I didn’t want Bran to come destroy Wulfe, because it would be wrong. He had done nothing, up to this point, that deserved aiming Bran at him. Besides, I tried really hard not to aim Bran at anyone. I had a policy of not using nuclear devices to take out pesky flies because that tended to yield mixed results. I tamped down the small voice that wondered if even Bran could take on Wulfe. I needed Bran to be immortal and unstoppable.
Right this moment, I had to convince Bran not to kill Wulfe.
“I hurt him—badly, I think,” I told Bran. “He was trying to help us for whatever twisted reason guides him—maybe because Marsilia asked him, maybe because he was bored. But he was trying to help us and got caught in the backlash of me trying to lay the spirits of zombies to rest. It broke something inside him.”
Bran muttered something that might have been, “I can break something inside him, too.”
“Bonarata broke him for real a long time ago,” I told Bran. “Wulfe is a wizard and a vampire and a witch.” That last might be a secret. I certainly hadn’t known it before the Night of the Zombies, as Ben liked to call it. But I needed Bran to understand about Wulfe so he didn’t just have him eliminated the way he’d just assigned us to eliminate Fiona. “He has spilled blood for Bonarata and for Marsilia for centuries. Tortured and killed for centuries.”
Into my dramatic pause, Bran said, with palpable irony, “Yes, Mercy, I know.”
“And his witchcraft is white.”
This time the pause was his.
“Exactly,” I said. “He is a lost soul wandering in the darkness . . .”
“Drivel,” said Bran, who had written that particular line for a rather beautiful song I’d heard him sing once. I think the song was a few centuries old—but he had written it.
“Mawkish sentimentality doesn’t make it untrue,” I told him. And that was a Bran quote as well. One he used both ways—true or untrue—depending upon the circumstances.
“He is dangerous,” I told Bran, “and unpredictable and all of that. But maybe he can be turned into an ally. Adam has made Marsilia an ally.”
“Adam thought Elizaveta was his ally.”
“So did Elizaveta,” I returned. “But that is beside the point.”
He took a long breath, and I pictured him holding the bridge of his nose. The breath had that sort of sound to it.
“I will leave him to you and Adam, then,” he said finally. “For now.”
“Thank you,” I said, and he growled at me.
“A third problem,” said Bran. “The creature who escaped Underhill. What you know about him, even with Beauclaire’s additions, is not enough for me to figure out who he is. It may be that I do not know him, or that I only know him through attributes that you haven’t run into.”
“Okay,” I said. I had really, really hoped that Bran could help us with this one. “He has Ben and Stefan,” I reminded Bran.
“I know,” he said gently. “And I would not like to lose either of them. To that end, I have some conjectures that may be useful.”
“Okay,” I said hopefully.
“First—that Beauclaire could not give you the creature’s name. The fae place great store by names. There are a number of fae who protect their names by not allowing others to speak them.”
“Okay, so the name could be important, once we figure out who this creature is. But we are unlikely to find him just by looking for someone hiding his name—because they all do that.”
“Exactly.” He sounded pleased again.
I wasn’t a child anymore. I shouldn’t be happy that he thought I was a good pupil for his Socratic method of teaching.
“I think you should focus on the bargaining part of what Beauclaire told you,” he told me. And now I could hear in his voice that he thought I’d missed something obvious.
“But they all bargain, too,” I said. And maybe I was a little sharp.
“Indeed,” he said. And the patience in his voice made me want to dye all of his underwear purple, though that hadn’t worked out so well the first time I’d tried it.
But I was a grown-up now, so I set aside petty vengeance and thought about what Beauclaire had said about the bargain.
“But not all of the fae had a bargain with Underhill,” I said finally.
My reward for seeing what Bran had seen was him saying, “And someone I know has a door to Underhill in her backyard, and one whom Underhill treasures to knock upon it and ask her to come out.”
I thought about Tilly and sighed. “You don’t happen to have any hints for dealing with a bloodthirsty immortal being with the attention span of a ten-year-old, do you?”
“Feed her sweets,” he said promptly. “Or call Ariana and ask her. But I think something sweet, especially if you bake it yourself, might be a way to coax out whatever information she might have.” He paused and then said, “And treat her like a co-conspirator, not a naughty child who has loosed doom upon the world. She may not be able to tell you much, but she may be useful to you all the same. Something within the boundaries of the bargain she has with him.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.
“And Adam?” I asked him hesitantly. All I had told him about Adam was that Adam had shut down our bond after we’d killed all the witches.
“Blow up the bond,” Bran said. “See what happens.”
And he hung up.
I stared at my phone. I called him back, but he didn’t pick up. I guess he thought that I needed to figure it out. Did he mean that I should try to destroy the bond between Adam and me? How in the world would I do something like that? I didn’t want to do that.
I tried to call him back again. Maybe if I explained that it wasn’t just Adam changing to the wolf involuntarily? It was . . . what? What did I know? That Adam thought I’d be harmed if the bond between us was open?
