Winter Lost

9

Mercy

I awoke to a finger drifting over my cheek. According to my inner clock, it was early morning—still dark this time of year. I smiled at the gentle touch and pressed my face into it.

But both of Adam’s arms were wrapped securely around my waist, holding me against his chest.

The hand on my cheek was icy.

Adam’s hands, like his body, were usually a few degrees warmer than a human’s would have been.

I opened my eyes and there was a stranger’s face not an inch from mine. If he hadn’t been dead, I’d have been breathing his air, he was that close. Panic held me frozen as he lowered his face and pressed his chill, hungry lips to mine.

I don’t know how a hungry ghost is made. There are stories, but they are told by the survivors, people trying to explain the inexplicable.

Gary once told me a tale he had heard from an old man at a pub in Yorkshire. A ship had capsized and the crew escaped on a boat. They drifted, lost at sea, for a very long time. After the food and water were gone, they ate each other—the last one starving to death.

Eventually, the boat washed ashore at a small fishing village. The ghosts of the sailors had nearly consumed the whole town before some bright person burned the boat and buried the ashes in holy ground. Hungry ghosts are dangerous.

Other ghosts could and would feed from the living. Once, when I’d been rendered defenseless, I’d had a ghost feed on me without consent. But hungry ghosts are different. They kill their victims.

Some kill in a single feeding, but others drain their prey for weeks or months before they die. Having fed once from a particular person, a hungry ghost can follow that person across oceans and continents. They don’t stop until their chosen quarry is dead.

Fortunately, they are rare. I’d only encountered a few of them, and they usually left me alone. I wasn’t food for them; my natural shields kept them out.

This one frightened me because he’d caught me asleep. That was all. I didn’t get scared by ghosts just because they touched me.

All I needed to do was move or push it away. But somehow, I couldn’t. It wasn’t panic holding me still—it was the ghost. But that was impossible. I was immune to them.

His lips grew warm as gooseflesh rose on my skin. He wasn’t stealing body heat, but the theft of spiritual energy chilled me to the bone as it warmed him.

I thought of what I’d done to myself last night to save Jack. I’d ripped off the hard-won bandages protecting me from what the Soul Taker had done. But I hadn’t needed to do that, had I? It had seemed necessary at the time, but when I had a chance to look back on it, what I had done for Jack I could have done without all the drama.

Vulnerable, Zee had called me in my kitchen. I’d chosen to believe Adam’s pack-magic kiss had fixed what I’d done, brought me back to where I’d been before I’d been stupid.

Demonstratively not, if I couldn’t send this ghost packing.

Frustrated in my efforts to move, I thought maybe I could wake Adam up. He was a light sleeper. If I could so much as tense a muscle or change my breathing, he’d wake up.

But I couldn’t move. Maybe I could reach Adam through our bond—I stopped that thought before it went any further. I wasn’t absolutely certain that wouldn’t give the ghost a way to attack Adam through me. And if I couldn’t defend myself, when ghosts were my bailiwick, I didn’t know what Adam could do against it.

If I didn’t figure out something pretty freaking quick, I was going to die.

What did you expect to happen, with you displayed like a lantern in the night, a picnic for any passerby? asked an impatient voice. She was a dozen words in before I realized I wasn’t actually hearing her with my ears.

One of Coyote’s get makes a rare meal for a spirit eater, she chided. That poor starveling likely traveled miles to feast upon you.

I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t blink or shift the direction of my gaze away from the dead man’s predatory eyes. But I recognized that voice.

Change, child, the spider told me in the tones of a disappointed teacher dealing with a willfully dim pupil. They can’t feed upon animals.

I had changed into a coyote before I could crawl. It was as basic to me as breathing. I couldn’t hold my breath or twitch a finger, but when I tried to shift, the familiar zip of magic shot through me.

The ghost jerked away from me with a hoarse cry that sounded more like a flutter of dry bones than any sound a human might make. I squirmed out of Adam’s hold and hit the floor, putting more distance between me and the ghost, which was flailing soundlessly on the floor as if the brief contact with my coyote self had been damaging. The dead usually had no physical presence, but a brass lamp on a table about ten feet from where the ghost held his solo struggle fell to the ground with a loud clatter.

Adam didn’t move.

That meant he was held as I had been. Helpless.

The thing writhing on the ground didn’t look dangerous anymore, but I put myself between Adam and the ghost anyway.

Now that he wasn’t touching me, I could get a good look at him. He was all bones and rags, a gray and off-white mass on the Persian carpet, smaller than he’d felt when he’d been feeding, barely recognizable as human.

