Mercedes Thompson 03: Iron Kissed Read online

  His smile widened. “I was going to say, it is always good. Come in.”

  He led me through the house and into the kitchen, where he had a small bowl of Caesar salad.

  “I like your kitchen.” It was the only room that seemed to have a personality. I’d been expecting oak cabinets and granite counter tops and I’d been right about the counters. But the cabinets were cherry, and contrasted nicely with the dark gray counters. Nothing too daring, but at least it wasn’t bland.

  He looked around with a frown. “Do you think it looks all right? My fiancée—ex-fiancée—told me I needed a decorator for the kitchen.”

  “It’s lovely,” I assured him.

  A bell chimed and he opened the oven door and pulled out a small pizza. My oven’s timer buzzes like an angry bee.

  The smell of the pizza distracted me from my oven-envy.

  “Now that smells marvelous,” I told him, closing my eyes to get a better sniff.

  A red flush tinted his cheeks at my compliment as he slid it onto a stone round and cut it with expert speed. “If you’ll get the salad and follow me, we can eat.”

  Obediently I took the wooden bowl of greens and followed him through the house.

  “This is the dining room,” he told me unnecessarily, since the big mahogany table gave it away. “But when I eat alone or with just a couple of people, I eat out here.”

  “Out here” was a small circular room surrounded by windows. The shape of the room was innovative, but it was outblanded by beige tiles and window treatments. His architect would be sad to know his artistic vision had been swallowed by insipidness.

  Tim set the pizza on the small oak table and opened the roman blinds so we had a view of his backyard.

  “I keep the curtains down most of the time, or it gets like an oven in here,” he said. “I suppose it will be nice in the winter.”

  He’d already set the table, and like the kitchen, his tableware was a surprise. Handmade stoneware plates that didn’t match exactly, either in size or color, but somehow complemented each other, and handmade pottery goblets. His was blue with a cracked glaze finish and mine brown and aged-looking. There was a pitcher on the table, but he’d already filled the glasses.

  I thought of Adam’s house and wondered if he still used his ex-wife’s china the way Tim obviously used the stuff his ex-fiancée or maybe the decorator had chosen.

  “Sit, sit,” he said, following his own advice. He put a piece of pizza on my plate, but allowed me to get my own salad and a generous helping of some kind of baked pear dish.

  I took a cautious sip of the contents of my glass. “What is this?” I asked. It wasn’t alcoholic, which surprised me, but something both sweet and tart.

  He grinned. “It’s a secret. Maybe I’ll show you how to make it after dinner.”

  I sipped again. “Yes, please.”

  “I noticed you’re limping.”

  I smiled. “I stepped on some glass. Nothing to worry about.”

  We both quit talking as we dug into the meal with appetite.

  “Tell me about your friend,” he said as he ate. “The one the police think killed O’Donnell.”

  “He’s a grumpy, fussy old man,” I said. “And I love him.” The pears had some sort of brown sugar glaze. I expected them to be too sweet, but they were tart and melted in my mouth. “Mmm. This is good. Anyway, right now he’s ticked off at me for poking my nose into this investigation.” I took a deep drink. “Or else he thinks it’s dangerous and I’ll quit investigating if he makes me think he’s angry with me.” Zee was right, I talked too much. Time to shift the conversation Tim’s way. “You know, I’d have thought you would be angry with me when you found out I had an ulterior motive for attending your meeting.”

  “I always wanted to be a private investigator,” Tim confided. He’d finished his food and was watching me eat with a pleased expression. “Maybe if I liked O’Donnell, I’d have been angrier.”

  “Were you able to come up with a list?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he lied.

  I frowned at him and put down my fork. I’m not as good at smelling a lie as some of the wolves. Maybe I’d misread his response. It seemed like an odd thing to lie about.

  “Did you make sure that Austin wouldn’t talk about it to anyone?”

  He nodded and his smile widened. “Austin won’t tell anyone. Finish up your pears, Mercy.”

