Fire Touched

11

We let him go. It was pretty obvious to anyone who thought about it for two seconds that we weren’t going to be able to keep him prisoner unless Zee wanted to babysit him. Ropes and duct tape don’t work on someone who can dissolve into nasty insectoid thingies whenever he wants to. I especially didn’t want to be around him in a car—I almost died once when my college roommate was driving a bunch of us to the movies and a hornet flew in through an open window.

Once Zee was sure that all of Mr. I-Am-Really-a-Hive-of-Female-Fae-Bugs was gone, and there were no more fae of any size or shape hanging around downstairs, we went upstairs. All the way, Zee muttered about stupid sprite lords who were weak and stupid—but not bothered as much by cold iron as most other fae.

“Cockroaches of the fae,” he pronounced. “Can’t hurt much, but they won’t die.”

Sherwood tossed his ax up in the air and caught it. I thought, by his attitude, that he was surprised at how comfortable he was with the ax.

Zee was still complaining about the sprite lord when we walked into the room with the hostages.

“I thought he’d get your dander up,” said Uncle Mike happily.

“What do you have yourself mixed up in?” Zee asked him in an exasperated tone. “Sprite lords. You’ve sunk to a new low dealing with such as those.”

Uncle Mike grinned. “Someone has to, Zee. If they’d managed to kill these humans, they would ruin any chance of an alliance with the werewolves. They don’t understand the connection between this pack and the Marrok’s—and I’m not inclined to enlighten them because they are too stupid, as this situation makes quite clear. They are too likely to think about it as an opportunity instead of a danger. Alas, this brave new world that has such idiots in’t.”

“There is no connection between our pack and the Marrok’s,” I said. “Not anymore.”

Uncle Mike looked at me like I was an idiot, too. “As you say,” he said blandly.

“Will you be in trouble for helping us?” I asked. “Are you going to be safe?” I didn’t quite offer him sanctuary—I could see the billboard now: COLUMBIA BASIN PACK WELCOMES DISENFRANCHISED OR ALIENATED FAE.

Uncle Mike laughed, a warm belly laugh. “If fate favors me, I hope not. There’s no fun in safety, is there?” He waved a hand at the salt circle, and a tickle in my throat I hadn’t been paying much attention to made itself felt by going away. Then he put his foot on the ring and broke the circle. When that was done to his satisfaction, he pulled open the single large window and, after peering left and right, jumped out.

I ran to the window to make sure he was okay because there was nothing to break his fall, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Salt circle broken, Sherwood had wasted no time in freeing the prisoners, starting with the hands of both men. The pastor reached up as soon as his fingers were free and ripped the duct tape off his face.

“How dare you?” he said to me, his voice rough. “This is a house of God. How dare you bring your supernatural evil into God’s house?”

His first instinct, as evidenced by what he’d said on the phone, had been to protect me. Apparently, he’d gotten over that. The other man took his time peeling the tape away from his mouth.

“Other way around,” I said in as mild a tone as I could manage. Another day, I’d feel bad about this, but right now, I needed to make sure Pastor White and the man he’d been counseling were safe, then go find out what was happening at home. “That supernatural evil brought me here.” I couldn’t help a bit of temper, and added, “I suppose I could have stayed away, and they’d probably have killed you.”

“Pastor,” said the other man.

“Married to a werewolf,” Pastor White said, spittle leaving his mouth with his words he was so upset. “I should have asked you to leave as soon as I found out.”

“Pastor,” said the other man again, his voice very quiet. Sherwood had freed both men’s hands first and was working on the stranger’s feet. “Pastor White, I think some reflection might be called for.” There was just a hint of something in his voice that made me think that he’d been called to reflect on things by the pastor once too often.

“This lady just saved both of our lives,” the man continued. “And I think the fae who jumped out the window cured my need for alcohol because I swear to God that this is the first time in twenty years I haven’t had the thirst. Not since that witch cursed me down in Bogotá.” He looked at me. “Josh Harper, ma’am. You must be Mercy Hauptman. Thank you for coming.”

Bemused, I shook his hand while Pastor White continued to be very unhappy with me, the werewolves, and most everything about this church in a rant that no one listened to, except for Zee.

That might not be healthy for Pastor White.

“Fear is a hard thing,” said Sherwood as he finished the last cut to free Pastor White’s feet. He patted the pastor on his knee. “You should give yourself some time to think about that.”

Impelled by Sherwood’s touch, the pastor surged to his feet. He opened his mouth again, looked at us, closed his mouth tightly, and made haste out of the room and down the stairs. I followed him, and I guess everyone else followed me down because we were all there when the pastor saw the chapel.

