Smoke Bitten

13

I found spare clothing, the metallic emergency blanket, and a real blanket in the back of the SUV. It took me a few minutes because as bad as the outside of the vehicle looked, the inside was worse.

The leather upholstery was slashed, seat stuffing scattered in chunks ranging from baseball size to pea size. One of the inner linings of the doors had been broken into two. The whole of the back two-thirds of the car was liberally sprayed with blood, as were the first two shirts I found.

I took the results of my search to Ben. He was curled up on the ground shivering convulsively. Kelly had wrapped his large body around Ben’s to help him keep warm. Luke crouched with his hand on Ben’s shoulder, talking to him in a low voice. It didn’t matter what the words were, it was the familiar voice that soothed him.

It probably would have looked a little odd to someone who didn’t know they were werewolves.

Adam stood a little back from them, holding the chain attached to the collar Ben wore. Adam had to stay far enough back that if the weaver took Ben again, Adam would be able to control the situation. But I could see from the expression on his face that Adam would rather have been in Kelly’s or Luke’s position.

The lamppost group had ventured nearer. Aidan and Jesse had stopped at the rock that was James Palsic. Jesse stood next to it . . . to him. She glanced up furtively to stare at the eyes that had no recourse but to look back. Aiden touched him, running his hands over the stone gently, as if petting a dog.

I could hear him murmuring, “Remember who you are. Remember.” Over and over as if it were a spell, but I couldn’t sense any magic.

Li Qiang and Kent were keeping watch over them, but Nonnie approached Adam while Luke and Kelly grabbed the clothes and blankets from me and used them to wrap Ben up.

“He hasn’t talked again,” Luke said in a low voice. “We think he’s in shock.”

“No wonder,” I said. “My fault. If I’d worked it through better, I could have told you I needed him human. It would have been easier on him if you didn’t have to make him change so fast.”

“Werewolves are tough,” said Luke. “Don’t fuss, Mercy.”

“So we just wait?” Nonnie said tightly. “How long?”

Adam looked at her thoughtfully. After a moment she started to squirm.

“We wait,” he said softly, “for my wife to risk her life for your mate.”

He looked over at Ben, who was dressed in sweats that were too big for him on the bottom and just right on the top. Luke wrapped him in the soft blanket first, and then the thin metallic one.

Then he looked at Nonnie, who had lowered her eyes and looked as though she was seriously regretting saying anything. Adam shook his head at himself. I knew that expression.

In a much gentler voice he said, “Mercy is risking her life for Ben and anyone else who might encounter this creature because Mercy is the only one who has the ability to make this bargain.”

“Why is that?” Nonnie asked.

Then she held up a hand. “Sorry. Not my business. I’m sorry.” She looked at the rock and then back toward Adam. “What I should be saying is thank you. You had no need to come to our aid at all after what we’ve been doing.”

“Desperate people do desperate things” was Adam’s reply. “We all understand that.”

Kent gave a low warning whistle, then said, “It’s getting darker.”

He was right. The sun was still high in the intense blue sky, but the area we were standing in was growing shadowed. I inhaled—and bless Hannah’s granny’s potion—and the magic scent that was unique, as far as I could tell, to the smoke weaver filled the air.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the waiting is over,” I said quietly. I kissed Adam, and it was a good kiss even though I had to do it from an awkward angle so that I didn’t interfere with his ability to manage Ben.

Then I walked to the middle of the driveway, halfway between Jesse’s car and Adam’s. Away from all of the people. I was pretty sure that the smoke weaver had to treat with me, and complete our bargain, before he went out biting anyone else. But pretty sure wasn’t certain, and I didn’t want him closer to anyone else than necessary.

A circle centered, more or less, on my position in the middle of the circular drive, and continued to darken, as if someone were drawing it with shadows.

Kelly and Luke had pulled the blankets off Ben again. And then Adam kissed the top of his head and pinned him to the ground so he could not move. Kelly stood on one side of them, Luke on the other, ready to help in case Ben broke free.

Like a Christmas snow globe, the dome over our head, cutting us off from the rest of the world, was invisible. But I could feel the resulting pressure drop as the circle sealed. Circles like this were something I associated with witchcraft. But this didn’t smell like witchcraft—it smelled like the smoke weaver.

