Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  He tipped an imaginary hat toward Samuel, then took my hand, bowed, and kissed it. “Mercy, I’d be doing you no favors if I didn’t tell you to stop. We appreciate the help you have given us so far, but your usefulness ends here. There are things going on that I’m not at liberty to tell you. If you continue, you are not going to discover anything—and if those Nameless Ones find out how much you know, it will go ill with you. And there are two too many of them about.” He nodded sharply at me, then at Samuel. “I’ll bid you both good mornin’.”

  And he was out the door.

  “Keep your weather eye on him, Mercy,” Samuel said, still standing with his back to me as we watched Uncle Mike’s headlights turn on as he backed out of the driveway. “He’s not Zee. His loyalties are to himself and his alone.”

  I rubbed my shoulders and stood up myself. Never have a discussion with a werewolf when he’s standing and you’re sitting; it puts you at a disadvantage and makes them think they can give you orders.

  “I trust him about as far as I can throw him,” I agreed. Uncle Mike wouldn’t go out of his way to harm me, but…“You know, one of the things I learned growing up about you wolves was that sometimes the most interesting part of the conversation with someone who can’t lie is the questions they don’t answer.”

  Samuel nodded. “I noticed it, too. That staff, whatever it is, was stolen from one of the murder victims—and he didn’t want to talk about it.”

  I yawned twice and heard my jaw pop the second time. “I’m going to bed tonight. I have to go to church in the morning.” I hesitated. “What do you know about the Black Smith of Drontheim?”

  He gave me a small smile. “Not as much as you do, I expect, if you’ve worked with him for ten years.”

  “Samuel Cornick,” I snapped.

  He laughed.

  “Do you know a story about this Black Smith of Drontheim?” I was tired and the heap of my worries was a weight I was staggering under: Zee, the Gray Lords, Adam, and Samuel—and the wait for Marsilia to find out that Andre had not been killed by his helpless victims. However, I’d been searching for stories about Zee for years. Too many of the fae treated him with awed respect for him not to be in stories somewhere. I just couldn’t find them.

  “The Dark Smith, Mercy, the Dark Smith.”

  I tapped my toe and Samuel gave in. “Ever since I saw his knife, I’ve wondered if he was the Dark Smith. That one was supposed to have forged at least one blade that would cut through anything.”

  “Drontheim…” I muttered. “Trondheim? The old capital of Norway? Zee’s German.”

  Samuel shrugged. “Or he’s pretending to be German—or the old story could have it wrong. In the stories I heard, the Dark Smith was a genius and a malicious bastard, a son of the King of Norway. The sword he made had a nasty habit of turning on the man who wielded it.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “I guess I could believe a villain before I’d believe a story about him being a goody-goody hero.”

  “People change over the years,” said Samuel.

  I looked up sharply and met his eyes. He wasn’t talking about Zee anymore.

  There were only a few feet between us, but the gulf of history was much larger: I’d loved him so much, once. I’d been sixteen and he’d been centuries older. I’d seen in him a gentle protector, a knight who would rescue me and build his world around me. Someone for whom I would not be an obligation, a burden, or a bother. He’d seen in me a mother who could bear his living children.

  Werewolves, with one exception, are made, not born. It takes more than a nip or two—or as I read in a comic book once, a scratch of a claw. A human who wants to change must be savaged so badly that he either dies or becomes a werewolf and is saved by the rapid healing that is necessary to surviving as a hot-tempered monster among other such beasts.

  Women don’t survive the Change as well as the men for some reason. And the women who do cannot bear children. Oh, they’re fertile enough, but the monthly change at the full moon is too violent and they abort any pregnancies when they shift from human to werewolf.

  Werewolves can mate with humans, and often do. But they have a terribly high miscarriage rate and higher than usual infant mortality. Adam had a daughter born after his Change, but his ex-wife had had three miscarriages while I knew her. The only children who survive are completely human.

