Fire Touched

by Patricia Briggs

  “Four,” I said, hopping up to sit on his desk. “Because Warren said the reason their attempt failed was because you also had a hairline crack they didn’t know about. For it to be a hairline crack an hour later, it was a break at first.”

  “Four,” he said. He moved his keyboard and mouse aside, then slid me sideways across the desk until I was sitting directly in front of him, one leg on either side of his. “And I was worried about what I had to do tonight. I couldn’t make everything work—my shoulder included—if I didn’t think. And if you were in that room, I wasn’t going to be thinking very clearly.”

  “And getting Zee down into medical would let you talk him into letting someone take a look at his wounds, too,” I said thoughtfully. “Did you?”

  “I can’t say,” he said. “I promised someone something as long as he wasn’t so bad that we couldn’t help.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “He’s a tough old smith,” Adam said. “But they had a real go at him.” Bad, I thought, but not bad enough he needed more help than Darryl and Warren could provide. “For what it’s worth, they left Tad alone. Zee managed to convince them that Tad was fragile, and they don’t know enough about humans to torture without killing him.” Adam smiled coldly. “But what they did to Zee—one of their own—puts me squarely behind your offer of sanctuary for Aiden.”

  “Good to know that you are both on the same side of this disaster,” said a voice.

  I wiggled and ended up on Adam’s lap. He caught me and helped me manage a not-very-dignified pose across his lap that was still better than the floor, where I’d been headed.

  “Good evening, Mercy. Adam,” said Bran from Adam’s computer screen. There was none of the usual Skype screen stuff—just Bran’s face. “Courtesy is for the courteous.”

  “Thanks, Charles,” I said. “Always nice to know that your computer skills are still cutting-edge. And good evening, Bran.” I wrinkled my nose. “Courtesy is for the courteous? Really? Did you find that in a fortune cookie?” I felt awkward on Adam’s lap in front of Bran and Charles, but when I started to slide off, Adam held me where I was.

  “You’re welcome,” said Charles’s voice from somewhere on the other side of the computer screen. Impossible to tell from his voice, but I think I’d amused him.

  “My mother’s phrase, actually. Though not in those words. She didn’t speak English,” said Bran in a very soft voice. I don’t know anything about his mother except that Bran only mentioned her when he was seriously unhappy. “Are you finished, Mercy?”

  If Adam wanted me to stay on his lap, he had a reason for it. However, it felt really awkward to deal with an irate Bran while sitting on my husband’s lap. Still, I trusted Adam’s instincts, so I stayed where I was to mount our defense. And the best defense is a good offense, right?

  “You really would have preferred we let a troll loose in a major human-population center?” I asked. If he was going to be mad, he was going to aim his mad where it belonged. At me. “Like you would have let one run around throwing cars all over Missoula without lifting a hand against it?”

  Adam kissed my cheek—and I got it. He was worried Bran was going to be mad at me, and he wanted Bran to remember that we were a team. If he thought a little PDA would help, I was willing to let him run with it.

  “You can stop at any time, Mercy,” Adam said. “As much as I’m enjoying your stepping in to rescue me, it is not only unnecessary, it’s likely to backfire.”

  He turned his attention to Bran. “We got a call from the Kennewick police that they needed our help with a troll. We had no idea it was anything more than that. I had two wolves already there, so I grabbed the other pack member and Mercy and we headed in.”

  Bran pinched the bridge of his nose. “Of course you did.”

  Behind him, someone snorted.

  “Go on,” Bran said.

  “I have some video I e-mailed to you. Did you watch it?”

  “It made the national news,” said Bran. “I’ve already watched it five times.”

  Adam nodded. “Okay, then. You saw Mercy and Zack rescue a woman and her baby at the risk of their own lives. You saw Darryl get thrown off the bridge, get fished out by concerned citizens whom he did not hurt, and go running back up to fight the troll some more. ‘Heroic efforts’ was the phrase I heard over and over again. ‘We could not have stopped that thing without more lives lost,’ the police chief said. ‘We are grateful to Adam Hauptman and his werewolves, who saved a whole lot of people.’”

