Storm Cursed

5

Sherwood growled again. This time it was a pained sound that had elements of human vocal cords in it. He had been all the way wolf when I’d seen him, not five minutes ago.

Adam, out of view, didn’t make any noise at all. And a wave of magic rolled over me again. I always had trouble with heavy magic use, but it seemed to me that my reaction to it was getting worse over time. That, or I was just being exposed to more powerful magic users.

As soon as I could stand up, I took a deep breath and decided I was done waiting. I traveled cautiously down the stairs. The bottom two were wet with repulsive goo from the original barrier that we, Adam and I between us, had brought down. But beyond a certain squick factor because I was barefoot, I didn’t pay much attention to that. What I saw in the room stopped me cold, right in the middle of the gooey spot.

Adam had paused about halfway across the room, presumably for the same reason I had.

At the far end of the room, where the shadows were deepest even in the middle of the day, was a giant beanbag chair. Beanbag chairs were one of the few pieces of furniture that were equally comfortable for wolf and human, so we had a few scattered around the room.

The remains of the zombie wolf were laid on the chair as if his comfort mattered. The dead werewolf looked lifeless, really dead and going to stay that way. Sherwood knelt on the floor next to the beanbag. He was a mess. I’d heard his human voice amid the wolf, and his body was like that, caught halfway back to human in a way I’d never seen before. He was stuck in a bizarre mismatch of human and wolf limbs and features that looked incredibly painful and completely unsustainable. If his outside was so wrong, I couldn’t imagine what his internal organs looked like.

But he had two human-shaped hands resting on top of the pile of hide-covered bones. Sherwood’s eyes—golden, feral eyes—tracked from Adam to me and back.

Adam sat on the ground where he was, all the way down, belly to the floor. I’d have sat down, too, but there was a deep puddle of goo under my bare feet. I hoped that the combination of how much less of a threat I was than Adam and the fact that I was farther away would be enough to make my presence not an issue for Sherwood.

Sherwood apparently agreed with me. He watched Adam for a moment more, then, satisfied that we would leave him to his work, he turned his attention to the dead-again werewolf.

And he sang.

The words were mangled by the caught-between-change shape of his mouth, but he was pitch-perfect and the song ruffled the hair on the back of my neck and broke my heart with its magic-carried grief.

We waited where we were, Adam and I, while the scent of black magic dissipated. The scent, the feeling of black magic, lingers for a long time, years or even decades. But the dead wolf and the basement—and me and even my unholy rank-smelling hair—were all being cleansed as Sherwood sang.

I don’t know what Adam could feel, but it seemed to me as if magic swept out from Sherwood and washed over us all. I couldn’t tell what kind of magic it was—a rarity for me. It just felt like Sherwood, masculine and reserved, werewolf and gruffly kind. Not werewolf magic—that’s another thing altogether. This was something . . . more primal. More wild. And I didn’t think there was a thing more wild than pack magic.

As I observed Sherwood grieving over this werewolf who had been a zombie, I thought about the power of what he was doing. Of what I’d felt course through me.

I thought about how Sherwood had ended up in our pack, sent by the Marrok who had ruled us all and now ruled all of the werewolves except for our pack. And how short a period of time lay between when Sherwood got here and when those ties had been cut.

I thought of what I knew of Sherwood, whose voice was so beautiful that tears coursed down my cheeks from his sorrow when I could not even understand the words of the song he sang. But I knew the music’s content because its intent was made magically clear.

Bran, the Marrok, had rescued Sherwood from a witch’s coven that the Seattle wolves had uncovered. Sherwood had been missing a leg that nothing could help him regenerate and no trace of memory that predated his stay with the witches. He hadn’t really answered me about how much of his captivity he remembered when I asked him when we’d headed into the witch’s house earlier today.

Eventually Bran had given him a name—in a fit of exasperation, from how Sherwood himself had recounted it to me: Sherwood Post. It wasn’t a . . . usual name, gleaned as it was from the authors of two books on Bran’s desk, a collection of short stories by Sherwood Anderson and Emily Post’s treatise on etiquette. Bran read all the time, but I had never known Bran to read either of those authors.

I’d had a class in American lit in college and the professor had made us memorize quotes, I’m not sure why. I’d thought Anderson a little too self-aware in his writing, and had much preferred F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was more readable, and Faulkner, who was a better wordsmith. But as Sherwood sang his mourning song, I remembered that Anderson had said something about people who were deliberately stupid, burying deeper thoughts beneath a steel barricade so they wouldn’t have to look at them. It made me wonder if Bran’s choice of name had been less impulse of the moment and more a reasoned epithet.

