Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12

by Patricia Briggs

  He didn’t answer me right away. “Any answer I make to you may be misleading,” he said.

  “We think Underhill let him out on purpose,” I told him.

  “Do you?” he asked, but more as if he found the idea interesting. “To what purpose, I wonder? And why at the door in your backyard instead of in one of those in the reservation where his prey would be so much more interesting, where he could cause so much more death?”

  “And become so much more powerful?” I half asked, half stated. Then I had a worrying realization. “As he did tonight at Uncle Mike’s?”

  “I am speculating now,” Beauclaire said in apology—or as close to an apology as a Gray Lord was comfortable giving. It was a matter of tone rather than words. “I do not know why Underhill does what she does. But it is interesting that the first thing that happened when she put a door in your yard was that the smoke beast escaped.”

  “Do you know what he wants? What his goal is?” I asked. “He seems to be sticking around here.”

  “I don’t know what he wants,” said Beauclaire, and again there was an apology in his tone. “I myself never met him personally. But he can take any of the fae—”

  “He said he couldn’t,” I interrupted him. “To me. He’s taken one of our wolves. He said he could take all but the most powerful of the fae lords.”

  “Interesting,” said Beauclaire. “But we cannot risk it. The one he took tonight was powerful. Our gates are closed indefinitely.”

  “How do I save them?” I asked. “My friends who he has taken?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. And he was fae, so it had to be true. “But I will ask if any do. Should I gain that knowledge, I will see that you are told.”

  “How many can he take and hold at a time?” I asked.

  “I don’t know that, either. Likely that depends upon the power he amasses.”

  In other words, more people now than he could have controlled before tonight.

  “How do I kill him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know that, either,” he answered. “No one has managed to do so yet. I do know that he can only be harmed in his own form, whatever shape he wears, not in the bodies of those he takes. That his own form shifts to smoke as he wills, so he cannot be easily imprisoned. Underhill managed—you might speak to her.” He paused. “There is a story about him. And it has to do with bargains.” He stopped again. “My incomplete knowledge of the smoke weaver—and creatures of his ilk—makes me leery of telling you more than this—”

  His voice changed, deepened, and developed an odd resonance. It sounded more feminine—and that voice was familiar. “The key to his undoing is in his basic nature. Do not pay attention to smoke and appearances.”

  “Baba Yaga?” I asked.

  Beauclaire sighed. “She will have her games,” he said. “But her advice is good.”

  He disconnected. I set my phone on the bedside table—and then realized that Adam was standing in the doorway. I didn’t know how long he’d been there. There was something … alien in his eyes that reminded me of the night we’d had the fight over Jesse’s school.

  “How much of that did you hear?” I asked cautiously.

  “I came up when the phone rang,” he said. “I wonder why Beauclaire called you instead of me.” There was an edge of anger in his voice. Probably, I decided, that was because Ben was locked up in a cage, possessed by an escapee from Underhill, and we couldn’t do anything about it.

  “I don’t know,” I said. And that was true. He could have called Adam. I wondered if Beauclaire’s calling me instead was a message, too. The fae could be very subtle creatures.

  Adam’s jaw tightened at my reply, but he didn’t say anything. He just shut the door and went back downstairs. I waited for him for a while, but it was nearing one in the morning and I was going to have to get up early to post a Closed until Further Notice sign on my business and call everyone who had an appointment at the shop.

  Without Tad or Zee, the shop made me a target. Not just for invading werewolves or escaped prisoners of Underhill, but also any crackpot, supernatural or not, who wanted to launch an attack on our pack. Most people, even most preternatural people, thought I was a mundane human. That I could turn into a coyote was pretty cool—but it didn’t make me a superhero.

  I set my alarm, pulled the covers over my head, and closed my eyes, but I didn’t really go to sleep until I felt the mattress sink under Adam’s weight. For whatever reason, he hadn’t gone to the spare room to sleep tonight, and I was grateful.