  I had eaten two bites before I realized something was wrong. Maybe if I hadn’t been fighting this kind of compulsion with Adam, I wouldn’t have noticed anything at all. I took a deep breath and concentrated, but couldn’t smell any magic in the air.

  “This was terrific,” I told him. “But I’m absolutely full.”

  “Take another drink,” he said.

  The juice or whatever it was tasted better with every sip—but…I wasn’t thirsty. Still, I’d swallowed twice before I thought. It wasn’t like me to do anything someone told me to do, let alone everything. Maybe it was the juice.

  As soon as the doubt touched my mind, I could feel it. The sweet liquid burned with magic and the goblet throbbed under my hand—so hot that I was surprised my hand wasn’t smoking.

  I set the old thing down on the table and wished the stupid book had included a picture of Orfino’s Bane—the goblet that the fairy had used to rob Roland’s knights of their ability to resist her will. I’d bet it would match the rustic goblet beside my plate.

  “It was you,” I whispered.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “Tell me about your friend. Why do the police think he killed O’Donnell?”

  “They found him there,” I told him. “Zee could have run, but he and Uncle Mike were trying to gather all the fae artifacts so the police wouldn’t find them.”

  “I thought I got all the artifacts,” said Tim. “The bastard must have been taking more things than the ones I sent him for. Probably thought that he might get more money for them somewhere else. The ring isn’t as good as the goblet.”

  “The ring?”

  He showed me the worn silver ring I’d noticed last night.

  “And it makes the tongue of the wearer sweeter than honey. It’s a politician’s ring—or will be,” he said. “But the goblet works better. If I’d made him drink before he went out, he wouldn’t have been able to take more. I told him if we took too much, the fae would start looking outside Fairyland for their murderer. He should have listened to me. I suppose your friend is a fae and was going to talk to O’Donnell about the murders.”

  “Yes.” I had to answer him, but I could hold back information if I tried. “You hired O’Donnell to get magic artifacts and kill the fae?”

  He laughed. “Killing the fae was his thing, Mercy. I just gave him the means to do it.”

  “How?”

  “I went over to his house to talk to him about the next Bright Future meeting, and he had this ring and a pair of bracers sitting on his bookcase. He offered to sell them to me for fifty bucks.” Tim sneered. “Dumb putz. He had no idea what he had, but I did. I put on the ring and persuaded him to tell me what he’d done. That’s when he told me about the real treasure—though he didn’t know what he had.”

  “The list,” I said.

  He licked his finger and pointed at me. “Score a point for the bright girl. Yes, the list. With names. O’Donnell knew where they lived and I knew what they were and what they had. He was scared of the fae, you know. Hated them. So I loaned him back the bracers and a couple of other things and told him how to use them. He fetched artifacts for me—for which I paid him—and he got to kill the fae. It was easier than I’d thought it would be. You’d think a dumbshit like O’Donnell would have a little more trouble with a thousand-year-old Guardian of the Hunt, wouldn’t you? The fae have gotten complacent.”

  “Why did you kill him?” I asked.

  “I thought the Hunter would take care of it, actually. O’Donnell was a weakness. He wanted to keep the ring—and threatened to blackmail me for it.
I told him ‘sure’ and had him steal a couple more things. Once I had enough that I could do my own stealing without much danger, I sent O’Donnell after the Hunter. When that didn’t work…well.” He shrugged.

  I looked at the silver ring. “A politician can’t afford to hang out with stupid men who know too much.”

  “Take another drink, Mercy.”

  The goblet was full again though it had only been half-full when I’d set it down. I drank. It was harder to think, almost like being drunk.

  Tim couldn’t afford to let me live.

  “Are you a fae?”

  “Oh, no.” I shook my head.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You’re Native American, aren’t you? You won’t find any Native American fae.”

  “No.” I wouldn’t look for fae among the Indians; the fae with their glamour were a European people. Indians had their own magical folk. But Tim hadn’t asked, so I didn’t need to tell him. I didn’t think it was going to save me, him thinking I was a defenseless human instead of a defenseless walker. But I was going to try to keep any advantages that I could.

