Fire Touched

9

As soon as she appeared, I could smell her. Her scent held a mix of cinnamon, brimstone, and honey, but no witchcraft. She smelled like a fae, but with overtones of earth and water rather than a clear allegiance to either, which was unusual in my experience.

Thomas jumped ten feet sideways, Margaret in his arms. Adam moved in front of them like a trained bodyguard. I recognized her scent and stopped my instinctive move to draw my carry gun. Instead, like Adam, I put myself in front of Thomas and Margaret. Zee stood where he was but put a hand on his hip, where I knew he kept one of his bladed weapons. He didn’t just use magicked swords—he made them.

“Dangerous to surprise us like that,” he said coolly, because he, of course, knew who it was.

I did, too. It’s not that I remember everyone I scent. It’s just that some people make a definite impression. Though some of the fae have favorite glamours they wear, visual impressions are not a definitive way to recognize a fae. Scent is much more difficult for them to change.

“What’s life without a little danger?” The woman looked at me, and said, “And didn’t I tell them to keep an eye on you? No one who carries Coyote so strongly is going to be resting on the sidelines. But they never listen to me.”

Thomas set Margaret on her feet.

“You aren’t a witch,” I said. I’d been as surprised as anyone when I met Baba Yaga the first time. The most famous witch in the world—wasn’t.

She shrugged. “You say tomato, and I say tomato.” She used the phrase backward, the second “tomato” carrying the long “a.” “A million people and a hundred tales can’t be wrong. You say fae, I say witch, and I am bigger than you—so I can call myself what I want.” She leaned toward me and sniffed and twitched her nose in a very unhumanlike way. “There’s a Russian here,” she said to me. “I can always tell. And it’s not you.”

She took a wide, awkward sideways step until she was in front of Zee. She frowned at Zee a moment. “I remember you as better-looking.”

“I remember you as an old Topfgucker, who sticks her long nose where it doesn’t belong,” said Zee, unimpressed.

She dropped her head and cackled, a real witch’s cackle—as if she’d watched too many cartoons. “There’s my Loan, darling. Oops, I forgot. You are calling yourself Siebold Adelbertsmiter now, aren’t you? Adelbert was such an old stick-in-the-mud—he deserved what he got, but he was a wimp, no one I’d brag about smiting. Siebold, darling, have you missed me? You never call, you never write. A person would be forgiven for thinking you didn’t like them. You certainly aren’t my Russian.”

She looked at Thomas, put a hand on Zee’s shoulder so she could lean past him to sniff the air. “Not you,” she told Margaret. She looked at Thomas, and said, “Obviously not you. Too much Earth Dragon, too little air of the steppe.” She took that odd sidestep again; this time it put her directly in front of Adam. She leaned too close to him and inhaled.

“So it is you!” she exclaimed, with the air of a vaudeville cop finding the villain. She waited a moment, relaxed, and said, “You smell of my home. True russkiy dukh. I should take you home for supper—I would have just a few centuries ago. Sharpened my brass tooth in your honor . . . silver would be more appropriate, but I broke that one in 1916.” The brass tooth threw me for a moment, then I remembered that Baba Yaga was supposed to eat people with metal teeth that she would take out of her mouth and sharpen in front of her victims. In the stories I’d heard, the teeth were supposed to be iron, not brass.

Baba Yaga had not slowed down her patter, though. “More to the point,” she said, then giggled. “Point—tooth, do you get it? I am so funny. But as I was saying, I am civilized now. Tamed for the sake of the others, you know. A fine handsome man as you? Now I take him home for other things.” She licked her lips hungrily.

Adam growled at her.

“Stop it,” I said to her, because I was afraid that if she kept talking, someone would make a stupid move and get themselves killed. “Everyone’s on edge, there’s no use pushing them over. What do you want?”

“Who are you?” asked Margaret.

The witch, who was a Gray Lord, took the sides of her sundress, one side in each hand, and curtsied. “Baba Yaga, at your . . . well, not at your service. That would be a lie. Say rather I’m not opposed to you—or not as opposed to you as I am to some others who were in the hotel tonight.” She dropped her skirt and held up a hand, displaying a business card with a cartoon Baba Yaga figure on it and a phone number. “For if they bother you, dearling. Just give us a ring. They being the other Gray Lords, of course.” She dropped the silliness for a moment. “Margaret, I owed your father, and he cannot collect. Take the card. Put it in the bottom of a drawer somewhere, but remember it. When you need me, you can call the number or rip the card in half, and I will come to your aid, once.”

Margaret put her hand on Thomas to steady herself and walked a few steps forward so she could take it. “My father told me stories about you,” she said. “He spoke well of you. Mostly.”