I had been mostly convinced that Bran knew who Sherwood had been before the witches had taken him. Standing at the foot of the stairs in a puddle of rotting slime with Sherwood’s magic washing over me, I was certain of it. There just weren’t that many werewolves who could generate this kind of magic; I could not fathom a world in which Bran would not know of him. Bran kept track of werewolfkind as closely as any dragon kept watch on its treasure.

I was getting an odd feeling, and I don’t know where it came from exactly, though it solidified as I watched Sherwood sing to the dead wolf as he drove the filthy magic out of it and away. I thought that maybe Bran had also known, somehow, that Adam and our pack would end up alone against the world, and he’d sent this broken wolf to help us survive. This wolf he would not be careless with. If Sherwood was here, it was because Bran wanted him here.

As he sang, Sherwood became human. Not as quickly as I could shift—but more quickly than I’d seen anyone else change except Bran’s son Charles or an Alpha wolf pulling power from the pack. The last few minutes, as he sang, fully human, I could pick out words, though not meaning, because he wasn’t singing in Welsh or any other language I recognized.

After the last note fell and silence reigned, Sherwood kissed the dead wolf on the muzzle, ichor- and blood-drenched though it was. Our broken wolf closed his eyes, rested his forehead on the hide-covered bones, and blasted the body to ashes in a burst of magic that sent me down on my butt in the cooling, fetid goo I’d been trying to avoid sitting in.

By the time I could see again, Sherwood was in a heap on the floor, unconscious, and Adam was licking my face.

“I’m fine,” I told him. “It’s just the magic.” Even the thought of how much power Sherwood had used made me shiver in reflex. “Go check on Sherwood.”

I lurched to my feet to do the same.

“Huh,” said Sherwood, drinking his third cup of cocoa and staring at the crumbs on his plate. He was bathed and wearing a set of black sweats a little too small for him, sitting at the kitchen table with his back to the wall.

The house reeked, and would until Adam’s contractor got his guys to come rip out the carpet where the zombie werewolf had left generous amounts of putrid fluids behind. I would finally get to replace all the white, and tomorrow I’d be happy about that. But the smell was only the organic part of the foulness that had invaded our house, and that wasn’t nearly as troubling as it might have been had Sherwood not banished the stink of black magic with his song.

My hair was wet and I had shoes on to protect me from standing in any more horrid stuff. I was on my third set of clothes today and it wasn’t even noon. I’d like to say it was a record, but it wasn’t even close. The washing machine, fortified with a cup of the orange cleaner I used to get grease off my hands, was attempting to remove the goo from the seat of my jeans. If that didn’t work, I’d throw those jeans away.

Adam, fully human again, had been in the middle of recounting the events following Sherwood’s expedition to the basement shower when I’d arrived freshly showered and clean. While he finished the tale, I made more sandwiches for all of us—and lots of hot, spicy cocoa.

As Adam finished describing what Sherwood had done to the zombie’s body, Sherwood shook his head.

“I don’t remember that,” he mumbled into his cup. He set the cup down, stared at it, then said, “I remember nothing after I headed down and set off the witch’s trap—not until I came to myself in the shower upstairs. I don’t remember a zombie werewolf. I don’t remember singing. I don’t sing. I don’t do magic.” He glanced up at Adam with shadowed eyes. “I don’t think I remember.” He clenched his hands.

The sorrow I sensed from him, through the pack bonds and through his scent, did not waver. But I was almost certain he was lying about not remembering, I just didn’t think that Adam and I were the people the lie was aimed at. Only his last sentence rang true, and I could see from his face that he realized that.

“Why did he change like that?” I asked Adam, because it had been bothering me—and Sherwood didn’t even remember doing it.

Adam had stopped his change midway once—and the result had been monstrous. I still wasn’t sure whether it had been on purpose. But what Sherwood had done had been different.

“Like what?” asked Sherwood.

“He couldn’t change his whole body quickly enough for his purposes,” said Adam. He spoke to me, but he was looking at Sherwood. “He just changed what he needed. I can’t do it—but the Moor and a few of the other older werewolves can.”

We all absorbed that for a few minutes.

“So,” I said briskly, “we need to figure out how the zombie got in.”

