Fire Touched

by Patricia Briggs

  I’d been there once, by accident. It hadn’t lasted long, but it had not felt safe. I crouched, balancing on my heels, so my head was more on a level with Tad’s. “What can you tell us about him?”

  Tad shook his head. “Not much. Your buddy who broke us out brought him to us.” He waited.

  “What buddy?” I asked.

  Tad raised his eyebrows and waited.

  “You know which buddy,” said Adam. “Think about it.”

  There was a certain Gray Lord who’d promised to help Tad and Zee in return for my giving him back the walking stick. But the walking stick hadn’t stayed with Beauclaire, so I’d figured that he would count that bargain null and void. “Buddy” wasn’t a word I would ever apply to Beauclaire.

  “Okay,” I said. “I know what buddy you’re talking about. Though I’m a little surprised because—” Because I still had the walking stick. I swallowed my words. If Tad didn’t think it was a good idea to talk about Beauclaire, then I would go along with his judgment. The whole pack knew that Beauclaire had come to me to get the walking stick, so I couldn’t mention the stick or the reason I was surprised Beauclaire had helped them.

  Tad waited until I’d finished working it out. Then he nodded. “Your buddy talked to me a couple of times. So I was prepared when he opened the cell where I’d been spending my alone time when they weren’t torturing Dad to get me to perform for them.” He sucked in a breath, and muttered, “Don’t look like that, Mercy. They’ll regret that for the rest of their short lives because . . . hey, it’s Dad. And they’ve forgotten what Dad can do.”

  There was something dark and not-Tad in his voice. I was used to that when dealing with the werewolves. Sometimes in the middle of the conversation, there would be a switch, and instead of talking to my friend Warren or my husband Adam, I was talking to someone a little more direct, someone who could eat little coyotes for breakfast. So I was used to it, but I’d never seen something . . . someone so dark and violent in the man I thought of as a kid brother, a guy who was a little bit of a clown to cover up just how competent he was.

  It was only for a moment. His voice was faintly cheerful as he said, “So your buddy opened the door, and he had Dad with him—and this kid. He told us that was as much as he could do, but that the kid could get us out and on our way. The kid, Aiden, had agreed to do this in return for my father’s help in gaining him a little time—twenty-four hours of safety under the pack’s protection. Hoping—as you probably have figured out—to see if he could finagle that into something really useful, like getting him away from here to somewhere else. Somewhere that he’s not so likely to end up back with the fae”—the darkness was back, just for that one word—“who would like to take him apart to see how he works.”

  “We’ll see,” said Adam, as if Tad had asked him a question. “We need to know a lot more about him than he’s told us. I’m not unhappy to thumb my nose at the fae—but I won’t do it over someone who will turn around and stab my friends in the back. Not even if that someone looks like a helpless little kid.”

  Tad looked down at his computer screen and brushed it with a forefinger. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember he’s not just a kid, Adam. He was just human, not witchborn or anything. No one knows how he can do fae magic the way he does—not even the fae. They know it’s something Underhill did, and they’re jealous—as if Underhill stole something they thought belonged to them and gave it to a human.”

  Like Tad, I thought. Mostly the half fae were just messed up, but Tad had come out with a powerful talent for metal magic—which was rare even in full-blooded fae. Were they jealous of that, too?

  Tad rubbed his face. “He’s just human. But all I can think of is Star Trek and ‘Charlie X.’”

  “Star Trek?” I asked, puzzled.

  Adam grunted. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Charlie is a kid who survived a spaceship crash and was rescued by aliens,” he said grimly. “They gave him powers so that he could survive. And, after a very long time, the Enterprise and her crew show up and rescue him. So he survived and is rescued . . . but he has all of this power and is turned loose on the universe without the experience of growing up human. He doesn’t understand how to interact with people, how to listen when someone tells him ‘no.’ And because of his power, no one can make him stop. Eventually, the aliens have to come and take him back with them, where he will be alone for the rest of his life—because it’s not safe for him to be out with the rest of the universe.”

  Tad nodded earnestly. “Now, your buddy who was repaying a favor to you, for a fae, he is pretty softhearted. I think he couldn’t stand to watch what the fae were prepared to do to figure Aiden out. They killed the last one of these kids they found—last year. That one was water touched. They told Aiden that the water-touched boy was crazy, but from what your buddy told me, he wasn’t crazy when he came out of Underhill. That happened later.” He took a breath. “I don’t think your buddy knows any more about what this kid is like than you or I do. I think he felt sorry for him. I do, too. He sure deserves a chance, don’t you think? After surviving Underhill for all those centuries?”

  “But ‘Charlie X’ weighs on your mind,” Adam said. “Are you guarding him from harm, or us from him?”

  Tad smiled. “Both, if you don’t mind.”

  “You need to sleep,” I said.

  He nodded around the room at the occupied chairs and sofas. “I’ll sleep down here just fine. Let Zack have the bedroom.” He took a breath and smiled brightly. “I’d just as soon not be alone for a while anyway.”

  Paul glanced at him obliquely, met Adam’s gaze, and nodded. Our pack had Tad’s back. Tad could keep Aiden safe, and us safe—and the pack would keep him safe.

