Smoke Bitten

by Patricia Briggs

  Adam finished his text to Jesse, glanced casually around, then said, “Let’s save other important things for the car. We are getting a lot of surreptitious attention.”

  “Sounds like a smart thing to do,” I said agreeably, and watched his shoulders ease down.

  Don’t worry, my love, I won’t peel open your pain until after I talk to Bran about how to do it most efficiently, I thought. But better to do that than to find out that Adam had given in to despair sometime when I wasn’t around to stop him.

  Elizaveta had broken open something inside him, and I wasn’t sure that just getting rid of the spell was going to fix him.

  “You are healing remarkably quickly from the car wreck,” he said. Apparently picking at my wounds was a good subject change.

  Fair enough, mine weren’t as deep, and they were getting better.

  “Right?” I said. “I’m still achy here and there—and my nose still hurts. But I’m a lot better than I expected to be at this point. I’m pretty sure it’s Hannah’s fault.”

  I told him about Hannah’s granny’s bourbon and what Underhill had said about it. I’d told him the gist of the conversation with Underhill yesterday, but I’d forgotten about Hannah’s bourbon.

  “It’s not going to bring anyone back from death’s door,” I told him judiciously. “But it beats any over-the-counter painkiller all to heck.”

  “I wonder if Hannah’s granny’s fae blood is the reason that Kelly and Hannah have so many kids,” Adam mused. “Though it seems like the fae blood should work against them, because the fae have more trouble reproducing than werewolves do.”

  “Maybe it’s Hannah’s granny’s secret ingredient,” I told him. “Take one sip before bedtime as needed for conception.”

  He rewarded me with a laugh.

  My cell phone rang. I dug it out of my purse and looked at the caller ID. Palsic. I turned it toward Adam so he could see.

  His smile fled, and he nodded.

  I answered it warily. “This is Mercy.”

  “This is Nonnie Palsic.” She sounded rattled down to her bones. “Could you help us? I don’t know . . . I don’t know what to do. He’s . . . like the trolls in The Hobbit.”

  I had to think a moment—and then realized what she was saying. “You mean when they turned to stone?”

  Adam had already taken out his wallet and was counting out bills on the table, paying for the food that hadn’t come yet. There were protein bars in the SUV. I would feed him on the way.

  “Sort of,” she said. “But like that. Yes. Can you help?”

  “We’re coming,” I told her. “Who did the smoke weaver get?”

  “Smoke weaver?” she said.

  “Fae,” I told her. “He bites people and makes them kill. And he can change one thing into another—like the old alchemists tried to change lead into gold. That kind of thing.”

  “God help us,” she said, and then she took a shaky breath. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier. “Your smoke weaver has changed my mate into stone.”

  “Where are you?” I asked her as we hurried through the restaurant toward the parking lot. Adam paused briefly to talk to our waitress and then caught up as Nonnie rattled off an address.

  Adam took out his phone and keyed in the location. As soon as we were outside, we both broke into a jog. I wasn’t sure there was a reason to hurry, though. James Palsic had been turned to stone. Even Tolkien’s trolls hadn’t come back from that.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Is Fiona there with you?” I asked, belting in.

  “No, I—wait.” She took another deep breath. And again, it seemed to help. When she started talking, she was calmer. “Things you need to know. Fiona and Sven are on their way to kill Warren Smith’s boyfriend, the one who shot Sven.”

  I glanced at Adam.

  “Kyle’s at work,” he said. “Both Warren and Zack are on guard duty at his work, too.”

  “Fiona likes to shoot people,” Nonnie told us in a weary voice. “She hits what she aims at.” Almost to herself she muttered, “I told James that she was bad news—but, as he pointed out, we didn’t have a lot of options at the time.”

  “Who is with you?” I asked, as Adam pulled out his phone and called Warren.

  “Li Qiang and Kent,” she said. “James said you told him to call Bran yesterday.” She hesitated, then said, “We’ve been trying to fly under Bran’s radar. Fiona said that our defection from the Galveston pack would be a capital offense—that he’d send Charles out to hunt us. He would kill us all. Fiona said that once Harolford was Alpha here, we’d be safe from retaliation because your pack isn’t one of the Marrok’s.”

  “We exist independently because Bran allows it,” I said dryly. “Bran hasn’t given our pack carte blanche, and he wouldn’t have overlooked Harolford taking over. Did James call Bran yesterday?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And talked to him for a while, apparently. But he didn’t say anything until Fiona and Sven left to go after their target—we were supposed to go after ours then. That doesn’t matter. We didn’t. Once the four of us were alone, James explained to us that Fiona had been lying to us all along: we could have gone to Bran for help—but Fiona is under a death sentence. She needed us.”

  “Bran would have killed her, even if she and Harolford had succeeded here,” I told her.

  “So James said,” she agreed.

  “So how did James get turned to stone?” I asked.

  “Bran invited us to Montana. As soon as Fiona and Sven left, we started packing,” she said. “James finished first so he went to get the car. He never came back. We were looking for him—and Li said . . . Li said, ‘Hey, Nonnie, do you remember a rock being there?’ And it was James.”