“Who is going to pay for this?” Pastor White whispered. “We’d been saving up for a new roof. It’s taken us two years to raise half the money we need.”

“You should wait until the morning and call someone to board up the windows,” said Zee.

“What happened to the bodies?” Sherwood asked. Because neither the woman Sherwood had killed nor the one Zee had beheaded were in the sanctuary.

“Bodies?” asked Pastor White.

“We fade when we die,” Zee told Sherwood. “At least, most of us do. There aren’t any bodies.”

“Look what you’ve done,” said Pastor White. There were tears in his eyes. “This stained glass cannot be replaced. Look at the pews.”

While he took inventory of the destruction, I tried to call Adam and got a “this customer is not available” message. I tried to contact him through our mating bond, but it was being obstreperous again. I could feel him, but I couldn’t contact him.

“We need to go,” I said. And I let my actions follow my words.

As we drove up to the house, the first thing that I noticed was that there were no lights. No house lights, no yard lights, nothing. It wasn’t just our home. The nearest house was a twenty-acre field away, and it was vacant, with a FOR SALE sign out front. I guess living next to a werewolf pack was too exciting for some people. But that didn’t explain the darkness that had swallowed the rest of the homes along our road.

Or Mary Jo’s car pulled mostly out of the road and empty. About a hundred yards beyond that, a black SUV that was a near match to Adam’s down to the elegant HAUPTMAN SECURITY hand-lettered on the driver’s side was parked—Adam was here.

I pulled into the crowded driveway and stopped the car. No one was dead, I reassured myself. I’d felt it when Peter died. If someone else in the pack died, I’d know it.

The three of us got out of the SUV and shut the doors quietly.

There was a howl and a crunching noise from the back of the house—at the same time the big glass window in the front room shattered, a dark shape hurtling through it. It smelled of rotting bog and salt and looked a little like a horse—it had four feet and hooves—but its head was more reptilian than equine. Its body was shaggy with fronds that made a slithery sound, like a wet hula skirt. The Fideal screamed when it saw me—long yellow-white teeth flashing for a moment in the still-lit SUV headlights.

I pulled out my Sig and shot the Fideal in the body twice as it galloped toward us. It reared and screamed again—but not because of the bullets. Sherwood threw the ax and hit it in the head. The ax dislodged from the Fideal’s head and slid down to his shoulder before it bounced off to the grass. The touch of iron left a brown gap in the plantlike hair from the top of the Fideal’s neck and down his chest.

Zee hopped onto the hood of the nearest car, ran to the top, and launched himself into the air, his sword raised. He seemed to linger in the air—but that couldn’t have been true because his sword flashed down on the Fideal before Sherwood could pick up the ax.

The Fideal shifted to human shape, a sword in his left hand that met Zee’s black blade with a noise fit to wake the dead. Sparks flew like fireflies and disappeared into the darkness. It wasn’t magic, I don’t think, just a bit of physics.

I heard Jesse scream, and the distinctive crack of my .444 Marlin rifle as it fired four times in succession. A moment later, there was a flash of fire I could see clearly through the broken window. I left the Fideal for Zee and Sherwood and bolted up the porch stairs. The front door was unlocked, and I opened it with a bang.

Jesse was on the second floor, at the top of the stairway, the rifle ready to fire. Cookie was pressed against her leg, growling ferociously. Their attention was focused toward the living room.

“Stay down there,” she said. “I won’t let you have him.”

Something the size of a car boiled out of the living room. My eyes didn’t want to focus on it because it was so ugly or beautiful. It had a lot of insectoid legs and some sort of flowing, luminous, blue-green carapace that moved like silk blown in the wind. But when Jesse shot the fae again, the bullet ricocheted off the carapace, hitting the wall two feet from my head.

“Stop firing,” I shouted, and raised my Sig.

I dropped to one knee on the ground, aiming under the carapace at an angle that wouldn’t allow me to bounce a bullet up to the top of the stairs. I emptied the gun into the fae, and blue-green blood sprayed onto the white carpet. That was good, because some of the fae can’t be hurt with lead bullets.

The fae creature whirled on me in a snakelike motion. I got a confusing glimpse of a beautiful woman’s face with skin of amber and eyes of ruby. I surged to my feet, running toward her even though I was weaponless. Running away would only have caused her to charge me. As it was, she hesitated, doubtless reasoning that, if I was running toward her, I must have some sort of an attack in mind.