Adam frowned. “We can try, but without a witch, I’m not sure we’ll get anywhere.”

“I can ask Zee to help,” I suggested. “He’s not a witch, but he’s been around a long time.” I hesitated. “I could call Bran or Charles.”

Adam shook his head. “Zee, but not Bran or Charles. There are too many eyes on us right now. I think it’s more important than ever that the supernatural community knows that we are not part of Bran’s people right now.”

Sherwood frowned at Adam. “What’s so important about right now?”

Adam looked at him for a long moment. “So,” he said, “let us leave aside why you wept over a long-dead wolf, shall we? Or how you cleansed the stink of the dark magic from our home.”

Sherwood looked away. “Please?”

“We have to figure out how they got in and planted that trap,” I said. “If Sherwood hadn’t been here, Adam—what if Jesse had found that thing? What if they plant another zombie werewolf?”

“They have no more,” Sherwood said, his eyes wolf-bright and his voice nearly guttural. The change was so sudden, his voice so powerful, that I found myself scooting back in my chair.

“The one who made that poor shadow is long dead.” The wolf in human-seeming almost glowed with power. “They have neither the learning nor the power to make him again. They would not have risked him if they had known who was here. I have made him free, my poor brother that was.”

He looked at Adam, but his eyes did not meet those of my mate. “As for other mischief—my song has claimed this place for now. No evil may enter without invitation. They cannot come in.” He glanced beyond us, behind Adam and me, toward the basement. “Not for a while.”

“Sherwood?” Adam asked.

“No,” growled Sherwood’s wolf, a hint of contempt in his voice. Then his voice gentled a bit. “Not yet. He still hides.”

“Wolf,” I asked, “who are you?”

“Witchbane,” he said. “Witch’s Spawn.” He grimaced, or maybe he smiled. “Something like that, maybe. I forget. Who are you?”

“Nothing that grand,” I said.

He bared his teeth. “Coyote’s Daughter,” he said. “We shall sing them to the great death.”

Then he shuddered, closed his eyes, and passed out cold. If Adam hadn’t been as quick as he was, he would have fallen all the way to the floor.

“Well,” Adam said, hefting Sherwood’s limp form and striding out to the living room, where he could put him down on the couch. “That was unexpected.”

“Not as unexpected as having him turn into a full-formed whatsit who obliterated a zombie werewolf,” I said.

Adam grinned at me. “That which doesn’t destroy us . . .”

“Leaves us scratching our heads and saying, ‘What’s next?’” I said. “Is he okay?”

Sherwood had already begun to stir.

“Pack bond says he’s fine,” Adam said. “Just worn-out. Maybe another couple of sandwiches?”

I made food—at this rate I was going to have to go shopping again. When I brought the food into the living room and set it on an end table, Sherwood was sitting up again.

He squinted at the food and began to eat like a . . . well, like a ravening wolf.

“I remember that,” he growled. “Whatever that was.” Then he looked a little sick and he quit eating. When he spoke again his voice was soft and uncertain. “Unsettling to have that inside me all this time. To know that it is there, all of it, waiting for me.”

I didn’t think he was talking about his wolf.

“What will come, will come,” Adam said. “That’s enough for now.”

Sherwood gave a derisive half laugh. “Right.”

“You saved the day,” Adam told him firmly. “Let it go.”

“Apparently that is something I’m good at.” Despite the self-directed bitterness of his words, when Sherwood gave another half laugh, this time it was genuine.

“Okay?” Adam asked.

“All right,” Sherwood said. To prove it, he started eating again.

Adam gave me a rueful look. “I planned on matters going a little differently, but I still have to discuss some things with you.” He turned to Sherwood. “And you, too. It feels a little anticlimactic after all of this—” He tipped his head toward the mess that started at the top of the stairway to the upstairs and continued in a trail of interesting stains and broken things down toward the basement. “But it is still important—in the long run, it might be more important.”

I swallowed, because Sherwood wasn’t the only one chowing down. Adam had not eaten—and he should because he’d changed back and forth, fought a zombie werewolf thingie, and healed himself really quickly. “You need to eat,” I told him.

“I ate while you were in the shower,” he said. “I promise.”

I glanced at Sherwood, who raised both eyebrows to Adam but then nodded.

“I’m not doubting his word,” I said with dignity. “But it’s my privilege to make sure while he’s looking out for everyone else that he looks out for himself, too.”