The darkened edges of the circle began to fill with smoke, covering the ground in folded layers that grew thicker and rounder until they reminded me of the rolled-up dough for a cinnamon roll before you cut it, or . . . the coils of a snake.

The smoke had left a little area around Adam’s group and another around James’s rock. I didn’t like the look of them separated.

“Kids,” I called, “get closer to Adam.”

Jesse and Aiden tried, but the smoke between them thickened and grew taller. Just before I lost sight of them in the smoke, I saw Luke make a rolling leap over the top of the coils. Hopefully he made it to Jesse and Aiden. I believed that Kent and Li Qiang had meant it when they told me they would guard my family, but I felt better having one of the pack with them.

I now had a smallish area to stand in, about ten feet around, but clear, more or less to the top of the dome—though even the surface of that dome was darkening. Meanwhile, the layers and layers of coils were becoming more real, and solid. Giant silver scales glinted iridescently in the filtered light that drifted through the smoke.

“Smoke dragon,” I said.

Beauclaire had called him that. There was evidently some truth in the appellation, though I thought that “wyvern” or even “serpent” might have been more accurate. The only dragon I had seen had had four legs and wings.

I supposed that there could be more than one kind of dragon, but this creature did not carry the amount of magic that dragons were reputed to have. While I didn’t see limbs, there might have been wings in the mists of smoke that filled the space not occupied by the smoke weaver.

The coils stirred, as if the weaver had heard me name him. One of the coils nearby moved and a giant, reptilian head slid over the mounds of his body to look at me through eyes that might have been fist-sized gemstones.

The head was as tall as I was, but still it seemed small for the size of his body. It didn’t look exactly like a snake’s head, but it resembled that more than a dragon’s. The weaver’s muzzle was long and almost delicate.

He snorted and a salty, watery gel covered me.

I wiped my face off impatiently. Coyote mates of Alpha werewolves don’t care if smoke dragons cover them in snot. We certainly wouldn’t squeal.

Instead, I asked him, in what I felt was a reasonably calm tone, “Why the show?”

There is not enough magic in your world to allow me to take my true shape, the smoke weaver said, though he wasn’t really talking. There was sound, it was a voice—but it wasn’t coming from the serpent’s mouth. I must make a place where I can gather it sufficiently. This takes time.

“It is an acceptable inconvenience,” I told him, not untruthfully. I didn’t care about circles—I cared about the time. Joel, I reminded myself, against two werewolves. If Fiona, “equally dangerous” as Charles, weren’t one of them, I wouldn’t have even worried.

I am here, the smoke weaver told me, in blood and bone.

He seemed to be waiting for something, so I said, “Yes, you have thus fulfilled the first part of this bargain.”

I don’t know why I used forsoothly speech; it just seemed the right thing to do—and when I had no clue, I tended to go with my instincts.

I was still musing about language when he bit me. The strike came without warning. My reactions were fast, but I didn’t have time to even flinch. He clamped his teeth over my left shoulder and the upper part of my chest.

I made an involuntary sound, as much of surprise as hurt—and it did hurt. It felt as though someone had stabbed me with something hot. That pain burned, and when he pulled his head back, the breaks in my skin where his teeth had been had trickles of smoke coming from them.

“Mercy,” Adam said.

“He surprised me,” I said back. “I am fine.” But I could have saved my breath.

As if it had been difficult for the smoke weaver to hold on to his enormous shape, the coils dissolved into grayish smoke that covered the globe of the circle so that we could not see out nor anyone outside see in. Then the inner part of the circle cleared until nothing lay between me and the others except for a dozen yards of driveway pavement.

Adam could see for himself that I was fine—so far.

A piece of smoke dropped from over my head, darkening as it fell. It hit the ground in front of me with an audible thump. The smoke drifted away and left a man no more than four feet high. Or someone who looked vaguely like a man, anyway.