I tripped on the walking stick and rolled with the fall. I used the momentum to power my thrust, and the walking stick’s sharp spearhead slid into the amber fae’s mouth. It wasn’t exactly unexpected that the walking stick would show up—but I hadn’t counted on it. I’d been planning on running past the fae creature and luring it away from the kids to the backyard, where I could hear a battle raging.

The fae creature dropped to the ground, the light fading from its carapace. I held the walking stick at the ready, but the fae stayed where she was, not breathing.

Aiden, appearing beside Jesse at the top of the stairs, made a motion with his hand, and the amber fae’s body began to burn with a smoldering, angry blue flame. There was a cracking boom from the kitchen that sounded like a door being ripped from its hinges. Then the tibicena, a great gash opened on his hip from which molten rock dripped, bolted into the foyer and closed his great jaws on the amber fae’s face. This time the tibicena was built like a wolf rather than the foo dog of his last appearance. Upright ears topped a muzzle that was long and narrow. His body was finer-boned than a werewolf of his size would have been, more like a wolf’s gracile and narrow form. His tail was covered with molten hair, and it curled a little.

He jerked his head, and there was a snapping sound before the fae’s amber face melted like wax in his teeth. Between Aiden’s sullen blue fire and the tibicena’s red flame and black teeth, the fae was definitely dead. Aiden closed his fist and spoke a word of power that emitted a sharp magical smell that made me sneeze. His fire died to nothing as the last of the fae’s body turned to ash.

Aiden slipped past Jesse and trotted down the stairs. Joel snarled at him, then at me when I moved. I froze, but Aiden kept coming.

“It’s done, it is,” Aiden told Joel. “That was the last of them. Can you hear the silence? It’s the good kind of silence, not the silence that listens back. Hear the silence and feel the air. There is only death that visited our enemies and the blood of our wounded. No more battle, no more enemies to kill. Time to sleep, fire dog,” he said, and touched his hand to Joel’s forehead.

Joel took a deep breath and turned his head to lick Aiden’s hand twice before settling on the floor in the ashes of the amber fae. A few breaths later, Joel’s naked human form lay in the tibicena’s place. He sat up, and Cookie bounded down the stairs and licked his face anxiously.

Joel began laughing. He looked up at Aiden, and said, “Thanks, mijo. That was the first time I’ve ever let the tibicena free, because I knew you’d be there. That was fun.” His voice slurred a little, as if he were drunk.

Rapid footsteps from the direction of the kitchen had me gripping the walking stick, which was once more a stick. But it was only Mary Jo, armed with a pickax that was covered with various substances that might be fae blood; she skidded to a stop, her hand half-raised.

“Which one was that?” she asked, gesturing at the ashes.

“Glowed blue,” I told her. “With a face that looked like it’d been carved in amber.”

“Caterpillar Girl,” said Mary Jo. “That only leaves Water Horse.”

The front door opened, and Zee and Sherwood ran in, weapons in hand. “Water Horse was the Fideal,” I told her. I looked at Zee. “Did you kill him?”

Zee relaxed and made a quick movement that my eyes didn’t quite follow, but after which his sword was gone. “I warned him not to come back,” said Zee, and he glanced at Sherwood. “I’ve seen you fight before. What did you say your name was?”

Sherwood gave him a half smile. “Sherwood Post.”

Zee blinked at him. “That sounds like a fence built by Robin Hood.”

“Don’t ever forget your name when Bran is around,” I told Zee. “I figure Sherwood got away lightly. Just think if Bran had been reading Moby-Dick and The Old Man and the Sea instead. Sherwood could have been Herman Hemingway.”

“Or what if he had been reading Louis L’Amour?” asked Mary Jo. “Sherwood L’Amour would have doomed you to stripper jokes for the rest of your life.”

Zee frowned. “If I’ve seen you fight—and I have, long ago. Somewhere . . . it may take some time to come to me. But if I’ve seen you fight, it’s a fair and sure thing that Bran knows who you are. There aren’t that many old wolves running around, and none that old bastard doesn’t know.”

I opened my mouth to say something—and shut it because it would have been bitter. Bran had made the decision to cut us loose based on what he thought would be the best for the werewolves. It was no use being bitter at Bran for acting like himself.

“Mercy,” Adam said.

I hadn’t heard him approach. I turned just in time to be enveloped in warm arms that closed just a little too hard. He smelled of blood—his own and others’—but I was reassured by the strength of his embrace. I just stood there for a moment and breathed him in.

“So I see you made it here alive,” he said after a moment.