  —

  I made Adam strip and let me look at his shoulder.

  There were bruises and swelling—a testament to how bad it had been. There had been other hurts, too. Places where I could see the faint remnants of bruises and damage. I touched those to make sure that what I was seeing was true healing and not some inner bleeding finding its way out.

  Something that had been tight since I watched him run up the bridge for the first time relaxed. He was okay. He’d fought a troll and come out okay.

  “Your turn,” he said, while I ran my hands over a bump on his lower ribs.

  “My turn?” It was an old bump, gotten before he’d become a werewolf. He’d told me that it used to be much worse: ragged, purple-edged scars over a broken rib where someone had shot him in another life on another continent. Some of his scars had disappeared overnight after he was Changed. But that one was fading gently. Someday it would be gone.

  “Your turn.” His voice was dark with something other than pain. “That’s how we do this, remember. You check me out, I check you out.”

  I looked up at him to meet his eyes and saw heat that had nothing to do with the room temperature. “I don’t think you are looking for bruises,” I told him.

  He put his hand under my chin, and without any kind of force, lifted me to my feet. “I’ve been a soldier,” he told me, his home state of Alabama thick in his voice. “Been Alpha longer than that. Sometimes I think that I’ve been on the front lines for most of my life, one way or the other. And no one, but you, wants so badly to keep me safe. You’ll have to forgive me if I find that sexy.” He kissed me, and when he pulled back, the Southern gentleman was gone. “But I am not blind, so although I want you naked in the worst way,” he told me conversationally, “I’ve also been watching you limp around all evening. So strip down and let me take a look.”

  I snickered. “You get many girls with that line?”

  “Which one? The ‘sometimes I think I’ve been on the front lines’?”

  I waved my hand. “Nope. The”—I dropped my voice down in imitation of his—“‘strip down and let me take a look’ line.” In my own voice, I said, “On the other hand, if you p
ulled out the wounded-soldier line, you’d be batting them off like flies.” I paused, frowned at him. “You do know that the time for your using that line is gone, right? No more pickups for you. Alpha or no, I’ll torture you to death, one day at a time.” I looked at him, and he didn’t seem to be taking me seriously. “Drip. Drip. Drip,” I said. “If you even think about another woman like that.”

  He waited, a small smile on his face. “I understand,” he said after waiting a courteous moment to make sure I was finished. “And just to keep such matters on the up-and-up, if I catch you flirting seriously with someone, I will rip out his throat.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “For the record, the ‘strip down and let me take a look’ line is not very sexy.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Mercy”—he deepened his voice—“strip down and let me take a look.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not fair. The voice doesn’t count.” But as I talked, I stripped down. Because underneath the sexy voice was worry, as if just because he’d hidden how bad his wounds were from me, I would have done the same to him.

  My knees were skinned, one shin was bruised, and when Adam touched my chin, it hurt.

  “From tripping while I was carrying you,” I told him.

  He nodded and turned his attention to a scrape on my hip. He was tanned, but my skin was still a shade or two darker than his, so mostly my bruises don’t stand out as much as his. “This didn’t come from a fall.”

  “It’s just a scrape,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow. Okay, it was a scrape and bruises that were still blossoming in glorious profusion.

  “I honestly have no idea,” I said.

  He put his forehead against mine. “I’m sorry.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “Fussing,” he said.

  I wrapped my arms around him, trying not to see the troll lift a car over his head. “I fussed first,” I said shakily. “I fussed first.”

  When he kissed me, it was a gesture of comfort. But with the both of us naked, it didn’t stay that way for long. We made love on the soft carpet, and afterward, he fell asleep on top of me. Exhausted, I thought, from the fight and from the healing that followed. I held him and wondered what I’d done to us. Wondered what changes the boy would bring.

  Coyote had told me once that changes were neither good nor bad—but brought with them some of both.

  I closed my eyes and prayed for more good than bad, for Adam’s safety, for Jesse and the pack. Then I thanked God for helping to return Tad and Zee out of the hands of our enemies. I fell asleep before I was finished.

  —

  The phone rang at four in the morning. My face was buried in my pillow—though I didn’t remember moving from the floor to my bed. Adam moved, and the phone quit making that annoying noise—I almost fell back asleep.

  “They told me, Wulfe told me, I should call you. That you’re taking care of such matters now,” said a high-pitched but sexless voice.

  Wulfe’s name had me sitting upright on the mattress.

  “I see,” said Adam.

  The voice said, “We are paid to watch the hotels and motels around town and to call the Mistress’s people when one of their kind shows up.”

  “I see,” said Adam again.

  There was a pause. “Are we going to get paid?”

  “I am sure you will,” Adam said. “I will call the Mistress and discuss the matter with her further. Is this a good number to reach you at?”

  “Yassir,” the voice said.

  Adam ended the call.

  “Do you know who that was?” I asked.

  “Probably a goblin,” Adam replied. “But I’m going to call and check.”

  Wulfe answered the phone himself. “Adam,” he purred. “How lovely to hear from you.”

  “Goblins?” Adam asked.

  “I see they contacted you,” Wulfe said. “They are a little unreliable, so I wasn’t sure they would.”

