hesitation.

A sociology professor of mine had asked that in my college class. She got answers ranging from wealth to the ability to do whatever you wanted to whomever you wanted. She said that when she’d asked that question in a village in a South American country that was on its fifth dictator in ten years, she’d gotten only one answer: safety.

“Okay,” I said, wondering what it said about Underhill that Aiden had that much in common with people who’d lived with uncertainty and terror for generations. “So what did you do when you touched Jesse without permission?”

There was a long pause. “I made her feel unsafe,” he said.

I shook my head. “Not really. She had no trouble defending herself—and she knew there was a houseful of people who would make sure she was safe. What you did do was tell her that you had no intention of letting her be safe with you.”

He said nothing.

“You are safe with us,” I told him. “We will not touch you nor allow anyone else to touch you while you are under our protection.”

“The big man with the dark brown skin touched me,” he said.

“Darryl.” I nodded. “You’re right. So unless you threaten one of our own, we will not allow you to be touched without your permission. We have the power to do that, and we extend that power to you—to our pack and to Jesse. Power comes from three places, Aiden. It comes from the power that you have as an individual. Some people have a lot of that—Zee has a lot of power just from being himself. Someone can leverage the power they have to take more power—but power taken by force only lasts as long as you can hold it. Most dictators don’t live long lives.”

He said, sounding offended, “The third way to gain power is to have others give you their power. I am not a child; nor am I stupid.”

I nodded, though I thought the jury was out on the last. “I’m pretty weak as far as creatures of magic are concerned. I have a few tricks. But I was able to grant you sanctuary from the Gray Lords—because I have friends, I have pack, and I have people who love me.” I turned my head, met his eyes, and frowned at him. “You are going to need a lot of power to stay safe from the Gray Lords. Right at this moment, that means you need to work at making people want to help you—instead of wanting to strangle you and shove your head through a refrigerator.”

He threw up his hands and cried out with honest frustration, “But how do I do that? I don’t understand you people. I don’t know your customs. I don’t know anything about this place.”

“Okay,” I told him. “Sometimes you have to start just knowing you don’t know anything. But if you assume that you are on the bottom of the pack—that means no touching anyone without invitation—you will be safe because I have promised you that, and I have the power to make that stick. But I cannot protect you from your own bad decisions; if you go around grabbing women’s butts, they might hit you with something a little sharper next time.”

Aiden stared at me. “You are very strange. I have no intention of coming anywhere near the Alpha’s daughter again.”

“That’s probably safer for you,” I agreed.

Jesse opened the back door. “Mercy,” she said, “Dad’s still in his office with Mom, and we have a visitor who wants to see you or Dad.” The subtle emphasis meant that Jesse knew who it was but didn’t think she should mention it in front of Aiden. That meant fae.

I stood up and dusted off the back of my pants, which were wet. “Okay,” I said. “In the interest of keeping our word, Aiden, you should come inside.”

“Why?” he sneered. “There are two werewolves watching the backyard. Aren’t three enough to give alarm? Or do you acknowledge that the fae can come into your territory and take me?”

Warren and Ben weren’t being obvious—I could smell them, but I couldn’t see them. Darryl had disappeared while I wasn’t watching.

“If we keep the weakest of us—that’s me—and the one most likely to be attacked—that’s you—in the same place, we keep our defense stronger than if we scatter them between us.” And there is a fae here to see us. I realized I hadn’t told him that because he looked like he was a child. I was going to have to get over that instinct. “Whoever our visitor is, he’s fae—or Jesse would have said something more. You need to come inside.”

I glanced at Jesse.

“Uncle Mike,” she said. “I told him to wait in the living room.”

“Is he here for me?” asked Aiden.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I suppose we’ll have to find out.”