“You, too,” I said. “Congratulations.” I might have been shaking a little. Now that it was all over, that we’d all survived—even poor Pastor White—and we’d kept them from taking Aiden, now I could shake.

When I felt the weight of eyes on my back, I took a deep breath and stepped back. “How did we do?” I asked.

“Paul’s hurt the worst,” Adam told me. “Mary Jo brought Carlos with her, and he’s doing wound care out in the backyard. Paul will feel it for a few days, but he’ll be fine. Ben got messed up pretty badly, too—he and Paul were on the front lines on their own for about five minutes before Mary Jo and her band of merry wolves got here.”

“I’m sorry,” said Aiden, his voice solemn.

“Yes, you are,” said Jesse stoutly. She’d come down the stairs while I wasn’t looking. “But that doesn’t mean that they can come here and feed you to a monster on our watch.” She patted him on the head. “And while I’m at it, thanks, squirt, for saving my life.” She looked at her dad. “They came out of the river. Ben was the first one to notice them—we were stargazing in the backyard. He yelled at us to get in the house, to get to the safe room.” She frowned. “We should have, but there were a bunch of those things, and only Paul and Ben to fight them. So we ran up to your bedroom and I grabbed the .444 and ran to the sitting room and started shooting. You’re going to have to get that window replaced.”

“There are a lot of windows that need replaced,” I said.

“The back wall of the house needs to be replaced,” said Mary Jo. “One of them had some sort of earth magic. She took the huge rocks that Christy had placed around the backyard as décor and hurled them. A couple of them hit the house.”

“I think I killed her,” said Jesse, suddenly sounding younger. “I tried to anyway. She threw that granite boulder and hit Paul with it.”

“That’s about when I arrived,” Mary Jo said. “Ben’s pretty proud of you, kid, you hit her right between the eyes. You are the reason that Paul and Ben aren’t dead—and if the fae had taken those two out that early, I’d have shown up too late.”

Adam started to put a hand on Jesse, and I caught his eye and shook my head. She was holding on, just barely. If he hugged her, she’d lose it—and she deserved better than that.

Jesse caught his hand and gripped it tightly, giving me a smile. “Anyway, one of them climbed up the side of the house—and bullets didn’t do anything to him. He got through the window in the sitting room, and Aiden touched him.” She swallowed. “I’m not actually sure he’s dead. We got out of there and shut the door. There was a lot of noise by that time, and the blue-silky caterpillar lady was downstairs, so Aiden and I crouched in the hallway and waited.”

Mary Jo said something under her breath, dodged into the kitchen, and grabbed the fire extinguisher from the counter—we now had a lot of fire extinguishers stashed around the house—and ran up the stairs.

“If the house were going to have caught fire,” Jesse said, “I think it would have done so by now.”

“Reflexes,” I told her. “Remember, Mary Jo fights fires for a living—and Aiden has been doing his best to refine her response time.”

“It’s okay,” Mary Jo called down after a moment. “But you’re going to have to replace some furniture and the carpets in the sitting room.”

Mary Jo had been right: the back of the house was going to need major repairs. The yard was a real mess. Christy’s careful landscaping had been ruined. Four of the five giant boulders were scattered at random, to the detriment of lawn furniture and trees and garden spots. The fifth boulder was in the middle of the kitchen floor. There was now no question that we’d have to retile the kitchen. The big window in the living room was shattered, as were, as far as I could tell, all but one of the windows in the back.

Werewolves trickled in as word spread to those not actively involved in the actual battle, and they came over to help with cleanup. Someone rustled up tuna-fish sandwiches, and the night took on the oddly festive air of a work party. When they were done, the yard didn’t look pristine, but it was neat. Paving stones were stacked in piles. Things broken beyond repair, like the cement benches, and a lot of garbage bags from the house were set aside for the next garbage run. We did the best we could with the inside of the house, mostly sweeping or vacuuming up glass and throwing away broken things.

Ben and Mary Jo brought out plywood sheets from the garage, and I helped put them in place over the windows. Windows are fragile, and werewolves are not. Putting up plywood wasn’t a skill I would have actively sought out on my own, but I was pretty good at it. We were four sheets short of getting the job done, so we left the front window open until someone could get to a hardware store in the morning.

Adam came over when we were getting the last one up.

“Ben,” he said, “Auriele and Darryl are headed home; you can ride in with them.”

Ben’s truck had gotten smashed in the battle between Zee, Sherwood, and the Fideal. I’d told him that he’d be better off taking a settlement from his insurance and buying a new truck rather than repairing the old one. Once the frame was bent, it wasn’t usually worth the trouble of fixing it.