  “How much are you paying them?”

  “Three hundred for every stray vampire they find,” Wulfe told him. “And a thousand a month to keep them looking.”

  “I’ll pay the three hundred,” Adam said. “But I won’t pay the thousand.”

  “Good luck finding the vampires who show up around here, then, darling,” said Wulfe.

  “Oh, I’ll find them all right,” Adam told him. “From what I understand, most of them are after Marsilia. I’ll just keep an eye on the seethe, and when they find her, I’ll find them.”

  There was a little silence. “Smart boy,” said Wulfe, “aren’t you just a smart boy. Fine. We’ll pay the thousand. But they’ll report to you, and you will pay for the actual sighting.”

  “Yes,” Adam agreed.

  The first change, I thought.

  Adam disconnected and called the goblin back—explaining the new order to . . . him or her, I couldn’t be sure from the voice alone.

  Goblins, according to Ariana’s book, were neither fish nor fowl. They qualified for status as fae—they could disguise what they were with illusion spells. But the fae didn’t want them. For human purposes, the goblins counted themselves fae, without argument from the Gray Lords, but the goblins didn’t want to be fae, either. Part of the problem seemed to be that goblins could reproduce as fast, if not faster, than humans, and the other part was that many of the fae considered goblin flesh a delicacy.

  When Adam got off the phone, I said, “So the vampires are punishing you because I got uppity?”

  He shook his head. “They’re seeing if we’re serious. Do you want to come with me to the hotel?”

  I considered it. “Bran sends minions; he only goes himself if he needs to rain death and destruction down upon the world.”

  “Yes,” Adam said. “But I’m awake, I might as well go check it out myself. I thought you might like to go along for the ride.”

  I couldn’t help smiling—and it was stupid. There was a strange vampire in town, and my own hasty words meant that we had to go confront him or her. But Adam wanted me with him on an adventure.

  “I’m coming,” I said. I glanced at the clock. Six hours of sleep was plenty.

  6

  Adam put on one of the suits he had for work, power suits designed to let people know who was in charge. That they looked spectacular on him was a bonus for me and a matter of indifference, if not embarrassment, for him. I’d chosen this one, so the colors were right—steel gray with faint chocolate stripes that brought out his eyes. The tie he wore with it was the same chocolate brown. He might not care about looking pretty, but he did care about the impression of power he made.

  People who were impressed by him were not so likely to try to screw him over, in business or with fang and claw. He enjoyed fighting, though I didn’t think he’d ever admit it to anyone else. What he didn’t like was the way fights could spill over onto the people he was responsible for: the people, human and other, who worked for his security company as well as the pack. He preferred to stop trouble before it happened when he could—thus, the suits.

  After some serious consideration, I put on a blue silk blouse, a pair of black slacks, and shoes I could run in. Next to Adam, I didn’t look underdressed, precisely—I looked like his assistant. But that was okay. Adam and I worked best together when he took point and I faded into the background. It suited our personalities. Adam was a “what you see is what you get” kind of guy, but I was happy to be sneaky.

  We pulled into the Marriott parking lot, and I looked up at the balconies and sliding glass doors outside each room. The sky was still dark, but it wouldn’t be in an hour.

  “Unusual hotel for a vampire,” I murmured as I got out of the car. The Marriott was covered with huge windows. Not that there was much choice; the Tri-Cities had mostly grown up during and after the Second World War, when the old hotels of small-
windowed rooms, chandeliers, and ballrooms had given in to the practicality of the motel, efficient and graceless—with lots and lots of windows. Still, it seemed to me that the Marriott was awfully light and airy for a vampire to feel comfortable with.

  I tucked my arm through Adam’s, and we started for the hotel. We hadn’t gotten three steps from the car before the sound of hard wheels on blacktop had us both turning to see a skinny teenager approaching us rapidly. Casually, I dropped Adam’s arm and stepped back. The kid hopped off the skateboard with a kick that threw the board up so he could catch it without bending down. He stowed it under one arm as he walked.

  “Hey, man,” he said, his voice familiar from the early-morning call, but it was far more laid-back—less meth-head and more stoner. “I looked you up on the Internet to see why suddenly I’m dealing with the werewolves and not the vampires. Nice work on that troll.”

  “Was it?” asked Adam. “There aren’t many trolls left, I am given to understand.”

  The boy spat on the ground. “They can all rot for all I care. Nasty pieces of work, trolls—killing ’em ain’t no cause for tragedy. Now, I’d like to get paid and get out of here before someone wonders why I’m riding around on this toy at five in the morning.”

  “What did the vampire look like?” I asked.

  He shrugged, but there was something sly in his eyes when he said, “Weren’t me what saw him.” He held out his hand.

  Adam handed him an envelope. The goblin in human guise dropped the skateboard back on the ground and hopped on the battered and scarred surface. He didn’t stop it when it started to drift backward. He gave Adam a salute with the hand that held the white envelope, dropped a toe, and spun his board around to speed off into the night.

  Three cars down from where Adam had parked there was a white Subaru Forester with California plates. I remember cars, a hazard of my job. I tugged Adam to a stop and examined it more carefully.