Storm Cursed (A Mercy Thompson Novel)

by Patricia Briggs

  “Not a pretty face,” she observed. “What about glamour, though?”

  Glamour was the magic the fae used to alter their appearance.

  “Why would a fae want to look like someone who killed a member of law enforcement?” I asked. “That would be unholy dumb. It seems more reasonable to assume that this one is one of the goblins whose glamour isn’t as effortless, so when he doesn’t actively need to blend in, he resumes his normal appearance.”

  The farmer who’d called me an hour or so ago had been apologetic. His son worked in the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, and that was the law enforcement office he should have called.

  “But I figure this creature didn’t seem to have had much trouble killing that policeman down in California, and my son is working tonight,” he’d said. “I thought I’d call you first and see if you might consider Mesa a part of the territory your pack protects.” He paused. “If you come out, I’ll have some explaining to do, but I expect that’s better than attending my son’s funeral.”

  I’d decided then and there, without consulting my husband, that we did consider Mesa a part of our territory. If I continued this trend, I was going to make us responsible for half the state.

  But humans had very little chance against a goblin. I wasn’t about to sit by while people were thrown into a situation they weren’t equipped for when I was able to handle it safely. Mostly safely. Probably safely.

  My eyes caught a movement in the cavernous darkness. Maybe if I changed to coyote I’d see better. Coyote eyes are good at seeing moving things in the dark. But I can’t talk while I’m a coyote, so I couldn’t relay intelligence to my allies. Taking the goblin on as a coyote would be even stupider than sending the human Franklin County Sheriff’s deputies after it. The farmer had been right; a normal human stood no better chance than a coyote did against a goblin. Goblins might be considered among the less powerful of the fae . . . but that didn’t mean they were weak.

  I patted the steel and silver weapon that hung at my hip for reassurance.

  The first game of ISTDPB4 (Instant Spoils: The Dread Pirate’s Booty Four) that the pack had played right after we’d gotten back from Europe I had, totally uncharacteristically, won. Usually I was among the first to go—due to my special high-value target status as She Who Makes Treats as Soon as She Dies. But everyone had been treating me like a weakling after I got myself kidnapped by vampires. Irritated, I’d used dirty tricks to take out the usual winners and fought the rest to the bitter end.

  Ben maintained that I’d won because they were all trying to coddle me. Honey said I was better at deviousness after being held by Bonarata, the vampire Machiavellian ruler of Europe. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to—both equally true. Adam said, with a sly smile, that the only reason anyone else ever won was because I didn’t usually try too hard, but this time I’d had something to prove. Ahem. It is only right and proper that one’s mate regards one with rosy glasses. Regardless, the next game, normalcy returned and they obliterated me in two rounds.

  However, in honor of the occasion of my only win in three months, the pack formally presented me with a prize. Normally winners get fun things like foil-covered chocolate coins or kid-sized eye patches. Once, at the end of a four-game winning spree, Auriele had received a Lego pirate ship complete with plastic Jolly Roger.

  But I earned a cutlass, the real thing, steel-bladed and silver-hilted. As a bonus, I got a whole bunch of werewolves who fancied themselves experts, eager to teach me how to defend myself so that no stupid vampires would ever be able to kidnap me again.

  I didn’t tell them that Excalibur herself would not have saved me from Bonarata. It is difficult to defend yourself when you are unconscious. Instead, I settled in and learned because next time I might have a chance to fight. My pack was thoroughly spooked at how easily the vampires had stolen me away—and I could feel their tension decrease as my skill with the cutlass increased. That made me work even harder.

  I had some experience with a katana, which helped more than I’d expected. Most of the wolves who tried to teach me were no better than I was once you made allowances for the advantages of speed and strength that being a werewolf bestowed. They still made good sparring partners. But a couple of wolves really knew how to use a blade. The best of those were our lone submissive wolf, Zack, and the one-legged Sherwood Post.

