The fairy queen had continued to talk in my head, but I wasn’t paying attention to what she said.
“Whom do you serve?” she asked aloud, pulling her hand away from my head. Not as though she were interested in the answer.
“ ‘Choose this day whom you will serve,’ ” I murmured. “ ‘But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’ ” It seemed appropriate to quote Joshua at her.
“What?” she asked, startled.
“What were you expecting me to answer?” I asked, feeling a little let down. Some of the very old fae react poorly to scripture, but this one didn’t seem to mind—not the scriptures anyway.
“Bring her to the hall,” she said, her eyelashes beating her cheekbones with the force of her temper.
The men picked me up, chair and all, and hauled me back to the hall. I had only vague memories of what had happened to me there at the hands of the witch—my mother once told me that childbirth was like that. All that pain, then nothing. But if my mind had blocked out the worst of it, my body seemed to make up for it. As we got closer and closer, my stomach clenched, and I broke out in a sweat. By the time we made it into the hall, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the men carrying me could smell my fear.
They brought me right up to the throne before setting me down.
“What did you do?” the queen hissed at the witch, who shrank back from her. “What did you do that she resists me?”
“Nothing, my queen,” the witch said. “Nothing that would allow her to resist you. She is only half-human. Perhaps that is the problem.”
The queen released her and stormed back to me. She took a silver knife out of her belt and cut my arm right over the bite Samuel had given me. The bite marks were still fresh-looking, so I hadn’t lost a lot of time.
She rubbed her fingers in my blood and put them in her mouth. Then she cut herself and dribbled three drops into the open wound on my arm.
She was going to use old magic to bind us together. This was the stuff the wolves got out to make someone pack.
I had a sudden panicky thought. If she got me, could she get to the pack through me? Zee had been worried about her enthralling the wolves.
“My blood to yours,” she said, and it was too late to do anything about what she was doing. “My silver, my magic, our blood makes you mine.” Because it was done.
A fog rolled over my head.
I struggled and struggled, but there was nothing to struggle against; it was only fog that seemed to cover everything and muffle my thoughts.
Chapter 15
AFTER STRUGGLING AND STRUGGLING, I FOUND MYself alone, standing on a great barren field of snow. The cold was so great that it froze my nose when I breathed in, but, although I was naked, I wasn’t uncomfortable.
“Mercedes,” Bran’s voice was breathless. “Here you are! Finally.”
I turned all around and couldn’t see him.
“Mercedes,” he told me, “I can talk to you because you are part of Adam’s pack and his pack is mine, too. But you need to listen because I can’t hear you. All I can do is show you what I think you need.”
“All right,” I told him. It felt lonely knowing he couldn’t hear me. Lonely because it wasn’t Adam who’d found me there in the snow. I shivered though I still wasn’t feeling the cold.
“The biggest weapon in the arsenal of a fairy queen is enthrallment. As a member of a pack, you should be all but immune to that. But yours is a special case, and I am told that no one thought to teach you how the pack magic should work for you. Apparently my son and Adam, who should know better, assumed that it would all be instinctive because that’s how it works for a wolf. When Adam found that it was not the case, he chose to wait so he could find out who had been messing with you—instead of making you safe.”
“There were complications,” I told him sharply. I didn’t like to hear him being critical of Adam. I’d known what he was doing and approved of the way his mind worked.
A pause followed, and I had the distinct impression of surprise.
“I’m sorry for offending you,” he said slowly. “That I know you are offended is . . . interesting.” I got the impression of a shrug, and he continued with his message. “You should know that thrall magic is not so different from the pack bonds, Mercedes. The pack bonds are not built to subdue individuality to the Alpha or enforce behavior of any kind. A pack needs all its differences, and we find strength in that: a lot more strength than one stupid fairy queen who is stealing magic and using a witch. You understand me? ” His fury shook my whole being, he was so angry.
He wasn’t angry with me, though, so it wasn’t my concern.
