Fire Touched

by Patricia Briggs

  Margaret said nothing, but I felt like she was going to, so I kept quiet.

  “That is,” she said, “I think, very much what is between Thomas and me.” She paused. “I don’t talk about him to other people. He wouldn’t like it. But I need advice, and I don’t know how I’m going to get it without giving you the whole picture.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Excuse me,” she said. She took out her cell phone and began texting. The phone chimed as her message was returned. She texted back and forth a bit more.

  “He says I should talk to you,” she said. “He” was obviously Thomas. “He says Adam says that you are a deep well. That secrets are safe in your keeping.” She gave me a considering look.

  “That’s me,” I said. “Damp. Also, cold and dank.”

  She laughed. “All right.” She quit laughing and looked out into the darkness. “I met Thomas when I was thirteen in Butte, Montana. Butte was . . . not what it is now—small and forgotten. Gold, then silver, and finally copper, which, in the age where all the cities of the world were stringing copper wire for electricity, meant money, and money is power. The people who flocked to the boomtown were not just human. My father came, hoping to set up a new court, I think. But his people weren’t the only fae, and there was conflict.”

  She hummed a little, reached out, and turned on the radio. Classical music filled the car, replaced by country and then eighties rock before she turned it off.

  “My father’s enemies used me against him. They stole me away and chained me in the mining tunnels.” Her restless fingers played with the fabric of her slacks. “The mining tunnels in Butte were five thousand feet below the earth and more, a mile deep. My father and I, our power comes from the sun.”

  Silence stretched.

  “Which is ironic, given that you love a vampire,” I said, trying to help her.

  “Not . . . not as ironic as you might think.” She played a little more with her slacks.

  “So you were trapped there for decades?”

  She shook her head, gave me a quick smile, then went back to her narrative. “Not that time. For a couple of days only. But it gave my father’s enemies the idea for what they did to me later. It was still dark and frightening. I was hungry and alone, and I heard a sound.”

  She swallowed. “I don’t have any friends,” she said. “Except for Thomas. I don’t quite know how to go about this.”

  She didn’t know me, and it was hard to tell someone you don’t know about private things. “My foster parents both died when I was fourteen,” I told her, breaking the awkward silence. Then I realized that was the wrong part of the story to start with. “Let me backtrack. My mother was a buckle bunny when she was sixteen.”

  “Buckle bunny?”

  I nodded. “That means she followed the rodeo and slept with rodeo cowboys. I guess her parents were a real freak show. She left home when she was fifteen or sixteen. She took the truck and horse trailer she’d paid for and her quarter-horse mare and hit the road. Traveled wherever there was a rodeo and barrel raced. She was good enough she made money at it. But she was lonely, so she chased after the cowboys.” I paused. “Rodeo cowboys aren’t universally horrible, but they are macho, and some of them, usually not the more successful, are brutal with their animals and with women. She had hooked up with this bronc rider in Wyoming, and he got drunk and pretty rough one night. They’d been sleeping in his horse trailer—”

  “In a horse trailer?” Margaret asked.

  “Some of them have campers in the front,” I said. “I guess his did. Anyway, the fight spilled to the outside and attracted attention. My mother is a lot shorter than me. She was sixteen, and he was twenty-eight and big for a bronc rider. He outweighed her by a hundred pounds or more. He was snake mean when he was drunk, and the other rodeo riders were afraid of him.”

  It had been a long time since I’d told this story to anyone. Even knowing what I knew about my father now, it was still pretty cool.

  “But my mom was nobody’s punching bag, and she doesn’t believe in fighting fair. She kicked his butt in front of his friends. Then she turned around to get her stuff out of his trailer, and he got to his feet and came after her while her back was turned.” I could see by the tension in Margaret’s shoulders that the story was getting to her.

  “There was this Native American, a Blackfeet man from Montana.” Which he sort of had been, and sort of hadn’t been. “He rode bulls, Mom said, and those bull riders are all a little crazy to do what they do. Anyway, he coldcocked that man before he got close to my mother again.”

