“Stay down there,” she said. “I won’t let you have him.”
Something the size of a car boiled out of the living room. My eyes didn’t want to focus on it because it was so ugly or beautiful. It had a lot of insectoid legs and some sort of flowing, luminous, blue-green carapace that moved like silk blown in the wind. But when Jesse shot the fae again, the bullet ricocheted off the carapace, hitting the wall two feet from my head.
“Stop firing,” I shouted, and raised my Sig.
I dropped to one knee on the ground, aiming under the carapace at an angle that wouldn’t allow me to bounce a bullet up to the top of the stairs. I emptied the gun into the fae, and blue-green blood sprayed onto the white carpet. That was good, because some of the fae can’t be hurt with lead bullets.
The fae creature whirled on me in a snakelike motion. I got a confusing glimpse of a beautiful woman’s face with skin of amber and eyes of ruby. I surged to my feet, running toward her even though I was weaponless. Running away would only have caused her to charge me. As it was, she hesitated, doubtless reasoning that, if I was running toward her, I must have some sort of an attack in mind.
I tripped on the walking stick and rolled with the fall. I used the momentum to power my thrust, and the walking stick’s sharp spearhead slid into the amber fae’s mouth. It wasn’t exactly unexpected that the walking stick would show up—but I hadn’t counted on it. I’d been planning on running past the fae creature and luring it away from the kids to the backyard, where I could hear a battle raging.
The fae creature dropped to the ground, the light fading from its carapace. I held the walking stick at the ready, but the fae stayed where she was, not breathing.
Aiden, appearing beside Jesse at the top of the stairs, made a motion with his hand, and the amber fae’s body began to burn with a smoldering, angry blue flame. There was a cracking boom from the kitchen that sounded like a door being ripped from its hinges. Then the tibicena, a great gash opened on his hip from which molten rock dripped, bolted into the foyer and closed his great jaws on the amber fae’s face. This time the tibicena was built like a wolf rather than the foo dog of his last appearance. Upright ears topped a muzzle that was long and narrow. His body was finer-boned than a werewolf of his size would have been, more like a wolf’s gracile and narrow form. His tail was covered with molten hair, and it curled a little.
He jerked his head, and there was a snapping sound before the fae’s amber face melted like wax in his teeth. Between Aiden’s sullen blue fire and the tibicena’s red flame and black teeth, the fae was definitely dead. Aiden closed his fist and spoke a word of power that emitted a sharp magical smell that made me sneeze. His fire died to nothing as the last of the fae’s body turned to ash.
Aiden slipped past Jesse and trotted down the stairs. Joel snarled at him, then at me when I moved. I froze, but Aiden kept coming.
“It’s done, it is,” Aiden told Joel. “That was the last of them. Can you hear the silence? It’s the good kind of silence, not the silence that listens back. Hear the silence and feel the air. There is only death that visited our enemies and the blood of our wounded. No more battle, no more enemies to kill. Time to sleep, fire dog,” he said, and touched his hand to Joel’s forehead.
Joel took a deep breath and turned his head to lick Aiden’s hand twice before settling on the floor in the ashes of the amber fae. A few breaths later, Joel’s naked human form lay in the tibicena’s place. He sat up, and Cookie bounded down the stairs and licked his face anxiously.
Joel began laughing. He looked up at Aiden, and said, “Thanks, mijo. That was the first time I’ve ever let the tibicena free, because I knew you’d be there. That was fun.” His voice slurred a little, as if he were drunk.
Rapid footsteps from the direction of the kitchen had me gripping the walking stick, which was once more a stick. But it was only Mary Jo, armed with a pickax that was covered with various substances that might be fae blood; she skidded to a stop, her hand half-raised.
“Which one was that?” she asked, gesturing at the ashes.
“Glowed blue,” I told her. “With a face that looked like it’d been carved in amber.”
“Caterpillar Girl,” said Mary Jo. “That only leaves Water Horse.”
The front door opened, and Zee and Sherwood ran in, weapons in hand. “Water Horse was the Fideal,” I told her. I looked at Zee. “Did you kill him?”