He was hairy and very ugly—as if someone had taken a rock and chipped away at it with a crowbar until they made something humanoid, and turned that into a living creature. Then, deciding they hadn’t quite managed to make him look human, they covered him with a great beard that fell to the ground. The hair on his head, about the color of cinnamon, was neatly braided and was also floor-length. But there was hair in his ears, and his eyebrows were unusually thick. There was not much room on his face for eyes and nose, and his mouth was lost under a prodigious mustache.

We stared at each other. Smoke still curled out of my burning wounds, but neither the smoke nor the pain or burning sensation increased.

Nothing happened.

I remembered the way the smoke had choked me the first time he had bitten me. That had been a worry. He had already proven he could simply kill me. But the night he’d taken Ben, Ben had told me what the weaver most wanted. Killing me was vital—but it was still secondary to finding out why he could not use Tilly’s gift to take me over.

In any case, so far, air continued to flow easily in and out of my lungs.

“You do not look like much,” the weaver said finally, his voice gravelly and rough.

“Nor do you,” I answered. “Not in this form, anyway. What are you waiting for?”

“For the smoke to do its work,” he told me, and I saw that his small beady eyes, mostly hidden under those eyebrows, looked identical to the sky-blue gemstone eyes that he had in his serpentine form.

I glanced down at my wounds and saw that the mists of smoke emerging from the breaks in my skin were thicker, as if I had smoke in my veins instead of blood. There was a viscosity to the smoke that I didn’t like. The bite continued to burn painfully.

“What are you waiting for?” asked Adam—asked me, even though he was echoing my words to the smoke weaver. This was where I had planned to call upon the power of the pack.

Cheating is an honored part of any fae bargain—but you can’t cheat by breaking your word. To test your power against mine, I’d said. I realized that I was hesitating because I was worried about breaking my word.

The pack was a part of my power. I fixed that idea in my head and believed it. It seemed like a very good idea that when dealing with fae bargains, I should be very clear in my own mind why the way I was cheating was not breaking my word.

And it was true that each member of the pack enjoyed the strength of the whole—and I was pack. With that thought in my mind, I called to the ties that bound me to the pack. Some instinct pushed me beyond that, though, and I called upon the mating bond and the bond with Stefan, though I knew that both were compromised. Damaged bonds still belonged to me.

Something else stirred, too, but it wasn’t unfriendly so I let that be for now. I had other things to worry about.

I did not pull magic, or even power, from my bonds with the pack: I pulled will. We, the Columbia Basin Pack, called no one our master. We lived and died by the will of our Alpha and no other.

As sometimes happened, especially when I had been spending so much time there recently, I found myself standing in the otherness without meaning to. This time, as soon as I stood in that place, the bite from the smoke weaver flared up from slow burn to hot coal and I couldn’t help but cry out at the agony of it.

Sweat beaded on my forehead and I had to work to keep my feet, balancing myself by pulling on the garlands I held fisted in my right hand—the pack bonds.

And at that moment, when my balance was fragile and the pain off the scale, I felt another’s will press down upon me with suffocating force. Unexpected force.

When I’d brought Stefan here, the weaver had not been able to follow him. One of my contingency plans, should I not be able to resist the weaver’s bite using the pack, had been to come here and see if I had other options to fight him with.

The power and unexpectedness of the attack made me stumble sideways and I knew, with absolute conviction, that falling would mean something a great deal worse than a mere scraped knee. In my spiritual place, things like falls could have symbolic consequences that had nothing to do with forces like gravity. Sometimes that was a good thing—but my instincts told me that falling while my body was filling with smoke would be a Very Bad Idea.

Knowing doom was coming and preventing it were two different things.

Fortunately, I was not all alone. Something tightened around my waist and lit my spine with a shiver of strength. I looked down and saw my mate bond. It was still red and rough and closed to me, but it was thicker than it had been when last I saw it. My right ankle had a creamy lace cuff, Stefan’s bond, that helped my right foot find balance when my left foot threatened to slip, despite the steadying effect of my tie to Adam.

Once I was solid on my feet, the pressure of that other mind didn’t feel so overwhelming. I took a deep breath and realized that the otherness I stood in was different.

Not that my otherness was ever exactly the same place twice, but usually it was based on a forest. Sometimes that forest was pretty weird—like diamond-encrusted trees that wept or grass that was knitting needles.