“I understand,” I told him, even though he couldn’t hear me. Or mostly couldn’t hear me.
“I’m going to show you something,” he said. And suddenly in the white snow there was a silver garland. “This is one of your pack bonds,” he told me. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him walking beside me as we followed the garland. We stopped by the end, and there was a rock tied . . . enveloped in a soft cage of silver. The rock glowed a warm yellow that was very welcome in this cold place.
“Christmas garlands and a rock?” he said, a smile in his voice. “Why not an ornament?”
“Wolves aren’t fragile,” I told him. “And they’re . . . stubborn and hard to move.”
“I guess that imagery works as well as anything,” he allowed. “Do you know who this is? Can you feel how worried she is for you?”
“Mary Jo,” I said. And once he’d pointed it out to me, I could feel it, too. Could feel that she was looking for me, running on four feet to use her nose to its best advantage. She wasn’t hot on the trail—and I had the impression of miles traveled and miles to go stretching out both ways in weary infinity.
“It is not usually so clear,” Bran said, pulling me out of Mary Jo. “Partially it is because I am with you—and I am the Marrok. Another part is that the fairy has locked you into your own head—I can tell that by the quality of my contact with you. That she has done this is an unforgivable offense”—once more I felt him try to contain his anger—“but that will give you strength here you would not otherwise have had.” He paused. “The connection between you and me is stronger than it should be, too. I’m not getting words back, but there is something . . . No use getting distracted with the why of that now. We have other tasks.”
He took me to another silver garland and had me tell him whom it belonged to. After the third, I could find the strands myself without his guidance. The fourth was Paul’s. He was running with Mary Jo—and just as anxious to find me. He still didn’t like Warren, though. I could see that his garland and Mary Jo’s were intertwined and connected to all the other garlands, too. One by one we walked by the rocks that were the wolves in the pack.
Bran held me at Darryl’s, when I would have hurried on because I wanted to find Adam.
“No,” he said. “I want you to look here for a bit. Can you find Darryl’s connection to Auriele? It’s different from the pack bonds.”
I looked and looked. I found Auriele’s rock nearby, but I couldn’t see anything. Finally, in desperation, I picked up Darryl’s rock and saw that it moved Auriele’s, too—as if they were tied together . . . and then I couldn’t understand how I’d missed the blazing gold rope between them, it was so obvious. Maybe I’d been looking too hard for a silver garland and instead their bond was very different—softer, stronger, and deeper. Unlike the pack bond, it wasn’t tied onto the rocks; it originated in one and ended in the other.
Bran took me by the elbow. “Okay, quit playing with them. You’re making Darryl unhappy. I have another one to show you.”
He led me to the center of all the strands of silver.
All but buried in the pack magic was a very, very black rock. It radiated anger and fear and sorrow so strongly it was hard to go near it.
“Don’t be frightened,” Bran said, and there was a rough affection in his voice. “Adam has been frightening
quite enough people lately. Look and tell me what you see.”
This was Adam? I ran up to the rock and put both hands on it. “He’s hurt,” I said, then corrected myself. “He’s hurting.”
“Where is your mate bond?”
It lay in the snow, a fragile and worn thing. There were a lot of places where it had been roughly knotted, just to keep it together.
“Hastily made in need, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” the Marrok said, “but that was compounded by rough handling by a bunch of idiots. Most of whom should have known better.”
I could see that around the knotted places, the rope was worn, as if a dog . . . or a wolf had chewed on it until someone had tied it to keep it from breaking.
“Henry isn’t in the pack anymore,” said Bran. “Just in case you hadn’t noticed. I’ve brought him to my pack for a little one-on-one. In a few months, I might let him go out on his own again. Most of that mess is his doing.”
But I wasn’t worried about the chewed sections anymore.
“It’s broken,” I said, kneeling in the deep snow. In front of me the rope came to an abrupt ending, as if sliced by a sharp knife. I’d thought that the reason I hadn’t been able to feel Adam was still the overload from when he’d thought I was dead. Though it had been recovering from that, hadn’t it? When had I lost the connection?
