Silver Borne mt-5 Read online

  “Right, boss.” Warren nodded at me and continued to talk to Adam. “I reckon I’ll stick by you for a bit, though, if you don’t mind. Darryl will be there, too.”

  * * *

  WE PACKED ADAM INTO THE BACK OF WARREN’S TRUCK on top of a thick camping pad and underneath a sleeping bag. Werewolves are pretty immune to the cold—especially the kind of cold the Tri-Cities could manage most winters. But we weren’t taking any chances with him. He accepted our fussing with a sort of royal amusement that managed to be appreciative, too, though he didn’t say a word.

  “Camping?” I murmured to Warren under my breath after we’d gotten Adam settled. “You actually got Kyle to go out camping?” Kyle was very happy with the comforts of civilization. I couldn’t see him spending a weekend in the woods voluntarily.

  “Nah,” he muttered. “Not overnight anyhow. But I’m hopeful for next spring.”

  “But you had sleeping bags and camp pads in your truck.” I couldn’t help the smile that grew on my face. “Does this have anything to do with the ice chest full of meat?”

  He ducked his head, but he was grinning. “You don’t ask me what you don’t want to know, Mercy.”

  Mary Jo rode in the back of the truck with Adam while I drove my car with Ben beside me and Sam in the back. Ben had offered to drive the Rabbit so I could ride with Adam, but his hands were raw and painful. Mary Jo wasn’t going to do anything to hurt Adam; whatever resentment or hatred she felt for me didn’t interfere with her desire to keep him safe.

  As soon as I started driving, Ben said, “You need to find out who the second man on watch was.”

  “What?”

  “The other wolf Adam had watching with Mary Jo. She doesn’t want to tell, and she’s higher rank than I am, so I can’t ask her. If Warren asked . . . She’s one of the crowd that thinks he shouldn’t be pack.”

  “What?” I’d thought the homophobic elements in the pack were all men.

  Ben nodded. “She’s quieter about it than most, but she’s also more stubborn. If Warren gave her an order she didn’t want to comply with—like one that would make her narc on someone she cares about—she’s likely to defy him. He’d have to hurt her, and that would hurt him more because he likes her—and doesn’t have any idea that she’s one of the stupid people.”

  I’d always thought Ben was one of the stupid people, too. I guess that must have shown in my face because he laughed.

  “I was bitter when I first came here. Eastern Washington is a big comedown from London.” He didn’t say anything for a while, but about the time I turned onto the highway he continued in a soft voice. “Warren’s okay. He cares about the pack, and that’s not as common in the upper echelon as you’d think. Took me a while to appreciate—and that’s on me.”

  I patted his arm. “Took us a while to warm up to you, too,” I said. “Must be your charming personality.”

  He laughed again, and this time it was with genuine humor. “Yes. No doubt. You’re a right bitch sometimes, you know?”

  The response was elementary-school automatic. “Takes one to know one,” I said. “You think there was someone else who watched Adam jump into a burning building to save me and didn’t do anything to stop him?”

  “I think that Adam sends us out in pairs. One man on point, the second as backup. Always. Mary Jo wasn’t out there alone when you and Samuel left. She wasn’t the only one who watched whoever set fire to your house.”

  He paused. “I think I know who it is, but I’m prejudiced, so I’ll keep my mouth shut. Just remember: Mary Jo . . . she’s good folk when it comes down to it. She’s been a firefighter since they allowed women to be on the teams. She may not like you that much, but she’s got no bone to pick with Samuel. I don’t think she’d have stood by and watched arson taking place without someone stepping in and influencing her. There aren’t many of the pack who could override her good sense like that.”

  “You think someone else made the decision to disobey orders.”

  Ben nodded slowly. “I do. Yes.”

  “Someone Adam trusted enough that he didn’t insist on their attending the meeting he held at his house.”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn it.”

  Chapter 9

  AT THREE IN THE MORNING, I FOUND MYSELF DRINKing hot chocolate at the kitchen table in Adam’s house with Jesse, Darryl, Auriele, and Mary Jo. Given my druthers, I’d have had a couple of people between Mary Jo and me—because I don’t believe in throwing water on boiling oil—but by the time I’d finished pouring cocoa, the seat between Jesse and her was the only one open.