Baba Yaga smiled, her teeth white and straight. “How good of him. I speak well of him, too—mostly.” She looked at me. “I like what you’re doing, Coyote girl—even though you had to kill my favorite troll. That’s not your fault, though. I know who sent him. They are claiming they forgot how strong the call of water would be on him—that it was an accident that they lost control. You and I know better.” She held out another card, this one poison green.

“You don’t get to call upon me for a favor,” she said when I took it. She glanced at Adam and licked her lips again. “Not unless you want to share the Russian wolf.”

“No,” I said, closing my fist on the card so it crumpled into a ball.

She cackled again, and said, “If you rip that one up, it will just be harder to read. You should call me for information—I think you might need advice soon. And I will call upon you from time to time. No obligation on either side, of course. You don’t have to tell me anything, nor do I have to tell you anything. But I don’t want a war with the humans, and some idiot among us—or more properly, some idiots among us—are determined to start one. If I know trouble is coming your way, I’ll tell you. Keep that card—you’ll need it soon.”

“All right,” I said slowly. “No promises implied or given.”

She smiled. “Just so.” And she disappeared. No mortar and pestle this time, she was just gone. Her scent lingered behind her.

“That’s all right, then,” said Margaret. “We needed a finale.”

“Don’t trust her,” Zee told me. He looked at Margaret. “You’re probably all right, if you’re cautious.”

“I am,” she said, tucking the card into the small handbag she’d been carrying. “And if I’m not cautious enough, Thomas is happy to point it out.” She looked at me. “Mercy. I really would like a chance to talk to you. Would you mind driving our car?” She gave her hands a rueful look. “I’m getting better, but my hands aren’t trustworthy to drive yet. Thomas, would you mind riding with Adam?”

The answer I saw on Thomas’s face was that he minded very much, but he said, “I can do that.”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll have a girl’s car and a guy’s car. It’ll be fun.”

Thomas picked Margaret up and put her in her seat, and watched gravely while she belted herself in. He shut her door and handed me the keys.

“Drive carefully,” he said.

“I will,” I promised.

He gave me a stiff nod and strode over to Adam’s SUV.

I didn’t have to adjust the seat to be comfortable. Thomas wasn’t very big to be that scary. I took a moment to familiarize myself with the car, so I wouldn’t have to do it while I was driving.

“Thank you,” Margaret said.

I gave her a startled look, because, as a rule, the fae don’t thank you—and you’d better not thank them, either. “Thank you” implies debt, and most fae will hold you to that. Margaret laughed.

“I’m not that old, Mercy,” she said. “About a hundred years, and most of that was spent in the Heart of the Hill—underground, imprisoned in a forgotten chunk of mine tunnel.”

She’d said that she’d had no food, no drink, no light. I tried to imagine what going without food and water for almost a hundred years would have been like. A werewolf would have died, starved to death like a human in that situation, maybe even faster than a human. There were degrees of immortality, some more terrible than others.

Unaware of my thoughts, Margaret had kept talking. “My father thought that it was important that we blend with the normal folk, so I don’t have a lot of the taboos the old fae do. ‘Thank you’ means just what it would to you.”

Adam’s SUV lit up, and I rolled down the window to wave them ahead. I didn’t spend much time in Walla Walla. If I’d been alone, I could have found my way out to the highway, but why bother when Adam could lead the way? He flashed his lights and took point.

“How did you survive?” I asked her.

“Not very well.” She held her hand up and moved it. “It’s taken me years to get this far—and the first year I spent as a total bedridden invalid. But I am better now, getting better almost every day. A month ago, I would not have been able to stay on my feet as long as I did tonight.” She paused. “That’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about. You are human.”

“Half,” I said apologetically. “My father is . . . not human.” I wasn’t up to explaining my complicated parentage to her, likeable as I found her. Besides, I was pretty sure my bloodlines weren’t what she wanted to talk about. “I can change into a coyote, and I have a few other tricks up my sleeve.”

“But your husband is still far stronger than you,” she said.

I nodded. “He is.”

“How did you get him to stop treating you like a fragile thing that might blow away in a harsh wind and take you to bed?” she said.

Holy cow. The girlfriend talk. I tried to remember the last time I’d done the girlfriend talk. Char. It had been with Char, when I’d talked her out of the very handsome but not very bright young man who would make a lovely date for someone else. That was all the way back in college.

I smelled Margaret’s sudden embarrassment. “I had a much more tactful way to ask that,” she said. Then she let out a frustrated growl. “We’ve been living together for two and a half years, and the most passion I get is a kiss on the forehead. And I don’t have anyone but Thomas to ask about it. And I can’t ask Thomas.”

“Obviously not,” I said. The reason I hadn’t had the girlfriend talk with anyone in a long time is that I sucked at it. I could barely talk to Adam about our relationship, and I loved Adam.