  But Samuel had a brother who was born a werewolf. The only one that anyone I know had ever heard of. His mother was from a family that was gifted with magic native to this land and not Europe as most of our magic-using humans have. She was able to hold off the change every month until Charles’s birth. Weakened by her efforts, she died at his birth—but her experiences had started Samuel thinking.

  When I, neither human nor werewolf, was brought to his father for his pack to raise, Samuel had seen his chance. I don’t have to change—and even when I do, the change is not violent. Though real wolves in the wild kill any coyotes they find in their territory, they can mate and have viable offspring.

  Samuel waited until I was sixteen before he made me fall in love with him.

  “We all change,” I told him. “I’m going to bed.”

  Just as I’ve always known there are monsters in the world, monsters and things even more evil, I’ve always known that it is God who keeps evil at bay. So I make a point of going to church every Sunday and praying on a regular basis. Since killing Andre and his demon-bearing spawn, church was the only place I felt truly safe.

  “You look tired.” Pastor Julio Arnez’s hands were big-knuckled and battered. Like me, he’d worked with his hands for a living—he’d been a lumberman until he retired and become our pastor.

  “A little,” I agreed.

  “I heard about your friend,” he said. “Would he appreciate a visit?”

  Zee would like my pastor—everyone liked Pastor Julio. He might even manage to make being in jail more bearable, but getting close to Zee was too dangerous.

  So I shook my head. “He’s fae,” I said apologetically. “They don’t think very highly of Christianity. Thank you for offering.”

  “If there’s anything I can do, you tell me,” he said sternly. He kissed my forehead and sent me off with his blessing.

  Zee on my mind, as soon as I got home I called Tony on his cell phone because I had no idea how to get in to see Zee.

  He answered, sounding cheerful and friendly rather than coolly professional, so he must have been home.

  “Hey, Mercedes,” he said. “It was not nice of you to sic Ms. Ryan on us. Smart, but not nice.”

  “Hey, Tony,” I said. “I’d apologize but Zee matters to me—and he’s innocent, so I got the best I could find. However, if it makes you feel any better, I have to deal with her, too.”

  He laughed. “All right, what’s up?”

  “This is stupid,” I told him, “but I’ve never had to go visit anyone in jail before now. So how do I go about seeing Zee? Are there visiting hours or what? Should I wait until Monday? And where is he being held?”

  There was a short silence. “I think visiting hours are weekends and evenings only. But before you go, you might talk to your lawyer,” he said cautiously. Was there something wrong with me seeing Zee?

  “Call your lawyer,” he said again when I asked him.

  So I did. The card she’d given me had her cell on it as well as her office.

  “Mr. Adelbertsmiter is not talking to anyone,” Jean Ryan told me in a frosty voice, as if it were my fault. “It will be difficult to mount an effective defense unless he talks to me.”

  I frowned. Zee could be cantankerous but he wasn’t stupid. If he wasn’t talking, he had a reason.

  “I need to see him,” I told her. “Maybe I can persuade him to talk to you.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to persuade him of anything.” There was a bare hint of smugness in her voice. “When he wouldn’t respond to me, I told him what I knew about O’Donnell’s death—all that you had told me.
That was the only time he spoke. He said that you had no business telling his secrets to strangers.” She hesitated. “This next part is a threat, and I normally would not pass it on, as it does my client’s case no good. But…I think you ought to be warned. He said you’d better hope he doesn’t get out—and that he’s calling the loan due immediately. Do you know what he means?”

  Numbly I nodded before realizing that she couldn’t see me. “I bought my shop from him. I still owe him money on it.” I’d been paying him on a monthly basis, just as I did the bank. It wasn’t the money, which I didn’t have, that left my throat dry and pressure building behind my eyes.

  He thought I’d betrayed him.

  Zee was fae; he could not lie.

  “Well,” she said. “He made it clear that he had no desire to talk to you before he went mute again. Do you still wish to retain my services?” She sounded almost hopeful.

  “Yes,” I said. It wasn’t my money that was paying her—even at her rates there was more than enough in Uncle Mike’s briefcase to cover Zee’s expenses.