Adam moved the few inches between where he stood and where I sat on a little round ottoman. He leaned down and kissed me.

When he straightened up, he didn’t move away. “So,” he said, “the late-night meetings I’ve been having are the forerunner of meetings between the government and the Gray Lords. No one really expects firm results, but it is the first nonhostile negotiation.”

Sherwood pursed his lips. “So why are you telling just Mercy and me? Why not the whole pack?”

“Neither of you appears on the list of active members of the Columbia Basin Pack that someone presented to my old friend General Gerald Piotrowski,” Adam said dryly. His voice was especially dry when he said “my old friend.”

“The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?” asked Sherwood.

I was impressed that he knew who Piotrowski was. Not many people could tell you who the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was, let alone the vice chairman. And Sherwood was an amnesiac who didn’t remember his own name—unless he was attacked by zombie werewolves, apparently—so in-depth knowledge about the government wasn’t something I’d have expected of him. Heck, I had a degree in history so I was supposed to be interested in things like that, and I didn’t know who the participants on the Joint Chiefs were.

“That’s the one,” agreed Adam. “And factually, it was you, Mercy, and Zack.”

“Someone has an old list of who is in the pack,” I said. “And maybe they missed me because I’m not a werewolf; I shouldn’t be pack, except in an auxiliary sense.” Something chilled in my veins, foreboding maybe. “The group of rogue Cantrip agents that kidnapped the pack in order to make you go assassinate their target had a list, didn’t they?” Last November, at the same time that Frost had been trying to take over Marsilia’s territory.

Adam put a hand on my shoulder and let it rest there. “I think that it’s the same list. I don’t know if they got it from the rogue group, the rogue group got it from them, or someone gave it to both parties.”

“I was,” I said slowly, “under the impression that it was Frost who gave the rogue agents that list.”

Adam gave me a quick nod. “That’s what I thought, too.”

“Is it important where their information came from?” asked Sherwood.

“Not to the immediate discussion,” Adam agreed. “But maybe for later investigation. I’ll see to it that Charles gets word—maybe he can figure it out.”

“Okay,” said Sherwood. “So why is it important that Mercy and I aren’t on this list?”

Adam gave me a very apologetic look. “Because the rest of the pack is going to be playing bodyguards for the governmental delegation.”

I twisted so I could look up into Adam’s face. “Can we do that? In a meeting between the government and the fae. Aren’t we supposed to be . . . I don’t know . . . neutral?”

“Yes,” said Adam. “At least if we are to keep to the spirit of the bargain. But the pack isn’t attacking the fae, just trying to keep the humans safe—from all threats.” He didn’t sound happy. “If the fae don’t attack us, we won’t attack them—and that is the essence of our agreement.”

“How did you get maneuvered into splitting hairs that fine?” Sherwood asked.

“How did the pack get wrangled into Hauptman Security business?” I asked. Because it had been HS business that had kept him in late-night meetings recently, not pack business. There were pack members who worked for Adam’s company and more who could be called in to substitute if needed. But most of the pack had their own careers elsewhere, and that was how Adam liked it.

“Remind me to fire the head of my contracts department in New Mexico,” Adam told me. There was heat in his voice that made firing the better of two options for the person in question.

“Okay,” I said.

Adam shook off his anger and continued briskly. “A contract with a small government project gave the US government access, not to Hauptman Security, but to ‘Hauptman Security and all of its adjunct personnel’—which is a phrase that snuck into our government contracts about two years ago so it didn’t raise any flags.”

“The pack isn’t adjunct to Hauptman Security,” I said.

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Adam agreed. “But on this ten-thousand-dollar contract, on page forty-eight, ‘adjunct personnel’ was defined as anyone under my aegis.”

Sherwood rocked back in his chair. “The pack.”

“So the rest of the pack is on guard duty?” I said.

“Protection,” Adam agreed. “This will be pretty high-level. The secretary of state, the vice president, the Senate majority leader, and a few other key people are all coming here with their staff to meet with a triumvirate of Gray Lords. They are trying to put together an agreement that will define the relationship of the fae to the human government of the United States that won’t lead to genocide.”

“Genocide of fae or humans?” asked Sherwood.

“Both,” I told him, because I could do that math. “Or either.”

“And they had to blackmail you into playing bodyguard?” Sherwood asked.

Adam gave him a wolf smile. “Funny that you noticed right off that it is a bad idea. It took me two days and a call to a friend who was fishing in Alaska at the time to convince the general of that.”