What did Adam think it would do to me? Did he think I would get caught up in his madness—assuming he thought that he was becoming a monster? “Argh,” I said in frustration, and hit the red button on the screen.
Bran had obviously decided not to take any more calls from me tonight.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” I grumped, trying to figure out what I could text to Bran so that he’d call me back.
“Me,” said Adam, opening the door. “Who were you on the phone with?”
“Bran,” I told him. “You and I need to talk.”
His eyes were so unhappy.
But his face was locked in his I-deal-with-messes expression, so I figured he didn’t know that I could see through it. It was easier to read him with our bond up and functioning—but I’d known him for a long time before we’d been mated, and I’d paid attention.
“I agree,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “But not here.”
“Not here,” I agreed. Too many sharp ears—and at least one of them had been co-opted by the enemy. But it wasn’t just that. With this many of the pack in the house, we wouldn’t have much time before someone needed Adam’s attention—as had been amply demonstrated when I’d been trying to talk to him earlier.
“Your house?” he asked, tipping his head toward my empty manufactured house.
I started to say yes, then hesitated. “I don’t want to run into Anna again,” I told him. “How about the garage? I can check the phone while we’re there.”
I had forwarded that phone to mine, but no one had called for the garage since this morning. That might mean that no one needed their car repaired. It might also mean that I’d flubbed it.
“Okay,” he said, holding the bedroom door wider and stepping back in invitation. “I’ll drive. Your cars are under the weather.”
“Ha-ha,” I grumbled, walking past him. “Poor Jetta.”
I was going to have to find time to work on the Vanagon, I thought, resigned. I hated to d
rive it until I got all the air bubbles out. The air bubbles wouldn’t actually hurt anything. All they would do was make the gauges tell me the van was overheating when it wasn’t. The big problem with that was that if the engine really did overheat, I’d ignore it because I’d think it was just air bubbles. That would ruin the engine.
“I will buy you a new Jetta,” Adam said, stepping into my path so I stopped.
He reached up and caressed my cheeks on either side of my broken nose. His touch was gentle enough that it didn’t make my nose hurt worse than it already did.
“I’m onto your devious plot,” I said, rising up on my toes to kiss his cheek. I did not wince when the move caused my ribs to remind me that they’d been injured, too. I didn’t want to devolve into a “Mercy is hurt” conversation again.
“No new Jettas,” I said, putting the emphasis on the word he’d tried to skate by me as I started for the stairs. “Even though they have airbags. I will be laughed at by all VW mechanics everywhere if I get caught driving a new car. I just have to find another old car. Those old VWs are engineered to fold around you so even without an airbag they do okay in accidents.”
I caught myself before confessing that I’d probably have been all right, or at least my nose would have been okay, if the seat belt hadn’t given way. Because that would feed his argument and not mine.
I thought about where I could start looking for another car as I started walking. It had taken me a while to find the Jetta. I’d call all the scrapyards here, in Yakima, and in Spokane, let them know I was looking for a car that was reasonably restorable. Maybe I’d have to give in and pay a little more—it was hard to find them cheap. At least those old Jettas and Rabbits weren’t doing what the Vanagons had done—Vanagons were more expensive to buy used than they’d sold fresh off the assembly line. My Syncro was worth a lot more now than it had been new.
“Maybe another Rabbit,” I mused. “My old Rabbit lasted me more than a decade. The Jetta didn’t even make it a year.”
“No more Rabbits,” said Adam. “At least not this week. I think we’ve had quite enough rabbits for one week.”
He trailed me down the stairs. Or maybe he was herding me down the stairs. I was starting to get an odd vibe from him.
I snuck a peek over my shoulder at him. Caught off guard, his eyes were still as unhappy as they had been when I opened the bedroom door.
“What?” Adam asked me.
But before I had to answer, Warren approached to ask him about the schedule for guard duty—and if we were still running with that plan after everyone had been told to bunk up.
* * *
• • •
It took us about a half hour before we actually got going. We didn’t talk in the SUV on the way to my office. I wasn’t sure why not.
I mean, of course I knew why I didn’t say anything. I was still mulling over what Bran had said, trying to organize it so it made sense. Sorting through the things Bran had actually said—and the things I’d extrapolated from those. The first being important, the second being a little more suspect.
But I didn’t know why Adam didn’t say anything. Maybe he’d forgotten what he wanted to talk to me about in the avalanche of questions he’d dealt with on our way out the door.
When I looked at him, his eyes were opaque in the shadows. For a moment, though, I was caught by the way the dashboard illuminated the planes and curves of his face. He had the kind of beauty that would make maidens in old tales throw themselves off cliffs in order to attract his attention. Mesmerizing.
He didn’t notice me watching him, though—too focused on whatever had been keeping him quiet the rest of the drive. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a good thought, judging by the tension in his shoulders.
I put my hand on his thigh. I wasn’t sure he noticed. That was really not like him at all. By the time we made it to the garage, I was starting to worry about him—or about what he had to say. Maybe he knew something more than I did about our current circumstances, but it didn’t feel quite like that.