  There was horror in her voice. I didn’t want to push her over the edge until she’d given us all of the information that we needed, so I didn’t ask her any more about James. I’d see him soon enough.

  “When are you expecting Fiona back?” I asked. “We will help if we can, but I need to know what my people will be walking into.”

  “Sven and Fiona are supposed to be back here by five,” she said. “But Fiona likes to savor her kills—and if you manage to keep her from her target . . . she doesn’t give up.”

  I looked at Adam, who had just set his phone down. I hadn’t tried to follow his conversation.

  “The three of them will stay indoors and away from windows until we give them an all-clear. Warren and Zack are armed. Kyle is sending everyone in his office home. We can hunt Fiona and Harolford down at our leisure.”

  “Did you hear that?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Kyle Brooks is safe and likely to stay that way. We have time. I am going to hang up now and confer with Adam. Expect us about a half hour from now.”

  “Okay,” she said mournfully. “We’ll wait.”

  I hung up.

  “We can’t help Ben,” Adam said. “And no one turned him to stone.”

  “I’ve been working on how to deal with the weaver,” I told him. I grabbed the backpack we kept on the floor of the back seat and came up with the protein bars. “I’d like to have had more time to make sure I’m right. But I know who our villain is—and I think I know what we need to do.”

  “Tell me,” Adam said.

  “I can’t tell you his name—I think that might attract his attention in the wrong way.”

  “But you’ve worked it out?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Maybe. Probably. He’s not powerful as the fae go.”

  Adam gave me a look.

  “Really. Outside of the power that Underhill gave him, he is one of the lesser fae.”

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  “The fae are creatures whose lives are bo
und by rules. That they cannot lie being the core rule all of them must follow.” I handed him a protein bar. “Here, eat this.”

  “I never thought of them that way,” Adam said, taking the bar and starting in on it. I immediately felt a little calmer.

  “That’s because you usually deal with the powerful fae,” I told him. “The Gray Lords, Zee, Baba Yaga, and the like. The powerful fae have a lot fewer rules and they are bendy.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Yes, I’ve noticed that.”

  “The other important thing to remember about the rules is that they constrain all the fae. But only the fae.” I frowned. “Dang it. I think that the rule about lying has to be an exception, because we know that the fae actually can lie—they just suffer a horrible fate if they do.”

  “Maybe that is the rule,” Adam suggested. “If a fae lies, they will suffer a horrible fate.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling better. “That fits. And the fae can’t lie without suffering a horrible fate. But we could lie to a fae.”

  “Only if we have a death wish,” said Adam. “But I know what you mean. I could tell Zee that you love orange juice. Which he knows isn’t true. But I could say the words and not suffer a horrible fate.”

  “Right,” I told him.

  “The weaker the fae, the more rules they have?” Adam asked, pulling the conversation back to the point.

  “Yes.” I looked up and realized he was taking the most direct route to the address we’d been given. “Could we make a stop at home before we go see what the smoke weaver has done to James Palsic?”

  His eyebrows went up, but he made a minor course correction that would take us home first. I unwrapped another protein bar and handed it to him. His lip quirked up, but he took the bar.

  I watched him eat and thought about how I wanted to frame the information I’d put together. I needed him to believe me so that he would agree to the plan I’d devoted a lot of time to yesterday while I had been fixing cars. Because that plan required a certain amount of risk on my part—which was something that was hard for Adam. But I was the only person who could do it.

  “Take brownies,” I said. “The lowest caste of brownies have very specific rules. They must find good people. Once they do, they clean their homes or do work for them—and this makes the brownies happy. But they can do these things only so long as the people they are working for never see them and never say anything about them. They must be given milk and bread—but cannot be thanked aloud. If they are seen, thanked, or not fed, the brownies have to move on and find someone else to serve. They have no choice about any of it.”

  “What rules does the smoke weaver have?” Adam asked.

  “He has to make bargains,” I told him. “If one is offered to him properly, he has to accept. That’s how Underhill caught him in the first place. And there’s a rule about his name, too. People who know it can’t tell anyone what it is. Before Underhill got ahold of him, he had only one power, to transform one thing into another. It is an impressive power—but it is also very limited.”

  “Tell that to James Palsic,” said Adam.

  “Yes, well.” I waved that away. It shouldn’t matter to my plan. I hoped. “Tilly told me that the intent of her upgrade was that he would have an easier time making himself look like a specific person. It made me think that was a problem for him before she changed him. Like maybe he couldn’t make himself look very much like a person at all.”

  Sorting through the implications of Tilly’s story had taken me most of yesterday.

  “The way to defeat him is to use the rules that he has to follow,” I said. Baba Yaga had told me something of the sort.

  “I can already tell,” Adam said, “that I’m not going to like this.”

  “Here,” I said. “Eat another protein bar.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I drove Jesse’s car to the address that Nonnie Palsic had given me. Adam would collect what I needed from home and then follow me out; hopefully it wouldn’t take too long.