The friend was probably the retired military man—someone who’d known what Adam was—who had been in charge of hiring Adam (not Adam’s company, which was strictly security) over the years. I knew that Adam had done a lot of contract work for the government during the Cold War era. I was pretty sure that had included some assassinations, but Adam never talked about what he’d done. All of that had stopped by the time Adam and I had become more than acquaintances, so I didn’t know who his “friend” was.

Sherwood grunted. “That little contractual nudge took a lot of planning.” He said it with regrettable admiration.

“Why didn’t they just hire Hauptman Security?” I asked. “And ask if you could pull the pack into it?”

Adam grunted. “Some of the people in the government want a better guarantee than my word and a paycheck. Because I’m a monster.”

“Wow,” said Sherwood. “A blackmailed monster is just what I’d want guarding my back.”

“Insulting,” I said.

Adam gave me a wry grin. “Exactly. At any rate, we have ironed out a deal. Mercy, you will be in charge of orchestrating the meeting—where and when.” I gave him a horrified look, which he ignored. “I give you Sherwood and Zack as your muscle. The pack will do guard duty for the government and get paid royally for it. When this is done, I’ll get a better contracts lawyer.” He sighed. “Or go back to reading every damned contract myself, which is how I used to do it.”

“What are you thinking?” I asked. “What idiot would put me in charge of a government meeting? I can’t organize a pack barbecue without Kyle. Why isn’t someone else doing it? Marsilia? Or one of the fae? Or one of the government people? I bet they do this all the time.”

“Kyle is a good idea,” said Adam, ignoring my objections. “I’ll see if he will consent to help us out. I can bill the government for him.” It sounded as though that last would make Adam very happy.

“Adam,” I said. “Why am I elected?”

“Because,” said Adam patiently, “you put us in charge of the Tri-Cities, Mercy. Our pack. That means the fae will only meet with the government if our pack hosts the meeting. We need a representative of our pack to be an intermediary between the government and the fae. It’s lucky that the fae are willing to accept you.”

Sherwood, watching me, laughed. “Don’t worry, Mercy. We won’t actually have to do anything difficult. We’re just glorified messengers. All the decisions will be made by the government and the fae.”

I swallowed. It didn’t sound like an easy job. Adam’s hand cupped the back of my head.

“I believe in you, little coyote,” he whispered into my ear.

I gave him an annoyed huff. “I’m not going to start reciting ‘I think I can, I think I can’ anytime real soon now.”

Adam laughed and straightened back up. This time, his hand came off my shoulder. I missed it.

“I have every confidence that you could do just fine if we put you in charge of everything,” he told me. “But Sherwood is right. It is mostly a ceremonial position with a lot of running around. The government will make their own arrangements for lodging and”—he grimaced—“security. As will the fae. Mostly you will be in charge of finding a venue that’s acceptable to everyone. And, once we have the dates, you’ll reserve the meeting place, show up on time, and give a very short speech that probably both the fae and the government will insist on editing.”

“How will this play with the fae?” I asked. “Not my bit in this. I mean, really, how will they think about the pack playing security for the government? Not just how we’re going to spin it. We are supposed to be a neutral party, right?”

“I checked with Beauclaire,” Adam said. “Not all of my meetings have been with the government. He thinks we can squeak by.”

Beauclaire was a Gray Lord, one we had a working relationship with. As close to a working relationship as you could have with someone who, I had reason to believe, could raise the sea and bring down mountains.

“Whatever the public thinks,” I said, “the fae know that the only reason our compact works is because the fae want it to work. We don’t have the horsepower to make a real stand against the whole might of the fae. Or, probably, even one of the Gray Lords. Not without the support of the Marrok.”

“Which they don’t know that we have,” said Sherwood.

“Which we don’t have,” I said gently.

“He loves you,” Sherwood said, his voice certain.

I nodded. “He does.” Bran had more than demonstrated that he thought of me as a daughter. “But he loves the werewolves more. He has fought for centuries for them.” I sought for words and found them in an unexpected place. “To give them ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ He can’t help us without risking that.”

“He would risk the werewolves for you,” Adam said.

He had risked everything for me. That knowledge had healed a wound going back to when he had driven me from his pack, from the only home I’d ever known, when I was sixteen. Bran had not abandoned me.