  I WOKE UP FACEDOWN ON MY PILLOW WITH THE URGENT feeling that I was under threat. I could feel eyes on me, feel the hunt engaged with me as its target. I lay very still and breathed shallowly through my mouth.

  Was it Wulfe? I couldn’t smell anyone but Adam and me in the room.

  Adam moved on the bed and the feeling gradually faded. Probably it was the leftover of a very bad dream. I rolled until I could touch Adam—and my fingers slid through his fur. I was pretty sure that he’d been in his human form when he’d come to bed, but I’d been mostly asleep so I could have been wrong.

  I buried my face in the fur at his neck, and the scent and feel of him brushed away the last of that paranoid feeling that had awoken me. I was very tired, so it didn’t take long to start drifting back to sleep.

  “Good night,” I murmured.

  Sleep, the wolf told me through our bond, the threat is over for tonight.

  8

  ADAM WAS GONE WHEN MY ALARM WOKE ME UP. Downstairs, Darryl had been replaced by George, who was taking his coffee down to keep watch over Ben.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “Not good,” said George, pausing halfway to the basement. “He’s himself this morning, but he says that thing still has a hold on him.” He hesitated. “He doesn’t want you down there. He says that thing in his head wants to kill you in the worst way.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. The urge to go down and watch over him was a pain in my heart. He was my friend and in trouble that he’d gotten into following my wishes. But if the thing was leaving him alone, more or less, as long as I was out of reach, I wasn’t going to make matters worse for him. The image of him crying on the bank of the river last night was a strong one.

  I didn’t have any comment on Ben’s situation that I wished to share out loud. So I said, “Beauclaire called me last night.” I needed a sounding board, but Adam had obviously not wanted to talk to me about the call; who better to talk to than George, who solved crimes for a living.

  “So I heard,” George said. “Adam talked to Darryl, Darryl told me.” He frowned at me, then said, “Darryl said Beauclaire didn’t have much to say.” He glanced downstairs and then started walking toward Adam’s office. “But both Adam and Darryl indicated that all important conversations should happen in the upstairs bedrooms with the doors shut or in Adam’s office.”

  So Ben wouldn’t overhear us.

  George took the fancy chair; I closed the office door and took my usual seat on Adam’s desk.

  “Did Adam and Darryl have their conversation in here or out there?” I asked.

  “In here,” George said, his eyes shrewd.

  I felt sick. Beauclaire had been subtle, but Adam understood subtle better than I did. Reading between the lines was admittedly dangerous with the fae. But Beauclaire did not want to keep his people locked up in the reservation. Without Underhill being a safe refuge for the fae—which she decidedly was not—the reservation was a limited-time solution. If all the fae remained trapped inside those walls, they would start feeding upon each other—in both a figurative and literal sense. Beauclaire had already proven that his primary goal was the survival of his people, and his people were all of the fae.

  Beauclaire had been subtle, for sure. But he’d given me a lot of information. That Adam hadn’t seen it scared me.

  “Beauclaire thinks that there is a reason Underhill let the smoke beast escape in our yard instead of the reservation, whe
re it could have had access to fae who could kill hundreds if not thousands of people in very short order.” And that last was why Beauclaire had pulled all of his people to safety. It was also why Marsilia had sealed her people in, too.

  “So she didn’t want to create chaos or kill lots of fae,” said George.

  “Right,” I agreed. “When Aiden discovered the door, Underhill told him, ‘I need a door to Mercy’s backyard. I miss you. The fae aren’t playing nice.’” I frowned, trying to remember exactly what Aiden had told me. There had been something about not wanting to owe the fae anything.

  But George said, “She meant those statements to be put together.” He’d seen what I had. “That she wanted a door to your backyard so she could see Aiden—because she didn’t trust the fae with him, or they were using his visits as bargaining chips or some such thing.”

  I nodded. “But why would she need to let him go in my backyard? She likes Adam better than me. She could have said Adam’s backyard. And Aiden lives here—so she could have said your backyard.”