  The one good thing was that most of the wolves had returned to their homes, and Adam was still safe. Sam and Warren were in Adam’s room, doing guard duty, while the rest of us tried to decide how to proceed until Adam was up and about. All the other wolves who’d shown up had been sent away.

  I planned on joining Adam as soon as we were done here, but I knew he was all right without me. He’d eaten about ten pounds of meat and lapsed into a sleep so deep it resembled a coma. Warren was a big enough wolf to take on any two of the rest of the pack as long as the group didn’t contain Darryl, who outranked him. Mostly.

  Sam was a little unpredictable, but in his current state I was pretty sure he would be on our team. When a wolf is hurt, he is vulnerable. In the best scenario, an injured wolf will be protected by his pack mates—but when the pack is uneasy, as Adam’s was just then, it is best to keep trustworthy guards around.

  Between the two of them, Warren and Sam, they’d see to it that no harm came to Adam.

  Ben trudged in, towing one of the dining-room chairs. He slid it between Jesse and Auriele, painfully pulled his gory fingers off the chair back, and dropped to the seat. Jesse slid a cup of hot cocoa in front of him, then reached across with the can of nondairy whipped cream and squirted a bunch of sweet artificial white goo on top. Jesse’s curly hair had grown out a little, and she’d dyed it pink.

  “Thanks, darling,” Ben told her in a suggestive voice, and she scooted her chair away from him. He tipped his head so she couldn’t see his face and smiled until he realized I was watching him. I narrowed my eyes, and he cleared his throat. “E-mail’s out to the list, detailing what happened and that Adam’ll be up and about in a day or two.”

  That there was a mailing list had been news to me. I wasn’t on it, probably so they could all complain about me without hurting my feelings. Given the state of Ben’s hands, Auriele had offered to send out the report, but he’d said that computer work was his duty, and as he still had ten fingers, he figured he could complete it.

  He leaned forward and sipped his cocoa without touching the hot cup.

  “It’s instant,” I apologized. “My stash of spicy real stuff went up with the house.” I wished I hadn’t said it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I had been doing just fine at forgetting that out in the darkness beyond the kitchen windows, my house was a pile of black scraps.

  “It’s chocolate,” Ben said. “At this point, that is sufficient.”

  Silence fell, and I remembered that I was supposed to be running this. It reminded me in an odd way of the time I’d had to take over my sister’s Girl Scout troop when my mother had been sick. Fourteen preteen girls, a tableful of werewolves—there were certain monstrous similarities.

  I ran my hands over my face. “So what else needs to be dealt with before we can go to bed?”

  Darryl folded his big hands on the table. “The fire marshal hasn’t made it out yet—but the firemen seemed pretty convinced it was the wiring. The fire started near the fuse box in the hall. Apparently, the old manufactured homes sometimes go up like that, especially the first few weeks the heating system kicks in in the winter.” He glanced at me. “Do we accept that, or have you been riling people up again?”

  He might owe his ebony skin and his size to his African father, but he could do Chinese inscrutable better than anyone I’d ever met who was wholly Chinese instead of just half
. It was hard to tell whether he meant the last sentence as a joke or a justifiable criticism.

  “It was the fae,” I said with a sigh, bumping the nearest table leg halfheartedly with my ankle.

  “What—all of them?” asked Ben humorously. I slid down in my chair so I could reach past Jesse and kicked his foot, which was more satisfying.

  “No, not all of them,” I said, after he yipped with mock pain.

  “You just bring us one damned thing after another don’t you, Mercy,” said Mary Jo, looking out the window.

  “Bitch,” said Ben. It seemed to be his word of the day—which was better than the usual assortment. He hadn’t actually sworn much around me that day, if I didn’t include the time while Samuel was fixing his hands. And if the only words that counted were the ones that got movies an “R” rating. I wondered if it was coincidental, if he was trying to improve himself—or if I hadn’t spent enough time with him.

  Mary Jo’s lip curled. “Suck-up.”