The damage he’d suffered trying to feed from a coyote lessened after maybe thirty seconds. For a moment he lay motionless, then he rolled to hands and knees and looked at me.

I felt a buzz of my magic and I saw him, not the ghost but the man he’d been before he’d become this monster.

I’d expected him to be Native because the land we were on had been occupied by Indigenous people, by my people, for a long time before the white settlers had come. But now, even in the dark room, I could tell that his hair had been several shades lighter than mine was. His features were Anglo, with a narrow chin and a prominent nose that had been broken at some point. His body was so thin that although he was clothed in the flesh he’d worn in life, I could see both the radius and ulna bones between his wrist and elbow.

The Cabinet Mountain Range was a dangerous and difficult area to try to survive in. There was a reason that it had still been largely uninhabited when it was made a protected wilderness in the middle of the twentieth century. Starvation was only one of the weapons the great mountains had used to kill interlopers.

I blinked, and the man the ghost had been vanished, with only the monster left behind. And then it, too, disappeared, because ghosts don’t need to move like real people.

I knew what that thing wanted. I was moving before the ghost reappeared on top of Adam. One hand gripped my mate’s bare shoulder, and the other caressed his cheek as the ghost kissed Adam’s lips.

I vaulted onto the bed and opened my jaws to grab the back of the ghost’s neck and wrest him away—my instincts working before my brain reminded me that he was probably not something that tooth and claw could affect. My teeth sank into something that was not flesh. But because ghosts are not limited to moving like normal creatures, something caught me under my ribs. My teeth couldn’t hold on as the blow propelled me across the room until I hit the chest of drawers with enough force to rock it back on the wall with a crack.

I rolled to my feet and bolted back to Adam.

The second time the ghost threw me, I hit the wall next to the bathroom.

I am curious why you are running around unprotected, like an invitation to any spirit-predator you happen by, the spider said.

I ignored her. Magic spiders talking in my head were something for future me to worry about. Right now, I had to save Adam. But her words broke the mindless frenzy that would have had me throwing myself at the ghost now feeding from Adam in earnest.

My previous actions hadn’t worked. I had to try something different.

Panting, more from terror than exertion, I stared at the thing killing my husband in front of my nose—and a flash of silver caught my eye as the spider descended down a line of tinsel-thick spider silk to land on the back of the ghost’s neck, just where I’d been attempting to seize it.

In return for answers, I will give you a gift, the spider told me.

I couldn’t tell what she did, but the ghost fell away from Adam, curled up into a fetal ball, then melted into a pile of stinking, unidentifiable goo.

Adam exploded out of the bed. He stood naked, breathing hard, his wary attention on the bed. I couldn’t tell if he was staring at what was left of the ghost or at the silver spider picking her way out of the wet mass and into the folds of the bedclothes.

Pretty man, said the spider with approval as she hid herself in the white chenille. As soon as I could no longer see her, her presence was gone from my head.

I shifted back into my human shape and hurled myself at Adam. I had almost had to watch while he was eaten by a ghost.

“Oh God,” I whispered in his ear as his arms closed around me with fiercely tempered strength. “Oh God, Oh God, thank you, God.” It was prayer. Unfinished, but I trusted it was still heard, as honest gratitude should be. “I thought he was going to kill you. Are you okay, Adam?”

His arms hurt the forming bruises on my back and made it a little hard to breathe. I was grateful for the pain. It meant we were both alive. And it gave me an excuse for the tears staining my cheeks.

I had almost lost him, because one of my few magics had failed me when I most needed it. Because I’d been stupid.

“I’m okay.” His voice shook a little, not with fear—he didn’t smell like fear. It was adrenaline fueled by frustrated rage. Pressed against him, I felt his stillness when he noticed my tears. Softer, he said, “I am okay, Mercy.”

I kissed him then. The kind of kiss required when your mate tries to die on you. Desperate didn’t cover it.

“What was that thing?” he asked eventually, after my heart admitted he was safe, so I wasn’t clinging quite so tightly. “I take it you are sure it’s not going to get back up and try again?”

“No,” I told him. “It’s gone.”

He set me on my feet and went to check the body anyway.

A ghost’s body, I supposed. It was certainly organic from the smell. I’d never encountered a ghost who left behind physical remains. Maybe a hungry ghost was more like a zombie.

I watched as Adam prodded it with an umbrella that had been hanging near the door for guests’ convenience in warmer weather. The unhealthy grayish mass seemed to have the consistency of Jell-O. It wiggled a bit before the end of the umbrella pierced its surface. It didn’t move on its own, but he did succeed in making it smell worse.