  “The smoke beast bit you,” George said. “And it couldn’t control you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I think that is significant. And later she told Aiden something about me being good at killing monsters.” I grabbed a small spiral notebook out of Adam’s top drawer, ruthlessly ripped out all the pages with writing on them, and shoved them back in the drawer. Then I wrote:

  Underhill released smoke beast here because of me. Smoke beast’s bite doesn’t let him control me.

  “It still almost killed you,” he reminded me.

  “Why didn’t it just turn me into concrete like it did that semi?” I asked him. “Or, for that matter, why didn’t it just turn you and me both into concrete?”

  “Because we’re living?” George postulated.

  I shook my head. “Zee says that for fae magic—transformation is transformation.”

  “Power,” suggested George—that was what Zee had concluded as well. “She said that she killed things for power. And she hadn’t been able to kill those kids crossing the road. Maybe she used all her power transforming the semi—and that’s why the whole semi wasn’t concrete when we got there. I’ve been wondering why, when she was mad at the driver, she only transformed part of the semi. What if she was trying to transform the whole thing, driver and all, but didn’t have the juice to do it? She took Dennis—and Dennis killed Anna, but didn’t kill anyone else. You didn’t kill anyone or die yourself. She took this poor hitchhiker and still didn’t manage to kill anyone—that we know of. That’s a lot of power outlay.”

  “That sounds right,” I said, writing:

  Did not have enough power to transform George and me and only ½ semi.

  “So if we can keep the people the beast takes from killing anyone, we can keep it powered down,” George said. “We have Ben contained.”

  He sounded so hopeful.

  “Did Adam tell Darryl, and Darryl tell you, that one of the fae was bitten, went into Uncle Mike’s, and killed a whole bunch of people—fae and human and goblin? That Larry and the frost giant stopped it?”

  George frowned. “No,” he said. “Just that the fae, like the vampires, are holed up until the smoke beast is dealt with. By us.”

  “Do you remember the big car wreck that pushed Kyle’s discharging of a firearm to protect Warren off the front page?” I asked.

  George looked sick. “Stefan,” he said.

  I nodded. “That’s what Beauclaire indicated. I think that the smoke beast has plenty of power right now.”

  “What else did Beauclaire tell you?” George asked.

  “He said that they called it the smoke dragon and smoke weaver—that both of those terms spoke to its nature—that it had a name, but Beauclaire could not speak it. Nor could any fae. And that that was because of the rules under which the smoke weaver operated.”

  George started to say something, but I held up a hand. “Sorry, there is something Zee told me. He said … he said that what the smoke beast—” I hesitated because Beauclaire had told me what they called the creature for a reason. “What the smoke weaver is doing with the whole body snatching and killing to power up is more like the way an artifact would have been made. He said that the transformations like what the weaver did with the semi are a power that belong to a group of lesser fae.”

  “Huh,” said George. “That would explain the power problem it has. I have never noticed that the fae have trouble powering their own magic. Maybe it has an artifact it’s using? All you have to do is figure out what it is and take it away.”

  That sounded like an interesting plan. I wished I had the book Ariana, a powerful fae I knew, had written about her people. It had a whole section on artifacts—but I didn’t remember any of them operating quite like that. If Zee had known of one (or built one), he would have told me. The book was gone, but I would call Ariana and see if she knew of something like this. Last I had heard from her, she was somewhere in Africa with her mate, Samuel, and communication was tricky.

  George had moved on. “Are we sure this is fae? You said her magic—its magic—didn’t smell fae.”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t run into it before. There are a lot of fae; maybe this one is like the platypus—or the goblins, for that matter. It doesn’t quite fit in.”

  “What else did Beauclaire say?” asked George, half closing his eyes, which was what he did when he was thinking hard.