  He picked up his fork and played with it. “So how did you end up with the walking stick? I looked all over for it and couldn’t find the darn thing. Where was it?”

  “In O’Donnell’s living room,” I told him. “Uncle Mike and Zee overlooked it, too.” It must have been the extra drink, but I couldn’t stop before I said, “Some of the old things have a will of their own.”

  “How did you get into O’Donnell’s living room? Do you have friends on the police force? I thought you were just a mechanic.”

  I considered what he’d asked me and answered with the absolute truth. The way a fae would have. I held up a finger for the first question. “I walked in.” Two fingers. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do have a friend on the police force.” Three fingers. “I’m a damn good mechanic—though not as good as Zee.”

  “I thought Zee was a fae; how can he be a mechanic?”

  “He’s iron kissed.” If he wanted information, maybe I could stall him and babble. “I like that term better than gremlin because he can’t be a gremlin if they just made up that word in the last century, can he? He’s a lot older than that. In fact, I finally found a story—”

  “Stop,” he said.

  I did.

  He frowned at me. “Drink. Take two drinks.”

  Damn. When I set the goblet down, my hands tingled with fae magic and my lips were numb.

  “Where is the walking stick?” he asked.

  I sighed. That stupid stick followed me around even when it wasn’t in the room. “Wherever it wants to be.”

  “What?”

  “Probably in my office,” I told him. It liked to show up where I was going to come upon it unexpectedly. But the need to answer him made me continue to feed him information. “Though it was in my car. It’s not now. Uncle Mike didn’t take it.”

  “Mercy,” he said. “What is the thing you least wanted me to know when you came here?”

  I thought about that. I’d been so worried about hurting his feelings yesterday, and standing on his doorstep I’d been a little worried still. I leaned forward and said in a low voice, “I am not attracted to you at all. I don’t find you sexy or handsome. You look like an upscale geek without the intelligence to make it work for you.”

  He surged to his feet and his face whitened, then flushed with anger.

  But he’d asked and so I continued, “Your house is bland and has no personality at all. Maybe you should try some naked statues—”

  “Stop it! Stop it!”

  I sat back and watched him. He was still a boy who thought he was smarter than he really was. His anger didn’t scare me, or intimidate me. He saw that and it made him angrier.

  “You wanted to know what O’Donnell had? Come with me.”

  I would have, but he grabbed my arm in a grip and his hand bit down. I heard a crack but it was a moment before the pain registered.

  He’d broken my wrist.

  He pulled me through the doorway, through the dining room, and into his bedroom. When he pushed me onto his bed, I heard a second bone pop in my arm—this time the pain cleared my head just a little. Mostly, though, it just hurt.

  He threw open a large oak entertainment center, but there was no TV on the shelf. Instead there were two shoe boxes sitting on a bulky fur of some sort that looked almost like yak hide, except it was gray.

  Tim set the boxes on the ground and pulled out the hide, shaking it out so I could see it was a cloak. He pulled it around himself, and once it settled over him, it disappeared. He didn’t look any different from when he’d put it on.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  And I did, because I’d been reading my borrowed book and because the strange-looking hide smelled of horse, not yak.

  “It’s the Druid’s Hide,” I told him, breathing through my teeth so I didn’t whimper. At least it wasn’t the same arm I’d broken last winter. “The druid had been cursed to wear the form of a horse, but when he was skinned, he regained his human form. But the horse’s skin did something…” I tried to remember the wording, because it was important. “It kept his enemies from finding or harming him.”

  I looked up and realized that he hadn’t wanted me to answer him. He’d wanted to know more than I did. I think it was the “not intelligent enough” comment still bothering him. But part of me wanted to please him, and as the pain subsided, that compulsion grew stronger.

  “You are much stronger than I thought,” I said to distract myself from this new facet of the goblet’s effect. Or maybe I said it to please him.

