“Huh,” I said.
“Do you want me to keep you up on when you make the news?” he asked. “One of my guys in the office tracks it for me—all the reporters have his name and contact information.”
“Like a movie star’s promotional manager,” I said, fluttering my eyelashes at him. “Assistant to Mr. Hauptman.”
He laughed. “I’ll tell him you said so. His main job is being big and scary to reassure clients we can protect them. He seems to be enjoying schmoozing the press—it’s a different look for him. He tells me that he’s just waiting until one of them actually sees him.”
“Butch?” I asked incredulously. “Butch is your PR guy?” Butch was six-eight and over three hundred pounds of ex– football player and Marine. Aided by some facial scarring, he could compete with Darryl for scary.
“Yes.”
“You need to get him on the air,” I said. “No one will pay attention to a few werewolves if they can follow Butch around.”
“Do you want me to tell him to keep you updated?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know I should track that on my own, but …” I shrugged. “If I can get a heads-up, I won’t react to people like a goldfish.” I opened my eyes wide and made bubble-blowing motions with my mouth to illustrate my point. “It isn’t a good look for me.”
“I have to agree,” he told me with an appreciative grin. “Especially with the tape on your nose.”
I had forgotten all about the tape somehow between the mirror in my bathroom and the front door of the restaurant. Now I remembered. And the way the bruising on my left eye was darker and bigger than the one on my right. It gave me a lopsided appearance.
Self-consciously, I glanced around at the tables where people were studiously not looking at us: the very handsome—if too thin—man and the lopsided woman, who had just been making goldfish faces. Maybe, if they didn’t know Adam, they would just think that slender was his normal build.
“I think you are beautiful no matter how much tape is on your nose,” he said consolingly.
He wasn’t lying. There was a reason why—even though he had shut down our bond; now turned into a terrifying monster instead of a beautiful, terrifying werewolf; and could be completely unreasonable at times—I loved him to bits.
“I know a good optometrist who can help you with that,” I told him, and he smiled at me.
“So everyone knows about the car wreck,” I said, because I couldn’t say, Let me take you to Bran and have him fix you. I wasn’t sure Bran could fix him—and I knew that he wouldn’t go as long as the smoke weaver and Fiona’s wolves were still running around.
“Better that than everyone wondering if I beat you up,” he replied.
“Hah,” I agreed.
The waitress came and took our orders. She didn’t even widen her eyes at the size of Adam’ s—we’d eaten here before.
After she left, I said, “I don’t know why it’s so different eating here than it is eating on the river shore by our house.”
“We could clear the river area and put up picnic tables down on the shore,” Adam said. “But I like it better the way it is.”
“With weeds and rocks and mud for all the river wildlife to use,” I agreed.
“And,” said Adam, raising his water glass to me, “here we have a chance to eat an intimate meal without the pack interrupting four times an hour.”
“With the added benefit that neither of us has to cook,” I said lightly. How could it be an intimate lunch when Adam still had our mating bond locked down tighter than a miser’s penny jar?
I knew about the monster he’d been hiding, and he still wouldn’t let me in.
Conscious that we were under surveillance by the curious, we avoided talking about the smoke weaver, the intruding werewolves, or Wulfe. Instead we discussed Jesse’s plans for school and whether she should get an apartment near the campus in Richland, which would give her some independence and a lot less daily travel time.
“Larry’s people,” said Adam, meaning the goblins, “would probably keep a close watch on her and alert us if there are any problems—as long as we pay them.”
“We have a number of werewolves who live in Richland near the school,” I said. “That way if there was trouble, someone could get to her over there pretty darn quickly. The question is, would Jesse want to do that?”
“Let’s see,” said Adam, and he texted her, his mouth quirked up, knowing that whatever her decision on the matter, Jesse would be excited to consider it.
He liked making Jesse happy. I wanted him to be happy, too.
“Have you thought about talking to Bran or Charles about what Elizaveta did?” I asked very quietly so no one else would hear.
This was neither the time nor place for that question, but I was so worried about him. He stopped texting and the small smile left his face. He didn’t look at me. “I called Charles yesterday. I was going to tell you about it last night, but …”
He smiled ruefully, his eyes carefully on a cormorant on the river. If he’d had good news, he’d have been looking at me.
“Charles,” Adam continued, “told me that witchcrafted spells usually dissipate when the witch dies, which we all know already. Death curses are a lot more difficult to deal with. He’ll look into it and get back to me.”
“Okay,” I said. I’d been hopeful that Charles would know what to do. Tonight I’d call Bran—assuming he was taking my calls again—lay everything on the table, and see what he said. Maybe he’d have more useful advice than “blow up the bond” if he knew what was really going on.
I wasn’t sure I’d tell Adam before I called Bran. Better, maybe, in this case, to ask forgiveness than permission. I was already feeling guilty in advance because of Adam’s weird reaction to the last call I’d made to Bran—and wasn’t that interesting.
Adam had gone back to his texting, so he didn’t see my assessing gaze. Maybe I was only feeling like this was a private, hush-hush matter because Adam was treating it that way. As if getting whammied by a scary and powerful witch was something to be ashamed of. He knew better than that. It must be something the curse was doing to him.