“Right?” she said.

I liked Margaret. I wanted to help her if I could, even if only as a sounding board. But. I couldn’t forget what Margaret was. Despite the easy way she’d thanked me and how she’d just established that she was not under the power of the Gray Lords, she was still fae. If there was one thing I’d learned about the fae, it was that being in their debt was only a little more dangerous than having a fae in my debt. If she wanted my help—I’d ask for her help, too.

“I have a proposition for you,” I said. “I’ll try to help you—as much as one clueless person can help another—if you’ll give me some intelligence on the people in the room tonight.” Like, say, the name of the middle-aged woman in salmon who had tortured Zee. “I could ask Zee—but he tends to hate everyone uniformly.”

It hadn’t been an accident that Tad had been the one to talk to Adam and me about the Widow Queen. I could call Ariana, maybe, but she was in Europe, and she hadn’t been in that room tonight.

“Deal,” she said promptly. “What do you want to know?”

“Don’t you think I should go first?” I asked. “I see your problem, but I’m relationship-challenged. Since Thomas sounds like he’s relationship-challenged, too, you might be better off talking to Adam, who has experience dealing with stupid people.”

She leaned back in her seat and smiled sweetly. Unlike when Zee smiled sweetly, it didn’t send the hairs on the back of my neck up with nervousness. “I’m not in the inner circle of the Council, either. All I know is the stuff my father drilled into my head. But he was pretty sharp. I have to tell you, that if all you do is listen to me whine, it would help me a great deal. Let’s do politics first. I have a feeling it will be less depressing. What do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with the woman in the salmon-colored suit,” I said.

“Órlaith,” she said. “She is the sister of Brian mac Cennétig.”

I frowned because she said the name of Órlaith’s brother as if I should have known him. “Who?” I asked.

“He was the high king of Ireland,” she said. “He defeated the kings of Ulster.”

I only knew one of the high kings of Ireland named Brian. Okay, I only knew the name of one of the high kings of Ireland, and his name was Brian.

“Do you mean Brian Boru?” I asked tentatively. “The one who united all of the Irish against the Vikings?”

She let out a huff of air. “And a good thing it is that my father died before he heard you say that. Boru is a nickname given him years after he died by people who didn’t know him. And the Vikings weren’t driven out, they were assimilated . . . not that it is important to our current conversation.”

Not being an expert on Irish history, I didn’t feel the need to argue. “Okay. So Brian Boru was fae?”

“No. His father married a fae lady who saw to it that he thought her daughter Órlaith was his. She soon grew bored of him and went on her way, but she left her daughter behind.” Margaret huffed. “But that’s not what you need to know, is it? Still, despite her chosen appearance, Órlaith is very young for a Gray Lord. Even so, my father said she is too tied to the glories of the past. Her greatest strength is in her ability to persuade people to follow her. My father liked her a great deal.”

“I think she tortured Zee,” I said. “I don’t think I’m going to like her.”

She smiled, but it was a sad smile. “My father did not like your Zee. The Dark Smith was not, even by the flexible standards of the fae, a hero.”

I knew that. I knew that. But I’d worked side by side with him for most of my adult life. I’d seen him do a lot of small kindnesses, and I suspected that there were some I’d missed because he was embarrassed by them. He was not petty, and I’d never seen him be cruel.

I decided it would be safer to change the subject. “So the Widow Queen?”

“Neuth?” Margaret focused her gaze on the dark beyond the windows of the Subaru. “She’s not a nice person. Dangerous. She takes pleasure in the misery of others. She despises humankind—despises those weaker than her, and most people are weaker than she is.”

That dovetailed with what Tad had said about her.

“Goreu,” I said.

She looked at me. “My father didn’t know him well. Goreu didn’t take an active role among the fae until after my father died. Much of what I know of him comes from the research Thomas did for this trip.” She smiled, as if at some memory. “The vampires follow fae politics for entertainment. Thomas gathered a lot more information about current politics than the Gray Lords would be comfortable with if they knew.” She tapped a finger on the dash. “So Goreu. King Arthur wasn’t a king, really, and the stories of the knights of the round table are only very loosely factual. But Arthur was a hero, and Goreu rode with him. He killed a giant. The troll you killed was but a rabbit to the wolf that a giant would have been.” She paused. “But that was a long time ago. Goreu has done nothing important since except for his selection into the Council of the Gray Lords. I wouldn’t have thought one of Arthur’s men would have stooped to the foulness of those slave bracelets.” She hummed a little; it was on key and pretty. “I also wouldn’t have thought a Gray Lord would have been so easily defeated.”

“Nemane.” Her name seemed to hang in the air longer than sound should have. Suddenly it was very dark in the car, the dash lights only a candle in the night.