  I carried the cutlass wherever I went. It made me feel better, and it made the pack feel better. I’d expected to have trouble with the police, but it seemed to make them feel better, too. Apparently if our pack was going to be protecting the humans in our territory from the fae, my carrying a sword made us look more like we were capable of doing our job. After the troll-bridge incident, we pack members had achieved brothers-in-arms status with most of the law enforcement types.

  So I was armed with the cutlass and my favorite carry gun, but my growing respect for the capabilities of goblinkind left me with no illusions about my ability to take down a goblin. I was, when it came right down to it, not that much better off against the supernaturally gifted than a run-of-the-mill human was. Coyotes are not huge and powerful predators. Which was why Mary Jo and Ben, my werewolf minions, were with me.

  “What are we going to do? Stand out here until the goblin gives up and runs out screaming, driven desperate by boredom?” asked Mary Jo after a bit.

  I listened for sarcasm and didn’t hear any. That didn’t mean she didn’t feel it—just that she was being careful. My mate had been very clear when he put the fear of God into the whole pack concerning me. I bit back a growl.

  “We,” I told them, “are waiting for backup.” I looked at the sky worriedly. I had just opened my garage for business again two days ago, so I couldn’t afford to be late. “I hope, anyway.”

  “Who else annoyed you enough to call?” Ben asked.

  “He didn’t annoy me,” I told him, “but I figured that we might need an expert, so I contacted Larry.”

  “The goblin king,” Mary Jo said, a little awe in her voice. It might have been horror rather than awe, but I took the optimistic view. “You called the king of the goblins in the middle of the night. What did he do to you?”

  Larry had moved to the Tri-Cities a couple of years ago because, he said, matters were getting interesting here. Common lore said that goblins ran from trouble, but you couldn’t prove it by Larry. I wasn’t really sure if he was the ruler of all the goblins or just the ones in the Tri-Cities—he tended to be vague about specifics in the way of most of the more powerful fae I’d dealt with. The only thing that Larry had said in my hearing about his rank was that goblins didn’t use the term “king.”

  “Fucking goblin problem,” said Ben good-humoredly before I could answer Mary Jo. “Who else should she have called, the elephant-shagging king of the expletive-deleted goblins?” That last sentence was about four words longer and he didn’t actually say “expletive-deleted.”

  “To be fair,” Larry answered mildly from just on the far side of my car, “I was still up. I tend to be nocturnal.”

  I hadn’t heard a vehicle drive up, nor had I seen or heard where he’d come from. I’d have felt stupid for not being more alert, but Ben and Mary Jo both subtly stiffened because Larry had taken them by surprise, too. None of us were crippled with mere human senses. He shouldn’t have been able to approach us without someone detecting him.

  With the darkness hiding the unreal color of his eyes and with gloves on his hands, he could easily have passed for human. I couldn’t tell if he was actively trying or if it was just an effect of the night.

  He wore his medium-brown hair in a cut that even I recognized as expensive. His jeans looked too tight for hand-to-hand fighting except that they stretched easily as he moved. His shirt was a black tee that fit like a second skin.

  He stopped on his brisk journey to close the distance between us as he passed my car, an old Jetta that had been well-used before
the twenty-first century dawned. It was my chosen replacement for my obliterated Rabbit and it had proved to be a challenging project, one I was nowhere near completing.

  Larry examined the Jetta mutely for a moment, then said, “Are you sure this is legal to drive?”

  “All the lights work,” I told him.

  My Vanagon, which was otherwise in showroom condition despite its age, had a coolant leak somewhere. With a radiator in the front and the engine in the rear of the fifteen-foot-long van, finding a leak that was probably a pinhole was a long and frustrating process. Adam had taken the new SUV that had replaced the SUV the vampires had smooshed with a semi. That had left only the Jetta to take me goblin hunting.

  I’d had to jury-rig the left rear turn signal with wires that ran out the trunk to the light, which was held on with zip ties. Then I’d crossed my fingers and headed out.

  I was hopeful it would make it home as well. In case it didn’t, I’d thrown my mobile tool kit into the backseat—or rather into the space where the backseat would someday be.