But this time, I stood in a great cave—a cave that was filling with smoke—and the smoke felt very wrong. It did not belong here—and it was boiling out of the wounds in my chest.

What is this place? asked the smoke, swirling in delight. I do like this. This has so many possibilities.

The pressure in my head lightened, the burning of the wounds fading as the smoke poured out of me and into my spiritual home. I had a feeling that wasn’t really an improvement, even though the surcease of pain was welcome.

The smoke ran down the glittery garlands of my pack bonds. As it touched them, the bonds sparked with alien magic, revealing the wolves on the other side of those bonds. They stood unmoving, like life-sized glass figures. I was all too aware that those figures were hollow—like blown glass. So fragile.

Long strands of graceful red garland wrapped precisely around Auriele and Darryl, binding them together. That red garland formed a braid as it stretched from them toward me.

Ben stood with his head bowed, leaning forward as if bracing himself against something I couldn’t perceive. His glass was not clear, and was instead the bright blue of the weaver’s serpent eyes. But his white garland, his pack bond, was solid.

Honey stood strong and resolute. Her right hand was held up and forward, extending the green-and-silver garland toward me. Her left arm was held a little behind her, and that hand held a few strands of tarnished tinsel that drifted limply in the light breeze that filled the cave.

Each and every member of our pack was caught in a single frame of their lives. Some of them, like Mary Jo and George, were in their wolf form. Joel was, surprisingly, his human self, and part of me knew that I’d been worried about him, but I couldn’t remember why just then.

All of those strands ended in my mate’s right hand. And they reappeared in his left hand, which was extended to me. His head was turned toward me. The half of his body nearest to the pack was his own, strong and true. The half of his body nearest to me was the body of the monster. His head was his own human self—his expression caught midscream. The clear glass that was his shell was spiderwebbed with fractures.

The smoke filled the cave rapidly, first covering the floor and then rising to waist height. It curled around Adam like a cat at the cream.

Ooo, it said. Pretty. And broken.

At that moment, I realized that the smoke didn’t belong to the weaver. It was familiar, though. Underhill. I had invited Stefan to my otherness, and he had come alone. But when I’d come here, filled with the power of the weaver’s bite, power that was a gift from Underhill, the power had come with me, leaving the weaver behind.

As I watched, she started to penetrate the fractures in my mate’s altered body.

I needed to stop that—but I was trapped where I was by the bonds that allowed me to keep my feet and resist that smoke. I strained helplessly, but I could not reach Adam.

And that was when that niggling presence I’d felt—that presence that was not pack, not Stefan, but bound to me anyway, by thin spidersilk that smelled of fae magic—that presence whispered in my ear.

Let me Be. I can help you, if you will only let me Be.

I chose not to answer it because taking up that new bargain felt dangerous. Instead I addressed the interloper.

“Go home, Tilly. You are not welcome here,” I said firmly.

Tilly’s voice was much louder than that other, secret whisper. The sound echoed in the hollow cave when she asked, How can I be unwelcome when you brought me here yourself?

“Not willingly or knowingly,” I said firmly. “Go home.”

You can’t make me go, she said, and the smoke near Adam became nearly solid and formed Underhill’s human avatar. Here, her hair was not dirty and her clothes were not tattered. She turned to Adam’s form and bent to the ground, picking up a rock from the cavern floor.

I held out my left hand, which was empty, as if I had known from the beginning that I would need it for something other than holding the ties to my beloveds. And I understood who and what that small secret voice was, and why what I was about to do was dangerous. Maybe I should have thought it over, but Underhill had a rock and my mate was already a little broken.

I said, “Come.”

And in my hand a familiar weight settled, so light for the power it represented in this place where love and hatred meant more than earthly forces like gravity or magic. I pointed Lugh’s walking stick toward the smoke assaulting Adam’s battered form. Light traced through the runes on the old gray wood and lingered on the silver on the blunt ends of the walking stick.

Find your way home, the walking stick told Underhill as lightning arced into the center of her chest. Its voice was still a whisper, but somehow it rang through the air as definite as and bigger somehow than the lightning that preceded it.