  I smiled as I got to the best part. “And my mom punched him in the stomach. She said, ‘I have a gun, you stupid son of a bitch. I could have shot him, and no one would have said it was anything but self-defense. Now he’s going to get to beat up some other woman, and it will be your fault.’”

  Margaret laughed.

  “I know, right?” I said. “Mom is scary. Even Adam walks softly around her. She and that bull rider hooked up for a couple of months. Then one day, he just didn’t come home. Died in a car wreck.” He’d been hunting vampires, and they’d caught up with him. “Mom was pregnant with me. Imagine her surprise when she came in to change my diapers and found a coyote puppy in my crib.”

  It was my turn to be quiet for a little while. “She eventually ran down a pack of werewolves—do you know who the Marrok is?”

  Margaret nodded.

  “Right,” I said. “That’s whose pack she found. He agreed to take me—but she couldn’t come with. She decided that it was the best place for me.” Mom never said exactly what had made her decide to do that, but I figured it was pretty bad, considering the stories she did tell me. I did know that she’d negotiated for visitation rights over Bran’s objections. “So I was raised by a pretty neat couple. She was human, and he was werewolf. She died, and he committed suicide to be with her. I was fourteen, and I didn’t want to live with anyone else, so Bran let me live on my own.” Bran was from an age when fourteen was an adult. “I was raised a coyote in a werewolf pack. I know exactly what it feels like not to have anyone to talk to. Tell me as much or as little as you’d like. I won’t swear not to tell Adam, he’s my mate. But if I’m a well, he’s a . . . bottomless pit.” I glanced at Margaret, then looked back at the road. “When we last left you, you were alone, chained in the dark, and hearing monsters.”

  “Thomas found me there,” Margaret said, but she sounded more comfortable. Good. I’d worried that the “monster” talk would throw her. If so, she didn’t stand a chance taking on someone as . . . closed as Thomas. He reminded me of my foster brother Charles, and, for Charles, it had taken an Omega wolf with a backbone of titanium to learn how to make a relationship work. Omega wolves didn’t come around very often; maybe a fairy princess would do.

  “He was . . . he was a very, very angry man. I asked for his help. He refused. I asked him what he wanted, and he said . . . no, that’s not right. He wanted. I felt what he wanted as if it were water, and he’d doused me in it, so I could feel his need in my bones. But what he asked for was to feed from me.”

  There was a long moment as she weighed what had happened with how much she wanted to tell me. She smiled. “I was frightened—but not so frightened I didn’t see the hurt that caused his anger. I didn’t think he’d be happy to know how easy it was for me to see.”

  She took a breath.

  “I gave him what he wanted as well as what he asked for, even though he’d done that last because he knew I’d refuse. That I’d give him an excuse to walk off. If I’d known him then as well as I do now, I’d have known there was no way he’d have left me. I’m not sure Thomas knows that.” She gave me an incredulous look. “Talking. Who would have thought talking to someone would be so useful. I bet he, too, needs to know that he would not have left me there.”

  Oh, I knew that battle. “Good luc
k,” I said. “When your man is responsible for the world, heaven forbid they aren’t guilty of every little thing.”

  She giggled. Looked at me and broke down in whoops of amusement. “Isn’t that the truth, now,” she said when she quieted, wiping her eyes.

  She laughed again and shook her head. “Anyway. We struck a bargain that night, but it was more than either of us expected. There is magic in bargaining with one of my kind that has nothing to do with what I had the power to do or not do. There, that’s some repayment for you. That’s why so many of the fae are willing to strike odd bargains—they can gain power from it. And mine wasn’t the only bargain present that night. Thomas’s father had bargained with the master vampire who made him. Two bargains in the Heart of the Hill—there is power in the deep places of the earth, Mercy. There was also my fire magic, tempered to a stronger force by my royal birth and his . . .” She hesitated. “Some things are his secrets to give. But there is magic in Thomas’s heritage, too. I gave him three gifts. His freedom from the vampire who had bound him—that was Thomas’s own power made manifest. From my magic, I—” She sucked in a breath. “You are easy to talk to. I think that is something else that belongs to Thomas.”

