Silver Borne mt-5 Read online

  Jesse reached out and grabbed my knee, but her face didn’t change as the fae woman slowly stood up. She began to breathe hard as she took several steps back, sliding her chair behind her until it bumped into the shelving in back of her, and she couldn’t retreat anymore. Her mouth opened and she began panting, and I realized what I was seeing was a full-blown panic attack done fae-style.

  Zee had said her panic attacks were dangerous.

  “Ariana,” Samuel said, in a voice like Medea’s gentlest purr.

  He didn’t move from the door, giving her space. “Ari. Your father is dead and so are his beasts. I promise you are safe.”

  “Don’t move,” Zee told Jesse and me in a low voice, his eyes on the fae woman. “This could go very badly. I told you not to bring any of the wolves.”

  “I brought myself, old man,” said Samuel. “And I told Ariana that if she ever needed me, I would come. It was a promise and a threat, though I didn’t mean it that way at the time.”

  Alicia Brewster—whom Samuel had apparently known as Ariana—hummed three notes and started to talk.

  “A long time past in a land far from this one,” said Alicia in a storyteller’s voice, “there was a fae daughter who could work magic in silver and so she was named. In a time where fae were dying from cold iron, their magics fading as the One God’s ignorant followers built their churches in our places of power, the metals loved her touch, her magic flourished, and her father grew envious.”

  “He was a nasty piece of work,” said Samuel, his eyes on the woman’s wrinkled face that sometimes wore scars on her cheek or at the corner of her eye. “Mercy would call him a real rat-bastard. He was a forest lord whose greatest magic was to command beasts. When the last of the giants—who were beasts controlled by his magic—died, it left him a forest lord with no great power, and he resented it as Ariana’s power grew. When the fae lost their ability to imprint their magic on things—like your walking staff, Mercy—she could still manage it. People found out.”

  “A great lord of the fae came,” continued Ariana. She didn’t seem to be listening to Samuel, but she waited for him to quit speaking before she started. “He required that she build an abomination—an artifact that would consume the fae magic of his enemies and give it back to him. She refused, but her father accepted and sealed the bargain in blood.”

  She stopped talking, and after a moment Samuel picked up the story. “He beat her, and she still refused. His was a magic sort of like the fairy queen’s, in that he could influence others. It might have been more useful, but he could only influence beasts.”

  “So he turned her into a beast.” Ariana’s voice echoed even though my office was full enough that a gunshot shouldn’t echo, and it was eerie enough that Jesse scooted nearer to me.

  Ariana wasn’t looking at Samuel anymore, but I couldn’t tell where she was looking instead. I don’t think it was a happy place.

  “In those days, the fae’s magic was still strong enough that it was harder to kill them unless you had iron or steel,” said Samuel.

  He didn’t seem worried about Ariana, but Zee was. Zee had gradually moved off his chair until he was crouched between Jesse and the scarred fae woman.

  “He used his powers to torture her,” Samuel said. “He had a pair of hounds who were fae hounds. Their howls would drop a stag in its path, and their gaze could scare a man to death. He set them at her every morning for an hour, knowing that as long as he went not one moment more than an hour, she could not die—because that was part of these fear hounds’ magic.”

  “She broke,” Ariana said hoarsely. “She broke and followed his will as faithfully as his hounds. She knew nothing but his commands, and she built as he desired, forged it of silver and magic and her blood.”

  “You didn’t break,” said Samuel confidently. “You fought him every day.”

  Ariana’s voice changed, and she snapped, “She couldn’t fight him.”

  “You fought him,” Samuel said again. “You fought, and he called his hounds until his magic failed him because he used it one time too often. I had this story from someone who was there, Ariana. You fought him and stopped, leaving the artifact incomplete.”

  “It is my story,” she growled, and she turned those black eyes on Samuel. “She failed. She built it.”

  “Truth belongs to no one,” Samuel told her. “Ariana’s father visited a witch because his magic was insufficient to work his will.” There was something in his voice that made me think that he knew and hated that witch. “He paid the price she demanded for a spell that combined witchcraft with his magic.”

  “His right hand,” said Ariana.

  Samuel waited for her, but she just stared at him.

  “I think he wanted to call his hounds,” Samuel said. “But they had strayed too far for him to influence. He got something quite different.”

  “Werewolves,” said Ariana, then she turned her back to us, hunching her shoulders. I saw that there were scars on her back, too.

  “We attacked because we had to,” Samuel said gently. “But my father was stronger than we were, and resisted. He killed her father. We stopped, but she was so badly hurt. A human would have died or been reborn as one of us. She only suffered.”

  “You doctored her,” I said. “You helped her heal. You saved her.”

  Ariana crumpled—and Samuel leaped over all of us and caught her before she hit the floor. Her body was limp, her eyes closed, and the scars were hidden safely behind her glamour again.

  “Did I?” Samuel asked, looking down at her with his heart in his eyes. “The scar on the top of her shoulder was one I gave her.”

  Hot damn, I thought, watching him. Hot damn, Charles. I found something for Samuel to live for.