But that was a dangerous secret. Only a few people knew what Bran had done, and we needed to keep it that way. The fae especially couldn’t know that Bran still felt responsible for me. They were a feudal society, for the most part. If they thought that our ties with Bran were still in place, then they would look upon our treaty with them as a treaty with all of the werewolves.

Our treaty with the fae had to stay small, only our territory, only our pack. That meant that Sherwood and the rest of the pack needed to believe we were on our own, too.

“Bran won’t help us,” I said firmly, believing it. Bran wouldn’t help us because he wouldn’t need to. “And that keeps him, and us, out of a power struggle between werewolf and fae that could escalate into a war that everyone loses. If we screw up here, the fae won’t go after the rest of the werewolves on the planet for it. Our separation from the other packs in North America makes everyone safer.”

Sherwood made a noise, but then said, “Therefore we don’t have the support of the Marrok. We only have ourselves to count on.”

It didn’t smell like he thought he was lying, precisely. That “therefore” was a wiggle word. He believed that the Marrok would help us if needed, but he understood that it would be a bad thing if other people thought so, too.

“And a treaty with the fae, in which they agree to abide by our rules within the bounds of our territory,” said Adam. “Beauclaire understood that guarding the humans is the business of my security firm, which has retained most of the members of my pack. He agrees that Mercy is acceptable to act as our liaison and our ringmaster. Since any fae who harms a human here is breaking the agreement the fae have signed, we, the pack, are not being put into a position where our honor would be compromised. Instead, Beauclaire assures me, I am a good businessman and dealmaker for getting the government to pay me to do something that we are already bound, by our word to the fae, to do anyway.”

Adam sounded a little bemused. I didn’t blame him. Being coerced didn’t sound like a smart business decision to me. But the fae had a twisted view of a lot of things.

“Are you charging them more, since they are taking not just your regular security detail but also most of the pack?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “I also added a premium for being a bunch of jack . . . rabbits.”

“You can say ‘jackass’ in front of me,” said Sherwood, batting his eyelashes.

“You swear in front of my wife again,” purred Adam, “and we’ll discuss what I will say in front of you.”

Sometimes I forgot how old my mate was. In most ways he was thoroughly modern. But he always opened the door for me, pulled out my chair at restaurants—and avoided swearing in front of me. None of which I minded.

Sherwood slid to the front of the couch—so he could get out of it in a hurry—and it wasn’t to run away. The events of this morning had left both werewolves on edge. It wasn’t beyond the pair of them to engage in what Adam liked to call “a good tussle” to blow off steam.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Does that mean that the government can force the pack to work for them whenever they want to?”

Adam said, “Point to you. That’s what the contract says, and it says it with no out date. However, I told them I would give in this one time—because of the importance of these negotiations. But I also told them that I’d take them to court to fight that contract if they didn’t add an addendum limiting them to this one time.”

“Slippery slope giving in to them at all,” said Sherwood.

“You make sure to fire that contract lawyer,” I told Adam. “Because the real problem if this came to a court battle isn’t privacy for the government; it’s making the fae think that we won’t keep our word.”

Adam nodded tiredly. “And if the government ever figures that out, it might give them the idea that if they want to get the best of us, they just need to go to Los Alamos, talk to one of my business directors, and get them to sign off on a contract with an obscure and useful clause.”

He took a breath and let it out. “The government, in the embodiment of Piotrowski, is anxious to move while the fae are willing to meet. It wasn’t in their interest to fight me. So I got more money and an addendum to that contract that ends any obligation my pack has to the government directly after the meeting is held. It isn’t always a bad thing that the government doesn’t know the fae as well as they might. As well as we do.”

We all fell silent, contemplating the complexities of a close personal relationship with the fae.

Finally, Adam slapped his hands together and dusted them. “But that’s a problem for another day. I think we have sufficient problems at hand.”

“Right?” I said. “How many of you think that the attack on Elizaveta has something to do with this meeting?”

We all raised our hands, including Adam.

“That goblin this morning could have been involved, too,” I said. “He told us that ‘she’ told him that he could come here, that we would keep him safe from the authorities—or words to that effect.”

“Checking our response time?” asked Sherwood.

I yawned. “Or exhausting our resources.”

“Or we are jumping to unwarranted conclusions,” cautioned Adam. “Getting from ‘she’ to ‘a witch’ to ‘the witches who attacked Elizaveta’s family’ is a leap of Olympian scale. And adding that this meeting has nothing to do with witches at all . . . and yet.”

