Witches were mortal, I was pretty sure. I had the feeling that they probably avoided the fae. It was a question that I might have thrown to Elizaveta—but not anymore.
“Do you think that we should warn the fae that there is a new group of witches in town?” I asked.
Zee grunted. “If they do not know, then they deserve to be blindsided. But I expect they know; they are planning their meeting with the government and so are more concerned with the doings of the mortals here than usual.”
I guess the meeting wasn’t as secret as all that, at least not among the fae.
Zee grunted again, then picked out a single inconsequential detail from my whole recitation of witches and zombies and said, “That rifle that was damaged—it was the one your father bequeathed you?”
I blinked at him a moment, then said, “Yes. The Marlin.”
He nodded. “Bring to me your father’s rifle, and I will fix it.”
Adam had looked at it and determined that the zombie had bent more than just the barrel. He didn’t think it could be fixed.
Neither of us had thought about bringing it to Zee. If Peter’s sword had been broken, Zee would have been the first person I’d have taken it to. But I just didn’t think of Zee and rifles at the same time.
“I will,” I said in a voice that was a little rougher than I meant it to be.
He frowned at me. “What are you leaking about, child? Go work on that carburetor. You have the mixture too rich, I can smell it from here.”
I huffed and went back to the car I’d been working on yesterday. I hadn’t been crying, no matter what Zee had said. Though it had been a close call. Bryan had really loved that rifle.
Tad returned with lunch. It was Chinese, so splitting it between the three of us instead of two was pretty easy. I shared the same information with Tad that I had with Zee. He was still mulling it over when an old customer stopped in with a stalling Passat and no appointment.
“I heard you were back in business,” Betty said, handing me the keys. “Thank goodness. I’ve had it to the dealership twice and they can’t figure out what it is.”
The dealership had a couple of decent mechanics in their mix. If someone brought a problem back to them, the car went to one of their good people. If they hadn’t been able to fix her Passat, then I was glad Zee had decided to spend the day here.
“We’ll take a look at it and call you when we know more,” I told her. “Do you want Tad to give you a ride home?”
Betty was in her eighties, though she didn’t look a day over sixty-five. Even if the waiting area was cleaner than it used to be, I wasn’t going to make her sit around until we knew what was up.
“Bless you, Mercy,” she said. “That would be wonderful.”
As Tad drove off with her, our two o’clock appointment drove in. I took that one and left the Passat with its mystery problem to Zee.
The rest of the day was pretty normal. We fixed a few cars, including the Passat. I never did figure out what was wrong with it—Zee told me he had to let the bad mojo out. I thought he was kidding, but that was what I put on the bill.
Betty had been Zee’s customer before I started working at the shop. She just laughed as she paid for the work when Tad and I dropped the car off.
“That Zee,” she said. “He likes his little jokes. One time he said that he told my car to behave itself. He didn’t charge me for that one—but the car ran fine for another six months. If Zee says he fixed the car, it will be fixed.”
We sent one old BMW to the eternal resting place (a scrap yard) and mourned with her owner. When there weren’t customers around, we chatted about odd topics. Zee, Tad, and I had spent a lot of days like this. It felt like coming home in a way the previous weeks had not, as if with Zee’s presence, the shop had regained its heart.
Working on a car cleared my head. When there was a gnarly mechanical problem to fix, I would concentrate on that—and all the other things going on in my life got sorted out by my subconscious. But most of the work I did in the shop was more like building with Legos. Once I had the plan of attack laid out, and understood the steps to take—then there was this Zen time where my head cleared and I could examine things without the hefty weight of emotion.
The first thing I decided was that now that there were witches added into the mix, Adam could not have left the humans in the government to guard themselves. There was only so much that mundane security could do against supernatural forces. Because of the badly written contract, he had an excuse to give to the fae—so that contract had actually turned out to be useful. And it was nice that he was charging them more money.
“Why are you humming, Mercy?” asked Tad, shutting the hood of a car with his elbow because his hands were covered with grease. Neither Tad nor Zee had adopted my new habit of using nitrile gloves to keep their hands cleaner.
“Humming is fine,” proclaimed Zee more directly from under the new bug (as opposed to the old ones) he was working on. He didn’t like the new version as well—he had a whole spiel in German that he would occasionally lapse into about the beauty of a simple car.
“But do not, please,” he continued, “hum ‘Yellow Submarine’ anymore today. I may be working on a Beetle, but it is not necessary to also sing songs of the Beatles.”
I switched to “Billie Jean” and Tad sighed. Zee snorted but didn’t object.
The second thing I thought about were the witches who had killed Elizaveta’s family. There weren’t a lot of clues about who they were. The only clue I could think of was that one of the witches shared a close bloodline with Frost.
I didn’t know much about Frost’s background, but I knew where to go looking.
I should talk to Stefan.
And all of my Zen disappeared in one thought. Stefan was my friend. He had risked his life for mine on a number of occasions, the most recent being my involuntary trip to Europe.
He had never done anything to me that was not my choice. But that didn’t matter. I didn’t want to talk to him at all.
Maybe Adam could.