  “That we’re unlikely to be able to kill it”—and Beauclaire hadn’t mentioned an artifact—“and that trick it has of transforming itself to smoke makes it hard to capture. He then said that Underhill had imprisoned it because of a bargain it made. And that there is a story about that bargain I should find. Then Baba Yaga shut him up and told me that the key to the smoke weaver’s undoing is to be found in his basic nature.” Huh. “His basic nature,” I said again.

  “So we have a start,” said George. “That’s more than we knew when Ben got bitten. I have a few contacts that might know something about artifacts. Even if they’re locked up in Fairyland, cell phones still work. I’ll do some sleuthing.”

  “I’d appreciate that.” I hopped off the desk and opened the door.

  “I need to go put some signs up at my garage,” I told George. “I’m trusting you to keep Ben from killing anyone—or himself—while I’m gone.”

  “He doesn’t seem suicidal,” George said. “He ate a hearty breakfast—muffin with bacon, eggs, and cheese—all off a paper plate without even so much as a fork or spoon. He’s not exactly cheery—but Ben isn’t usually a cheery sort of guy.”

  Hmm. Ben was usually pretty cheery around me. Foul-mouthed and sarcastic, maybe, but cheerful enough. For sure he hadn’t started out that way. Maybe he was grumpier around other people—or they avoided him so much that they didn’t know he’d changed.

  “So you played cook this morning?” I asked. George didn’t strike me as the homemaker type. Toast and eggs maybe, but not a better-than version of a fast-food staple.

  “Adam cooked it up for all of us.” George frowned at me. “He was cooking when I got here at five—and Darryl said you didn’t get to sleep until the wee hours. You look like you could use another eight hours to sleep. You both need to get more rest or you aren’t going to be any good for anything.”

  “News at eleven,” I said dryly, and he grinned.

  “Telling you things you already know is the job of all of your friends,” he said, and headed down to the basement.

  When had George become my friend?

  I had a smile on my face when I opened the fridge, but it dropped away when I saw the deconstructed breakfast sandwich on the large plate with assembly instructions written out in Adam’s handwriting.

  The sandwich was for me. And another time I would have taken it as a thoughtful love-note kind of thing. But we weren’t in that place right now, so that limited the reasons for this gesture. Apologies or guilt—which were both kind of the same thing.

  I tho
ught, just then, of waking up in the middle of the night knowing there was a predator watching me with hostile eyes. Of reaching out and finding Adam in wolf form.

  I don’t trust myself, he’d said. I’ve been a werewolf for longer than you’ve been alive and it’s been decades since I’ve had trouble with it. But now I wake up and I’m in my wolf’s shape—without remembering how I got there.

  Could that hostile presence have been Adam?

  Shaken, I microwaved the things that needed to be microwaved and toasted the English muffin. Adam had said he didn’t know what had caused his problem controlling his shapeshifting—but his wolf had blamed the witches.

  Adam was smart, but beyond that he was perceptive. He didn’t usually have blinders on when he was looking at people, even if he was looking into a mirror.

  I bit into the sandwich.

  He was, in fact, overly harsh when looking into a mirror. He still thought he was a monster. I swallowed and considered that. Could it be that the witches had done something to him and he thought it was his own inner demons breaking free? That the wolf was right and Adam was wrong?

  And what the freak could I do about that? Find another witch? I thought of Elizaveta, who had been our pack’s witch for decades before Adam had had to kill her. I didn’t know that there was a witch I would trust Adam to. Maybe I should talk to Bran? That was an idea with some merit.

  I finished the sandwich and punished myself with a glass of orange juice for health. Followed that up by punishing myself with a cup of coffee to stay awake for the day. Coffee I found nearly as vile as orange juice, but hopefully both of them would do their jobs.

  I was dumping the last half of my coffee in the sink when the front door opened and my nose told me that Auriele had walked in.

  “We are both being chastised,” she told me as she walked into the kitchen. “I am to accompany you on whatever you are doing today.”

  Her tone was neutral, as was her body language. I had no idea what she was feeling about doing guard duty for me. Maybe it was time to put the cards on the table.