“The Carrion Crow,” Margaret said slowly, and for the first time I smelled fear rising from her skin. “One of the three fae who could be Morrigan, the goddess of battle. She is smart and very old. And very, very clever. My father respected her—and feared her. The only one of the fae he truly feared. She is capable of playing a very long game. She is patient.” Margaret swallowed. “And bloodthirsty.”

Maybe if we hadn’t been in a dark car, driving through the dark, her words wouldn’t have been so . . . frightening. Like how a story told by firelight has more power than one told in the light of day. But I hadn’t been afraid of her back in the hotel. Neuth, yes, but not Nemane.

I could just be affected by Margaret’s fear, but it felt like more than that. Maybe it was just that we spoke of someone who was a Power and had been a Power for longer than I could imagine, and we spoke of her in the loneliness of the night.

“Okay,” I said. “Now that you’ve scared us both . . .” I had the sudden conviction that Adam and I were in way over our heads. We had just met with five of the Gray Lords—but those weren’t the only Gray Lords on that reservation.

“When I saw her sitting there . . .” Margaret said. “I was very grateful for Thomas at my back.”

There was still one we hadn’t spoken of.

“Beauclaire,” I said. I knew him best of the Gray Lords and liked what I knew.

She smiled and relaxed. “My father said that Lugh’s son likes to be underestimated. It helps him that so many of the fae remember his father, Lugh, and judge the son from that scale. Lugh . . . Lugh was everything they say he was. Sometimes the humans called him a god, and they weren’t far wrong.” She didn’t exactly stiffen, but she eyed me. “He was good, glorious, and kind—and your Dark Smith killed him.”

I knew that. Zee had killed him because Lugh had, like many very old creatures, started to become a monster. It was why Zee and Beauclaire did not deal well together—and another reason I’d been surprised when he helped Zee escape.

“Beauclaire and Nemane are allies,” she said. I’d picked that up from tonight’s meeting. “From what happened when Adam spoke, I think that those two have a use for you and your pack. Zee distracted Órlaith and Neuth. Goreu was still recovering from the slave bracelet. But Nemane and Beauclaire could have responded to Adam when he spoke. By not doing so, they gave legitimacy to Adam’s claim—unless they rule against it out loud, all of Faery must respect the borders of your territory. That tells me that Adam’s claim played right into whatever those two have planned.”

“Okay,” I said. Being part of any fae’s plans wasn’t a good thing. I’d have to warn Adam. And speaking of warning . . . “You should know that Edythe didn’t have any trouble seeing through your glamour.”

Margaret frowned. “Edythe?”

“There were two guards the Gray Lords brought with them,” I said. “She was the one that looked like a girl.”

“They weren’t guards,” she said. “The Gray Lords don’t use guards. They were servants, to be sent to fetch food or whatever else was required.” She frowned. “She saw through the glamour?”

I nodded.

“There are some who see truth,” Margaret said. “But it is a rare gift. It may be that gift was the reason they brought her to the meeting. Interesting that she didn’t speak when she saw who accompanied us.”

“I’m not a threat,” I said. “And I’m the only one she looked at.”

“Okay,” she said. She dusted her hands on her thighs and took a deep breath. “So tell me how you got an Alpha werewolf to treat you like a partner instead of a princess who needs protecting.”

I pursed my lips. “I can tell you that, but I don’t think it will be useful in your situation. By the time I’d met Adam, I’d spent my whole life proving myself, Margaret. I knew who I was and what I could do—and I didn’t let anyone make me less.”

“Damn it,” she said. “I hoped that you could give me some useful advice. I don’t know many women—have never known many women. And your situation seemed so similar.”

It hadn’t been, really. Not the beginning of Adam and me—but . . . “A couple of months ago, this volcano god—a great manitou—came after Adam’s ex-wife,” I told her. “We defeated him, but in the process, I was badly injured. Our pack doctor told Adam I was going to die.”

“But you didn’t,” said Margaret.

I drew in a breath. “I was dying, no question. Only by the weirdest circumstances ever did I survive. Not quite dumb luck, but unexpected enough that it was worse really.” Coyote counted as weird circumstances—and he was unpredictable.

“It took a while for me to recover completely. Adam, who has been very, very good about not indulging his wolf’s need to be overprotective, has had to deal with his perceived failure to protect me. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night to listen to me breathe.” I didn’t tell her about the nightmares, or the times when he pulled me close to him to listen to my heart, and his skin was damp with the sweat of fear. Or that sometimes, in the darkness of our room, he cried. Those moments weren’t for public consumption. “But Thomas didn’t fail to keep you safe, so the situation isn’t completely analogous.”

