Smoke Bitten

by Patricia Briggs

  “Why you?” repeated the weaver.

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

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

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

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

  He knew, I thought.

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

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

  The weaver looked up at me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He looked small and powerless—an object of pity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I imagine not,” I told her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He nodded, then went back to his call.

  * * *

  • • •

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

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

  “Or years,” said Nonnie.

  James nodded, pointing a finger in her direction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

  • • •

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

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

  “Yes,” he said, “we have noticed.”

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

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

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

  “May I ask one question?”

  “Of course.”

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

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

  “Friendship?” I said.

  “Not all relationships look alike,” he said.

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

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

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

  “Good,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

  And I had to be satisfied with that.

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

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

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

  Fiona was still a problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Life happened. And we forgot to worry about Fiona.

  14

  I couldn’t sleep.

  A heavy arm wrapped around my shoulders.

  “Feeling restless?” The growl in Adam’s voice made my toes curl—they knew what that roughness meant and they liked it.

  So did I.

  “Yes,” I answered, my own voice a purr.

  “I can help with that,” he promised. And boy did he.

  His efforts were above and beyond to the point that when his phone rang in the middle of the night, I only woke up long enough to hear a bit of the convers
ation.

  “—false alarm, probably, sir, cameras don’t—”

  There was no stress in Adam’s employee’s voice and it didn’t sound urgent, so I went back to sleep.

  I woke up when Adam patted my butt. I cracked my eye open suspiciously and he laughed.

  “Not waking you up for that again—not that it wasn’t fun. But we have some equipment problems. The alarms at the garage are going off again, though the cameras aren’t showing anything.”

  The system at my garage had been developing quirks over the last couple of weeks. His IT people couldn’t run it down closer than “an intermittent glitch.” Adam had finally ordered a whole new system, but it wouldn’t be in for a couple of weeks.

  “I’m going to check in on that, then drive out to work and give my people a surprise visit.” He did those to keep his people on their toes. And to let them know that he wasn’t asking them to do anything he wouldn’t do—because on his surprise visits, he’d sometimes pick a random pair of guards and do their patrols with them. Sure enough he continued, “I’ll be out most of the day. I have a couple of new people to torment.”

  I grunted at him.

  “Why don’t you sleep in this morning?” he said.

  “How is it that you are this cheerful?” I asked him plaintively. “You didn’t get any more sleep than I did.”

  “I am male,” he said, and wiggled his eyebrows like the villain from a B horror movie. “Sex is better than sleep.”

  “Go away,” I moaned, rolling over to bury my face in my pillow.

  He laughed and started to do that.

  “But kiss me first.”

  He rolled me back over and did that, too.

  When my alarm went off an hour later, I was really tempted to sleep in. Then I remembered that it was Saturday and I would be the only one at work.

  Jesse and her friends were going to a concert in Seattle. Adam had fretted about security—so Jesse had called Tad and invited him along as her “muscle.” Which was all well and good, but it left me alone to mind the shop. I could have asked Zee to come in, but he had a project of some sort going on and told me not to bother him for a couple of weeks.