6
Adam called about five minutes before closing time to say that he had another meeting and Jesse was staying over with a friend. He sounded tired. I told him it was no trouble; I’d just stop and grab something on the way home.
Zee had gone for the day, but Tad was helping me tidy the office.
“You know,” he said, swinging his mop with practiced ease. “You and my dad have been whining all day about how sterile the garage is. But now you’re insisting on cleaning all the nooks and crannies that might have gotten even a smudge of dirt.”
“I don’t know why I surround myself with insubordinate smart alecks,” I said, getting a smudge off the big window with a little elbow grease. “Maybe I should fire a few.”
He gave me a companionable grin. “If you’re going to start firing smart alecks, you’d have to start with the biggest one of all. I dare you to fire my dad, I just dare you.”
I looked around. “You know that he’s going to give us both the edge of his tongue if we don’t have this immaculate when he gets in tomorrow.”
“Yep. Hypocrites, the both of you,” he said affectionately.
We were getting ready to lock up when a battered bug sporting a rattle-can, glitter-gold paint job drove into the lot. The VW known as Stella chugged roughly, coughed, and died as soon as she stopped moving.
“Sorry,” Nick, Stella’s owner and devoted fan, said. “I know it’s closing time, but Stella isn’t doing well—I can’t figure it out. And I need her to run for another three weeks before I can afford to fix her again.”
It took Tad and me and the young man about three hours to fix Stella to our satisfaction. Nick wasn’t an absolute newbie; buying Stella two years ago had turned him from someone who had never put a wrench on a bolt to someone who could change his own oil and spark plugs
. But Stella was a diva who would be a challenge for the most experienced mechanic to keep running.
Darkness had fallen by the time Nick drove off, but Stella was purring like a kitten.
“Softy,” said Tad as we cleaned up.
“You donated your time, too,” I reminded him. I’d told Nick that we’d throw in labor because he’d been sending people to the reopened shop. He could pay for the parts when he caught his breath. If money was too tight, he could come put in a few hours—he knew enough to run tools.
I expected Tad to continue teasing, but he turned grim instead. “Last time I left you alone here,” he said shortly and half-embarrassed, “you almost died. Not going to do that again anytime soon. Nick wouldn’t have even slowed your kind of bad guys down.”
And that explained why he’d been coming to the shop before I got here and insisted on locking up afterward. We all had our scars.
“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate it.” Contrary to popular belief, I did know my limits. Having Tad guard my back was comforting.
He nodded without meeting my eyes. And he waited until I was safely in my car before he got into his own.
I decided to celebrate surviving the day by driving the extra few miles to a local fast-food place that served an Asian-Mexican fusion that could take the roof of your mouth off with heat and still taste amazing. I grabbed enough food to feed half the pack, just in case, and headed home. Traffic made me turn right instead of left and I found myself taking the long way back.
The long way took me past the turn to Stefan’s house. I had decided that Adam could talk to Stefan. I slowed the car, giving it a bit more gas when it stuttered. I needed to do some fine adjustments still.
Without letting myself think too much, I turned the car and drove to Stefan’s house. I pulled into the driveway and parked next to the dust-covered VW bus that had been painted to match the Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine.
I got out of the Jetta but couldn’t make myself go to the house. Instead I wandered around the bus. Life-sized and stuffed, Scooby watched me sadly from the front passenger seat. His coat was getting sun faded.
Stefan opened his front door and walked out, stopping well clear of me, but close enough to engage. He didn’t say anything.
“Shame to let it sit there,” I said finally, not looking at him. “I’ve spent a lot of hours keeping her running. If you leave her there, she’s going to need rebuilding again.”
“I need to drain the gas tank and refill it before I drive it again,” he said. “I confess, the prospect is a little daunting.”
“Call Dale and have him tow it to the garage,” I suggested. Dale was one of the towing guys we both knew. One of the perks of driving old cars is getting to know towing guys. “You might air up the tires first, though; the right front tire is a little low.”
“And having you fix her is messy, too,” Stefan said. “If I pay you, Marsilia might take it into her head that you should be punished for charging me money. If I don’t pay you, I’m telling her that I consider myself a part of her seethe again—which I do not. I’m an ally, certainly. But never again will I owe her fealty.”
Marsilia ruled the vampires in the Tri-Cities. We had a long-standing agreement that I would provide whatever maintenance her cars needed and she would keep her vampires from attacking me. She had destroyed Stefan, who had been her loyal wingman, for her own needs. If that had been the extent of it, I thought Stefan would have forgiven her for that. But to do it, she’d gone after the people Stefan kept in his household to feed upon, his sheep. Most vampires would not have cared, but Stefan believed in taking care and responsibility for his people.
I pursed my lips, took a deep breath, and turned to face him. “How about an exchange of favors?” I proposed. “I came here for information—and I am happy to fix the Mystery Machine to get it.”
“What do you need?” he asked.
The yard light did a decent job of illuminating Stefan. He looked good. Back to his usual self, even. He was tall and lean, but not skinny now. And he looked entirely human again, something in the way he balanced on his feet and the energy with which he moved. For a while he’d moved more like a vampire—some of the very young or the very old have this odd jerkiness to their movements, like somewhere there might be a puppeteer making them move.