Momentarily, almost as if altered by a stray breeze, Tilly’s face softened, then formed a grimace of rage. But as I stepped forward, able at last to move, pointing the walking stick toward her as if I were an extra on a Harry Potter film with an unusually big wand, her body became smoke. Then the smoke retreated, first folding in upon itself and then disappearing altogether.

As the smoke vanished, the glass figures vanished, too. The cave gave way to open air. Between one instant and the next, I stood in the dark heart of a small grove of oak trees. I could feel the ties, but I could not, in this moment, see them. I was alone, except for the walking stick, which was very pleased with itself.

“Mercy.” Adam’s voice recalled me to the real world.

Breathing heavily, sweat pouring off me, and both hands empty, I looked down to see that the wounds on my shoulder no longer bled. I blinked a couple more times before I could orient myself.

I stood once more on an asphalt driveway. Adam stood between me and the enraged, ugly little man who was screaming in a voice that must have had some magic in it to sound so sharp and wrong.

“I’m here,” I said, because Adam’s back was to me. Only afterward did I realize that had probably been the wrong thing to say. To the perception of anyone watching, I had never gone away. “I’m fine. I’m still me.”

I flexed my fingers, still feeling the impression of the walking stick in my hand—but there was nothing there.

“Stole it! She stole it!” the weaver screamed.

For a moment I thought that he was talking about the walking stick—then I realized that he meant the power that had followed me to my other place and had not come back to him. I noticed that the smoke was entirely gone from the circle—although the circle, stretching over our heads like a giant snow globe made with darkened glass, was still in place.

Ben, Luke, and Kelly were on their feet. Kelly held the chain to Ben’s collar, but they were all staring at the little man and his very noisy rage.

There was no more pillar of rock. Only a cluster of people on their knees beside a very still body. That was something I would have to worry about later.

And the little man raged on.

“Quiet,” my mate thundered, the power of an Alpha werewolf in his voice.

And it was evidently as effective on very angry little men as it was on a restless pack of wolves. The weaver stopped his tantrum, though his whole body shook with the effort, his skin, where it showed, several shades redder than his hair.

“I have completed the second part of our bargain,” I said into the sudden silence.

“You never said you would steal it,” the weaver said in despair. “It was mine. Fair and square. I bargained for it. You can’t take it.”

“Underhill is what she is,” I told him. “She isn’t a personage, though it pleases her to pretend. Any magic, any power that is hers, remains hers even if she lent it to you. You pushed it all inside me. When all of it was in me, and you held none of it—it became hers once more. It has returned back to where it came from.”

Adam, once he had determined that the weaver was no longer a physical threat to me, stepped aside. We faced each other, the weaver and I.

“I have completed the second part of our bargain,” I said again. “You came here in your own blood and bone. You bit me and failed, once more, to hold me. Now, as agreed, I will answer one question and then give you one truth. Ask me your question, smoke weaver.”

“Why you?” he asked. “Why were you able to resist my power? And you the second person I bit after my escape? How did chance favor me so ill?”

In words it was more than one question—but it felt like they were twined together—something that would balance the truth I would have for him after I answered. For the first time, I really felt the power of a fae bargain. Because certain things became very clear to me that had not been clear until he asked his question. I didn’t gain new knowledge, but all the bits and pieces seemed to gather together. I just had not realized, until the weaver’s question, how much I actually knew.

“I was supposed to be the first person you bit,” I told him.

Underhill had driven me out of my own house, hadn’t she? Just after the weaver escaped. She could not break her bargain with the weaver, but she could cheat.

“Your power came from Underhill—was a part of Underhill,” I told him. “And so it was limited by her limitations. Had you bitten me while I was standing in Underhill’s own realm, I might be in your power now. But this is not the heart of Underhill’s power.” And where I had unwittingly taken her magic was the heart of mine.

“Why you?” repeated the weaver.

“Because I am Coyote’s daughter,” I told him, though that would mean nothing to him, trapped as he’d been in Underhill. So I explained in a way he could understand. “My father is a primal power and he has jurisdiction over certain spiritual magics. He is an agent of chaos. Underhill’s magic, wielded secondhand, could not prevail over that.” Not in my otherness.