Margaret said nothing, but I felt like she was going to, so I kept quiet.

“That is,” she said, “I think, very much what is between Thomas and me.” She paused. “I don’t talk about him to other people. He wouldn’t like it. But I need advice, and I don’t know how I’m going to get it without giving you the whole picture.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Excuse me,” she said. She took out her cell phone and began texting. The phone chimed as her message was returned. She texted back and forth a bit more.

“He says I should talk to you,” she said. “He” was obviously Thomas. “He says Adam says that you are a deep well. That secrets are safe in your keeping.” She gave me a considering look.

“That’s me,” I said. “Damp. Also, cold and dank.”

She laughed. “All right.” She quit laughing and looked out into the darkness. “I met Thomas when I was thirteen in Butte, Montana. Butte was . . . not what it is now—small and forgotten. Gold, then silver, and finally copper, which, in the age where all the cities of the world were stringing copper wire for electricity, meant money, and money is power. The people who flocked to the boomtown were not just human. My father came, hoping to set up a new court, I think. But his people weren’t the only fae, and there was conflict.”

She hummed a little, reached out, and turned on the radio. Classical music filled the car, replaced by country and then eighties rock before she turned it off.

“My father’s enemies used me against him. They stole me away and chained me in the mining tunnels.” Her restless fingers played with the fabric of her slacks. “The mining tunnels in Butte were five thousand feet below the earth and more, a mile deep. My father and I, our power comes from the sun.”

Silence stretched.

“Which is ironic, given that you love a vampire,” I said, trying to help her.

“Not . . . not as ironic as you might think.” She played a little more with her slacks.

“So you were trapped there for decades?”

She shook her head, gave me a quick smile, then went back to her narrative. “Not that time. For a couple of days only. But it gave my father’s enemies the idea for what they did to me later. It was still dark and frightening. I was hungry and alone, and I heard a sound.”

She swallowed. “I don’t have any friends,” she said. “Except for Thomas. I don’t quite know how to go about this.”

She didn’t know me, and it was hard to tell someone you don’t know about private things. “My foster parents both died when I was fourteen,” I told her, breaking the awkward silence. Then I realized that was the wrong part of the story to start with. “Let me backtrack. My mother was a buckle bunny when she was sixteen.”

“Buckle bunny?”

I nodded. “That means she followed the rodeo and slept with rodeo cowboys. I guess her parents were a real freak show. She left home when she was fifteen or sixteen. She took the truck and horse trailer she’d paid for and her quarter-horse mare and hit the road. Traveled wherever there was a rodeo and barrel raced. She was good enough she made money at it. But she was lonely, so she chased after the cowboys.” I paused. “Rodeo cowboys aren’t universally horrible, but they are macho, and some of them, usually not the more successful, are brutal with their animals and with women. She had hooked up with this bronc rider in Wyoming, and he got drunk and pretty rough one night. They’d been sleeping in his horse trailer—”

“In a horse trailer?” Margaret asked.

“Some of them have campers in the front,” I said. “I guess his did. Anyway, the fight spilled to the outside and attracted attention. My mother is a lot shorter than me. She was sixteen, and he was twenty-eight and big for a bronc rider. He outweighed her by a hundred pounds or more. He was snake mean when he was drunk, and the other rodeo riders were afraid of him.”

It had been a long time since I’d told this story to anyone. Even knowing what I knew about my father now, it was still pretty cool.

“But my mom was nobody’s punching bag, and she doesn’t believe in fighting fair. She kicked his butt in front of his friends. Then she turned around to get her stuff out of his trailer, and he got to his feet and came after her while her back was turned.” I could see by the tension in Margaret’s shoulders that the story was getting to her.

“There was this Native American, a Blackfeet man from Montana.” Which he sort of had been, and sort of hadn’t been. “He rode bulls, Mom said, and those bull riders are all a little crazy to do what they do. Anyway, he coldcocked that man before he got close to my mother again.”

I smiled as I got to the best part. “And my mom punched him in the stomach. She said, ‘I have a gun, you stupid son of a bitch. I could have shot him, and no one would have said it was anything but self-defense. Now he’s going to get to beat up some other woman, and it will be your fault.’”

Margaret laughed.

“I know, right?” I said. “Mom is scary. Even Adam walks softly around her. She and that bull rider hooked up for a couple of months. Then one day, he just didn’t come home. Died in a car wreck.” He’d been hunting vampires, and they’d caught up with him. “Mom was pregnant with me. Imagine her surprise when she came in to change my diapers and found a coyote puppy in my crib.”

It was my turn to be quiet for a little while. “She eventually ran down a pack of werewolves—do you know who the Marrok is?”

Margaret nodded.