It hurt to know that it was broken.
“Now, that,” Bran growled, “was cut by black magic.”
His voice was so strong in my right ear that I turned—and got a glimpse of something huge and awful that didn’t look anything at all like Bran in any form I’d ever seen.
“I couldn’t see how it would be possible until Samuel told me there was a witch involved. Between the witch and the queen, they found a weakness and broke it,” he told me. And then, in a curiously amused tone, he said, “And I don’t scare you a bit, do I?”
“Why would I be afraid of you?” I asked—but my focus was on the broken rope. Would I hurt Adam if I touched it?
“Go ahead,” said Bran. “He would give anything for you to touch it again.”
“Mine,” I said. “Mine.”
But I still didn’t touch it.
With that superior humor he occasionally used, which made me want to hit him every time, Bran said, “I’m sure he can find someone else who wants it.”
I grabbed it with both hands—and not because I was worried there would be someone else, no matter what Bran thought. But because we belonged together, Adam bound to me, me to him. I loved it when he let me make him laugh—he was a serious man by nature and weighed down by the responsibility he held. I knew he would never leave me, never let me down—because the man had never abandoned anything in his long life. If I hadn’t taken the gold rope of our bond, I knew Adam would have sat on me and hog-tied me with it. I liked that. A lot.
“Mercy!” This voice wasn’t Bran’s. This voice was demanding and half-crazed. A short pause, then much more controlled, Adam said, “About damned time. Found you. Mercy, we’re coming to get you. Just sit tight.”
I wrapped his voice around me and held on tighter to the rope between us until it settled into my bones, and I didn’t have to hold on anymore. “Adam,” I said, happily. And then added, because he’d know I was teasing, “Took you long enough. You were waiting for me to get myself out?”
I looked around my field of snow, by then littered with cheery garland and glowing rocks. I closed my eyes and wrapped the feel of pack around me like a warm cloak. I felt the fairy queen’s magic touch the golden rope I shared with Adam—and this time it was the queen’s magic that shattered.
* * *
MY GAZE WAS LOCKED WITH THAT OF THE TRAPPED forest lord. He blinked, and I jerked my eyes down—and saw that my arm was still dripping blood. From the amount I’d lost, I hadn’t been out of it for more than a few seconds.
“There,” said the fairy queen. “Now you are mine.”
I blinked at her and tried to mold my features into the stupid expression I’d seen on the other thralls as she cut the ropes that held me to the chair.
“Go to the kitchens and get something to wipe the blood off the floor,” she told me.
I stood up and started walking. She quit paying attention to me, because I wasn’t interesting anymore. I started walking a little faster because I saw my gun on the floor by one of the benches, where someone must have kicked it. I suppose that made sense. There weren’t many fae who could have picked it up without hurting themselves. None of the thralls would dream of using it—but I could see that the fae might hesitate to have a thrall dispose of it.
I picked it up and turned around. Slowly, so as not to attract the attention of the fae in the room—who were all looking at the fairy queen and not at her new thrall. The queen was leaning over the arm of her throne, talking to her witch. I shot the queen three times in the heart. The witch was watching me and smiled as I pulled the trigger.
“Huh,” said a voice right next to me. I turned my head and had to look down at a human-seeming child who appeared to be no more than eight or nine years old.
She smiled at me. “And they were afraid something would happen to you if we waited until everyone could come to the party. Just like a coyote to spoil the fun for everyone.”
The last time I’d seen this fae, she’d been playing with a yo-yo in the front yard of a murder scene she was guarding. I didn’t know her name, just that she was plenty powerful, people were scared of her, and she was a lot older than she looked.
For an instant I almost saw something completely different standing beside me, then she smiled at me, and said, “Not my glamour you don’t, Mercedes.”
The other fae in the room didn’t move, frozen in the moment of the fairy queen’s death.