Stefan also looked like a cat contemplating a strange dog.
I laughed. “Nothing to put that look on your face. I just stopped in to ask a question. If we can turn that into an exchange that gets you out of a dilemma, that’s all the better.”
He relaxed fractionally. “What did you need to know? Or do we need privacy for it?”
“I just need to know whatever you can tell me about Frost. I don’t think that we need privacy.”
“Frost?” said Stefan. “He is dead, Mercy.” Then, very un-Stefan-like, he stumbled a little. “All the way dead, I mean.”
“I know that—I accomplished his demise,” I said, putting him out of his apparent misery. I’d have thought a vampire as old as he was would have gotten around the awkwardness of how to announce the extinction of a vampire. Maybe that awkwardness was more about what was between us, though. “Or at least I was there when Adam finished him off—but Adam wouldn’t have been there without me. However you’d prefer.”
Frost had been finished, I was pretty sure, before Adam got there to complete the business. But there was no arguing that Adam had ended Frost with absolute finality.
“But here’s the thing,” I said. “I stumbled into someone who smells a lot like Frost recently. Since it is the only identifier anyone has picked up in the whole mess, I decided it might help to get more information.”
“Today’s mystery?” asked Stefan.
And because he was a friend, and because Marsilia needed to know about the attack on Elizaveta’s family and I wasn’t about to call her, I told Stefan about my morning, stopping just after the werewolf zombie in the basement—and I tidied up the zombie wolf’s attack and end without much detail, leaving out Sherwood’s spectacular performance entirely. His secrets didn’t belong to me.
Unlike with Zee, I left out the upcoming meeting between the fae and the government. I would have been surprised if the vampires didn’t know about the meeting—the vampires had ties pretty high up in politics. But if they didn’t know, they weren’t going to learn about it from me.
I also didn’t tell him about the evidence that Elizaveta and her brood were working black magic—just as I had not told Zee. That was pack business. We paid her a retainer for her services. We had been supporting her while she tortured unwilling subjects for the power she used to aid us.
“Elizaveta’s family is gone?” he murmured.
I couldn’t tell what he felt about that.
“Yes.”
“And you and Adam were attacked by a zombie werewolf at your home and”—he did air quotes—“‘the werewolves took care of him.’”
“Not a lie,” I told him. I don’t lie very often, so I’d been very brief instead. “I can’t tell you things that aren’t mine to tell.”
He watched me for a moment, and then his face relaxed and he nodded. “Okay.” Looking away, he continued, “You could have called on me for help with the goblin.”
I knew what he meant. Just as I bore bonds to my mate and to our pack, I also had a bond to Stefan. Through it, he could control me, not just my actions, but my thoughts. He could take away my ability to make decisions for myself. All I could do was trust that he would not do that, that he would continue as he had since I’d asked for his help against another vampire.
That was why I’d been avoiding him.
He didn’t deserve my first response, so I kept my mouth shut until I could give him the real truth.
Finally I said, “I didn’t think about it. It was pack business, so I took a pair of werewolves. He was a goblin, so I
called Larry.”
“Fair enough,” he acknowledged. “But it could have killed you when it came out of the barn. You are no match for a goblin. You could have called me.” And he could have come. Like his former Mistress, Marsilia, Stefan could teleport. I’d never heard of any other vampires who could do that.
He paced away from me and stood, arms crossed, with his back to me. “Once you married Adam, you pulled yourself out of your weight class. Someday I will be looking at your dead body, because you were too stubborn to call me.”
There was real anger in his voice. I thought about telling him that it wasn’t his job to protect me—but I actually didn’t know the vampire protocol about situations like ours. I thought about telling him I could protect myself—but he was right.
“If I had thought about it,” I told him, “I might have called you. But that would have been a mistake. Marsilia leaves you alone now.”
He laughed and it sounded harsh, like broken dreams.
“She allows you to stay here, Stefan. In relative safety. Instead of forcing you to move into another vampire’s territory. She allows you to be independent when you might not have that luxury elsewhere.”
He nodded. “She is generous,” he told me, meaning the opposite.
“If she thinks that your first loyalty is to our pack—or me . . . especially me—she will not abide it.” I held up a finger to make him pause. “And if the pack thinks that I have a tame vampire that I call upon whenever things might get hairy, it will be equally bad for me.”
I put a hand on his arm and he stiffened. “But I am very happy to come over to your house and ask you to help me solve mysteries.”
He drew in a deep breath he didn’t need. Then he turned around and let his arms drop to his side. My hand fell away when he moved.
“All right,” he said. “All right, Mercy. We are friends as well as allies? But I am not pack—nor should I be.”
And I realized that Stefan was lonely. Werewolves are like that. They need a pack to belong to, to be safe with. Some of them don’t like it much, but that doesn’t change the nature of the beast. I knew vampires lived in seethes, but it had never occurred to me that one of the reasons they did so was that they, like the wolves, needed to belong.
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