Ben stepped back from the job and stretched. He had a long cut the length of his face from the tip of his eye, down his jaw, and onto his collarbone. It had mostly healed up, and he looked as though he’d been in a car wreck several days earlier. “My croaking fat frog will shag my fucking Aunt Fanny before I’ll go now,” he said. “Until we get matters straightened out with the fae, I’m living right the fucking hell here.”

And, as if in answer, the lights all over the world—or at least our part of the world—turned on as the power company figured out how to fix whatever the fae had done.

Ben took a bow and accepted the applause of the pack.

We spent the next couple of days repairing what we could and carting away what we couldn’t. Adam’s contractor friend was optimistic that the stucco on the front of the house could be saved.

Adam and I were repairing a planting bed crushed by the granite boulder when it landed on Paul, who was mostly back on his feet now. We were discussing the merits of a rosebush in place of the dogwood, which was not as tough as Paul and had suffered unrecoverable damage, when the house phone rang.

“I’ve got it,” called Jesse. I heard her voice as she answered the phone but didn’t catch what she said. Then she called brightly, “Hey, Dad. Baba Yaga is on the phone for you.”

I followed him into the kitchen, where Jesse stood with the handset. She gave it to him. Then she looked at me and raised her eyebrows in an exaggerated fashion that made her eyes bulge, and mouthed, “Baba Yaga. Really?”

I nodded and mouthed, “Really.”

She hugged herself and, as she passed by me on her way out of the room, she whispered, “Now, how many people have gotten to say that? ‘Hey, Dad. Baba Yaga is on the phone for you’?”

Aiden was coming in as she was going out. Fighting together seemed to have broken the cold war and initiated a detente between Jesse and Aiden.

Her tone was relaxed as she said, “Hey, short stuff. Offended anyone bigger than you lately?”

“Everyone is bigger than me, Daisy Duke,” he said.

His attempt at teasing was lame, but he was making an effort. Last night, the werewolves had run a Dukes of Hazzard marathon in Aiden’s honor. The whole pack were trying their best to help him climb into the modern era with the help of TV shows and movies. It might have been more effective if they’d chosen something filmed in this decade, but their hearts were in the right place. I hoped that Aiden didn’t think that cars really could jump rivers and barns and whatever.

He seemed to know that he’d gotten it wrong with the Daisy, but he cleared his throat and tried again. “Bigger is easy. Finding someone smaller to offend is a real challenge.”

“I’m sure you’re up for that, too,” Jesse said, teasing him back. “You show some real aptitude in that area.”

He grinned at her, but then he turned his attention to me. “The witch is calling for a meeting with the fae, right?”

Jesse paused, and they both looked at me.

“That’s what it sounds like,” I agreed.

“You need to take me to this meeting,” he said. “Zee says that Underhill won’t leave them alone. They can’t afford for me to escape.”

“We’re not giving you to them,” I told him.

“Excuse me,” said Adam. He covered the mouthpiece, looked Aiden in the eyes, and said, “You stay here. No question.”

Aiden opened his mouth to argue, but Adam stared him down. Only when Aiden dropped his eyes did Adam go back to his call.

We agreed to meet at Uncle Mike’s. It was as close as we could come to neutral territory. The once bar was in east Pasco near the river, on the edge of the industrial district. The bar had been shut down for more than half a year. I expected it to smell musty or unused. But when Uncle Mike opened the door, his face somber, it smelled exactly the way it always did: alcohol, sawdust, peanuts, and the scents of hundreds of individuals. The last were faded and mixed into a musk from which it would have been impossible to coax a single thread free. And it smelled of magic.

When it had been open, the light had been kept low. But all the lights were on, and it was nearly as bright as it would have been had there been windows. Most of the tables were stacked in a pyramid in one corner of the room, large tables on the bottom, smaller on top. The chairs were mostly stacked, too, awaiting the day when the bar reopened.

One of the big tables had been set in the middle of the mostly empty room, and chairs were set around it.

“The others are here,” said Uncle Mike, “in the back. I’ll get them.”

He left us, Adam and me, alone in the room. The rest of the pack, all of them, were at our house protecting Aiden and Jesse. Darryl hadn’t been happy that we weren’t taking any extra wolves with us. But the fae had no reason to kill us, and the pack could protect Aiden and keep him safe. Or else, I’d been happy to point out to Darryl, nothing we could do would keep anyone safe at all.