  I nodded. “I can live with that.” It was the truth, but I was very curious anyway.

  She laughed. “That was almost a lie.” She looked at me. “I tell you what. I’ll tell Thomas what we talked about, and he can tell you if he chooses.”

  “I can live with that better,” I said. “Or at least, it isn’t any worse.” But then I got an inkling. A terrible horrible very, very scary inkling.

  No normal vampire would have chosen a hotel like the Marriott. There were too many windows—and the ones in their room all faced the east, where the sun would rise.

  And Margaret said that her power, like her father’s, came from the sun.

  Unbidden, I remembered walking at night once with Stefan, a friend who was a vampire. At one point, he stopped, looked up at the moon, and said, totally out of the blue, “I miss the sun.” And the last word sounded as though it had been dragged up from the depths of his being. If someone asked Stefan what he would wish for, I think that the ability to walk in sunlight would be very high on that list.

  Could Thomas walk in the sun?

  As soon as I thought that, terror screamed up my backbone. Vampires are evil. Even though I like some of them, I know that they are evil. Symbols of faith can work against them, repel them and cause them pain. Wood works against vampires because it was something that once was living that became dead—sympathetic magic of a sort. But it is sunshine that is the real weapon against vampires.

  “Mercy?” Margaret said, her voice concerned.

  That was a secret too dangerous for anyone to have. They would hunt him down. Which they? All of “they.” Vampires would hunt him down to steal his secret. Everyone else would hunt him down to kill him to get rid of the fear I had coiled in my stomach.

  “Don’t ask him,” I said, my voice hoarse. “This gift from your power, I think I know what it was.” Thomas called her Sunshine, I remembered. “That’s a secret too big for acquaintances, no matter how friendly. When we’re friends, we can pretend you told me then. For now we can say that I have an idea—and I’m going to pretend I’m wrong because that would make Thomas the scariest vampire I’ve ever heard of.”

  We drove for a few miles in silence.

  Then she said, “Thomas isn’t a monster—though he’d disagree with me on that. I don’t know how he managed it, with his father, who was the single coldest being I have ever known, but he’s a good man.”

  I nodded, though I wasn’t as sure of it as she was. I cleared my throat. “So the third thing you gave him was your blood.”

  “It sealed the bargain,” she said. “That’s what my father said. For the next seventeen years, I always knew where he was, whether he was . . . well, not happy. Thomas doesn’t do happy very much. But he was content. Or if he was unhappy or cold or whatever . . . He says that he did not feel the same connection—not the same way.”

  “That’s backward to the way a vampire’s feeding usually works,” I said. I knew that because apparently my . . . Stefan felt that way about me. He knew when I was sad or hurt. He’d known when I had nearly died. I knew that because he’d shown up at the hospital and sat with me all through the night. I’d been pretty high on pain meds, but Adam had told me that Stefan hadn’t said a word the whole time.

  Margaret nodded. “Backward, yes. That’s what my father said. Then he said he thought it was the thing that Thomas gave me back for my gifts. Thomas was raised to be a guardian, to protect his father’s interests. When his father betrayed him, he still guarded, but he no longer believed in what he was doing. He gave me himself, everything of what he was, when we sealed the bargain with blood.” Voice tight, she said, “My father said that the vampire usually takes ownership of those he feeds from, but Thomas reversed that in an effort to balance our bargain.”

  “That’s . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to be offensive.

  “Messed up,” she said. “I know. If I think of it as a gift of service, it helps. But I used him—and now . . . we’re so lopsided. It’s like he thinks of himself as my devoted . . .”

  “Slave?” I suggested. “Servant?”

  She laughed, wiping tears from her eyes again. “Can you imagine Thomas as a slave? He’d have the person who thought he was his master committing suicide in an hour, all the while helping out with solicitous advice on the proper length of blade. And even as the knife slid in, the master would think it was all his own idea.”