Zee relaxed and made a quick movement that my eyes didn’t quite follow, but after which his sword was gone. “I warned him not to come back,” said Zee, and he glanced at Sherwood. “I’ve seen you fight before. What did you say your name was?”
Sherwood gave him a half smile. “Sherwood Post.”
Zee blinked at him. “That sounds like a fence built by Robin Hood.”
“Don’t ever forget your name when Bran is around,” I told Zee. “I figure Sherwood got away lightly. Just think if Bran had been reading Moby-Dick and The Old Man and the Sea instead. Sherwood could have been Herman Hemingway.”
“Or what if he had been reading Louis L’Amour?” asked Mary Jo. “Sherwood L’Amour would have doomed you to stripper jokes for the rest of your life.”
Zee frowned. “If I’ve seen you fight—and I have, long ago. Somewhere . . . it may take some time to come to me. But if I’ve seen you fight, it’s a fair and sure thing that Bran knows who you are. There aren’t that many old wolves running around, and none that old bastard doesn’t know.”
I opened my mouth to say something—and shut it because it would have been bitter. Bran had made the decision to cut us loose based on what he thought would be the best for the werewolves. It was no use being bitter at Bran for acting like himself.
“Mercy,” Adam said.
I hadn’t heard him approach. I turned just in time to be enveloped in warm arms that closed just a little too hard. He smelled of blood—his own and others’—but I was reassured by the strength of his embrace. I just stood there for a moment and breathed him in.
“So I see you made it here alive,” he said after a moment.
“You, too,” I said. “Congratulations.” I might have been shaking a little. Now that it was all over, that we’d all survived—even poor Pastor White—and we’d kept them from taking Aiden, now I could shake.
When I felt the weight of eyes on my back, I took a deep breath and stepped back. “How did we do?” I asked.
“Paul’s hurt the worst,” Adam told me. “Mary Jo brought Carlos with her, and he’s doing wound care out in the backyard. Paul will feel it for a few days, but he’ll be fine. Ben got messed up pretty badly, too—he and Paul were on the front lines on their own for about five minutes before Mary Jo and her band of merry wolves got here.”
“I’m sorry,” said Aiden, his voice solemn.
“Yes, you are,” said Jesse stoutly. She’d come down the stairs while I wasn’t looking. “But that doesn’t mean that they can come here and feed you to a monster on our watch.” She patted him on the head. “And while I’m at it, thanks, squirt, for saving my life.” She looked at her dad. “They came out of the river. Ben was the first one to notice them—we were stargazing in the backyard. He yelled at us to get in the house, to get to the safe room.” She frowned. “We should have, but there were a bunch of those things, and only Paul and Ben to fight them. So we ran up to your bedroom and I grabbed the .444 and ran to the sitting room and started shooting. You’re going to have to get that window replaced.”
“There are a lot of windows that need replaced,” I said.
“The back wall of the house needs to be replaced,” said Mary Jo. “One of them had some sort of earth magic. She took the huge rocks that Christy had placed around the backyard as décor and hurled them. A couple of them hit the house.”
“I think I killed her,” said Jesse, suddenly sounding younger. “I tried to anyway. She threw that granite boulder and h
it Paul with it.”
“That’s about when I arrived,” Mary Jo said. “Ben’s pretty proud of you, kid, you hit her right between the eyes. You are the reason that Paul and Ben aren’t dead—and if the fae had taken those two out that early, I’d have shown up too late.”
Adam started to put a hand on Jesse, and I caught his eye and shook my head. She was holding on, just barely. If he hugged her, she’d lose it—and she deserved better than that.
Jesse caught his hand and gripped it tightly, giving me a smile. “Anyway, one of them climbed up the side of the house—and bullets didn’t do anything to him. He got through the window in the sitting room, and Aiden touched him.” She swallowed. “I’m not actually sure he’s dead. We got out of there and shut the door. There was a lot of noise by that time, and the blue-silky caterpillar lady was downstairs, so Aiden and I crouched in the hallway and waited.”