The spider had told me the hungry ghost had been attracted by my presence—called by the damage the Soul Taker had done, like a shark summoned by blood in the water. I had to figure out how to fix myself.

Once Adam had made certain the thing wasn’t going to rise again, we coped with our fears in our various ways. I told him about hungry ghosts in a babble of information that helped me calm the freak down. I would have told him about the spider, but he decided he needed to explain why I should have escaped and left him to deal with it as soon as I’d realized my ghost-mojo was broken.

That went well for him, with me still on edge from the utter terror of understanding I could do nothing while a ghost ate my husband, a ghost I should have been able to drive away except that a stupid ancient artifact decided to play around in my head.

Adam and I didn’t fight very often. He didn’t enjoy being mad at me, so mostly I tried to resist the temptation. I couldn’t say why it was such a turn-on or why it made me feel safe when he was angry. Perversity, probably—it was my besetting sin, after all. Sometimes you just had to accept who you were and move on.

Eventually I made him laugh by calling him a word I’d learned from the pack’s foul-mouthed British import. By that time, both of us were done fighting.

“I haven’t heard that one before,” he said. “Are you sure Ben didn’t make it up?”

“Urban Dictionary says not,” I assured him, and he laughed again.

“What does it mean?” he asked.

I bit his neck lightly and said, “Allow me to demonstrate.”

“You don’t have to nudge me twice,” he growled. And when I bit his neck again, he added, “But you can if you want to.”

By mutual unstated agreement we avoided the bed with its reeking mass of goo and made love on the floor.

Sex with Adam is never boring and seldom follows the same path. This time it had the give-and-take of a good conversation. I was never quite sure where the discussion was going, but we visited some interesting places. Sometimes our path covered emotional territory, sometimes we got a bit heated. In the end, we had a genuine exchange of views, to our mutual satisfaction.

Not even the sting of my elbow where it had hit something at some point in the proceedings put a dent in the joy that was my body. He’d started out on the bottom to keep my elbows safe.

“The floor’s hard,” he’d said. “Any bruises I get will heal up quick.”

That had lasted for a bit, but my elbow and both knees attested that sometimes passion and good sense have only a passing acquaintance. We’d ended up back where we started, though I was pretty sure I was way more comfortable than he was. Adam’s hard body only made a good bed if I was relaxed enough to achieve near bonelessness, which I was.

“I’ve got to get up,” I told Adam’s chest reluctantly. “Now that you aren’t quite so distracting…that smell.”

His quiet laugh bounced me up and down. “Rank,” he agreed.

The remnants of the ghost reeked like a skunk ten days dead on hot pavement—considerably worse than it had originally smelled. If we left it in here much longer, the room would be uninhabitable.

I got up and examined the problem. Coagulating on the bedding was a gelatinous mound roughly the mass of a large watermelon, with what looked like a few bone fragments in it. A grayish stain that might have had green overtones in better light spread around the remains where the bedding had absorbed liquid.

“I don’t think that a washing machine is going to clean that bedspread,” I said. “The obvious answer is to chuck the whole mess outside where it can freeze.”

But when I tried to open them, the windows proved to be old, fragile, and frozen shut.

“How did you stop it?” Adam asked.

“It wasn’t me,” I told him. “It was that silver spider.”

He’d been heading over to help me with the window, but stopped at my words.

“I thought the spider was an enemy,” Adam said cautiously. “Why did it save us?”

That’s right. We’d gotten into a fight before I could tell him what I knew about the spider.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “She told me to change to coyote when it had me. Apparently, it is an obligate human predator. Foiled, it went for you. When I couldn’t stop it, the spider informed me that I was to repay her efforts with information and then dropped down on the hungry ghost and turned it into goo.”

“You bargained with her?” asked Adam, and not in the tones of someone admiring their spouse’s intelligence.

“The spider isn’t fae,” I said. “She didn’t wait for my consent, just made an assumptive close like a pushy salesperson.”

I shoved again at the window—which remained stubbornly in place.

“Are you going to keep staring at my butt or help me with this window?” I had no idea where he was looking, but I was done arguing with him for the day. Distracting him from the (hopefully harmless) bargain I’d made seemed like a good idea. “I can’t get enough force at the right angle, and if I keep going, I’m going to break it. Which seems stupid given there’s a blizzard going on outside.”

He patted my bare butt with an appreciative hand and a huff of a laugh. “Let me get the bedding bundled up and ready to go. That way we don’t have to leave the window open so long.”

Thanks to a waterproof cover, the mattress had escaped being destroyed, but the bedspread and the pretty quilt were toast. In a few quick moves he had everything in a neat bundle, the goo on the inside and the waterproof cover clean-side out. He set that on the floor and had the window open in a couple of wiggles and a crack that worried me.