  “Guard dog,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “That one. It’s as if he sees me as this fragile thing to be protected.” She paused. “That’s not quite right. It’s not as though he doesn’t respect me, respect my power. But he sees me as different from him. Separate.” She sighed. “I hoped you could help me.”

  I thought about it. Sometimes simple is best when dealing with men. It’s not that they are simple. Simple and Adam didn’t belong in the same room. But dealing with them . . . that was simple.

  “So seduce him,” I said.

  “I’d love to,” she all but wailed. “But how?”

  Okay. Seducing Adam wasn’t exactly . . . difficult. It was fun, actually, just how much I could get him to react with subtle cues. A nudge. He did it back to me, too—with interest. But Thomas was more like Charles. Thomas needed a sledgehammer first.

  “Victoria’s Secret,” I said. “No. That’s too feminine. Too much what women think is sexy.” I tried to channel Adam.

  “Have you looked at me?” she said. “I am covered with scars, and I’m too skinny. I have no muscle. I’m ugly.”

  I wasn’t a guy, so I knew better than to argue with that last statement. What I thought didn’t matter—what she thought mattered.

  “Thomas doesn’t think you’re ugly,” I told her. “No one who watches him watch you—no one who saw his face when he picked you up back there in that hotel would ever, ever be under that impression.”

  “I’ve tried lingerie,” she said after a moment.

  “Big guns are required,” I said. “Subtle won’t work. Naked.”

  “But I don’t have big guns,” she said. Then she dropped her head in her hands. “I can’t believe I just said that. I can’t believe I said that to someone I’ve just met.”

  “Thomas will like your guns just fine,” I assured her. “Just ask him.”

  Her jaw dropped open. Then she closed it and laughed.

  We talked awhile more. I offered improbable suggestions, and she responded in kind. Just outside of Pasco, she fell asleep.

  It had been a long time since I’d talked with a woman who was just my friend. I’d called Char, my old college roommate, over Christmas. Maybe it was time to call her again.

  —

 
I parked the Subaru, and before I had the engine off, Thomas had the passenger door open. When he saw Margaret asleep, he extracted her from the seat without waking her up.

  Yep, I thought with satisfaction, he’s a goner.

  I got out of the car, locked it with the appropriate button on the key fob, and handed the keys to Thomas.

  He took them, looked at me, then glanced over his shoulder at Adam, who was standing beside the black SUV in the parade-rest position that he habitually fell into when waiting for someone. Zee had the hood of the SUV up and was tinkering.

  I frowned at Zee. There was nothing wrong with the SUV. I kept all of our cars in excellent running condition.

  “You should come visit us in San Francisco,” Thomas said, his voice quiet. “I would be delighted to serve as your escort.” Then he smiled. A real smile. He didn’t have Adam’s dimples, but it was a good smile anyway. “In the purely tourist sense of the word.”

  “We’ll do that,” I said. “Margaret and I had fun.”

  Margaret opened her eyes and, in a sleepy voice, said, “Take care, Mercy. And thank you. I hope not to need the big guns.”

  I laughed. “I think you’ll find that your guns are plenty. Safe travels.”

  Thomas turned and headed for the hotel entrance.

  I stalked to the SUV, and said, “There is nothing wrong with the SUV.” Zee kept tinkering. I stood on my tiptoes to see what he was doing. “Is there?”

  Zee removed himself from under the hood and held up a small device. “Not anymore. Someone’s been tracking you.”

  Adam held his hand out, looked at the device, and snorted. He passed it to me. It bore a neat label with the SUV maker’s logo on it. I’d never had to do anything more complicated than an oil change on the SUV. If I’d noticed the little box, I’d have assumed it belonged.

  “Feds, I bet,” Adam said. “We are persons of interest.”

  “How did you find it?” I asked Zee.

  “Nothing you could do, Liebling,” he said. “I felt it transmit. It didn’t bother me much, but since we had a moment here, I thought I’d take a look.”