An e-mail came through on my phone. I checked it—it was from Ariana. Short and sweet, it read:
I agree with your conclusions. Bargaining is a thing of rules, especially for the lesser fae, with balance being the most important part. Bargains, properly made, are complicated things. Above all else, a proper bargain is balanced. Each party gets something they want that is of equal value. I save your life—you give me your firstborn child. That is a balance. You give me your bubble gum, I give you my balloon. That is also balanced. Unbalanced bargains have no power—and you need a bargain with power. Good luck, my friend.
Adam finished his text to Jesse, glanced casually around, then said, “Let’s save other important things for the car. We are getting a lot of surreptitious attention.”
“Sounds like a smart thing to do,” I said agreeably, and watched his shoulders ease down.
Don’t worry, my love, I won’t peel open your pain until after I talk to Bran about how to do it most efficiently, I thought. But better to do that than to find out that Adam had given in to despair sometime when I wasn’t around to stop him.
Elizaveta had broken open something inside him, and I wasn’t sure that just getting rid of the spell was going to fix him.
“You are healing remarkably quickly from the car wreck,” he said. Apparently picking at my wounds was a good subject change.
Fair enough, mine weren’t as deep, and they were getting better.
“Right?” I said. “I’m still achy here and there—and my nose still hurts. But I’m a lot better than I expected to be at this point. I’m pretty sure it’s Hannah’s fault.”
I told him about Hannah’s granny’s bourbon and what Underhill had said about it. I’d told him the gist of the conversation with Underhill yesterday, but I’d forgotten about Hannah’s bourbon.
“It’s not go
ing to bring anyone back from death’s door,” I told him judiciously. “But it beats any over-the-counter painkiller all to heck.”
“I wonder if Hannah’s granny’s fae blood is the reason that Kelly and Hannah have so many kids,” Adam mused. “Though it seems like the fae blood should work against them, because the fae have more trouble reproducing than werewolves do.”
“Maybe it’s Hannah’s granny’s secret ingredient,” I told him. “Take one sip before bedtime as needed for conception.”
He rewarded me with a laugh.
My cell phone rang. I dug it out of my purse and looked at the caller ID. Palsic. I turned it toward Adam so he could see.
His smile fled, and he nodded.
I answered it warily. “This is Mercy.”
“This is Nonnie Palsic.” She sounded rattled down to her bones. “Could you help us? I don’t know … I don’t know what to do. He’s … like the trolls in The Hobbit.”
I had to think a moment—and then realized what she was saying. “You mean when they turned to stone?”
Adam had already taken out his wallet and was counting out bills on the table, paying for the food that hadn’t come yet. There were protein bars in the SUV. I would feed him on the way.
“Sort of,” she said. “But like that. Yes. Can you help?”
“We’re coming,” I told her. “Who did the smoke weaver get?”
“Smoke weaver?” she said.
“Fae,” I told her. “He bites people and makes them kill. And he can change one thing into another—like the old alchemists tried to change lead into gold. That kind of thing.”
“God help us,” she said, and then she took a shaky breath. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier. “Your smoke weaver has changed my mate into stone.”
“Where are you?” I asked her as we hurried through the restaurant toward the parking lot. Adam paused briefly to talk to our waitress and then caught up as Nonnie rattled off an address.
Adam took out his phone and keyed in the location. As soon as we were outside, we both broke into a jog. I wasn’t sure there was a reason to hurry, though. James Palsic had been turned to stone. Even Tolkien’s trolls hadn’t come back from that.
________
“IS FIONA THERE WITH YOU?” I ASKED, BELTING IN.
“No, I—wait.” She took another deep breath. And again, it seemed to help. When she started talking, she was calmer. “Things you need to know. Fiona and Sven are on their way to kill Warren Smith’s boyfriend, the one who shot Sven.”
I glanced at Adam.
“Kyle’s at work,” he said. “Both Warren and Zack are on guard duty at his work, too.”
“Fiona likes to shoot people,” Nonnie told us in a weary voice. “She hits what she aims at.” Almost to herself she muttered, “I told James that she was bad news—but, as he pointed out, we didn’t have a lot of options at the time.”
“Who is with you?” I asked, as Adam pulled out his phone and called Warren.
“Li Qiang and Kent,” she said. “James said you told him to call Bran yesterday.” She hesitated, then said, “We’ve been trying to fly under Bran’s radar. Fiona said that our defection from the Galveston pack would be a capital offense—that he’d send Charles out to hunt us. He would kill us all. Fiona said that once Harolford was Alpha here, we’d be safe from retaliation because your pack isn’t one of the Marrok’s.”
“We exist independently because Bran allows it,” I said dryly. “Bran hasn’t given our pack carte blanche, and he wouldn’t have overlooked Harolford taking over. Did James call Bran yesterday?”