Uncle Mike returned, escorting Beauclaire and the bald man whom Margaret had forced to her will. Goreu. The discrepancy between what I would have expected from a knight of the round table, fictional though it was, and Goreu left me bitterly and irrationally disappointed. They’d brought the good fairy and the bad fairy. I looked at Beauclaire and frowned at him. He looked cool and composed, as he had every time I’d seen him. Maybe we were meeting the bad fairy and the worse fairy. I had expected to be facing more. We apparently weren’t, Adam and I, as important as Margaret. I might have been offended, except the fewer Gray Lords we sat down with, the more likely we would be to walk away alive.

We all went to the scarred table and sat down, virtually at the same time. Adam was slower because he held my chair out.

“Are there any other fae in the building or adjacent lot?” asked Adam as he settled.

“No,” said Uncle Mike. “Just the three of us—and I don’t count.”

“What do you want?” asked Adam.

“There are nine fae dead,” said Beauclaire, very softly. Yep, I thought, my stomach clenched, bad fairy and worse fairy.

“They attacked us,” Adam told them. “That makes their deaths their own fault.”

“Point,” agreed Beauclaire, and he glanced at Goreu. “They were on their own,” he told us, “as, I understand, Uncle Mike informed you.”

“How often,” said Adam dangerously, “are we going to be discussing how many of your people have been killed by their own stupidity before you stop them instead of making me do it?”

“We have discussed this very thing,” said Beauclaire grimly.

Goreu pushed back his chair and sighed. “As well as a whole rotting cesspool of other things.”

He sat in silence a moment, examining Adam without meeting his eyes—and avoiding any kind of dominance game. Finally, he leaned forward, and it was as if he peeled off a glamour without changing his form at all. When he spoke, his voice was still tenor, but it had softened and lost the squeak. Instead of a parody, he became . . . someone who might once have ridden beside Arthur. “Some old king,” Goreu said, “some old time or other proclaimed that if the Welsh had all started fighting one enemy instead of each other, they would have conquered the world—that goes double for the fae. Still, we did passably well for the past couple of hundred years, protecting the weak and reining in the strong and vicious.” He flashed a humorless smile. “Coexisting, you could call it. Then Underhill opened unexpectedly—on one of the reservations, then on all of the reservations, thousands if not tens of thousands of miles from the nearest old door.”

“Unexpected by some,” murmured Beauclaire.

Goreu nodded gravely at Beauclaire. “You were behind the drive to create the reservations. I followed your lead because it made sense to have a place of safety to keep those who were too frightening or too frightened. I don’t know five fae who thought that you’d be right about Underhill, that she would follow us.”

He looked at Adam again. “While we were still debating what should change, what could change—this one killed a human for the sake of Justice.” There was a capital letter starting that word; I could hear it in his voice. “And then he issued a recall, and all of us were penned up in the reservations.” He pinched his nose and gave Beauclaire a pained look. “There were probably less . . . eventful ways to handle it.”

Beauclaire pursed his lips. “Are you sure that we should spill our secrets here?”

Goreu smiled, a smile as sweet and innocent as sunshine. “And what do you think they will do with our secrets, this warrior and his softhearted coyote mate? If our side in this battle prevails, it won’t matter—if not, well then, we’ll probably be fighting on their side anyway.”

Beauclaire gave a reluctant nod. “Point.”

Goreu’s smile widened a little, then died. When he spoke again, it was to us. “Afterward, we thought for a while that we could stay on our reservations. No humans could get in, not with their fighter jets or tanks. A bard might have managed, but your bards are not given to wandering in the wilderness in this era. We had, after all, Underhill to live in. Underhill exists in a different space and time. Infinite space.”

He and Beauclaire exchanged a glance. Beauclaire snorted abruptly and threw up his hands.

“Why not?” he said, and it was Beauclaire who continued. “But Underhill is different. I will spare you the dozens of explanations we’ve thrown at her and had thrown back. No one knows why. She’s volatile. Unpredictable. We lost four selkies on one of the other reservations. They apparently had found a doorway—” Here he paused, and said, “A doorway is not, strictly speaking, a doorway as you would think of it, though it can be. Some of the doors to Underhill are invisible and impossible to detect unless you happen to stumble through one.”

He sighed, which didn’t bode well for the four selkies, I thought. “They found a place where there was a big salt lake, cold and clear, a fifth selkie told me, that they could see to the bottom of, though it was a hundred feet down. They disappeared for a couple of weeks—which would not normally have been a concern because time can pass differently in Underhill. But the fifth selkie had gone to the salt lake and couldn’t find them. We searched and asked Underhill, who quit talking to us for a couple of days. Then the fifth selkie found the skeletons of the four selkies laid out on the sands of their lake.”

