Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12 Page 19

  Bran was more Socratic when delivering aid. “Adam,” he might have said, “where do you think you should go looking for information? If I were you I might look at … Texas.”

  Which was why Adam had gone to Charles for help and not Bran. Well, that and Bran had formally washed his hands of our pack as a necessary step in the experiment of a werewolf pack being the neutral party while the humans and the fae worked out how they were going to live in the same world together. Our pack had to be independent so that if matters didn’t go well, we wouldn’t drag every werewolf in North and South America into a war with the fae or the humans—or both.

  I had gone to Bran because I wasn’t looking for loads of information—I needed advice. Advice was Bran’s best thing.

  “One of the invading wolves is Fiona,” I told him. I wasn’t actually sure of her last name, but I didn’t need it.

  Bran inhaled, then said, “She’s dead.”

  “Nope,” I said. “I just saw her tiny as life about three … no, five hours ago. Time flies when you are in the emergency room.” And I shouldn’t have said that last.

  “Are you all right?” he demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “Mercy.”

  “Jeez,” I complained, feeling about four. “I broke my nose running my car into a possessed wolf who was hurting one of the pack’s children. Because I broke my nose, she only has a broken wrist and ankle, and the wolf is dead. I’m all right with the results of today.”

  “Semantics,” he growled.

  “Truth,” I told him. “What can you tell me about Fiona?”

  “Stay away from her,” he said.

  I hoped he could hear my eyes rolling. “That’s what you told me when I was fourteen. I was hoping for something more useful now that I’m an adult and she’s trying to take over my pack.”

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me,” he snapped. “And you were fifteen.”

  I looked at the phone. “You remember how old I was?” I asked incredulously.

  “It was the day Charles glitter-bombed my office,” Bran said darkly. “Of course I remember.”

  “Charles?” There was no way. “Charles glitter-bombed your office.” Cold, scary, efficient, deadly—those were words that suited Charles. That the term “glitter bomb” and Charles’s name were in the same sentence was dumbfounding except maybe in something like “Charles discovered the glitter-bomber’s secret identity and hanged her by her toenails to teach the other people who stole her idea never to do that ever again.”

  “Why did he glitter-bomb your office?” I asked.

  “It was something I said,” Bran told me. “And not your business. What do you know about Fiona?”

  “You told me to stay away from her,” I said, “which left me insatiably curious.”

  “Of course it did,” Bran returned dryly. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Like a carrot in front of a horse,” I agreed. “But no one knew very much. She was your assassin that you sent out to do work that Charles wouldn’t do.”

  “Yes,” agreed Bran.

  “That she is as deadly as Charles.”

  “Differently deadly,” he said. “Charles or Adam could take her in a fight. But she won’t engage them unless she has to. She will use people … Charles told me that there were six wolves invading your territory. Since he didn’t mention Fiona—and he would have—are there any others you know of?”

  “No. The only ones I have personally seen are James and Nonnie Palsic,” I told him. “Oh. And Lincoln Stuart, but he doesn’t count because he is dead.”

  “He is the one you killed?”

  “He’s the one I hit with my car. I would have shot him, but there were too many onlookers. James Palsic killed him.” I could see that I had the choice of telling Bran what happened today one sentence at a time, or I could tell him the whole story. Actually, I was probably better off throwing everything into the mix in order to save time.

  “I think,” I told him, “that I really need to start with the jackrabbit.”

  “If that is what you think,” he said. “Then by all means, start with the jackrabbit.”

  He was utterly silent while I was talking—so I really didn’t know how he persuaded me to tell him about Wulfe when I hadn’t intended to. Or Adam’s growing problem with whatever it was that was making him shift without meaning to and that was causing him to close down our mating bond. Or that was what Adam had implied as the reason for closing down our mating bond— sometimes just talking about something out loud pointed out information I’d missed.

  I did manage to keep to myself that cold feeling I’d awoken to last night, when only Adam and I had been in the room. I know what it feels like to be the subject of a hunt. To be prey. It could have been my imagination, despite the I’m-sorry breakfast sandwich.