“It’s just the ice,” he told me. “Nothing broke, but I have to hold this up. Can you—”

I grabbed the bundle of bedding and dropped it into the snow outside.

“What about the umbrella?” I asked.

“Chuck it.”

I did.

With the remains of the dead thing outside and the window closed again, the room smelled a lot better. It would be a while before it was pleasant again, though. The radiator rattled in an effort to bring the temperature back up.

“I didn’t think ghosts left a rotting corpse behind,” Adam said.

“Me, either,” I told him. “First time for me. I was able to bite it—sort of—when it was feeding off you.”

As soon as I said it, I felt my gorge rise, though there was no lingering taste in my mouth. But. Ugh. “Excuse me while I brush my teeth.”

I returned from the bathroom and contemplated the bare mattress.

“It’s still dark out,” I said. “But it feels like morning. Are we getting up?”

“It’s seven thirty or thereabouts,” Adam agreed. “Six thirty our time. We might as well get dressed.”

We’d had about five hours of sleep. I could function on five hours, but I wasn’t going to be happy about it. Adam was a machine. If he needed to, he could go days without sleep. That didn’t have much to do with being a werewolf—werewolves need sleep like anyone else. It had to do with being Adam.

I dressed in my only clean clothes. I hadn’t packed with the idea of getting snowed in. With the power out, I thought it was unlikely that the lodge would have a functioning laundry. I picked up yesterday’s wet clothes, rinsed them off, and hung them up to dry on the towel racks, the shower rod, and a couple of chair backs. There was no saving my jeans, so I tossed the remnants into the inadequate garbage can in the bathroom.

Adam had put on his clothes and taken a seat on the mattress. He watched me with a thoughtful expression. Drat. I’d given him time to think. I smoothed out my socks so they would dry without wrinkles—something I cared nothing about.

“We should check in with the pack,” I said, and hearing my own words I was suddenly concerned with doing just that. “Let them know we made it here and see how my brother is.”

“We can’t call out,” Adam said. “My sat phone isn’t finding reception.”

I stared at him. “I thought those things picked up signal in Antarctica.”

“I suspect that something is interfering,” he said. “The storm—”

“Or the frost giant,” I said. “We’re stuck in the dark until we make it out of here.”

“Yes.” My mate looked thoughtfully at me. “And that was a good distraction—or would be if I didn’t know you better.”

I frowned at him, and his eyes warmed. “All right, Mercy, what don’t you want to tell me?”

I bounced on the bed next to him and put my head on his shoulder. “You’re going to make me talk.” I sighed.

“Yes,” he said.

I heaved another sigh. “That ghost shouldn’t have given me any trouble. It shouldn’t have been able to trap me. I shouldn’t have needed someone else to destroy it.”

Adam kissed the top of my head and let the silence continue, because he was good at interrogations.

“I don’t think it belonged here at the lodge,” I told him. “The spider said the hungry ghost sensed me and traveled here to enjoy a meal. Apparently, something the Soul Taker did made me a good snack for hungry ghosts and probably other things that feed that way.” I paused. “I’m pretty sure that I didn’t help matters when I fixed Jack.”

Adam’s muscles were tense against me. “Whatever the Soul Taker did to you, it’s not getting better,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

I shrugged. “Comes and goes, mostly.”

“How often do you have a headache?”

Busted. I shrugged. “Nothing too bad.”

“Mercy.”

“I think I need to go look for help,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Where?”

“That’s the eighty-four-thousand-dollar question,” I said. “And that’s the reason I haven’t looked for help before this.”

“Sixty-four,” he corrected.

“Inflation,” I offered. More seriously, I said, “There’s Sherwood.”

Adam shook his head. “I asked him. He says he can tell there’s something wrong with your magic, but it’s deeper than that. He is afraid that if he tries to mess with it, he’ll only make it worse for you.”

I lifted my head so I could see his face. “You’ve been going behind my back?”

“You weren’t doing anything about it,” he said without shame or remorse. “We’ve all been worried.”

When I attempted a fierce stare, he said dryly, “You’d have done the same thing for me.”

“Fair enough,” I had to admit, resettling myself until I was lying next to him, my head on his thigh. My head did hurt, and the warmth of his body was soothing. “I assume you’ve talked to Zee?”

“He’s been looking since October,” Adam said. “He told me he has something he is pursuing, but he has that sour expression when he talks about it. I don’t think we should count on Zee pulling your fat out of the fire.”