Mary Jo said something under her breath, dodged into the kitchen, and grabbed the fire extinguisher from the counter—we now had a lot of fire extinguishers stashed around the house—and ran up the stairs.
“If the house were going to have caught fire,” Jesse said, “I think it would have done so by now.”
“Reflexes,” I told her. “Remember, Mary Jo fights fires for a living—and Aiden has been doing his best to refine her response time.”
“It’s okay,” Mary Jo called down after a moment. “But you’re going to have to replace some furniture and the carpets in the sitting room.”
—
Mary Jo had been right: the back of the house was going to need major repairs. The yard was a real mess. Christy’s careful landscaping had been ruined. Four of the five giant boulders were scattered at random, to the detriment of lawn furniture and trees and garden spots. The fifth boulder was in the middle of the kitchen floor. There was now no question that we’d have to retile the kitchen. The big window in the living room was shattered, as were, as far as I could tell, all but one of the windows in the back.
Werewolves trickled in as word spread to those not actively involved in the actual battle, and they came over to help with cleanup. Someone rustled up tuna-fish sandwiches, and the night took on the oddly festive air of a work party. When they were done, the yard didn’t look pristine, but it was neat. Paving stones were stacked in piles. Things broken beyond repair, like the cement benches, and a lot of garbage bags from the house were set aside for the next garbage run. We did the best we could with the inside of the house, mostly sweeping or vacuuming up glass and throwing away broken things.
Ben and Mary Jo brought out plywood sheets from the garage, and I helped put them in place over the windows. Windows are fragile, and werewolves are not. Putting up plywood wasn’t a skill I would have actively sought out on my own, but I was pretty good at it. We were four sheets short of getting the job done, so we left the front window open until someone could get to a hardware store in the morning.
Adam came over when we were getting the last one up.
“Ben,” he said, “Auriele and Darryl are headed home; you can ride in with them.”
Ben’s truck had gotten smashed in the battle between Zee, Sherwood, and the Fideal. I’d told him that he’d be better off taking a settlement from his insurance and buying a new truck rather than repairing the old one. Once the frame was bent, it wasn’t usually worth the trouble of fixing it.
Ben stepped back from the job and stretched. He had a long cut the length of his face from the tip of his eye, down his jaw, and onto his collarbone. It had mostly healed up, and he looked as though he’d been in a car wreck several days earlier. “My croaking fat frog will shag my fucking Aunt Fanny before I’ll go now,” he said. “Until we get matters straightened out with the fae, I’m living right the fucking hell here.”
And, as if in answer, the lights all over the world—or at least our part of the world—turned on as the power company figured out how to fix whatever the fae had done.
Ben took a bow and accepted the applause of the pack.
—
We spent the next couple of days repairing what we could and carting away what we couldn’t. Adam’s contractor friend was optimistic that the stucco on the front of the house could be saved.
Adam and I were repairing a planting bed crushed by the granite boulder when it landed on Paul, who was mostly back on his feet now. We were discussing the merits of a rosebush in place of the dogwood, which was not as tough as Paul and had suffered unrecoverable damage, when the house phone rang.
“I’ve got it,” called Jesse. I heard her voice as she answered the phone but didn’t catch what she said. Then she called brightly, “Hey, Dad. Baba Yaga is on the phone for you.”
I followed him into the kitchen, where Jesse stood with the handset. She gave it to him. Then she looked at me and raised her eyebrows in an exaggerated fashion that made her eyes bulge, and mouthed, “Baba Yaga. Really?”
I nodded and mouthed, “Really.”
She hugged herself and, as she passed by me on her way out of the room, she whispered, “Now, how many people have gotten to say that? ‘Hey, Dad. Baba Yaga is on the phone for you’?”
Aiden was coming in as she was going out. Fighting together seemed to have broken the cold war and initiated a detente between Jesse and Aiden.
Her tone was relaxed as she said, “Hey, short stuff. Offended anyone bigger than you lately?”