  When I finally finished up with Ben scaring Makaya in the basement, I was a little hoarse. I waited for Bran’s response. It took long enough that I checked my phone to make sure we were still connected. I’d feel pretty stupid if I’d spent the last hour talking to myself.

  “Bran?” I asked. “Are you still there?”

  “Tell Adam to kill Fiona, whenever and wherever he gets a chance,” he answered briskly. “She is selling her services to the highest bidder. She doesn’t share her money with a team, so the others are probably useful tools. She does not make a good ally for anyone or anything she is not terrified of. If she has made, as you are concerned about, an alliance with the smoke weaver—proceed with caution.”

  “You said that she was supposed to be dead,” I said as I wondered who Fiona was working for—and didn’t like the obvious answer much. There were other people who wanted us dead besides the witches. She had been sincere when she told me that Adam and I could take three of our people and leave—so maybe she was here to create a base for herself, a pack independent from the Marrok and too important to his schemes for him to destroy.

  “I was assured of her demise five or six years ago,” he agreed. He could remember that I had not glitter-bombed his office when I was fifteen, but he didn’t remember how long ago Fiona had died?

  “Did you have her killed?” I asked, remembering the bitterness in Fiona’s voice.

  “I would have,” he told me. “But no. She was working for a witch and the deal went bad.”

  “Deals with witches frequently go bad,” I muttered. “Exactly so,” he said gently. “You should tell Adam that the Palsics and Chen Li Qiang I would prefer saved if possible. Kent? Other than which pack he is affiliated or not affiliated with, I haven’t heard anything about Kent since the sixties, which I find concerning. Either he is hiding from me, or he has settled down into a boring life with a small blip when he joined the rebels in Galveston.”

  “We don’t work for you anymore,” I said dryly. “You can’t just dictate to us.”

  “Why am I helping you, then?” he asked equally dryly.

  He had a point. And we’d try to do what he asked as far as the Palsics and Chen were concerned. I’d seen Carlos’s face when he talked about Chen. And I’d found myself liking James Palsic. I didn’t know about Nonnie—she hadn’t done or said anything remarkable, but it might be nice to have another woman in the pack. But I’d had to give Bran a hard time about his assumption that we’d obey his orders, if only for form’s sake.

  “Okay,” I conceded. “I will inform Adam that you suggest that we should kill Fiona—and her mate?”

  “Mate?” Bran asked.

  “Harolford,” I told him.

  “I’d forgotten about Harolford,” he said. “But by all means kill Harolford, too. Just remember that Fiona is the more dangerous of the two.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “We’ll do our best to absorb the Palsics and Chen into the pack and make up our own minds about Kent.”

  “Good girl,” he said, and I could hear the squeak of his chair and knew he was leaning back in it. That was how you always knew he was happy with you.

 
; And if I was pleased about making him happy, I was sure as shooting not going to let him know that.

  “So have I solved one of your problems?” he asked.

  “Nope,” I told him promptly. “But you’ve told me how you see it—and you have more information than we do. And I know that you are rooting for this experiment—our pack, the fae, and the vampires working together for the good of all—to work, so you are on our side in this. Which means we will take your advice seriously. And that, oh Marrok, makes it easier for us to solve our own problem.”

  “Good,” he said, sounding pleased again. Making me think for myself, was he? As long as I thought what he wanted me to think, he liked it when I thought for myself.

  “Now, about your problem with Wulfe.” His voice grew darker and arctic.

  Just from that tone, I realized that someone had told Bran that Wulfe had been the reason that Bonarata, the king of the vampires (or at least the de facto ruler of the vampires), had captured me and taken me to Europe. Bonarata had asked Wulfe who the most dangerous person in the Tri-Cities was. Wulfe, who has an abysmal sense of humor as well as an almost fae-like ability to lie with the truth, told Bonarata that it was me. I am still not quite sure of the logic that Wulfe used.