“Well,” I said after a minute, “there’s my brother. But any help he can give is stuck in the world of ‘There’s a Hole in My Bucket’ territory. We need to fix him before he can help. And to fix him we have to find the harp that looks like a lyre.”

Neither of us mentioned my father. But both of us thought about it. Coyote’s methods of fixing something were terrifying.

“I think I smell food cooking,” I said. “And, dear Liza, the sooner we get out and meet these people, the sooner we can find the artifact and get my brother free.”

Adam took a deep breath and said, “I suppose we go look for some straw, then, dear Henry.” He hummed a few bars of the song as we headed out.

The reception desk was still unmanned, and Adam’s half-written note was undisturbed. Adam popped into the office to finish writing the note and added an addendum about the bedding and umbrella we’d destroyed. He didn’t say what had happened to them.

When he was finished, we followed the scent of breakfast down the long hall to the opposite side of the hotel. We walked by a wall of smoked glass that protected a speakeasy-style room with a dozen small tables and two large ones. A sign proclaimed that The Gunner’s Moll was closed for the season.

According to Elyna, Looking Glass Hot Springs closed down on Labor Day weekend and reopened on Memorial Day. The restaurant was a separate business that was open for the regular season. The resort opened in December every year on a limited basis for weddings.

During December, the hotel staff cooked breakfast and made sack lunches for guests. The guests were encouraged to take themselves off to one of the local communities for dinner—or hire a caterer or chef who could use the kitchen facilities. The groom’s family had planned on bringing their own cook, but like most of the party, he had been scheduled to arrive yesterday.

We passed the door leading outside to the hot tub area and took a left through a short corridor and into a dining hall still (according to the signage) awaiting renovations.

The plank pine floor had seen better days, and there were water stains on the dropped ceiling tiles. Five out of the eight fluorescent light fixtures worked—and those were better suited to my garage than a hostelry of any kind. But the music piped into the room—presumably generator powered, because the kitchen was—came from a decent sound system. Elyna had told us the lodge had fuel enough to keep the generators going for a couple of weeks. I hoped that we could resolve the cause of the storm before the fuel supply was put to the test.

The room might be ugly, but it was big. The three sizable round tables looked a little lost. Efforts had been made to brighten them up with white lace tablecloths and small bouquets of fresh flowers—Elyna had mentioned a greenhouse. The flowers and lace were completely outmatched by the general seedy air of the room.

Last night, Elyna had divided the people here into groups: the bride’s party, the groom’s party, random refugees from the storm, and the lodge staff. Around the tables, the lodge guests had organized themselves in much the same way, probably for different reasons.

“There are thirteen people here now, not including you, me, or Jack,” Elyna had told us.

Seventeen people. Four of us were definitely not hiding the frost giant’s artifact, which left thirteen. Thirteen didn’t feel like an unreasonable number of suspects. I’d suggested that maybe my brother, acting alone, had hidden the harp somewhere, and that was still a possibility. But it wasn’t likely.

Artifacts are difficult to hide. The warm water in the horse barn told me that my brother had tricks I didn’t know, but hiding an artifact was another level. Artifacts hummed with magic. Werewolves might not be able to hunt them down, but anyone with an ounce of fae blood could.

“We could just ask if they’ve stolen a lyre,” I’d suggested to Elyna and Adam last night, sticking my feet out of the tub to cool off, because the water was a little too warm to keep every part of me in it all of the time. “And make them give it back.”

“You’ll run into trouble with that,” Elyna said.

“She isn’t serious,” Adam told her. “We need the lyre back, not broken or thrown into the lake as a sacrifice or tribute.”

He’d accepted that we were looking for a lyre rather than a harp. I wondered why an ancient, presumably knowledgeable being hadn’t known what to call his own artifact. I wondered if it would turn out to be significant. Still, a silver stringed musical instrument with a face carved on it should be easy to identify whether it was a harp or a lyre.

“We’re getting off track,” said Elyna. “Let me tell you about the people trapped here with us.” She eyed me. “Maybe it would be best to keep your questions for the end.”

Adam waved a hand in invitation.

“The largest group,” she said, “even if you don’t count Jack and me, is the bride’s party. We arrived before the storm got so bad. The bride, Tammy Vanderstaat, is in her midtwenties. She has a master’s in social work and is employed by a nonprofit.”

Standing in the dining hall now, it was easy to pick out the bride’s party. They occupied the table farthest from where Adam and I stood. The bride definitely drew my eye first—and I wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t beautiful, but her face was full of character, lit from within. She had more muscle than I was used to seeing on someone who wasn’t a shapeshifter. Maybe she was into martial arts or gymnastics or something.