  “Princess,” said Larry doubtfully, “I think you have your work cut out for you. This car looks older than Zee.” But his eyes had released my car and traveled to the barn. When he moved, he didn’t hesitate, walking past me and the werewolves and into the doorway of the barn, where he stopped.

  “Hey, you!” he called, standing on the edge between night-dark and lightless dark. The white toes of his New Balance tennis shoes were cut off from my vision as thoroughly as if they had been taken off with an axe.

  Larry waited, his body intent, but no one answered him. He said something else—this time in a language with tongue clicks and a couple of odd sounds I’m not sure a human mouth could make. He wasn’t particularly loud, but whatever he said was effective.

  “No!” shouted a squeaky male voice from inside the barn. “Sanctuary. I claim sanctuary from this wondrous and glorious city said to be safe for fae and foe alike. Grant this me, dear my lord. An it is granted, I will happily emerge into thy keeping, great one.”

  I didn’t know how old goblins got. I didn’t know if they were one of the immortal or nearly immortal fae. I’d given back the only trustworthy book that recorded what the different kinds of fae were like before I’d known exactly how much I was going to need that knowledge.

  I’d gotten the impression that the goblins were one of the shorter-lived races of the fae, but there was something about the way the voice in the darkness put together sentences and ideas that indicated that my memory or my interpretation might have been wrong. It was possible that “shorter-lived” meant something different to the fae woman who had written the book than it did to me. Or maybe our fugitive spent too much time at summer Shakespeare festivals.

  Larry turned his body to me without taking his gaze away from the interior of the barn. “Do you know what he is running from?”

  “Last week a goblin killed a police officer in California. The video of the incident was all over the news,” I began, but paused when Larry glanced my way for a hair’s breadth. Long enough for me to see the odd expression on his face.

  “And people say humans don’t have magic,” he muttered, once again facing our fugitive. He made a circling gesture with one hand. “Never mind. Go on.”

  “He has a pretty distinctive scar,” I told him, gesturing at the scar on my own right cheek. “His is a lot bigger. A goblin with that scar killed the police officer in LA who was trying to arrest him. The police have a manhunt”—I cleared my throat and corrected myself—“a goblinhunt aimed at him.”

  Larry muttered something to himself in that other language. Then he called out, “Apparently you have an affinity for getting caught on camera. Careless of you to allow a mindless human device to record you doing murder. And you let it catch you murdering a knight of the human law, no less.”

  He emphasized some of the words oddly, leading me to suspect that there were several deadly insults buried in Larry’s comments. I knew that getting caught was very poorly thought of in the goblin culture—but I hadn’t known that getting caught by technology was viewed as even worse. I found it reassuring that, apparently, even to the goblins, killing a police officer was a bad thing.

  “No, no—I killed none,” our prey squeaked. “No child of humankind died at my causing, great one. No. No murderer I. I killed nary a one. Not knight nor even child. Not a wee boy with blinky shoes. Not me. I would never so defy the Gray Lords, great one. No more would I ever defy thy commands.”

  That gave me pause.

  As a matter of course, werewolves don’t lie because most werewolves can tell if someone is lying. I was raised by werewolves, and although I am not one, apparently a coyote can tell if someone is lying, too. I only lie when I think I can get away with it.

  But the fae don’t lie because they cannot lie. They can twist the truth until it is a Gordian knot, but they cannot lie.

  Still, that goblin’s words seemed oddly specific for someone who hadn’t killed a policeman or, apparently, a child with blinky shoes. But he wasn’t guilty because he said so. Maybe, I thought, he’d been a witness. But his words sounded like a lie to me. Not even a good lie.

  Both the werewolves relaxed, a subtle softening of their stances. He wasn’t guilty because he said so. And unlike human criminals, that was actually a true thing, no matter how much it sounded like a lie.

  Mary Jo turned to me. “Do we need to offer this goblin sanctuary? If the humans are going after him just because he is a goblin . . . isn’t that what our claiming dominion over the Tri-Cities is all about?”