“A predator?” I asked.

“Selkies are tough,” said Goreu. “And there were no teeth marks on the bones.”

“There are some of us who are very old,” Beauclaire said. “Baba Yaga is one of those. She remembers a time when Underhill killed as many fae as traveled through her, a time when Underhill was very young. She told us that Underhill mellowed with time. Five or six hundred years.”

“So you couldn’t stay on the reservations,” said Adam. “There are too many of you for the land you have if you can’t trust Underhill to be a home.”

Goreu nodded. “So we were going to have to resume living in the humans’ world. But we would do it on our own terms.”

“We had quite a lively discussion on the matter,” said Uncle Mike with an unrepentant grin. “Not that I was a participant, mind you. But some things should be witnessed.”

Both of the other fae gave him an unamused look that bothered Uncle Mike not at all. “I have some very nice hard cider in the back room,” he said. “Would anyone care for some?”

Goreu gave him a sharp look.

“I like humans,” Uncle Mike said seriously. “I might be the only fae alive today who can say that and not mean as a meal. I want them to survive. I want to survive. I’m on your side.”

“Cider would be good,” said Adam. “This sounds like it will take a while. And, though we are intrigued with the story—I’m not sure why you are telling it to us.”

“I want you to understand that our options are limited,” said Goreu. “I want you to really, really understand why we find ourselves here in this place at this time. If we—and by ‘we,’ I mean the fae, the werewolves, the humans, and anyone else who wants to live a full life—are to find our way out of it, then we—Beauclaire and I—need your help.”

Uncle Mike excused himself, and we waited quietly while he made glass-clinky and cider-getting noises behind the closed doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY in bright green letters. He brought back a tray with five clear, frosty mugs, and a glass pitcher filled with a golden liquid that bubbled and sparkled like champagne.

I generally don’t drink alcohol. I have too many people’s secrets in my head—and alcohol affects me oddly. But to refuse it in this place and time was more of a statement than I wanted to make. I took the glass that Uncle Mike poured and brought it to my lips—and stopped.

I set it down on the table with a shaky hand, gave Uncle Mike a tight smile. “I had a bad experience with drink and the fae.”

His eyes grew sad. “I’d forgotten that.” He touched the glass, and the liquid cleared. “It’s water now, cool and sweet. I give my word that water is all it is, safe for you to drink. But if you’d rather not, I will not take offense.”

I took a sip, and it tasted like water. Goreu glanced at Beauclaire, who shook his head. Neither of them had heard that story—they could get the whole tale from Uncle Mike when we were gone. I mostly trusted Uncle Mike. But as soon as no one was paying attention to me, I set the water down on the table and left it there.

“So,” I said, as the others drank their cider. “When we left off, the fae were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Let me guess—the result of the discussion that Uncle Mike is so gleeful about was the release of a few of the nasties that the Gray Lords have been keeping a choke hold on. We had a little excitement, and some werewolf friends of mine had trouble in Arizona.” I let them see what I thought about their solution. The two that I knew about both preyed upon children.

“I was unhappy with the decision,” Beauclaire said. “I was unhappier with the way it was carried out. The fae who were released were all under a death sentence. After they had caused a stir, one of us was supposed to go out and kill them. Making us heroes of sorts.”

I gave him a sour look. The years I had spent working with Zee had given me more than the know-how to rebuild an engine: I had Zee’s patented sour look down cold. “That’s not what happened.”

“No,” agreed Beauclaire. Maybe he’d hung out with Zee at some point, too, because his sour look was pretty good. “I thought it was overly optimistic. I was outvoted.” He gave Goreu a cool look.

Goreu grimaced. “I had no choice. We need someone in with the genocidal bunch. Since I’m the one with the harmless look and no reputation for stuff, it’s got to be me. We vote as a block.”

“The genocidal bunch?” I asked cautiously.

He nodded. “The majority of the Gray Lords want to deal with the humans from a point of strength: appease us, and we won’t kill you. But there is a cadre of us who look at Underhill, look at our numbers—and at the fact that our population has dropped by half since we left Europe and traveled here—and they don’t believe we can survive. They want a war, a war with the humans or a war with the werewolves that will devolve into a war with the humans. They think that if all of Faery fight, we can kill humankind and die in glory.”

I felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me.

“Are they right?” asked Adam. “Could you destroy humanity?”