  “You have some nerve throwing stones,” he told her, “when you just sat there and watched them set fire to Mercy’s house.”

  “What?” said Darryl in a very, very soft voice.

  But Mary Jo wasn’t listening to Darryl. Instead, she half rose to her feet and leaned on the table, threatening Ben. “So what? You think I should have taken on a bunch of unknown fae for her?”

  Auriele stood up and gave the table a hard shove, pinning Mary Jo against the wall behind her with a bang that must have hurt. If someone didn’t know her very well, I suppose it might be possible to underestimate Auriele. She was delicately built, as some Hispanic women are, and looked as though she’d never gotten her beautifully manicured hands dirty.

  Most of the pack would rather have Darryl mad at them than Auriele.

  Darryl’s mate’s voice was frozen as she asked, “You just watched a bunch of fae burn down the house of a pack member?”

  I’d picked my cocoa up off the table when it moved and managed to save Jesse’s, too. With my hip, I altered the trajectory of the table just enough to make certain that it didn’t hit Jesse. Darryl caught Ben’s cup—he’d finished his own. So it was only Mary Jo’s and Auriele’s cocoa that spilled across the table and down on the floor.

  Into the tense silence of that moment, the interruption of my ringing phone seemed decidedly welcome. I thumped the two mugs I held down onto the table and pulled the phone out of my pocket.

  I didn’t recognize either the number or the area code. Usually, I recognize the number of people who call me in the middle of the night.

  “Hello?”

  “Mercedes Thompson, you have something that belongs to me. I have something that belongs to you. Shall we play?”

  I hit the speaker button and set the phone in the middle of the table. Of course, everyone except for Jesse could have overheard the call anyway—but with all of us listening full volume, maybe someone would hear something different. My cell was relatively new, and I’d paid extra to get one with good sound quality.

  Darryl pulled out his phone—one of those miniature computers with every gadget known to man—hit the screen a couple of times, and set it next to mine. “Recording,” he mouthed.

  “Everything I have went up in flames last night,” I told my unknown caller, and after I said it, the truth of that hit me again. Poor Medea. I set my jaw with determination that this person—who sounded female to me, though a female with a deep smoker’s voice—would never hear the pain she’d caused me. Assuming that this was one of the fae who set the fire.

  “It wasn’t there,” she said—and I was growing more confident it was a “she.” Her next words made me certain that she was one of the fae, too. “It would have revealed itself in fire or in death. We watched it burn, watched the fire eat your life, and what you took from Phineas Brewster wasn’t in the coals or in the ashes.”

  Fae often say things that sound odd to human ears. I’ve found myself spouting Zee’s sayings and having people stop to look at me.

  “In fire or in death,” I said, repeating the phrase that had sounded like a quote of some kind.

  “It reveals itself when the one who holds it dies or if it burns,” she clarified impatiently.

  “Your bounty hunter seemed like the kind of man who gets things done,” I said. “Why didn’t you have him kill me instead of relying on backup?” Growing up with werewolves has taught me several ways of controlling the situation without being too aggressive. Asking a question a little off topic is one way of doing it—and if the question is hidden as another question, my chances of getting information are even better.

  “Kelly?” she said, her voice incredulous. But she knew who I was talking about. She must be the fae who’d created the incident that had almost gotten Maia hurt. “Kelly would never hurt a woman. But the police wouldn’t have believed it.”

  There was a tone to the woman’s voice that told me she knew Kelly Heart personally—and felt a veiled contempt for something in him that she thought was a weakness.

  “I take it I am speaking to the one who calls herself Daphne Rondo?” I’d remembered the missing producer’s name because she shared the first with Scooby Doo’s token cute girl and it had caught my attention. I phrased the question carefully because the fae cannot lie—and it probably wasn’t her real name. Mostly the fae don’t give their true names to anyone.

  “Sometimes,” she said, but she didn’t like it that I’d figured her out. She could have refused to answer, of course, but that would have been as good as an answer anyway. A fae who wasn’t Kelly Heart’s missing producer would take great pleasure in informing me I was mistaken.