“Right?” I said.

“Coincidences sometimes happen,” Sherwood said heavily. “But when they happen around witches, they aren’t usually coincidences.”

When I got to work, finally, the imaginary parking lot full of cars with scheduled appointments that I hadn’t been there to repair wasn’t there. The customer parking lot was empty, as were the three repair bays.

Maybe Tad had called everyone and told them not to come in—but that didn’t sound like Tad. Answers came when I opened the office door and saw Zee at the computer inputting invoices.

Siebold Adelbertsmiter looked like a wiry old man, balding and nimble for his age. Looks, in his case, were very deceiving. Zee was an ancient fae smith, a gremlin, if you read his official government ID. Since gremlins were an invention of the twentieth century and Zee had been ancient when Columbus was commissioned to find a new route to Asia, I had my doubts. But I seldom contradicted Zee on matters that didn’t involve me.

He glanced up at me but didn’t stop the rapid keystrokes. “Your inventory is too low,” he said. “You will be out of parts this time next week.”

“I have a large order coming in day after tomorrow,” I said.

He grunted. “You are charging too much for labor. It is more than the dealership.”

“They charge what their faraway masters tell them a job should take. We charge actual time. Since I was trained by the best mechanic in the world, I am a lot faster. My right hand is arguably better and faster than I am, since his father is that same mechanic. Our clients usually get out cheaper—and they know that our repairs are solid.”

Zee grunted again.

Since he’d given me that same speech in the past—not quite verbatim, but close enough—I assumed that grunt was a grunt of approval.

“It is good,” he said after a moment, “when children prove they actually listen to their elders.”

“It is good,” I said carefully, because the old fae was as prickly as an Alpha werewolf about people noticing weaknesses, “to see someone who can really type. It takes me twice the time to do those entries as it does you.”

He huffed, but we both knew that not very long ago, his hands had been in no shape for quick typing. He’d been held and tortured by the fae who had been trying to find out just how powerful Zee’s half-human son was. That was why I hadn’t called him in to help Tad this morning. My comment amounted to “I’m glad to see you’re feeling better” in such a way that he wouldn’t take offense.

“This shop,” he said, changing the subject away from his hands. “Everything works correctly. It has no character.”

“Give it a few months,” I said. “Things will start breaking down just when we need them. It will be back to usual before you know it.”

He looked at me over the rims of the wire-framed glasses that he wore when doing close work. I was pretty sure they were an affectation. “Are you patronizing me?”

I hitched a hip on the padded stool that was on the customer side of the counter. “Nope.” I looked around at the clean walls and neatly organized matching shelving units. Even the bays smelled clean and new. “This shop makes me feel itchy, too.”

He hit the enter key and set his work aside. He took off his glasses and set them on the counter.

“You do not smell like a goblin,” he said.

Zee could smell goblins? I mean, I could smell goblins, and the werewolves could smell goblins, but I didn’t know that Zee could smell goblins.

“That was this morning,” I told him. “Very early this morning. I’ve showered since then. The more recent thing was a zombie werewolf set loose in the basement of my house.”

I gave him a general rundown of everything that had happened. Except for the secret part—that Elizaveta and her family had all been practicing black magic. I didn’t leave out the fae-government meeting. Zee was in a precarious place with the Gray Lords. They had wronged him and he’d avenged himself on the responsible parties. I wasn’t sure how safe he was, and I wouldn’t leave out any information about the Gray Lords for fear that it could affect his safety.

“Witches,” Zee said when I was done, ignoring the information about the meeting, which told me that he’d probably already known. “I have not had much to do with witches. In the old days, if one became troublesome, I killed them. Mostly they died off on their own before I felt the need to bestir myself.”

Witches were mortal, I was pretty sure. I had the feeling that they probably avoided the fae. It was a question that I might have thrown to Elizaveta—but not anymore.

“Do you think that we should warn the fae that there is a new group of witches in town?” I asked.

Zee grunted. “If they do not know, then they deserve to be blindsided. But I expect they know; they are planning their meeting with the government and so are more concerned with the doings of the mortals here than usual.”

I guess the meeting wasn’t as secret as all that, at least not among the fae.

Zee grunted again, then picked out a single inconsequential detail from my whole recitation of witches and zombies and said, “That rifle that was damaged—it was the one your father bequeathed you?”

I blinked at him a moment, then said, “Yes. The Marlin.”