  “I think you can leave Wulfe to Adam and me,” I said hastily. “He’s just playing, I think. He saved my life. I don’t mean that he’s one of the good guys, but …” I drew in a breath and centered myself.

  I didn’t want Bran to come destroy Wulfe, because it would be wrong. He had done nothing, up to this point, that deserved aiming Bran at him. Besides, I tried really hard not to aim Bran at anyone. I had a policy of not using nuclear devices to take out pesky flies because that tended to yield mixed results. I tamped down the small voice that wondered if even Bran could take on Wulfe. I needed Bran to be immortal and unstoppable.

  Right this moment, I had to convince Bran not to kill Wulfe.

  “I hurt him—badly, I think,” I told Bran. “He was trying to help us for whatever twisted reason guides him—maybe because Marsilia asked him, maybe because he was bored. But he was trying to help us and got caught in the backlash of me trying to lay the spirits of zombies to rest. It broke something inside him.”

  Bran muttered something that might have been, “I can break something inside him, too.”

  “Bonarata broke him for real a long time ago,” I told Bran. “Wulfe is a wizard and a vampire and a witch.” That last might be a secret. I certainly hadn’t known it before the Night of the Zombies, as Ben liked to call it. But I needed Bran to understand about Wulfe so he didn’t just have him eliminated the way he’d just assigned us to eliminate Fiona. “He has spilled blood for Bonarata and for Marsilia for centuries. Tortured and killed for centuries.”

  Into my dramatic pause, Bran said, with palpable irony, “Yes, Mercy, I know.”

  “And his witchcraft is white.”

  This time the pause was his.

  “Exactly,” I said. “He is a lost soul wandering in the darkness …”

  “Drivel,” said Bran, who had written that particular line for a rather beautiful song I’d heard him sing once. I think the song was a few centuries old—but he had written it.

  “Mawkish sentimentality doesn’t make it untrue,” I told him. And that was a Bran quote as well. One he used both ways—true or untrue—depending upon the circumstances.

  “He is dangerous,” I told Bran, “and unpredictable and all of that. But maybe he can be turned into an ally. Adam has made Marsilia an ally.”

  “Adam thought Elizaveta was his ally.”

  “So did Elizaveta,” I returned. “But that is beside the point.” He took a long breath, and I pictured him holding the bridge of his nose. The breath had that sort of sound to it.

  “I will leave him to you and Adam, then,” he said finally. “For now.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and he growled at me.

  “A third problem,” said Bran. “The creature who escaped Underhill. What you know about him, even with Beauclaire’s additions, is not enough for me to figure out who he is. It may be that I do not know him, or that I only know him through attributes that you haven’t run into.”

  “Okay,” I said. I had really, really hoped that Bran could help us with this one. “He has Ben and Stefan,” I reminded Bran.

  “I know,” he said gently. “And I would not like to lose either of them. To that end, I have some conjectures that may be useful.”

  “Okay,” I said hopefully.

  “First—that Beauclaire could not give you the creature’s name. The fae place great store by names. There are a number of fae who protect their names by not allowing others to speak them.”

  “Okay, so the name could be important, once we figure out who this creature is. But we are unlikely to find him just by looking for someone hiding his name—because they all do that.”

  “Exactly.” He sounded pleased again.

  I wasn’t a child anymore. I shouldn’t be happy that he thought I was a good pupil for his Socratic method of teaching.

  “I think you should focus on the bargaining part of what Beauclaire told you,” he told me. And now I could hear in his voice that he thought I’d missed something obvious.

  “But they all bargain, too,” I said. And maybe I was a little sharp.

  “Indeed,” he said. And the patience in his voice made me want to dye all of his underwear purple, though that hadn’t worked out so well the first time I’d tried it.

  But I was a grown-up now, so I set aside petty vengeance and thought about what Beauclaire had said about the bargain.

  “But not all of the fae had a bargain with Underhill,” I said finally.