Goreu shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Uncle Mike took a deep drink of his cider, and said, “The only thing that has saved us so far is that they are aware that most of the fae, the ones who are not Gray Lords, would like to live. We don’t care so much about the fae as a race, we care about ourselves and our families. And there are still enough of us that we’d have a fair chance of stopping the Gray Lords who want war. Which is why they have to make the humans or, failing that, the werewolves make war first.”

Did Bran know this? I took a deep breath. Of course he did. He’d abandoned our pack so that if we failed to negotiate with the fae, they couldn’t use that as the flash point for a war with all of the werewolves. Was it better that Bran abandoned us not just for the safety of the werewolves, but of the humans, and, probably, the fae, too? Yes.

“The Widow Queen is one of the suicidal, genocidal group?” I hazarded.

Goreu shook his head. “No. She’s part of her own small group of delusional idiots. She thinks that if the werewolves don’t come in on the humans’ side, we can actually kill all the humans who live on this continent and survive. Happily, you’ve just killed most of her followers. She thought she could use Aiden to gain control of Underhill as part of some further and complicated plot to destroy the other Gray Lords and take control. She likes to rule.”

“To be fair,” Uncle Mike said, “we watched the Europeans do a fair job of killing off the people who were originally on this continent.” He gave me a sly look. “You could ask your father’s people about that. But she doesn’t have smallpox or the black measles, so she’s trying out a few other things. The last one was a troll who was nearly mindless—there are a few of them who are quite brilliant by troll standards at least, Mercy—but who had the delightful talent of growing in strength every time he ate a human and, in the water, was impossible to kill.”

I stared at him, trying to imagine that troll being stronger.

Uncle Mike gave me a cheery smile. “Happily for our side, he was too dumb to jump in the water before your pack killed him. Had he made it to the city and started killing hundreds of people, none of us could have stopped him.” He paused. “Well, maybe Nemane or Beauclaire. But the Widow Queen forgets how much power she’s lost.”

“Our storytelling this night is at an end,” Beauclaire said softly. He got up from the table. “If you would excuse me for a few moments. Goreu will continue our conversation.”

Goreu leaned forward. “The situation with your pack has presented us with a unique opportunity. We need to negotiate with the human government—and have scared them to the point that there is no path for communication. But you killed a troll.”

He let that statement sit in the air.

“And you did it on national TV. In the past few months, several fairy monsters have been publicly taken down by werewolves.” He tapped on the table. “If we can manage to sign a nonaggression pact that would make the Tri-Cities a neutral territory, somewhere that we have agreed that no aggressive act can take place—enforced by someone the humans can trust in, trust in their honor and in their ability—then it is just possible that we might avoid a war with the humans and go back to how we have been. Coexisting.”

“Are we negotiating with Beauclaire and Goreu?” asked Adam softly. “Or the Council of the Gray Lords?”

“The Council,” Goreu said. “Beauclaire to represent the majority and I the minority opinion. It took some doing for that to happen. If they’d been able to locate Órlaith, this would have been much more difficult.”

“Goreu,” I said, “did you hurt Zee?”

He met my eyes. “No.”

“So why did you cringe from him?”

He smiled. “Because it was the action that the male who I pretend to be would have done once the wristlets had proven him weaker than the half-dead daughter of one of the Old Kings. Such a fae would know that Zee was a threat he could not face.”

“They believed that?” asked Adam. “That a Gray Lord would be so weak?”

“They remember the Old Kings,” Uncle Mike answered. “They remember what Zee can do—they fear him themselves. And Goreu is powerful enough that the battles he fought to become a Gray Lord looked . . . like a political animal wiggling his way into power.” He smiled. “And most of them would have been afraid to share those wristlets with the daughter of the Dragon Under the Hill.”

“All right,” I said, and looked to Adam.

“You know that we would sign a nonaggression pact,” he said. “So why the story hour?”

“Because nothing is that simple,” agreed Goreu. “The humans might believe that your killing of the troll was enough to make us sign such an agreement. But those of Faery know better. It would be a loss of face—and might spell the downfall of the Gray Lords. The individuals are strong—but there are those, like your Zee and Uncle Mike”—he nodded to Uncle Mike, who grinned and drank his cider—“who hide what they are. If we appear too weak, we shall be brought down—and chaos will rule. That would not be good for anyone. So.” He stood up. “Two things. First, a show of force, something to demonstrate that it is no weakness of the fae that makes us sign a treaty. Beauclaire should be ready for his demonstration.”

I felt a slow, rolling anxiety. Beauclaire had once, not long ago, told me that he could create hurricanes and tidal waves. That he could drown cities. The Columbia was a mile wide and sixty feet deep.