He nodded. “Bring to me your father’s rifle, and I will fix it.”

Adam had looked at it and determined that the zombie had bent more than just the barrel. He didn’t think it could be fixed.

Neither of us had thought about bringing it to Zee. If Peter’s sword had been broken, Zee would have been the first person I’d have taken it to. But I just didn’t think of Zee and rifles at the same time.

“I will,” I said in a voice that was a little rougher than I meant it to be.

He frowned at me. “What are you leaking about, child? Go work on that carburetor. You have the mixture too rich, I can smell it from here.”

I huffed and went back to the car I’d been working on yesterday. I hadn’t been crying, no matter what Zee had said. Though it had been a close call. Bryan had really loved that rifle.

Tad returned with lunch. It was Chinese, so splitting it between the three of us instead of two was pretty easy. I shared the same information with Tad that I had with Zee. He was still mulling it over when an old customer stopped in with a stalling Passat and no appointment.

“I heard you were back in business,” Betty said, handing me the keys. “Thank goodness. I’ve had it to the dealership twice and they can’t figure out what it is.”

The dealership had a couple of decent mechanics in their mix. If someone brought a problem back to them, the car went to one of their good people. If they hadn’t been able to fix her Passat, then I was glad Zee had decided to spend the day here.

“We’ll take a look at it and call you when we know more,” I told her. “Do you want Tad to give you a ride home?”

Betty was in her eighties, though she didn’t look a day over sixty-five. Even if the waiting area was cleaner than it used to be, I wasn’t going to make her sit around until we knew what was up.

“Bless you, Mercy,” she said. “That would be wonderful.”

As Tad drove off with her, our two o’clock appointment drove in. I took that one and left the Passat with its mystery problem to Zee.

The rest of the day was pretty normal. We fixed a few cars, including the Passat. I never did figure out what was wrong with it—Zee told me he had to let the bad mojo out. I thought he was kidding, but that was what I put on the bill.

Betty had been Zee’s customer before I started working at the shop. She just laughed as she paid for the work when Tad and I dropped the car off.

“That Zee,” she said. “He likes his little jokes. One time he said that he told my car to behave itself. He didn’t charge me for that one—but the car ran fine for another six months. If Zee says he fixed the car, it will be fixed.”

We sent one old BMW to the eternal resting place (a scrap yard) and mourned with her owner. When there weren’t customers around, we chatted about odd topics. Zee, Tad, and I had spent a lot of days like this. It felt like coming home in a way the previous weeks had not, as if with Zee’s presence, the shop had regained its heart.

Working on a car cleared my head. When there was a gnarly mechanical problem to fix, I would concentrate on that—and all the other things going on in my life got sorted out by my subconscious. But most of the work I did in the shop was more like building with Legos. Once I had the plan of attack laid out, and understood the steps to take—then there was this Zen time where my head cleared and I could examine things without the hefty weight of emotion.

The first thing I decided was that now that there were witches added into the mix, Adam could not have left the humans in the government to guard themselves. There was only so much that mundane security could do against supernatural forces. Because of the badly written contract, he had an excuse to give to the fae—so that contract had actually turned out to be useful. And it was nice that he was charging them more money.

“Why are you humming, Mercy?” asked Tad, shutting the hood of a car with his elbow because his hands were covered with grease. Neither Tad nor Zee had adopted my new habit of using nitrile gloves to keep their hands cleaner.

“Humming is fine,” proclaimed Zee more directly from under the new bug (as opposed to the old ones) he was working on. He didn’t like the new version as well—he had a whole spiel in German that he would occasionally lapse into about the beauty of a simple car.

“But do not, please,” he continued, “hum ‘Yellow Submarine’ anymore today. I may be working on a Beetle, but it is not necessary to also sing songs of the Beatles.”

I switched to “Billie Jean” and Tad sighed. Zee snorted but didn’t object.

The second thing I thought about were the witches who had killed Elizaveta’s family. There weren’t a lot of clues about who they were. The only clue I could think of was that one of the witches shared a close bloodline with Frost.

I didn’t know much about Frost’s background, but I knew where to go looking.

I should talk to Stefan.

And all of my Zen disappeared in one thought. Stefan was my friend. He had risked his life for mine on a number of occasions, the most recent being my involuntary trip to Europe.

He had never done anything to me that was not my choice. But that didn’t matter. I didn’t want to talk to him at all.

Maybe Adam could.