  “Just wait until they get the bill for the bridge,” murmured Charles’s voice—earning an irritated look Bran sent over his shoulder.

  Charles was trying to calm Bran down, I realized. I shook my head. Hard to be dignified when you’re sprawled across someone’s lap, but I tried. “They will send the bill to the fae.”

  “If they can find the fae to give it to them,” Charles said.

  “Werewolves fighting the fae,” said Bran.

  Silence fell.

  “I’ve been trying for six months to keep that from happening.” Bran’s voice had a rare growl in it. “To keep this from happening.”

  “Neutral doesn’t work,” Charles said. “When you watch your allies commit atrocities and do nothing, who is more reprehensible? Those who rape and plunder or those who could have stopped it but do nothing?”

  “You are misquoting your grandfather,” said Bran. “And you have caused me enough trouble. At least we could argue that the fae struck the first blow against us when you hunted down that fae lord in Arizona. Here, we are clearly the aggressor.”

  He took a deep breath, raised his chin, and stared at Adam—who stared right back, though I could feel the pulse of his effort not to drop his gaze.

  “Very well, then,” Bran said—and he was looking at me, not Adam. “Defend your territory.”

  “You heard that part,” I said, fighting not to squirm. In retrospect, I regretted that my speech would have been at home on the set of Cleopatra, The Ten Commandments, or one of the other epic films from the middle of the last century before Hollywood decided to tone down the overacting. I could have done something more Dirty Harry and been just as effective—and less embarrassing.

  “It’s been playing in various cuts on the news stations all afternoon,” said Charles. “CNN has a special show scheduled for tomorrow to discuss the fae and the werewolf pack that, and I quote, ‘protected the people who live in their territory.’ Unquote.”

  Bran tapped the top of his desk. “So you two, you see if you can back up Mercy’s words. Your territory to hold when the fae come calling. There is a slim chance I can still keep this from being an all-out war between werewolves and the fae. There is a case to be made that we always have protected our territory from the fae—a fiction that stands only because they have not moved against the humans in five hundred years.” He took a breath through his teeth. “If you succeed, I’ll have to convince the other Alphas who live near the fae reservations to do the same—there are only two of them.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, thinking. When he opened his eyes again, the anger was gone, though there was a grimness to his expression that I didn’t trust. “Adam, be aware that if you let that boy go after twenty-four hours and something happens to him, all of the good publicity could easily turn against you.”

  Adam nodded, his body stiff. There was something going on that I wasn’t reading, something hard and tense between Adam and Bran. I was getting a bad feeling about this conversation.

  “Your pack has made enemies among my Alphas,” said Bran. “Change is not easy on the old wolves. Your wholehearted embrace of it has created a lot of conflict, and they know, the old ones, exactly where to aim their ire. You should expect some challenges to your leadership from outside the pack, Adam, from other Alphas.”

  That was so unusual as to be almost unheard-of. Outside ch
allenges usually came from lone wolves too dominant to be welcomed into a pack on their own. One of the secrets of Bran’s successful rule was that he tried to keep track of the lone wolves and found places for them to be useful—even building new packs—to accommodate their needs. It didn’t save them all, or even most of them, but it helped.

  One Alpha only challenged another when two packs were too close together—or if an Alpha had a personal vendetta against another. Such battles were supposed to be one-on-one, but, historically speaking, unless an Alpha was utterly useless, his pack would fight for him, too. Quite often both Alphas and most of both packs would die in the fight.

  “I am aware,” Adam said.

  One of the things Bran had done was virtually eliminate fighting between packs. He’d send Charles out at the first hint of real conflict—and none of the werewolves wanted to have Charles land in the middle of their business. If he thought an Alpha was taking liberties without provocation, he was likely to take out that Alpha. He’d done it a couple of times I knew of, and I expected that the werewolves, who had longer memories, would know of other times.