  “I’ll be honest, Ms. Thompson, if he doesn’t talk to me, I can’t do him any good at all.”

  “Do what you can,” I told her numbly. “I’m working on a few things myself.”

  Secrets. I shivered a little, though as soon as I’d gotten home from church, I’d turned up the temperature from the sixty degrees Samuel had set it at this morning before he’d left to go to the last day of Tumbleweed. Werewolves like things a little cooler than I do. It was a balmy eighty in the house, not a reason in the world that I should feel cold.

  I wondered which part of what I’d told the lawyer he objected to—the murders in the reservation, or telling Ms. Ryan that there had been another fae with him when he’d found the body.

  Damn it, I hadn’t told Ms. Ryan anything someone wasn’t going to have to tell the police. Come to think of it—I had told the police most everything I’d told Ms. Ryan.

  However, I should have asked someone before I’d talked to the police or the lawyer. I knew that. It was the first rule of the pack—keep your mouth shut around the mundanes.

  I could have asked Uncle Mike how much I could tell the police—and the lawyer—rather than depending upon my own judgement. I hadn’t…because I knew that if the police were going to look beyond Zee for a murderer, they’d have to know more than Uncle Mike or any other fae would have told them.

  It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission—unless you are dealing with the fae, who aren’t much given to forgiveness. They see it as a Christian virtue—and they aren’t particularly fond of Christian anything.

  I didn’t lie to myself that Zee would get over it. I might not know much about his history, but I did know him. He gathered his anger to him and made it as permanent as the tattoo on my belly. He’d never forgive me for betraying his trust.

  I needed something to do, something to keep my hands and mind busy, to distract me from the sick feeling that I’d done something terrible. Unfortunately I’d stayed late and finished all the work I had at the shop on Friday, thinking I’d be spending most of Saturday at the music festival. I didn’t even have a project car to work on. The current project, an old Karmann Ghia, was out getting the upholstery redone.

  After pacing restlessly around the house and making a batch of peanut butter cookies, I went to the small third bedroom that served as my study, turned on the computer, and connected to the Internet before I started on brownies.

  I answered e-mail from my sister and my mother and then browsed a bit. The brownie I brought into the room with me sat undisturbed on its plate. Just because I make food when I’m upset doesn’t mean I can eat it.

  I needed something to do. I ran through the conversation with Uncle Mike and decided that he probably really didn’t know who had killed O’Donnell—though he was pretty sure it wasn’t the ogres, or he wouldn’t have mentioned them at all. I knew it wasn’t Zee. Uncle Mike didn’t think it was the Gray Lords—and I agreed with him. From the fae point of view, O’Donnell’s murder was a screwup—a screwup that the Gray Lords could have easily avoided.

  The old staff I’d found in the corner of O’Donnell’s living room had something to do with the murder, though. It was important enough that the raven…no, what had Uncle Mike called it—the Carrion Crow—had come and taken it, and Uncle Mike hadn’t wanted to talk about it.

  I looked at the search engine screen that I used as my default page when I surfed the ’Net. Impulsively, I typed staff and fairy then hit the search button.

  I got the results I should have expected had I thought about it. So I substituted folklore for fairy, but it wasn’t until I tried walking stick (after magic staff and magic stick) that I found myself on a website with a small library of old fairy and folklore books scanned online.

  I found my walking stick, or at least a walking stick.

  It was given to a farmer who had the habit of leaving bread and milk on his back porch to feed the fairies. While he held that staff, each of his ewes gave birth to two healthy lambs every year and gave the farmer modest, if growing, prosperity. But (and there is always a “but” in fairy tales) one evening while walking over a bridge, the farmer lost his grip on the staff and it fell into the river and was swept away. When he got home, he found that his fields had flooded and killed most of his sheep—thus all the gain he’d gotten from the staff had left with it. He never found the staff again.