“I would have killed you if it had not been for the vampire,” growled the weaver bitterly. “You are not that powerful.”

I nodded. “Yes. Not by myself. But my mate, my pack, and my friends and allies are part of my power. That the vampire saved me was because of my own earlier actions. He was something I had the right to call upon.”

“Accepted,” said the weaver sadly. “Your answer is full and whole truth. Give me then your truth that I have not asked for, would not ask for.”

He knew, I thought.

“There is a more complete answer for your question than what I have given you,” I told him. He was right, I didn’t owe him more. But I felt that I needed to give it to him to keep the balance of our bargain. It was insight that I wouldn’t have had without our bargain, after all. “Underhill released you on purpose—you did not escape against her will. She is girding up for war and so collecting all the bits of herself that she had used to make better playthings.”

The fae aren’t playing nice, Tilly had told Aiden when she first put the door in our backyard.

The weaver looked up at me.

“She had intended her bargain with you to be small. She told me so. She carefully found something that you wanted—to be able to appear human so you could more easily blend in with humanity.”

“To make better bargains,” agreed the weaver. “Bargains are more necessary to me than soup or bread. Better that I should starve than to have no one to bargain with.”

“She made a mistake. The power she gave you was no small thing.” I thought of how I had perceived the smoke in my otherness, how immense and heavy it had felt. It had contained so much of Underhill that she had been able to manifest in the heart of my spirit.

To the weaver I said, “She did not understand how much power she must give up to allow you to overcome another’s will, to steal their spirit. And she feels that she needs that power now. She used me to cheat you of your due. But she did it without breaking your bargain. You lost the gift she gave you; she did not take it from you.”

That was behind the avarice she felt when she looked at Aiden, as well. If the weaver had consumed a noticeable amount of her magic—how much more of her magic did Aiden hold?

The weaver nodded slowly. “I understand. Now your truth?”

He looked small and powerless—an object of pity.

I turned my head to watch Nonnie Palsic pull James up to a sitting position. Saw him turn his head and heard his voice, soft and rough, say, “Nonnie.”

I thought of Anna and Dennis, of Ben who had had all the trauma he ever needed in his life well before the weaver had bitten him, of Stefan helpless—bound and tortured. Of a young hitchhiker and Lincoln, a wolf I didn’t know but whom James Palsic had mourned.

“Your name,” I said, “is Rumpelstiltskin.” And then, because it felt like the right thing to do, I said it two more times, pronouncing it carefully each time. “Rumpelstiltskin. Rumpelstiltskin.”

In the story, the little man danced about in a rage until the earth opened up beneath his feet and swallowed him, never to be heard from again. Today, the little weaver’s rage was spent, but the earth still opened up and swallowed him, shaking under my feet and sending me staggering forward. If Adam’s strong hand had not grabbed my wrist, I might have fallen in as well.

That was twice he’d stopped me from falling to my doom. Or at least to my harm. Adam was good at saving people other than himself.

The earth closed again with a final crack, leaving only a thin break in the asphalt of the circular drive where the hole had been.

A voice by my elbow said, “That was fun.”

I looked down at Tilly without favor. I swallowed the first three things I wanted to say because none of them would have been smart. Duplicitous, sneaky, and horrible she might be. But she was unimaginably powerful, and old, and we still had to hold to our bargain, another bargain, to make Aiden available to her.

Adam was watching me, letting me take point on this one because I had just demonstrated that I had a little more information than he did.

“I wish you hadn’t given him the answer to his question quite as thoroughly as you did,” she continued when I didn’t say anything. “He’s not going to be as fun a playmate as he usually is, at least not for a while. He knows how to hold a grudge.”

“How is it that you are able to come here?” I asked, because it was worrisome. There was a limit to the distance she could travel from one of her doorways—or so I had been led to believe. “There is no door to your realm near this place.”

“No,” she agreed sadly. “But he drew this circle we stand in with power he got from me.” She frowned up at me. “I did not intend for you to figure that out.”

“I imagine not,” I told her.

“Mercedes Thompson Hauptman,” she purred with one of her mercurial mood changes. “You are more interesting than I imagined.”