“Everyone is bigger than me, Daisy Duke,” he said.
His attempt at teasing was lame, but he was making an effort. Last night, the werewolves had run a Dukes of Hazzard marathon in Aiden’s honor. The whole pack were trying their best to help him climb into the modern era with the help of TV shows and movies. It might have been more effective if they’d chosen something filmed in this decade, but their hearts were in the right place. I hoped that Aiden didn’t think that cars really could jump rivers and barns and whatever.
He seemed to know that he’d gotten it wrong with the Daisy, but he cleared his throat and tried again. “Bigger is easy. Finding someone smaller to offend is a real challenge.”
“I’m sure you’re up for that, too,” Jesse said, teasing him back. “You show some real aptitude in that area.”
He grinned at her, but then he turned his attention to me. “The witch is calling for a meeting with the fae, right?”
Jesse paused, and they both looked at me.
“That’s what it sounds like,” I agreed.
“You need to take me to this meeting,” he said. “Zee says that Underhill won’t leave them alone. They can’t afford for me to escape.”
“We’re not giving you to them,” I told him.
“Excuse me,” said Adam. He covered the mouthpiece, looked Aiden in the eyes, and said, “You stay here. No question.”
Aiden opened his mouth to argue, but Adam stared him down. Only when Aiden dropped his eyes did Adam go back to his call.
—
We agreed to meet at Uncle Mike’s. It was as close as we could come to neutral territory. The once bar was in east Pasco near the river, on the edge of the industrial district. The bar had been shut down for more than half a year. I expected it to smell musty or unused. But when Uncle Mike opened the door, his face somber, it smelled exactly the way it always did: alcohol, sawdust, peanuts, and the scents of hundreds of individuals. The last were faded and mixed into a musk from which it would have been impossible to coax a single thread free. And it smelled of magic.
When it had been open, the light had been kept low. But all the lights were on, and it was nearly as bright as it would have been had there been windows. Most of the tables were stacked in a pyramid in one corner of the room, large tables on the bottom, smaller on top. The chairs were mostly stacked, too, awaiting the day when the bar reopened.
One of the big tables had been set in the middle of the mostly empty room, and chairs were set around it.
>
“The others are here,” said Uncle Mike, “in the back. I’ll get them.”
He left us, Adam and me, alone in the room. The rest of the pack, all of them, were at our house protecting Aiden and Jesse. Darryl hadn’t been happy that we weren’t taking any extra wolves with us. But the fae had no reason to kill us, and the pack could protect Aiden and keep him safe. Or else, I’d been happy to point out to Darryl, nothing we could do would keep anyone safe at all.
Uncle Mike returned, escorting Beauclaire and the bald man whom Margaret had forced to her will. Goreu. The discrepancy between what I would have expected from a knight of the round table, fictional though it was, and Goreu left me bitterly and irrationally disappointed. They’d brought the good fairy and the bad fairy. I looked at Beauclaire and frowned at him. He looked cool and composed, as he had every time I’d seen him. Maybe we were meeting the bad fairy and the worse fairy. I had expected to be facing more. We apparently weren’t, Adam and I, as important as Margaret. I might have been offended, except the fewer Gray Lords we sat down with, the more likely we would be to walk away alive.
We all went to the scarred table and sat down, virtually at the same time. Adam was slower because he held my chair out.
“Are there any other fae in the building or adjacent lot?” asked Adam as he settled.
“No,” said Uncle Mike. “Just the three of us—and I don’t count.”
“What do you want?” asked Adam.
“There are nine fae dead,” said Beauclaire, very softly. Yep, I thought, my stomach clenched, bad fairy and worse fairy.
“They attacked us,” Adam told them. “That makes their deaths their own fault.”
“Point,” agreed Beauclaire, and he glanced at Goreu. “They were on their own,” he told us, “as, I understand, Uncle Mike informed you.”
“How often,” said Adam dangerously, “are we going to be discussing how many of your people have been killed by their own stupidity before you stop them instead of making me do it?”
Fire Touched Page 24