  It wasn’t likely that a staff that ensured all its owner’s ewes had two healthy lambs each year was worth murdering people over—especially as O’Donnell’s killer hadn’t taken it. Either the walking stick I’d found wasn’t the same one, it wasn’t as important as I had thought it might be, or O’Donnell’s killer hadn’t been after it. The only thing I was certain of was that O’Donnell had taken it from the murdered forest man.

  The victims, even though they were mostly names, had been gradually becoming more real to me: Connora, the forest man, the selkie…It is a habit of humans to put labels on things, Zee always told me. Usually when I was trying to get him to tell me just who or what he was.

  Impulsively, I typed in dark smith and Drontheim and found the story Samuel had told me about. I read it twice and sat back in my chair.

  Somehow it fit. I could see Zee being perverse enough to create a sword that, once swung, would cut through whatever was in its path—including the person who was using it.

  Still, there wasn’t a Siebold or an Adelbert in the story. Zee’s last name was Adelbertsmiter—smiter of Adelbert. I’d once heard a fae introduce him to another in a hushed voice as “the Adelbertsmiter.”

  On a whim I looked up Adelbert and laughed involuntarily. The first hit I had was on Saint Adelbert, a Northumbrian missionary who sought to Christianize Norway in the eighth century. All I could find out about him was that he’d died a martyr’s death.

  Could he be Zee’s Adelbert?

  The phone rang, interrupting my speculations.

  Before I had a chance to say anything, a very British voice said, “Mercy, you’d better get your butt over here.”

  There was a noise in the background—a roar. It sounded odd and I pulled my ear away from the phone long enough to confirm that I was hearing it from Adam’s house as well as through the phone.

  “Is that Adam?” I asked.

  Ben didn’t answer me, just yelped a swearword and hung up the phone.

  It was enough to have me sprinting through my house and out my door, the phone still in my hand. I dropped it on the porch.

  I was vaulting over the barbed wire fence that separated my three acres from Adam’s larger field before it occurred to me to wonder why Ben had called me—and not asked for, say Samuel, who had the advantage of being a werewolf, one of the few more dominant than Adam.

  chapter 6

  I didn’t bother going around to the front of Adam’s house, just opened the kitchen door and ran in. There was no one in the room.

  Adam’s kitchen had b
een built to cordon bleu specifications—Adam’s daughter, Jesse, had once told me that her father could really cook, but mostly they didn’t bother.

  As in the rest of his house, Adam’s ex-wife had chosen the decor. It had always struck me as odd that, except for the formal living room, which was done in shades of white, the colors in the house were much more welcoming and restful than she had ever been. My own house was decorated in parents’ castoffs meet rummage sale with just enough nice stuff (courtesy of Samuel) to make everything else look horrible.

  Adam’s house smelled of lemon cleaner, Windex, and werewolves. But I didn’t need my nose or ears to know that Adam was home—and he wasn’t happy. The energy of his anger had washed over me even outside the house.

  I heard Jesse whisper, “No, Daddy,” from the living room.

  It was not reassuring that the next sound I heard was a low growl, but then Ben wouldn’t have called me if things had been good. I was pretty surprised he’d called me at all; he and I weren’t exactly great friends.

  I followed Jesse’s voice into the living room. The werewolves were scattered all over the big room, but for a moment the Alpha’s magic worked on me and all I could pay much attention to was Adam, even though he was facing away from me. The view was nice enough that it took me a moment to remember that this must be a crisis situation.

  The only two humans in the room huddled together under Adam’s intense regard on Adam’s new antique fainting couch that had replaced the broken remains of his old antique fainting couch. If I had been Adam, I wouldn’t have wasted money on antiques. Fragile things just don’t fare well in the house of an Alpha werewolf.

  One of the humans was Adam’s daughter, Jesse. The other was Gabriel, the high school boy who worked for me. He had an arm around Jesse’s shoulders, and her diminutive stature made him look bigger than he actually was. Sometime since I’d last seen her, Jesse had dyed her hair a cotton candy blue, which was cheerful, if a little odd. Her usual heavy makeup had slid down her face, striping it with metallic silver eye shadow, black mascara, and tearstains.