“The other members of the bride’s party are her father, Peter, and four of his crew—all Chicago police officers who moonlight in remodeling.” Elyna had stopped there, then said, “I’ve known all of them for nearly a decade. They’ve never been to Montana before. We arrived here the day before the artifact was stolen, but I judge it highly unlikely that any of them are involved.”

“Artifacts can make people do very strange things.” I answered her from a wealth of unwanted experience.

Elyna’s eyelids lowered, and there was a growl I had not heard before in her voice. Not quite a threat, but nearly there. “They are mine, these men. I will protect them.”

That was why they had traveled to the lodge before the rest of the wedding party, missing the storm. Elyna had to come early because travel was complicated for vampires. Feeding along the way would be dangerous. Feeding at an isolated place in Montana in the winter would be very dangerous. Vampires need to feed often. Most of the ones powerful enough to live on their own find it more convenient to have a pool of humans who are regular donors: sheep.

“Understood,” Adam said easily. He knew vampires as well as I did. “We are here to get the artifact back, not to hurt anyone.”

Even without Tammy among them, I could have picked out the table of police officers. Not because I was so good at picking out policemen or vampire donors. And not even because it was the largest group seated in the dining room. It was because I could spot a pack at a hundred yards.

All of the laughing faces were turned toward their Alpha. The father of the bride, Peter Vanderstaat, I assumed, because he looked like Tammy. And also because when Elyna had spoken of him, she had done so with affectionate respect—and she hadn’t named the other men. It might have been because she didn’t care about them, but I thought it was to protect them from us. They were hers. But she hadn’t felt the same need to protect Peter. Or his daughter. She considered them her equals.

The second table held only two people, a man and a woman. Both of them bore a clear resemblance to each other in features and coloring, though her build was slight while his was heavier. He was dark haired and dark eyed. Her face was turned away, so I couldn’t see her eyes, but her hair was dark and, even braided, reached down past her hips.

“Then there are the refugees,” Elyna said. “They came here yesterday—no. It is after midnight. That means they came here the day before yesterday.”

The day my brother arrived at our house.

“I haven’t met them. I am a writer with odd hours.” It was said so airily I couldn’t tell if she really was a writer or if she used it as an excuse for not appearing in daylight. “They are hikers who go to bed early and, presumably, rise early, too. Victoria and Able Morgan, Peter told me, brother and sister. Midtwenties—about Tammy’s age.”

“What were they doing out here?” I asked, levering myself up on the edge of the tub for a while because, even after nearly freezing my feet earlier, I was now too hot.

“They were hiking.” She smiled at me. Neither she nor Adam had had to get in and out of the hot tub. I used my toe to splash some water in her direction.

She said, “I know, that’s what I thought, too.”

So her smile hadn’t been because I wasn’t as tough as she and Adam were, but because my face had shown what I thought about human people hiking for fun in the Cabinets in the middle of the winter. When I was growing up, not too far from here, my foster father had been part of a group of volunteers that went out to find people who had gone hiking in the winter. Once in a while they found them when they were still alive.

“Still think, actually,” she said. “I might be a city girl, but I know stupid ideas when I hear them. Peter tells me they are experienced winter hikers who have done winter hikes in Alaska, Northern California, and even, once, the Swiss Alps. This is the first time they’ve been here. The sudden cold snap that preceded the storm caught them unawares, and when they saw the lights—we had lights then—they decided it was smarter to take shelter for a few days and resume their hike when the weather subsides. Peter says they keep to themselves. Jack says he can’t get into their room.”

“Is that unusual?” Adam asked her.

Elyna shrugged. “He sounded like it was.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said, sliding back into the tub until the water hit the bottom of my chin and wishing my head didn’t hurt. “What about the groom’s people?”

“Zane’s not here,” Elyna said. “He was supposed to be on a plane landing in Missoula. But that wasn’t looking good last I heard.”

“Zane is the groom?” Adam asked.

Elyna nodded. “I haven’t met him, but Peter likes him—and after decades in the CPD, Peter’s instincts are pretty good. The only members of Zane’s party here are his parents.” She grimaced. “His parents—”

“The billionaires?” I said sympathetically.

She looked at me, eyebrows raised.

“The gas station attendant in Libby said it was a billionaire’s wedding.”

She laughed. “I don’t know about billionaire, but rich, yes. The family owns Heddar’s.”

“The grocery store chain?” Adam asked.

She nodded again. “And has controlling interest in two other chain stores I know about. Andrew and Dylis Heddar. Andrew’s grandfather started the grocery chain. Andrew’s father turned it into a national business concern, and Andrew, the biggest shark of all, has taken it international. They are not happy that their only child has chosen to marry a social worker from Chicago. Not happy at all. At least, Andrew isn’t pleased, and his wife…Peter says that she feels however her husband tells her to feel. She was an heiress of some sort, I think. Her family money was what allowed Andrew to expand.”