“Right,” I said. “That’s whose pack she found. He agreed to take me—but she couldn’t come with. She decided that it was the best place for me.” Mom never said exactly what had made her decide to do that, but I figured it was pretty bad, considering the stories she did tell me. I did know that she’d negotiated for visitation rights over Bran’s objections. “So I was raised by a pretty neat couple. She was human, and he was werewolf. She died, and he committed suicide to be with her. I was fourteen, and I didn’t want to live with anyone else, so Bran let me live on my own.” Bran was from an age when fourteen was an adult. “I was raised a coyote in a werewolf pack. I know exactly what it feels like not to have anyone to talk to. Tell me as much or as little as you’d like. I won’t swear not to tell Adam, he’s my mate. But if I’m a well, he’s a . . . bottomless pit.” I glanced at Margaret, then looked back at the road. “When we last left you, you were alone, chained in the dark, and hearing monsters.”

“Thomas found me there,” Margaret said, but she sounded more comfortable. Good. I’d worried that the “monster” talk would throw her. If so, she didn’t stand a chance taking on someone as . . . closed as Thomas. He reminded me of my foster brother Charles, and, for Charles, it had taken an Omega wolf with a backbone of titanium to learn how to make a relationship work. Omega wolves didn’t come around very often; maybe a fairy princess would do.

“He was . . . he was a very, very angry man. I asked for his help. He refused. I asked him what he wanted, and he said . . . no, that’s not right. He wanted. I felt what he wanted as if it were water, and he’d doused me in it, so I could feel his need in my bones. But what he asked for was to feed from me.”

There was a long moment as she weighed what had happened with how much she wanted to tell me. She smiled. “I was frightened—but not so frightened I didn’t see the hurt that caused his anger. I didn’t think he’d be happy to know how easy it was for me to see.”

She took a breath.

“I gave him what he wanted as well as what he asked for, even though he’d done that last because he knew I’d refuse. That I’d give him an excuse to walk off. If I’d known him then as well as I do now, I’d have known there was no way he’d have left me. I’m not sure Thomas knows that.” She gave me an incredulous look. “Talking. Who would have thought talking to someone would be so useful. I bet he, too, needs to know that he would not have left me there.”

Oh, I knew that battle. “Good luck,” I said. “When your man is responsible for the world, heaven forbid they aren’t guilty of every little thing.”

She giggled. Looked at me and broke down in whoops of amusement. “Isn’t that the truth, now,” she said when she quieted, wiping her eyes.

She laughed again and shook her head. “Anyway. We struck a bargain that night, but it was more than either of us expected. There is magic in bargaining with one of my kind that has nothing to do with what I had the power to do or not do. There, that’s some repayment for you. That’s why so many of the fae are willing to strike odd bargains—they can gain power from it. And mine wasn’t the only bargain present that night. Thomas’s father had bargained with the master vampire who made him. Two bargains in the Heart of the Hill—there is power in the deep places of the earth, Mercy. There was also my fire magic, tempered to a stronger force by my royal birth and his . . .” She hesitated. “Some things are his secrets to give. But there is magic in Thomas’s heritage, too. I gave him three gifts. His freedom from the vampire who had bound him—that was Thomas’s own power made manifest. From my magic, I—” She sucked in a breath. “You are easy to talk to. I think that is something else that belongs to Thomas.”

I nodded. “I can live with that.” It was the truth, but I was very curious anyway.

She laughed. “That was almost a lie.” She looked at me. “I tell you what. I’ll tell Thomas what we talked about, and he can tell you if he chooses.”

“I can live with that better,” I said. “Or at least, it isn’t any worse.” But then I got an inkling. A terrible horrible very, very scary inkling.

No normal vampire would have chosen a hotel like the Marriott. There were too many windows—and the ones in their room all faced the east, where the sun would rise.

And Margaret said that her power, like her father’s, came from the sun.

Unbidden, I remembered walking at night once with Stefan, a friend who was a vampire. At one point, he stopped, looked up at the moon, and said, totally out of the blue, “I miss the sun.” And the last word sounded as though it had been dragged up from the depths of his being. If someone asked Stefan what he would wish for, I think that the ability to walk in sunlight would be very high on that list.

Could Thomas walk in the sun?

As soon as I thought that, terror screamed up my backbone. Vampires are evil. Even though I like some of them, I know that they are evil. Symbols of faith can work against them, repel them and cause them pain. Wood works against vampires because it was something that once was living that became dead—sympathetic magic of a sort. But it is sunshine that is the real weapon against vampires.

“Mercy?” Margaret said, her voice concerned.

That was a secret too dangerous for anyone to have. They would hunt him down. Which they? All of “they.” Vampires would hunt him down to steal his secret. Everyone else would hunt him down to kill him to get rid of the fear I had coiled in my stomach.