Yo-yo Girl walked forward to the dead queen, and I followed her. The witch had grabbed the body and was taking handfuls of the queen’s blood and painting it over the silver thrall necklace around her neck.
“I don’t think so,” said Yo-yo Girl. She bent and touched the remains, and said something that might have been a word. The queen’s body turned to dust.
Yo-yo Girl started to back away—and then saw the forest lord in his chains beyond the throne. Somehow I don’t think that she’d seen him before reducing the queen to so many ashes.
The silver ring popped off the witch’s neck—only to be replaced by small fingers. I heard only the echo of a whisper, then the witch was dust, too. Yo-yo Girl took a handful of the resultant gray mass, lifted it to her mouth, and licked it like an ice-cream cone.
“Yum,” she said to me. Her hands, her clothes, and her mouth were covered with ashes. “I love witches.”
“I’ll take chocolate, if it is all the same to you,” I told her.
“Mercy!” roared Adam from somewhere beyond the hall.
“Uh-oh,” said Yo-yo Girl. “Someone missed out on all the killing.”
“Here!” I called. “We’re okay.”
And then it was true. Because Adam was there and he had his arms around me and that made everything all right.
* * *
I KICKED THE SNOW AND STUBBED MY TOE ON THE kitchen sink. It was the night of the big rescue, and everyone was partying over at Adam’s house. I’d been hugged and fussed over until I decided that it was a good time to go check out the remains of my home.
The snow hid a lot, and the pack had cleaned it up. They’d had the whole month that I’d been missing to do it. I suppose I was lucky it hadn’t been a year or a century.
They hadn’t been able to find the Elphame after Zee had been forced to let his door close. Apparently, as Zee explained it to me, the Elphame moved in relation to the reservation, and Ariana hadn’t been able to find me.
It was only when the bond between Adam and me reconnected that they were able to locate the Elphame. While Zee worked to make another entrance, they’d sent Yo-yo Girl ahead to make sure I was safe. She apparently didn’t need anything as crude as an entrance to find he
r way to the Elphame. She probably had a name besides Yo-yo Girl, but the fae are funny about names, and no one wanted to give her a real one.
The fae who had belonged to the fairy queen were being housed in the reservation temporarily. Some of them had no memory of how they’d come to follow the fairy queen. Some of them were angry that I’d killed her, but not so angry they’d made any move against me. Zee said that the Gray Lords were torn between anger at the way the fairy queen had used a forest lord and a black witch, and triumph at the proof that Underhill was returning some power to all of the fae.
There wasn’t much left of my trailer except for a small pile of things that might be reused. I hadn’t lost the pole barn with my Vanagon inside. I hadn’t lost Medea or Samuel.
The first time I’d seen the place, there had been a coyote hiding under the porch, and I’d taken it as an omen. When I’d finally bought it, I’d felt like I had a home for the first time in my life. A home no one could take away from me.
“Saying good-bye?”
I hadn’t heard the Marrok, but Bran was like that.
“Yeah.” I smiled at him so he’d know I didn’t mind his presence.
“I meant to thank you for Samuel,” Bran said.
I shook my head. “It wasn’t me. It was Ariana—have you seen them together? Aren’t they cute?” Ariana wasn’t at Adam’s house, though Samuel was. She wasn’t quite up to bearing a pack of werewolves celebrating madly. Samuel had talked about her for twenty minutes, though.
Ariana hadn’t managed to touch Samuel when he was a wolf—yet, Samuel had told me. But she didn’t have any trouble with Samuel the man, and she didn’t have panic attacks around any of the werewolves—as long as they were calm and approached her one at a time in human form. She’d just needed a reason to work on her phobias, he’d explained with great pride. Bran had smiled when Samuel said that, the smile that said the Marrok had been up to something. So he might have had something to do with her finding her way among the wolves. Or maybe he just wanted me to think that. I’ve found that I do better when I don’t worry too hard about what Bran can and can’t do.
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