Mercedes Thompson 03: Iron Kissed Read online

  “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 been 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.

  For a moment I thought the obvious. I’d warned Gabriel to be careful with Jesse and explained the downside of dating the Alpha’s daughter. He’d heard me out and solemnly promised me that he’d behave himself.

  Then I realized that under the streaks of makeup were the faint marks of new bruises. And part of what I’d thought was more mascara was actually a trickle of dried blood that ran from one nostril to her upper lip. One bare shoulder had a patch of road rash that still had gravel in it. No way that Gabriel had done that—and if he had, he wouldn’t be living now.

  Damn, I thought, growing cold. Someone was going to die today.

  Gabriel’s submissive posture must have been a reaction to something Adam had done, because as I watched him, he straightened his shoulders and lifted his gaze to Jesse’s father’s face. Not a really smart move with an enraged Alpha, but brave.

  “Did you know them, Gabriel?” I couldn’t see Adam’s face, but his voice told me that his eyes would be bright gold.

  I took another step into the room and a wave of his power almost sent me to my knees—as it did all of Adam’s wolves, who fell to the floor almost as one. The motion made me actually look at them and realize that there weren’t as many as I’d originally thought. Werewolves have a tendency to fill up the spaces in a room.

  There were only four. Honey, one of the few women in Adam’s pack, and her mate had their heads bowed and were holding each other’s hands in a white-knuckled grip.

  Darryl kept his face up and expressionless, but there were a few drops of perspiration on the mahogany skin of his forehead. Chinese and African blood ran in his veins and combined in a rather awesome mixture of color and feature. By day he was a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; the rest of the time he was Adam’s second.

  Next to Darryl, Ben looked as pale as his hair and almost fragile—though that was deceptive because he was tough as nails. Like Honey, he’d been gazing at the floor, but just after he’d dropped to the floor, he looked up and gave me a rather frantic look that I had no idea how to interpret.

  Ben had fled England to Adam’s pack to avoid questioning in a brutal multiple rape case. I was pretty sure he was innocent…but it says something about Ben that he’d have been my first suspect also.

  “Daddy, leave Gabriel alone,” said Jesse with a shadow of her usual spirit.

  But neither Adam nor Gabriel paid attention to her protest.

  “If I knew who they were and where to find them, sir, I wouldn’t be here now,” Gabriel said in a grim voice that made him sound thirty. “I’d have dropped Jesse off with you and gone after them.”

  Gabriel had grown up the oldest male in a house that had more than a passing acquaintance with abject poverty. It had made him driven, hardworking, and mature for his age. If I thought him reckless for going out with Jesse, I thought Jesse very wise for choosing him.

  “Are you all right, Jesse?” I asked, my own voice more of a growl than I’d planned.

  She looked up with a gasp. Then jumped up f
rom her seat, where she’d been trying not to lean too close to Gabriel and give her father a target for his anger. She ran to me, burying her face in my shoulder.

  Adam turned to look at us. Being a little better versed in prudence than Gabriel (even if I used it only when it suited me), I dropped my gaze to Jesse’s hair almost immediately, but I’d seen enough. His eyes blazed just this side of change, icy yellow, pale like the winter morning sun. White and red lines alternated on his wide cheekbones from the force he was using to clench his jaws.

  If a news camera ever captured a shot of him looking like this, it would ruin all the spin-doctoring the werewolves had been doing over the last year. No one would ever mistake Adam in such a fury for anything except a very, very dangerous monster.

  He wasn’t just angry. I’m not sure there is an English word for just how much rage was in his face.

  “You have to stop him,” Jesse murmured as quietly as she could in my ear. “He’ll kill them.”

  I could have told her that she couldn’t whisper quietly enough that her father wouldn’t hear, not when he was in the same room with us.

  “You protect them!” he roared in outrage and I saw what little humanity he was clinging to disappear into the anger of the beast. If he hadn’t been as dominant, if he hadn’t been Alpha, I’m not sure he wouldn’t have already changed. As it was, I could see the lines of his face begin to lose their solidity.

  That’s all we needed.

  “No, no, no,” Jesse chanted into my shoulder, her whole frame shaking. “They’ll kill him if he hurts someone. He can’t…he can’t…”

  I don’t know what my mother intended when she sent me to be fostered with the werewolves on the advice of a cherished great-uncle who was a werewolf. I don’t know that I could have given away my child to strangers. But I’m not a teenage single parent working a minimum wage job who’d discovered her baby could change into a coyote pup. It had worked out for me—at least as well as most people’s childhoods. And it had left me with a certain skill for managing enraged werewolves, which was a good thing, my foster father had told me often enough, since I sure had a talent for enraging them.