“Yes,” she said. “And talked to him for a while, apparently. But he didn’t say anything until Fiona and Sven left to go after their target—we were supposed to go after ours then. That doesn’t matter. We didn’t. Once the four of us were alone, James explained to us that Fiona had been lying to us all along: we could have gone to Bran for help—but Fiona is under a death sentence. She needed us.”
“Bran would have killed her, even if she and Harolford had succeeded here,” I told her.
“So James said,” she agreed.
“So how did James get turned to stone?” I asked.
“Bran invited us to Montana. As soon as Fiona and Sven left, we started packing,” she said. “James finished first so he went to get the car. He never came back. We were looking for him—and Li said … Li said, ‘Hey, Nonnie, do you remember a rock being there?’ And it was James.”
There was horror in her voice. I didn’t want to push her over the edge until she’d given us all of the information that we needed, so I didn’t ask her any more about James. I’d see him soon enough.
“When are you expecting Fiona back?” I asked. “We will help if we can, but I need to know what my people will be walking into.”
“Sven and Fiona are supposed to be back here by five,” she said. “But Fiona likes to savor her kills—and if you manage to keep her from her target … she doesn’t give up.”
I looked at Adam, who had just set his phone down. I hadn’t tried to follow his conversation.
“The three of them will stay indoors and away from windows until we give them an all-clear. Warren and Zack are armed. Kyle is sending everyone in his office home. We can hunt Fiona and Harolford down at our leisure.”
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Kyle Brooks is safe and likely to stay that way. We have time. I am going to hang up now and confer with Adam. Expect us about a half hour from now.”
“Okay,” she said mournfully. “We’ll wait.”
I hung up.
“We can’t help Ben,” Adam said. “And no one turned him to stone.”
“I’ve been working on how to deal with the weaver,” I told him. I grabbed the backpack we kept on the floor of the back seat and came up with the protein bars. “I’d like to have had more time to make sure I’m right. But I know who our villain is—and I think I know what we need to do.”
“Tell me,” Adam said.
“I can’t tell you his name—I think that might attract his attention in the wrong way.”
“But you’ve worked it out?” he asked.
I nodded. “Maybe. Probably. He’s not powerful as the fae go.”
Adam gave me a look.
“Really. Outside of the power that Underhill gave him, he is one of the lesser fae.”
“How do you know that?” he asked.
“The fae are creatures whose lives are bound by rules. That they cannot lie being the core rule all of them must follow.” I handed him a protein bar. “Here, eat this.”
“I never thought of them that way,” Adam said, taking the bar and starting in on it. I immediately felt a little calmer.
“That’s because you usually deal with the powerful fae,” I told him. “The Gray Lords, Zee, Baba Yaga, and the like. The powerful fae have a lot fewer rules and they are bendy.”
“Okay,” he said. “Yes, I’ve noticed that.”
“The other important thing to remember about the rules is that they constrain all the fae. But only the fae.” I frowned. “Dang it. I think that the rule about lying has to be an exception, because we know that the fae actually can lie—they just suffer a horrible fate if they do.”
“Maybe that is the rule,” Adam suggested. “If a fae lies, they will suffer a horrible fate.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling better. “That fits. And the fae can’t lie without suffering a horrible fate. But we could lie to a fae.”
“Only if we have a death wish,” said Adam. “But I know what you mean. I could tell Zee that you love orange juice. Which he knows isn’t true. But I could say the words and not suffer a horrible fate.”
“Right,” I told him.
“The weaker the fae, the more rules they have?” Adam asked, pulling the conversation back to the point.
“Yes.” I looked up and realized he was taking the most direc
t route to the address we’d been given. “Could we make a stop at home before we go see what the smoke weaver has done to James Palsic?”
His eyebrows went up, but he made a minor course correction that would take us home first. I unwrapped another protein bar and handed it to him. His lip quirked up, but he took the bar.
I watched him eat and thought about how I wanted to frame the information I’d put together. I needed him to believe me so that he would agree to the plan I’d devoted a lot of time to yesterday while I had been fixing cars. Because that plan required a certain amount of risk on my part—which was something that was hard for Adam. But I was the only person who could do it.
“Take brownies,” I said. “The lowest caste of brownies have very specific rules. They must find good people. Once they do, they clean their homes or do work for them—and this makes the brownies happy. But they can do these things only so long as the people they are working for never see them and never say anything about them. They must be given milk and bread—but cannot be thanked aloud. If they are seen, thanked, or not fed, the brownies have to move on and find someone else to serve. They have no choice about any of it.”
“What rules does the smoke weaver have?” Adam asked.
“He has to make bargains,” I told him. “If one is offered to him properly, he has to accept. That’s how Underhill caught him in the first place. And there’s a rule about his name, too. People who know it can’t tell anyone what it is. Before Underhill got ahold of him, he had only one power, to transform one thing into another. It is an impressive power—but it is also very limited.”
“Tell that to James Palsic,” said Adam.
“Yes, well.” I waved that away. It shouldn’t matter to my plan. I hoped. “Tilly told me that the intent of her upgrade was that he would have an easier time making himself look like a specific person. It made me think that was a problem for him before she changed him. Like maybe he couldn’t make himself look very much like a person at all.”
Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12 Page 25