And the circle broke. The sun brought light, a breeze blew away the last remnant of smoke—and Tilly disappeared with a crack that sounded like a great rock breaking in half.

Ben said, “Get this freaking collar off me. And get me a phone. We need to check on the house. He was in my head you—you nitwits. And he had Harolford like he had me. Harolford and Fiona knew we left the house, left the children, the humans with only Joel to protect them. They knew. And I couldn’t get you to pay attention, to listen to me.” As if to make up for the “freaking” and “nitwits,” he devolved into a solid stream of swear words.

I lost the gist of what he was saying because I was sprinting for Jesse’s car, where I’d left my cell phone.

I had twelve missed calls. I called Lucia on the grounds that she would know what had happened and no one else here would try calling her first. She picked up on the second ring.

“They came,” she said, not waiting for me to say anything. “A woman and a man. They shot Joel—he is fine. One thing that tibicena spirit is good for is that it takes more than a bullet to hurt my Joel. Libby grabbed one of the rifles from your gun safe and, from your upstairs window, she shot the man who had the gun. The female carried him back to their car and they left.”

I sucked in a deep breath of relief and met Adam’s gaze across the twenty yards of driveway—because even as I’d run for my car, Adam had run for the SUV. He, too, had a phone against his ear. I gave him a thumbs-up.

He nodded, then went back to his call.

James was going to survive. Adam offered them all a place in the pack if they wanted it.

James shook his head. “Not that I’m not grateful,” he wheezed. “But I had a couple of hours that felt like a year to contemplate what you-all go through living in Crazytown. Bran invited us to Montana. Said we could take some time up there to catch our breath. Maybe find another good pack in a few months.”

“Or years,” said Nonnie.

James nodded, pointing a finger in her direction.

Kent got to his feet. “Fi and Sven won’t be best pleased with us. If we are going to go, I suggest we go now. We’re packed. I’ll get the car, and Li Qiang and I will get it loaded.”

“Careful,” said James. “That’s what I was doing and then ‘poof,’ I was a rock.”

I called Bran to tell him they were coming, and watched Adam’s face out of the corner of my eye. There was a white line on his cheek from the clenching of his teeth.

I hung up. “He says someone will meet you in Spokane to escort you the rest of the way. That way you aren’t trying to drive the dirt roads in the mountains of Montana in the middle of the night.”

I gave Bran’s number to Nonnie—James’s phone had not survived its time as part of a rock. And I gave her the number of the pack member they would meet in Spokane.

We saw them off. They drove an Accord with a V6. I don’t know what happened to the bug I’d repaired for James.

Once they were gone, we dusted ourselves off and looked at our available rides home.

“My car is fine,” Jesse said cheerfully. “Dad, you and Mercy have got to take better care of your stuff. Do you think that money grows on trees?”

Joel took a few hours to downgrade from his tibicena form to the presa Canario. But the more-mortal dog showed no signs of having been shot. A few hours later—without help from Aiden—Joel was able to wear his human self for the rest of the night. Despite Adam’s belief that Joel’s unexpectedly long stint as a human was a result of the time Joel had spent in tibicena form, any number of the pack offered to shoot him again—or get Libby, the sharpshooting heroine of the hour, to do it.

I called Beauclaire and told him most of what happened to Rumpelstiltskin. And warned him that Underhill was amassing power for something.

“Yes,” he said, “we have noticed.”

I almost said, Thanks for the warning, but not thanking the fae is a good general rule for people who want to live a healthy and free life. The same could probably be said for sarcasm.

Instead I said, carefully, “The clues that you gave to me when we talked were instrumental in allowing me to identify Rumpelstiltskin.”

“I am happy that I was of service,” he said.

“May I ask one question?”

“Of course.”

“Why did Rumpelstiltskin’s magic not feel like fae magic to me?”

“He is of an older lineage. Most of them were gone when I first came to the earth—and that was a good long time ago. The reason he survives is probably because of the friendship he developed with Underhill.”

“Friendship?” I said.

“Not all relationships look alike,” he said.

“Indeed,” I agreed. “Are we friends?” I probably should have waited until I’d had a good night’s sleep before calling him, I thought. That was not a safe question.