  My reward for seeing what Bran had seen was him saying, “And someone I know has a door to Underhill in her backyard, and one whom Underhill treasures to knock upon it and ask her to come out.”

  I thought about Tilly and sighed. “You don’t happen to have any hints for dealing with a bloodthirsty immortal being with the attention span of a ten-year-old, do you?”

  “Feed her sweets,” he said promptly. “Or call Ariana and ask her. But I think something sweet, especially if you bake it yourself, might be a way to coax out whatever information she might have.” He paused and then said, “And treat her like a co-conspirator, not a naughty child who has loosed doom upon the world. She may not be able to tell you much, but she may be useful to you all the same. Something within the boundaries of the bargain she has with him.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thank you.

  “And Adam?” I asked him hesitantly. All I had told him about Adam was that Adam had shut down our bond after we’d killed all the witches.

  “Blow up the bond,” Bran said. “See what happens.”

  And he hung up.

  I stared at my phone. I called him back, but he didn’t pick up. I guess he thought that I needed to figure it out. Did he mean that I should try to destroy the bond between Adam and me? How in the world would I do something like that? I didn’t want to do that.

  I tried to call him back again. Maybe if I explained that it wasn’t just Adam changing to the wolf involuntarily? It was … what? What did I know? That Adam thought I’d be harmed if the bond between us was open?

  What did Adam think it would do to me? Did he think I would get caught up in his madness—assuming he thought that he was becoming a monster? “Argh,” I said in frustration, and hit the red button on the screen.

  Bran had obviously decided not to take any more calls from me tonight.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” I grumped, trying to figure out what I could text to Bran so that he’d call me back.

  “Me,” said Adam, opening the door. “Who were you on the phone with?”

  “Bran,” I told him. “You and I need to talk.”

  His eyes were so unhappy.

  But his face was locked in his I-deal-with-messes expression, so I figured he didn’t know that I could see th
rough it. It was easier to read him with our bond up and functioning—but I’d known him for a long time before we’d been mated, and I’d paid attention.

  “I agree,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “But not here.”

  “Not here,” I agreed. Too many sharp ears—and at least one of them had been co-opted by the enemy. But it wasn’t just that. With this many of the pack in the house, we wouldn’t have much time before someone needed Adam’s attention—as had been amply demonstrated when I’d been trying to talk to him earlier.

  “Your house?” he asked, tipping his head toward my empty manufactured house.

  I started to say yes, then hesitated. “I don’t want to run into Anna again,” I told him. “How about the garage? I can check the phone while we’re there.”

  I had forwarded that phone to mine, but no one had called for the garage since this morning. That might mean that no one needed their car repaired. It might also mean that I’d flubbed it.

  “Okay,” he said, holding the bedroom door wider and stepping back in invitation. “I’ll drive. Your cars are under the weather.”

  “Ha-ha,” I grumbled, walking past him. “Poor Jetta.”

  I was going to have to find time to work on the Vanagon, I thought, resigned. I hated to drive it until I got all the air bubbles out. The air bubbles wouldn’t actually hurt anything. All they would do was make the gauges tell me the van was overheating when it wasn’t. The big problem with that was that if the engine really did overheat, I’d ignore it because I’d think it was just air bubbles. That would ruin the engine.

  “I will buy you a new Jetta,” Adam said, stepping into my path so I stopped.

  He reached up and caressed my cheeks on either side of my broken nose. His touch was gentle enough that it didn’t make my nose hurt worse than it already did.

  “I’m onto your devious plot,” I said, rising up on my toes to kiss his cheek. I did not wince when the move caused my ribs to remind me that they’d been injured, too. I didn’t want to devolve into a “Mercy is hurt” conversation again.

  “No new Jettas,” I said, putting the emphasis on the word he’d tried to skate by me as I started for the stairs. “Even though they have airbags. I will be laughed at by all VW mechanics everywhere if I get caught driving a new car. I just have to find another old car. Those old VWs are engineered to fold around you so even without an airbag they do okay in accidents.”