  He stared at me. I couldn’t tell if he liked hearing that or not. Finally he drew up the sleeves of his dress shirt to show me that he wore a silver band around each wrist. “Bracers of giant strength,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Those aren’t bracers. Those are bracelets or maybe wristlets. Bracers are longer. They were used—”

  “Shut up,” he gritted. He closed the wardrobe and kept his back to me for a moment. “You love me,” he said. “You think I’m the handsomest man you’ve ever seen.”

  I fought it. I did. I fought his voice as hard as I’ve ever fought anything.

  But it’s hard to fight your own heart, especially when he was so handsome. Until that moment, no man had competed with Adam for sheer breathtaking male beauty—but his face and form palled beside Tim.

  Tim turned to me and stared into my eyes. “You want me,” he said. “More than you wanted that ugly doctor you were dating.”

  Of course I did. Desire made my body go languid and I arched my back a little. The pain in my arm was nothing to the desire I felt.

  “The walking stick makes you rich,” I told him as he put a knee on the bed. “The fae know I have it and they want it back.” I tried to brace up on my elbow so I could kiss him, but my arm didn’t work right. My other hand did, but it was already reaching up to caress the soft skin of his neck. “They’ll get it, too. They have someone who knows how to find it.”

  He pulled my hand away.

  “It’s at your work?”

  “It should be.” After all, it followed me wherever I went. And I was going to go to my office. This beautiful man would take me.

  He ran a hand over my breast, squeezed too hard, then released it and stood up. “This can wait. Come with me.”

  My love had me drink some more from the goblet before we took his car to go to my office. I couldn’t remember what it was that we were looking for there, but he’d tell me when we got there. That’s what he told me. We were on 395 headed toward East Kennewick when he unzipped his jeans.

  A trucker, passing us, honked his horn. So did the car in the other lane when Tim swerved too much and almost had a wreck.

  He swore and pulled me off him. “We’ll do that where there aren’t so many cars,” he said, sounding breathless and almost giddy. He had me zip his pants again, because he couldn’t manage. It was hard with
only one hand, so I used the other one, too, ignoring the pain it caused.

  When I’d finished, I looked out the window and wondered why my arm hurt so badly and why I was sick to my stomach. Then he picked the cup off the floor where it had fallen and gave it to me.

  “Here, drink this.”

  There was dirt on the outside of the cup, but the inside was full—which didn’t make sense. It had been on its side on the floor mat under my feet. There shouldn’t be any liquid there at all.

  Then I remembered it was a fairy thing.

  “Drink,” he said again.

  I quit worrying about how it had happened, and took a sip.

  “Not like that,” he said. “Drink the whole glass. Austin took two sips this morning and did exactly what I told him to do. You sure you aren’t fae?”

  I upended the goblet, drinking as fast as I could, though some of it spilled over and poured stickily down my neck. When it was empty, I looked for a place to set it. It didn’t seem right to put it on the floor. Finally I managed to make the cup holder on my door fit around it.

  “No,” I told him. “I’m not fae.”

  I set my hands on my lap and watched them clench into fists. When the highway dropped us into east Kennewick, I told him how to find my shop.

  “Would you shut up?” he said. “That noise is getting on my nerves. Take another drink.”

  I hadn’t realized I was making noise. I reached up and felt my vocal cords, which were indeed vibrating. The growl I’d been hearing must be me. It stopped as soon as I became aware of it. The cup was full again when I reached for it.

  “That’s better.”

  He pulled into the parking lot and parked in front of the office.

  I was so jittery that I had trouble opening the door of the car, and even when I was out, I was shaking like a junkie.

  “What’s the code?” he asked, standing in front of the door.

  “One, one, two, zero,” I told him through the chattering of my teeth. “It’s my birthday.”

  The little light on the top switched from red to green: something in me relaxed and my jitters settled down.

  He took my keys and opened the door, then locked it behind us. He looked through the office for a while, even pulling the step ladder over so he could get up high on the parts shelves. After a few minutes he started pulling things off the shelves and dumping them on the floor. A thermostat housing hit the cement floor and cracked. I would have to remember to reorder it, I thought. Maybe Gabriel could go through the parts and see what we could salvage. If I had to repay Zee, I couldn’t afford to lose too much inventory.