“Don’t ask him,” I said, my voice hoarse. “This gift from your power, I think I know what it was.” Thomas called her Sunshine, I remembered. “That’s a secret too big for acquaintances, no matter how friendly. When we’re friends, we can pretend you told me then. For now we can say that I have an idea—and I’m going to pretend I’m wrong because that would make Thomas the scariest vampire I’ve ever heard of.”

We drove for a few miles in silence.

Then she said, “Thomas isn’t a monster—though he’d disagree with me on that. I don’t know how he managed it, with his father, who was the single coldest being I have ever known, but he’s a good man.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t as sure of it as she was. I cleared my throat. “So the third thing you gave him was your blood.”

“It sealed the bargain,” she said. “That’s what my father said. For the next seventeen years, I always knew where he was, whether he was . . . well, not happy. Thomas doesn’t do happy very much. But he was content. Or if he was unhappy or cold or whatever . . . He says that he did not feel the same connection—not the same way.”

“That’s backward to the way a vampire’s feeding usually works,” I said. I knew that because apparently my . . . Stefan felt that way about me. He knew when I was sad or hurt. He’d known when I had nearly died. I knew that because he’d shown up at the hospital and sat with me all through the night. I’d been pretty high on pain meds, but Adam had told me that Stefan hadn’t said a word the whole time.

Margaret nodded. “Backward, yes. That’s what my father said. Then he said he thought it was the thing that Thomas gave me back for my gifts. Thomas was raised to be a guardian, to protect his father’s interests. When his father betrayed him, he still guarded, but he no longer believed in what he was doing. He gave me himself, everything of what he was, when we sealed the bargain with blood.” Voice tight, she said, “My father said that the vampire usually takes ownership of those he feeds from, but Thomas reversed that in an effort to balance our bargain.”

“That’s . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to be offensive.

“Messed up,” she said. “I know. If I think of it as a gift of service, it helps. But I used him—and now . . . we’re so lopsided. It’s like he thinks of himself as my devoted . . .”

“Slave?” I suggested. “Servant?”

She laughed, wiping tears from her eyes again. “Can you imagine Thomas as a slave? He’d have the person who thought he was his master committing suicide in an hour, all the while helping out with solicitous advice on the proper length of blade. And even as the knife slid in, the master would think it was all his own idea.”

“Guard dog,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “That one. It’s as if he sees me as this fragile thing to be protected.” She paused. “That’s not quite right. It’s not as though he doesn’t respect me, respect my power. But he sees me as different from him. Separate.” She sighed. “I hoped you could help me.”

I thought about it. Sometimes simple is best when dealing with men. It’s not that they are simple. Simple and Adam didn’t belong in the same room. But dealing with them . . . that was simple.

“So seduce him,” I said.

“I’d love to,” she all but wailed. “But how?”

Okay. Seducing Adam wasn’t exactly . . . difficult. It was fun, actually, just how much I could get him to react with subtle cues. A nudge. He did it back to me, too—with interest. But Thomas was more like Charles. Thomas needed a sledgehammer first.

“Victoria’s Secret,” I said. “No. That’s too feminine. Too much what women think is sexy.” I tried to channel Adam.

“Have you looked at me?” she said. “I am covered with scars, and I’m too skinny. I have no muscle. I’m ugly.”

I wasn’t a guy, so I knew better than to argue with that last statement. What I thought didn’t matter—what she thought mattered.

“Thomas doesn’t think you’re ugly,” I told her. “No one who watches him watch you—no one who saw his face when he picked you up back there in that hotel would ever, ever be under that impression.”

“I’ve tried lingerie,” she said after a moment.

“Big guns are required,” I said. “Subtle won’t work. Naked.”

“But I don’t have big guns,” she said. Then she dropped her head in her hands. “I can’t believe I just said that. I can’t believe I said that to someone I’ve just met.”

“Thomas will like your guns just fine,” I assured her. “Just ask him.”

Her jaw dropped open. Then she closed it and laughed.

We talked awhile more. I offered improbable suggestions, and she responded in kind. Just outside of Pasco, she fell asleep.

It had been a long time since I’d talked with a woman who was just my friend. I’d called Char, my old college roommate, over Christmas. Maybe it was time to call her again.

I parked the Subaru, and before I had the engine off, Thomas had the passenger door open. When he saw Margaret asleep, he extracted her from the seat without waking her up.

Yep, I thought with satisfaction, he’s a goner.

I got out of the car, locked it with the appropriate button on the key fob, and handed the keys to Thomas.

He took them, looked at me, then glanced over his shoulder at Adam, who was standing beside the black SUV in the parade-rest position that he habitually fell into when waiting for someone. Zee had the hood of the SUV up and was tinkering.