The parking lot was lit up a lot better than it had been before we’d rebuilt the garage. I could have sat on the front step and read a book. The light made it easier for Adam’s security cameras to get clear pictures.
I stopped on the way to the office and stared at one of the cameras. Not that I could see it—it was really small. But I knew where it was.
“Adam,” I said thoughtfully. “How often do you purge the surveillance video from here?”
“I don’t,” he said.
That distracted me. “Really? Never? Doesn’t that take up a lot of data storage?”
“Data storage is cheap at twice the price,” he said. “You have been attacked here by werewolves, vampires, volcano gods, and—” He stopped and grimaced.
“A Tim,” I told him stoutly. “Though he came out the worst in that encounter.”
He gave me a short nod. “I don’t erase anything.”
“Okay,” I said, getting my brain off Tim and onto more current matters. “If you don’t erase it, do you have some nifty way of sorting through it?”
“What do you need?” he asked.
“James Palsic brought a car in for me to repair a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t notice him then, because I am pretty sure that remember-me-not thing he has going is a variation of pack magic that he’s learned to twist to his own use. Zee was here that day—and he didn’t even notice James was a werewolf.”
“If you didn’t recognize him then, how did you figure out he came in?” he asked. “Did he tell you?”
I shook my head. “Something clicked while we were exchanging words at Kelly’s house and that magic quit working on me. Apparently, it quit retroactively, too. Because as soon as it quit working, I remembered him.
“If you can find him on the feed, maybe he left some clue about where they are staying,” I said.
We had the plates to the Ford truck, but they were registered to a fictional address, according to George. They did tell us that the wolves had been here for long enough to acquire Washington plates. I didn’t expect the plates on his VW bug to be any more use. Especially because I was pretty sure those plates had been from out of state. But he had given us a phone number that might be of use.
Adam nodded and sounded more like himself when he said briskly, “Sounds like a good idea.”
I keyed in the sequence that would unlock the door—for a garage that specializes in inexpensive repairs to cars that tend to be older than I am, my shop’s security is pretty high-end.
“I know it’s a long shot,” I told him. “But I hate waiting for the bad guys to make a move. We could head to your office after we get done here.”
“I don’t like defensive wars, either,” Adam agreed. “I can access the video files from here.”
I let us in but didn’t turn the lights on in the office. There were windows all the way around, which was awesome for working there. But just now, lighting up the office would make us a perfect target for someone sitting outside with a gun.
It was true that the immediate threats I knew about were unlikely to be sitting outside with a gun. Though werewolves (and I supposed Wulfe, too) could use guns just fine, shooting us in an attempt to take over the pack would make them look weak. A bullet wouldn’t be enough fun for Wulfe to try.
But there were a lot of people who were unhappy about the changes taking place in the world, and everyone knew that the Columbia Basin Pack’s Alpha was mated to Mercy, who owned that garage in east Kennewick.
There were shades on the windows for just that reason, but they were a pain in the butt. They were supposed to be electronic, but that had lasted exactly a week. We were in discussions with the manufacturer that felt like they might take a long time.
“Can you see well enough to get into the video system?” I asked Adam. “I could just pull the shades and turn on the l
ights if that’s useful.”
“I can see fine.” He walked toward the door to the bays instead of to the corner of the office where a monitor that scrolled through the cameras sat on an expensive-looking pile of electronics.
“Adam?” I asked. “Where are you going?”
“The controls in the office are dummy controls,” he told me. “The real controls are in the garage proper.”
“Huh,” I said.
“We give the bad guys something to ‘shut down’ and they quit looking,” he explained. Which was why he made the big money in security.
“Okay,” I said. “While you do that, I’ll search the receipts. We require a phone number and an address. The address may be bogus—but we called him to get his car.” I was pretty sure he hadn’t given the name James Palsic. That was an odd enough last name, I’d have remembered it. And a pseudonym might be a clue, too.
“So he’ll be on the cameras twice,” Adam said.
“Yep. He came in about four p.m., maybe as early as three thirty, but no earlier than that. Not last week but sometime in the previous two weeks,” I told him.
“Okay.”
He waited in the open doorway while I settled myself on a box behind the counter and pulled the office keyboard and monitor down where I could use them. Tucked behind the counter, they were low enough that no one would see the light from the monitor from the outside.
“Why did we put all the windows in here, again?” Adam asked as I sat down. I think he was trying for a teasing tone, but his eyes were focused on my face. On my nose. The tape strapped across the bridge of my nose was going to be my friend for a week or so; I’d get rid of it about the same time my black eyes would turn yellow. At least they hadn’t had to pack it.
“Because windows are more friendly than walls,” I told him, touching my nose a little self-consciously. “And mostly we are in the bays anyway.” Having our bond shut down was making me ridiculous. Adam loved me, broken nose and all. I reassured myself of that with the memory of his face when he’d first seen me in the hospital. Even so, I couldn’t help but say, in a voice that was a little wobbly, “They said it would heal without a bump.”
Smoke Bitten Page 20