  “No, love,” Ben said in a mock-sorrowful tone designed—as Mary Jo’s had not been—to carry to the goblin hidden in the barn. “Not our thing at all. We keep people safe—but sanctuary is a whole different level of stupid.”

  I was still trying to figure out how the goblin was being so specific if he had not killed the police officer and, apparently, a child. Goblins have glamour. Maybe another goblin—or one of the fae—had been trying to frame this one?

  Larry’s mouth twisted in a grimace. “At least tell me that you didn’t get caught on camera killing the child,” he said in a resigned voice.

  I frowned at Larry. First, because he sounded as if getting caught on camera had been worse than killing the child. But mostly I frowned at him because he sounded as if he knew that the goblin was guilty. But the goblin couldn’t lie.

  “No, not I,” said the voice inside the barn earnestly. “I killed not the wee boy with his two sweet blue eyes. Eyes like a robin’s egg so round and innocent and tasty they were. Nor killed I the fierce-voiced police officer who came to stop me.”

  Mary Jo and Ben looked as perplexed as I felt.

  “I am innocent,” wailed the goblin in the barn. “Innocent and they will harm me if you do not protect me from the humans.”

  “The fae are part of the bargain we made,” I said slowly. Did we owe the goblin sanctuary? I might have to go read the whole stupid document we’d signed again. At this rate, I’d have it memorized by Christmas.

  “And goblins are fae,” said Mary Jo. Larry snorted. Mary Jo continued, “At least insomuch that they have glamour and they are forced to tell the truth.” But her voice was hesitant.

  “We are a part of that ancient bargain, yes,” agreed Larry, frowning at the barn. “If the powers that be hear us lie, a terrible and mortal fate comes to us, as to all fae. Those greater in power may fight off their fate for a time, but for the lesser fae, like goblins, we die the moment a lie, knowingly spoken, leaves our lips.”

  “That means we do need to protect him,” said Mary Jo without enthusiasm. She looked at me and then away, careful not to express in any other way that she held me responsible for the pickle the pack was in. But then she straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin, and said, firmly, with an undertone of satisfaction I don’t think she intended me to hear, “We protec
t the innocent.”

  She wasn’t the only wolf who was finding . . . solace in their new role as heroes, which had replaced their old role of being monsters. The whole demeanor of our pack had been lightening up since my rash declaration on the Cable Bridge.

  The old Cable Bridge. The new Cable Bridge was a year out, at least. Engineers were having trouble trusting the site after one of the Gray Lords of the fae had opened up the earth there and let it swallow the old bridge. The fae had offered to build another bridge, but so far the city planners were smart enough not to take them up on that offer. I think it was the no-steel part that bothered them, but I was pretty sure taking gifts from the fae would have been the bigger problem.

  Ben sighed—he had obviously been looking forward to a fight. “It’s not what we signed on for—but I guess it’s what we have to do, since he’s innocent.”

  Ben hadn’t noticed exactly what Larry had said, not the way I had. Maybe I was paranoid, or maybe I’d just been spending too much time with the fae lately.

  “I be innocent,” said the fugitive goblin, sounding as though he was approaching the opening of the barn. His voice was fervent as he repeated, “I be innocent.”

  Larry rubbed his face, looked at me, and sighed, a sound more heartfelt than Ben’s had been. “I am about to reveal something . . . Mercy, this cannot get back to the fae.”

  “The not-goblin fae,” I clarified.

  He nodded. “Yes, those folk.”

  “Okay,” I told him. “We don’t owe it to the other fae to give them goblin secrets.”

  “Swear to it,” he said seriously. “This goes beyond me. This is for the safety of me and mine. Swear you will tell no one what I do here.”

  “No, great one,” said the voice in the barn, his voice low and solemn. “No. Betraying our secrets is not worth my unworthy death, no it isn’t. I should leave, a small and unimportant child, I. My fate is not worth betraying a great secret to such as these.”

  “Silence!” roared Larry in a very un-Larry-like voice. “Thou hast caused enough trouble for our kind. Thou hast no voice in what I choose to do.”