  So why was Bran issuing a warning now?

  “Make her declaration real,” Bran said in a low voice. “Give us grounds to make some places safe. Let us be heroes as well as monsters.” He looked at me then. “And do not make this into a full-scale war.”

  “Unless you can’t help it,” murmured Charles.

  “You know what this means,” said Bran.

  “I do,” agreed Adam.

  The two of them stared at each other for a moment, then Bran said, “I repudiate you and your pack. You are sundered from me and mine.”

  Something happened to the pack bonds, a shivery pain slid through them into my head and was gone a moment later. It hit Adam harder; he took a deep breath, and his whole body broke out in a light sweat.

  Bran’s eyes caught mine. He started to say something, then shook his head.

  The monitor went blank for a moment, then the familiar Skype screen reappeared.

  “He had to do that,” Adam said. “Or else there would have been a war between werewolves and the fae. By cutting us off, by making us a rogue pack, he made sure that this stayed a local matter. We should expect that he will get word to the other packs and to the fae immediately, or else there would be no point.”

  He waited, then said in a soft voice, “Mercy, he had to do this.”

  “Of course he did,” I said, still frozen on Adam’s lap.

  He leaned sideways and grabbed his cell phone off his desk. I started to get up, but his arm wrapped around my middle. He hit a button on the phone.

  “Yes,” said Darryl.

  “We’re on our own,” Adam told him.

  “I felt that,” Darryl said, “and you warned us. I’ll let the pack know.”

  “Tell them they can leave if they want to,” he said.

  Darryl laughed. “Like that will happen. After your performance tonight, you couldn’t pry anyone out of this pack with a crowbar and a bucketful of dynamite, as Warren would say. No worries, we’ve got this.”

  Adam disconnected and set the phone back on the desk.

  “I suppose,” I said, my voice more wobbly than I liked, “that it’s a good thing you yanked the pack’s chain. If it’s going to be us against the world, we better all be fighting the enemy instead of each other.”

  My stomach felt like I’d been kicked. Bran wasn’t my father, wasn’t even my foster father, but he had raised me just the same. “You knew this was going to happen?”

  “I thought it might.” Adam relaxed back against his seat and pulled me more tightly against him.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Not your fault,” he said.

  “Uhm.” I considered the progress of events again. “Yes, it is.”

  He shook his head. “Nope. If you hadn’t given notice to the fae—what would they do next? I’m not willing to allow them to prey upon our town.” He paused. The Tri-Cities are three towns . . . and a bunch of small towns tucked right up against them. “Towns. Our towns.” He growled, and I made a sympathetic noise. He said, finally, “Our territory.” That sounded right.

  Bran might have cut me loose, but Adam would never do that. Adam was mine, and I was his. Sometimes I chafed a little at all the belonging I’d been doing lately: belonging to Adam, to Jesse, to the pack, and having them belong to me in return. Oddly, the responsibilities of taking care of them didn’t bother me at all; only being taken care of brought out my claustrophobic reactions. I had spent most of my life being independent, and it took an effort to have to answer to other people, no matter how much I loved them. Loved him.

  Right now, belonging felt a lot better than being alone. The last time Bran had abandoned me, I’d been alone.

  “Are you done being mad at me?” Adam asked. He was changing the subject for me, I knew. There was nothing more to be said about Bran.

  “I wasn’t really mad at you,” I told him. It wasn’t a lie, because it had been myself I’d really been angry with. “You’d have known if I’d really been mad.”

  “For a good time, call—” he said, and I gave a watery laugh and put my forehead against his shoulder—his good shoulder.

  The old VW still sat facing the backyard of this house, looking more and more disreputable every day. Once, Adam threatened to have it towed, and Jesse—not me—told him, seriously, that it was a bad idea.

  “As long as Mercy has that way to torment you,” she’d told her father, “you’ll know where it’s coming from. If you get rid of that now, you’ll never know what to watch out for.”