  It wasn’t that far from our house—maybe ten minutes in a direction I seldom took, one of those out-of-the-way places that didn’t lie on a direct route between our house and anywhere I was likely to need to go. It was out in the hill country between the Tri-Cities and Oregon where there was no water available for irrigation and not enough houses that the city would pipe water out. This late in the summer the hills were a pale dirt brown dusted with sparse remains of grass.

  I turned up a well-tended gravel road and followed it for a quarter of a mile that twisted around with the lay of the land, no houses in sight. It took a final turn, climbed a steep grade, and popped out on the top of a hill, where it ended in an asphalt circular driveway laid out before a huge house. The house had been carefully placed to hide itself from the highway below without impacting the panoramic views. A narrow ring of bright green grass circled the house, and there were a few raised flower beds that were unplanted.

  I parked the car near the front door, as far as I could get it from the three people on the other edge of the driveway. It left me with about twenty yards to walk—it was a big circular drive. But I didn’t want Jesse’s car to suffer the same fate my last two cars had, so I wanted it well out of the action. I couldn’t do anything until Adam got here anyway.

  I didn’t say anything as I approached the three werewolves because I was too busy looking at the tall, pillar-like rock they were huddled around. I had expected a detailed sculpture in stone—maybe because of Nonnie’s comparison to The Hobbit, or maybe because of how detailed the concrete version of the semi tractor’s tire at the Lewis Street tunnel had been. But this looked sort of like a basalt columnar joint—the kind houses like this used as landscaping focal points—except that it lacked the sharp-edged hexagonal structure.

  I walked around to the side that the others were standing in front of, and I realized that the image I should have been imagining was more like Han Solo’s encasement than Peter Jackson’s stone trolls. This side of the rock had eyes and an opening through which I could hear the faint slide of air.

  Nonnie looked at me with a tear-stained face and said, “He’s having trouble breathing now.”

  It did sound shallow and irregular.

  “Adam’s bringing what I need,” I told her.

  “What kind of a place is this?” asked Kent, sounding traumatized.

  “The kind of place where fairy tales live,” said Chen Li Qiang in a dreamy voice, “and monsters dwell.”

  I gave him a concerned look, but he just hugged himself.

  “We are the monsters,” he told me seriously. “And we are damned.”

  I frowned at him and asked the others, “Has he been bitten recently? By anything, a rabbit, maybe?”

  “No, he just falls into bad poetry when he’s sad. It was—” Kent Schwabe stopped as Adam’s big black SUV topped the rise and drove directly to where we stood.

  Li Qiang watched it for a minute, then said, “Is there something wrong with the suspension? It seems to be bouncing more than nec—”

  One of the rear windows exploded outward in a shower of glass.

  “Nothing wrong with the SUV,” I said, and turned my attention back to James. His eyes, encased in stone, were red and dry. He couldn’t blink because he did not have lids. I wondered if the smoke weaver had done that deliberately, or if it had been a cruel accident. Regardless, they didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if that was because he couldn’t move them—or because he didn’t move them.

  If it weren’t for the shaky breathing, I would never have believed that he was still alive.

  “Oh my God,” said Jesse beside me.

  “What are you doing here?” I said, horrified.

  “There wasn’t anyone to drive the car,” she told me.

  “Oh,” said Aiden in a small voice. “This. He’ll take a day or two to die
all the way.”

  “Not going to happen,” I said, with a lot more sangfroid than I actually felt.

  I looked around and said, “Li Qiang? I am putting you in charge of making sure that Jesse and Aiden don’t get hurt. Jesse”—I tapped her on the shoulder—“is our human daughter. This is our son, Aiden.” I tapped him. I met Chen Li Qiang’s eyes. “I am trusting you because everyone else I trust will have their hands full—and Carlos has vouched for you. I trust Carlos’s judgment.”

  Li Qiang gave me an oddly formal bow that would have been more at home on another continent. “You can help my friend?”

  “I hope so,” I told him.

  “Then I will keep them safe this day as long as I have breath in my body.”

  I turned to Jesse and Aiden and started to say something, but Aiden beat me to the punch. “Your son.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “It would be weird the other way around, don’t you think?”

  His smile was a little tentative and he gave me a nod.

  “Okay—you two and Li Qiang, I want you to stand . . .” There was nowhere safe, not until I was further into my gambit.

  “Next to each other out of the way,” said Jesse.

  “I’ll help keep them safe,” Kent said to me. He had to raise his voice a little to be heard over the sounds coming from the SUV. “If you are what I have heard, you will know I am telling the truth.”

  He was. But he was also the one that Bran had been unsure of. I hesitated—but Aiden was capable of protecting himself, now that his fire was mostly recovered from what Wulfe had done to it.

  “Thank you,” I said, nodding toward Li Qiang, so he would know I meant him, too. I liked having the (more or less) innocent bystanders innocently bystanding instead of getting hurt.

  I looked at the SUV and said, “Hey, Jesse. You and Aiden are here. And that looks like Luke, Kelly, and your father in the car. Who is minding the fort?”