  “Mr. Heart is worried about you,” I told her. And then could have bitten my tongue. This woman did not deserve to know about his concern—she’d sent him here to die. If Adam had believed that Kelly had killed me, he would have personally seen to Heart’s death. Anyone who knew I was dating the local Alpha would understand that much—it was why she had contrived to set the bounty hunter up. “He’d feel differently if he knew what you planned for him.”

  “If he knew what I was after, he would support me with his whole heart,” she said with sudden passion that told me she had her doubts, and they bothered her. “He is my soldier, and he follows my orders.”

  I’d heard that kind of talk before and felt my lips curl in anger—on behalf of a stranger who’d mainly just ticked me off . . . but mostly for a friend of mine, Stefan, another soldier who’d been used too hard and had finally broken.

  “You are overburdened with self-importance,” I told her. “But that is a common condition with the fae.” I was tired, and it was hard to keep to the fine line that kept her from taking the upper hand without enraging her. Who did she have? Stefan? I hadn’t seen the vampire for weeks. Zee? I hadn’t called him as I’d planned to before my house burned down.

  “You are overburdened with stupidity,” she replied with icy contempt. I’d pricked her about Kelly . . . not that she’d hurt him, but that he might not do her bidding if he’d known what she wanted. “But that is a common problem with humans. Especially humans who involve themselves in matters that are none of their business.” There was a pause as if she was weighing some matter. Then she said, “You would be wise not to irk me when I hold something you value.”

  There were two distinct sounds right as she finished. The first was something striking flesh, the second a muffled cry. We all stilled, listening for a hint of identity.

  “Male,” mouthed Darryl.

  I nodded. I’d caught that as well. The cry was followed by a third sound: someone who was gagged trying to talk. He was furious. There was something about the sound . . . not Stefan, not Zee.

  Mary Jo caught my shoulder. Her face was pale and pinched. “Gabriel,” she mouthed.

  That was it. Mary Jo had spent some time doing guard-Mercy-at-work duty this summer, working with me and Gabriel. She knew him, too.

  I hadn’t been listening for Gabriel—because I thought he
was safe. I closed my eyes in momentary despair. Stefan was a vampire; Zee was a fae other fae gave a good deal of respectful space to. Gabriel was a seventeen-year-old with no supernatural powers. He didn’t stand a chance against one of the fae.

  Jesse made a little sound, then jerked her hands to her mouth, but the fae on the other end caught the noise.

  “Angry, child?” she asked. She thought she’d heard me. “Do you know who we caught? I’ll give you a hint. He was stealing a car from you. We almost disposed of him—but he belongs to you, doesn’t he? We decided to bring him along and see if you would play the game.”

  “Gabriel is welcome to drive anything I own,” I told her in clear tones—and hoped that even Gabriel’s human ears could hear me. “The Gray Lords are not going to be happy that you brought a human into fae matters.”

  She laughed. Her laughter caught me completely by surprise. Any woman with a voice as deep as hers usually has a complementary laugh. But hers was delicate and light—completely inhuman, like silver bells ringing—and the sound of it told me what kind of fae she was, which only made my stomach clench harder. Gabriel was in more than one kind of danger.

  There was a pad of paper next to the phone on the wall. I pointed at it, and Auriele got up soundlessly and brought it back to me.

  “So you figured out who we have,” the fae woman said. “Did his mommy call you? He’s awfully sweet-looking, don’t you think?” There was a wistfulness in her voice. “If this were a different age, I would keep him for my own.” I waited for the diatribe about how it was different in the old days—I’ve heard a lot of variations on that over the years. But there was only silence.

  I wrote, Fairy queen. Travels with five to twenty fairy followers. Used to capture humans to use as servants/lovers. Takes them to her own realm, sort of like Underhill but different. Enchantment: humans perceive time passing oddly. “Rip Van Winkle” (100 years) or “Thomas the Rhymer” (seven days became seven years). I underlined Thomas the Rhymer’s name because it was history and Rip was a story by Irving that might or might not have been based on various legends—including Thomas’s. Her laughter like tinkling of silver bells. Also some sort of mesmerizing spells. Robs victims of free will—might have the same effect on her fae followers, too. Rule bound more than most fae, but powerful within those rules.