“Are they trying to stop it?” I asked.

Elyna shrugged. “Peter says there’s nothing they can do. Zane has his own money, inherited from his grandfather. He runs the company’s charitable arm—that’s how he and Tammy met. But he doesn’t need to work.”

At the table nearest to Adam and me, an elegantly clothed woman, presumably Dylis Heddar, pushed around her food—an egg white omelet—without enthusiasm. The man sitting next to her, his arm possessively on the back of her chair, conversed with a teenage girl who had a serving tray on her hip. The girl was Native, like me—nothing unusual in that, given where the lodge was located.

I found my eyes returning to Dylis Heddar. Elyna had dismissed Zane’s mother as a society woman who happened to be married to a dangerous man. The vampire had sounded both pitying and dismissive. But my instincts warned me to keep my eyes on Dylis—the nonentity wife rather than her business-shark husband—as if she were the more dangerous of the two.

Dylis was racehorse thin, with sharp cheekbones and skin as white as the snow outside. Her hair was white, too. Long and fine, it was caught up in a simple twist at the nape of her neck. She wore makeup, but it was subtle stuff. Her husband, Andrew, looked like he should be on a horse out on the range. He was tall and had a mobile face, given to sudden changes of expression. I was close enough to see that his eyes were clear blue.

One of the abilities I’d been born with was that I could usually tell what kind of magic a person held.

Mr. and Mrs. Heddar carried fae blood. He wasn’t even half-blood, though without the assist of the Soul Taker’s tinkering—which seemed to be in abeyance just now—I didn’t entirely trust that assessment. Dylis…Dylis felt different. She was fae, full-blooded, even. But there was something wrong with her magic.

The teenage server tried to take a step away from Heddar. He caught her wrist. It was just for an instant, long enough for her to stop trying to leave. When she quit, Heddar released her. Beside me, Adam tensed.

The girl moved her tray so that it was between her and the older man. She had a tight smile on her face, while her whole body told anyone with eyes she was very, very uncomfortable. I couldn’t hear what was being said over the music. Which was, I suppose, the point of having music. I recognized the girl from Elyna’s description as one of the three staff members; I assumed that the other two were in the kitchen.

Of her, Elyna had said:

“Emily’s responsible for cleaning rooms and whatever they need her for. She usually stays at the lodge for her workweek when there is a room available, going home to Libby on her days off. She works here summers and during school breaks and has since she was fourteen or fifteen. She’s seventeen now, will graduate from high school this year, and has been accepted to college at Montana State with scholarships. Pre-med.”

There was a sound out in the lake, and Elyna paused to stare into the mist before going back to her description. “Peter says she’s another quiet one. People like him, though, and he got her talking.”

Andrew Heddar knew he was making the girl uncomfortable and was enjoying it. I would have disliked him even without Elyna’s distaste.

“I know who I hope has the artifact,” I told Adam.

“He needs to leave the children alone,” Adam said. “Pick on someone his own size.”

I’d spoken very quietly, but Adam’s voice was louder than necessary, deliberately pitched to carry over the music. Everyone became aware of us at the same time.

This one’s for you, brother mine, I thought, taking a deep breath. Showtime.

“Who the hell are you?” asked Heddar, all the affable charm gone.

We were the center of everyone’s attention.

Except for Emily. As soon as Heddar was distracted, she made for the kitchens as fast as she could without actually running. I couldn’t tell if she was taking her moment to escape unwanted attention—or if she was going to get help. Maybe both.

At the far table, Peter rose to his feet in a measured movement that spoke to his training. He kept everyone else in his pack—his group, since they weren’t werewolves—seated with a short gesture of his left hand. He didn’t move quickly, but he pushed the chair out of his way in case he had to move. Standing, he wasn’t tall, but that didn’t matter. He owned the ground he stood upon in a way that reminded me of Adam.

I was pretty sure Elyna’s police officer friend was carrying a weapon from the way his right hand strayed a little farther back along his side than was natural. But his real power was in his shrewd, cool eyes and his trained calm. I had no doubt that he was, outside of my husband, the most dominant person in the room.

The hiker pair, Victoria and Able, moved at the same time as Peter stood. Their movement was more subtle. If I hadn’t been on high alert, I might not have noticed how the woman, Victoria, turned so she had a better view of Peter, or maybe Peter’s table—though I knew which way I’d vote on that. While she did that, her brother turned more fully toward Adam and me.