I frowned at Zee. There was nothing wrong with the SUV. I kept all of our cars in excellent running condition.

“You should come visit us in San Francisco,” Thomas said, his voice quiet. “I would be delighted to serve as your escort.” Then he smiled. A real smile. He didn’t have Adam’s dimples, but it was a good smile anyway. “In the purely tourist sense of the word.”

“We’ll do that,” I said. “Margaret and I had fun.”

Margaret opened her eyes and, in a sleepy voice, said, “Take care, Mercy. And thank you. I hope not to need the big guns.”

I laughed. “I think you’ll find that your guns are plenty. Safe travels.”

Thomas turned and headed for the hotel entrance.

I stalked to the SUV, and said, “There is nothing wrong with the SUV.” Zee kept tinkering. I stood on my tiptoes to see what he was doing. “Is there?”

Zee removed himself from under the hood and held up a small device. “Not anymore. Someone’s been tracking you.”

Adam held his hand out, looked at the device, and snorted. He passed it to me. It bore a neat label with the SUV maker’s logo on it. I’d never had to do anything more complicated than an oil change on the SUV. If I’d noticed the little box, I’d have assumed it belonged.

“Feds, I bet,” Adam said. “We are persons of interest.”

“How did you find it?” I asked Zee.

“Nothing you could do, Liebling,” he said. “I felt it transmit. It didn’t bother me much, but since we had a moment here, I thought I’d take a look.”

Adam stuck it under the bumper of the Chevy parked next to the SUV. The Chevy bore all the signs of a rental vehicle, including a license-plate surround that advertised for Enterprise. I patted its trunk. “May someone rent you for a very long drive to Alaska,” I told it.

Adam snorted, then asked Zee, “Could you tell how long it has been there?”

Zee nodded. “Six months, maybe a bit more. Someone wants to keep tabs on you, Adam.”

This time it was my turn to snort. “If I’d known it was there, we could have done something more interesting—like drive out to the middle of the Hanford Reach every full moon and park for the night.” Which we did, mostly. We had other hunting spots, but the Reach was the best. “Sorry I didn’t find it, Adam. I’ll keep a better eye out next time.”

“No worries,” said Adam softly. “I’ll have a talk with a few people I know about boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. It won’t happen again.”

We arrived home to find every door and window in the house open, and the smell of burning wool in the air.

“Hey, Boss,” said Warren, as we came through the doorway, his expression somewhere between pained and amused. “We had a little mishap. Aiden was sleeping when his blankets burst into flame. Happily, Mary Jo was here. While we were all trying to figure out what to do—besides hold our ears to try to shut out the fire alarm—she grabbed the fire extinguisher from the garage and put the fire out. Mattress is a goner, but the room’s okay. We have the situation under control.”

About that time, Mary Jo came up the stairs, carrying an armful of sodden, blackened fabric that had at one time been a Pendleton wool blanket. She looked at me, and said, “Life is never boring around here.” Then she grinned at me, an expression she hadn’t turned on me in a very long while. “Your fire demon says that he needs to leave. We convinced him that it would be rude to leave before you got back, but I’m not sure we could have kept him here much longer.”

As she finished speaking, Aiden came up the stairs. His hair was wet, and he was wearing sweats from the pack stores—I made a mental note that we were going to have to get him clothes if he was going to stay here long.

“My apologies,” he said as soon as he reached the landing. He didn’t look at either of us. “I am not safe to be around. I didn’t light fires in my sleep when I was in Underhill—at least, not that I know of. I will find somewhere else to sleep tonight. I appreciate the help you have given me thus far.”

“Why are you planning on leaving?” Adam asked.

That made Aiden raise his face briefly. “I have damaged your home.”

Adam shrugged. “We house werewolves here, Aiden. I don’t think anyone has tried to burn the house down before—”

“No,” I agreed, “that was my house.”

Adam gave me a rueful grimace. “At least you weren’t in it. Werewolves can be very destructive. My contractor sends me Christmas cards and most-valuable-customer presents every year.”

“And this time the damage was confined to a mattress and some bedding,” I told him. “That’s cheap by werewolf standards.”

“The mattress might have been all right,” Mary Jo said, “if Ben hadn’t dumped a five-gallon bucket of water on it. I told him I had it under control with the fire extinguisher. So the mattress isn’t really Aiden’s fault.” She wrinkled her nose. “Excuse me, though, I’m going to get rid of this blanket.”

Aiden opened his mouth, then shut it again.

“No worries,” Adam said. “We’ll just make sure to keep a fire extinguisher around. Until the situation with the fae stabilizes, we’ll have to have twenty-four/seven guards at the house anyway. I’ll just make sure that they keep watch for fire, too.”