  “She just wants to save it because she likes the bunny she painted on the trunk last week,” I’d said.

  Adam had laughed, and the wreck stayed where it was, with “For a Good Time Call” followed by Adam’s phone number scrawled across it for anyone (in our backyard) to see.

  “I am not mad at you,” I told him. “But you should be aware that if you try to keep me away from you when you are hurt again, I will take you down when you least expect it.”

  “Seriously,” he said, “I didn’t expect it to work.”

  I lifted my head and looked at him. Maybe I hadn’t been the only one I disappointed when I hadn’t hunted him down in the infirmary. “I thought you were mad at me,” I said. “I mean—look what I did when you couldn’t defend the pack. I agreed to protect a boy that the fae had sent a troll after, and to cap it off, I told the world that we would protect the whole Tri-Cities from whomever and whatever. I figured that you needed time to cool down. I didn’t realize how bad it was—though I knew it was bad enough—until I talked to Warren later. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let your anger, however righteous, keep me away.”

  “You stayed away because you thought I was mad?” he said, sounding . . . smug. Which was better than hurt.

  “I stayed away because you wanted me to stay away,” I growled at him. “That’s not going to happen again.”

  He hugged me hard. “Good,” he said, his voice muffled in my hair. “Don’t let it happen again.”

  “We’ll be okay, right?” I said. If I’d been sitting on anyone else’s lap, I’d have been embarrassed by how little my voice was.

  “You and I,” he said, “will always be okay. I can’t promise anything more.”

  “Me, either,” I told him. “So what do we do about Aiden?”

  —

  What we could do, evidently, was let him sleep.

  Tad was sitting on the floor in the rec room directly in front of the lockup-room door (which was shut, not locked). Cookie was curled up next to him, asleep. His legs were crossed in front of him, and they held a battered laptop. He had earphones in, and his fingers made castanet sounds on the keyboard. His mouth was moving silently. Reading his lips and making some educated guesses, he was
saying, “Come on, come on, come on. I’ve got this, see? And boom, boom, boom. Like that, suckers. Just like that.”

  “Success?” Adam asked.

  Tad looked up. For a moment his face was somber and . . . old. Then his mask came back up. “You betcha. I have really missed”—he raised his voice—“playing with you guys.” There was a universal, but friendly, groan that echoed through the room where people, intent on their own laptops, were draped over various seats and couches like cats in a dry sauna, limp and happy.

  “And they all died before me greatness, the scabbied old lot of ’em,” he said. “Who is the greatest pirate of all?”

  “Me,” declared Paul. “The king of CAGCTDPBT. The ruler of ISTDPBF.” CAGCTDPBT and ISTDPBF were the pack’s favorite computer games. Codpieces and Golden Corsets: The Dread Pirate’s Booty Three, and Instant Spoils: The Dread Pirate’s Booty Four, respectively. “You talk too much—and now you are dead, you lowly deck scrubber. Nothing but a landlubber with salty aspirations. Yarr harr and yohoho.”

  “Argh, verily, argh!” chorused the rec-room occupants obediently, though none of them raised their gazes off their monitors. Cookie woke up and barked a couple of times.

  Tad looked at his laptop and scowled. “Now, that’s not right. No one should die buried in fish eggs.”

  He looked back at us. “Jesse’s in her room—she said something about ‘homework waits for no woman,’ and barred the door. I decided keeping an eye on Aiden would be useful. But after the barbecue, he wandered around the house, then retreated down here. I think he’s asleep now.” He frowned at his keyboard, debating with himself. Then he said, “He locked the window bars and came out ten minutes later and locked the door from the inside. He looked pretty spooked, and the locks make him feel safer.” Tad glanced at the door to Aiden’s room and shivered. “I don’t know how long he was in Underhill, but a week would be enough to make me sleep in the closet with the door shut. It’s not a place that feels like it could ever be safe.”