At the table nearest us, Dylis Heddar surged to her feet, accompanied by the crash of her chair.

“I know you,” she declared, her glassy eyes fixed on my husband. “I know who you are.” Her voice was soft, but it cracked on the beginnings of the words and sometimes in between. She sounded like a drug addict, pushing through lethargy with something that seemed like panic—or a very bad actor in a mid-century horror movie that probably featured a guy in a rubber monster costume. Her eyes were an even lighter shade of blue than her husband’s, but equally unusual.

Heddar’s expression sharpened. I could see he was still offended by Adam’s words but was rapidly rethinking his initial reaction. His peripheral vision must have been terrific, because he didn’t look over when he grabbed his wife’s arm with an unkind hand.

“Enough, Dylis.” To Adam he said, “I asked you. Who are you?”

Heddar had tried to assume control of the room and failed. I was pretty sure that at least some of his irritation with his wife was because she was holding the room’s attention without appearing to seek it. And his second attempt wasn’t doing any better than his first.

Dylis jerked her arm in an unsuccessful attempt to free herself. Like her voice, her movement was off, a little convulsive and awkward, the most effort put into the motion at the least efficient time.

“No,” she said breathlessly, still struggling. “No. He’s here to get it. The thing I hear in the walls. He’s here to save us all.”

“Dylis,” Heddar said sharply, his voice louder than the situation called for. “Stop.”

None of the other people in the room looked surprised at her outburst. At Peter’s table, Tammy Vanderstaat started to get up, her face concerned with a hint of anger ascending, eyes locked on Andrew Heddar’s hand. Her father said something in a low voice and she sat back down, but she wasn’t happy about it.

“The music,” Dylis said.

A clue! I thought in my best Inspector Clouseau imitation, caught up in the half-histrionic spell of the woman.

Dylis caught Adam’s gaze, and when she did, her body quit moving, stilling from her center of gravity out to her extremities. Briefly, the pupils of her eyes were hourglass shaped, like a goat’s, before they resumed a normal human appearance, even if they retained their startling sky-blue color.

Dylis Heddar’s power swirled around her, overwhelming her husband’s faint aura of magic as easily as her presence eclipsed his.

“The music in the walls,” Dylis whispered, as if we might have missed the clue the first time she’d said it.

Silence fell.

Able, the male half of the pair of hikers, broke the spell. “Hauptman?” He stood up, eyes widening in some strong emotion. “Who are you hunting here?”

I took a step closer to Adam—and it was as though the room was bathed in magic. It was hard to breathe, hard to hear—like Uncle Mike’s had been the day before yesterday—as if all of the protections in my mind went down at once.

I closed my eyes and grabbed Adam’s arm, using him, using our link, to center myself. I could feel the power of the Heddars’ magic. His not so negligible as I’d thought, hers far more vast and old—but still wrong in a way that I could not define.

I could feel the power of Elyna’s presence. Not just emanating from the room where she now rested, but in the ties she shared with all the people gathered around the farthest table—the bride’s table. She had been right; they were hers. She’d lent them power—as vampires do. They’d be a little harder to kill, a little faster, and age more slowly.

In the middle, between the Heddars’ fae magic and the bride’s table’s necromancy, were a pair of goblins—I presumed those were the two hikers.

In the kitchen…in the kitchen was—

Then Adam stepped into me, powering up the bonds between us, and I was back to normal.

There were, I thought, a lot of magical folk trapped in a lodge in the middle of a blizzard. What were the odds? There was more going on here than a stolen artifact. What had my brother gotten himself into?

“I am Hauptman,” Adam said. “Have you done something that means you need to be hunted?”

I’d forgotten that one of the goblins had challenged Adam. The spell of Soul Taker woo-woo must have only lasted a second or two. I would have been less surprised to find it had been hours.

Able raised his chin. “Not by the likes of you.”

“What’s going on out here?” asked a congenial voice in an accent even a little more Irish than the one Elyna’s dead husband had used. A man stepped out into the room, drying his hands with a dishcloth. He was tall and handsome yet somehow effacing, like the perfect British butler. The effect was only a little ruined by the Irish accent.

But the magic…

It rolled over the room like a warm wave that calmed and soothed as it drowned its victims. Able sat down, his face relaxing—though I noticed that his companion’s face didn’t seem to be reassured. Dylis sat down, too, and her husband released his punishing grip. Peter stayed on his feet, but he looked less like a policeman ready for anything and more like a mildly interested observer at a high school basketball game.

The green man said, “Ah, new flotsam from the storm. Welcome and more to all who seek shelter.”