He laughed. “Perhaps tentative allies? Definitions are not always useful, are they? Mercedes, thank you for dealing with the smoke weaver. We will open our gates at dawn and allow our people to go about their business.”

He had thanked me. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

“Good,” I said.

I called Marsilia next, but she did not pick up the phone. Five minutes later she called Adam.

He told her basically the same story I’d just conveyed to Beauclaire—edited for the audience.

“Ah, that explains Stefan’s sudden improvement,” she told him. “We despaired of his survival the past few nights, but he held on.”

I remembered how bad he had been when I’d seen him in my otherness. “Can we go see him?”

She heard me. “No. He wouldn’t want you to see him this way. I will call you as soon as he is better—or should he worsen again.”

And I had to be satisfied with that.

Like Stefan, Ben didn’t just step back into who he had been before the weaver had taken him. Being in someone else’s power was pretty much a reliving of his worst nightmare. He had four weeks of vacation time built up at work, and he took those and stayed with us.

The goblins found Harolford’s body in a shallow grave near the river. Dead from a silver bullet wound, presumably Libby’s. I asked, but all of the witnesses were pretty sure that Fiona could not have known who it was that shot him.

The goblins did not bring us the body. They texted photos to Adam’s phone. When Adam asked what they’d done with it, Larry the goblin king laughed and said, “Finders keepers,” before he disconnected.

Fiona was still a problem.

We stayed on high alert and bunked up for the three days following the banishing of the smoke weaver. But when Charles called with news that Fiona had been sighted in Wichita, Adam told everyone to go back to normal.

“People can only stay alert for so long,” he told me. “And she is only one werewolf.”

“Charles is only one werewolf,” I told him, and he laughed.

Adam was doing . . . “better” was the wrong word. More stable was probably closer to the answer. There had been no further appearances of the monster, and when the moon hunt came, Adam wore his wolf’s form just as he usually did.

But I had seen his wolf fading, and I worried. The pack was uneasy, though no violence broke out. Adam still would not open our bond. But he put back on some of the weight he had lost and he did not seem to be getting worse, so I bided my time. I had a date circled on the calendar—and if matters did not change, I was going to have another conversation with Bran.

A month went by. Jesse started school and began looking for an apartment. Aiden started school, too.

We enrolled him in sixth grade, which was a compromise. He would look younger than most of his schoolmates but not so much so as to be an outcast. Tutoring by Jesse and the pack had brought his math skills up to high school level, but his reading skills were below sixth-grade level. The translation spell did not help him read or write in English.

We had none of the paperwork for him, but Adam and I sat down with the school district superintendent and told him the whole story, a heavily edited version of the whole story. We didn’t tell him about the fire, just that we’d found Aiden in Underhill, where he’d been trapped for a very long time. We didn’t tell him that Aiden could burn the school down if he wanted to. I figured that most kids in sixth grade could burn down a school if they wanted to anyway—they would just have to work a little harder at it than Aiden would.

The superintendent agreed that the circumstances were unusual and gave us a paperwork path to follow that would let Aiden start school. We managed to get it done (thanks to Kyle, who knew family law and could make it dance to his tune), and Aiden made it to the first day.

There were a few rough patches the first month of school, but Aiden finally settled in with a group of computer gamers. He still had those moments that reminded me that he was centuries older than he appeared, but mostly he looked happy.

I didn’t visit Stefan, but he called me twice and sounded nearly himself the second time. He said that the hope I’d given him was still helping him cope. I didn’t know what to say to that.

“I didn’t want to lose you,” I said, finally.

“Thank you,” he’d said. And he’d disconnected shortly thereafter.

The pack killed a pair of ghouls who had tried to settle in near Lourdes Medical Center in Pasco. Apparently hospitals are a favorite hunting ground of ghouls. We helped Marsilia roust a couple of itinerant vampires who tried to set up shop in West Richland. Renny started coming to Sunday breakfasts with Mary Jo and struck up an unlikely friendship with Ben, our candidate for wolf most likely to end up in jail. Anna’s ghost waved at me whenever I drove past my old place. I didn’t wave back.

Life happened. And we forgot to worry about Fiona.