  Samuel had been upstairs with Adam when the fairy queen called to tell us what she was looking for. Silver Borne. The mention of the artifact alone was enough to make it impossible for him to yield to his wolf. But it had been when Zee had called me and Ariana spoke that he’d come back to us.

  “You saved her,” I told him. “And you loved her.”

  “She didn’t know, did she?” said Jesse, sounding as caught up in the story as Ariana had been. “You doctored her up, and she fell for you—and you couldn’t tell her what you were. That’s really romantic, Doc.”

  “And tragic,” said Zee sourly.

  “How do you know it’s tragic?” sputtered Jesse.

  The old fae scowled and gestured toward Samuel. “I’m not seeing a happy-ever-after ending here, are you?”

  Samuel pulled the fae woman against him. It looked odd, a young man holding a woman who could have been his grandmother indeed. But fae don’t age, they fade. Her grandmotherly appearance was a glamour. The scars were real—but I saw his face and knew that he only cared about the pain they represented.

  “Endings are relative,” I said, and Samuel jerked his head up. “I mean, as long as no one is dead, they get the chance to rewrite their endings, don’t you think? Take it from me, Samuel, a little time can heal some awfully big wounds.”

  “Did she look healed to you?” he said, and his eyes were the color of winter ice.

  “We’re all alive,” said Zee dryly. “And she didn’t disappear on us—which she still has the magic to do. I’d say you have a chance.”

  Chapter 13

  SAMUEL STARTED TO SAY SOMETHING TO ZEE WHEN the woman he held opened her eyes, which were green again. She gave us all a bewildered look, as if she could not imagine how she’d gotten where she was.

  I knew exactly how she felt.

  As soon as he saw that she was awake, Samuel set her down with careful haste. “I’m sorry, Ari. You were falling . . . I wouldn’t have touched—”

  I had never in my life seen anything like it. Samuel, the son of a Welsh bard, who shared his father’s gift for words, stammering like an infatuated teenager.

  She grabbed Samuel’s sweatshirt and looked up at him in utter astonishment. “Samuel?”

 
He stepped away from her, but stopped short of pulling the shirt from her grasp. “I can’t give you space unless you let me go,” he told her.

  “Samuel?” she said, and, though it hadn’t caught my notice before, I realized that her voice had changed sometime in the middle of her panic attack, and sounded way too young for the late-middle-age face she wore. It was also lightly accented, some combination of British and Welsh or a related language. “I thought . . . I looked but I never could find you. You just disappeared and left me nothing. Not a shirt or a name.”

  He pulled away again, and this time she let him go. Free, he retreated to the damaged door that separated my office from the garage. “I’m a werewolf.”

  Ariana nodded and took two steps forward. “I did notice that when you killed the hounds who had come for me.” There was a hint of humor in her voice. Good, I thought. Any woman I’d allow to have Samuel would have to have a sense of humor. “The fangs gave it away—or maybe the tail. You saved me again—and then you left, and all I knew was your first name.”

  “I scared you,” he said starkly.

  She gave him a half smile, but clenched her hands. “Well, yes. But it seems I scared you worse because you ran away for . . . a very, very long time, Samuel.”

  He looked away from her gaze—the most dominant werewolf in the Tri-Cities, and he couldn’t meet her gaze. Didn’t he see that even if he scared her, she still wanted him?

  She tried to take another step toward him and stopped. I could smell her terror, sharp and sour. She backed away from him with a little sigh.

  “It is very good to see you again, Samuel,” she said. “Because of you I am whole and here all these centuries after my father would have destroyed me. Instead, his body long ago fed his beasts and the trees of his forests.”

  Samuel bowed his head and, to the floor, he said, “I’m glad you are well—and apologize for causing your panic attack today. I should have stayed out . . .”

  “Yes. Panic attacks. They can be pretty . . .” She looked at Zee, who was back in his chair looking as relaxed as if he’d spent the last ten minutes watching a very boring soap opera. “Did I hurt anyone, Siebold?”

  “No,” he said, folding his arms. “Just true-named our wolf, and told Mercedes and Jesse the story of the Silver Borne.”

  She looked at me, then at Jesse, maybe to see how frightened we were. Whatever she saw reassured her because she gave a shy smile.

  “Oh, that’s good. Good.” Her shoulders relaxed, and she turned her attention back to Samuel. “I don’t have them often anymore. Not at all with mortal canines. It’s just the fae dogs, the magic ones—black dogs and hounds—that set me off. Only when I am overcome with—” She bit her lip.

  “Fear?” Samuel suggested, and she didn’t answer. She also had left off werewolves, I noticed.

  “I am glad to see that your magic has returned,” he said. “You thought it was gone.”

  She took a deep breath. “Yes. And for a while I was glad of it.” She looked at me. “And that has bearing on the present situation. You are Samuel’s friend, Mercedes?”

  “And mate of the local Alpha werewolf—Jesse’s father,” I told her. I could hardly tell her that Samuel was single—that was a little too obvious. I saw that it mattered to her that Samuel didn’t belong to me.

  “You were going to—” I was so caught up in matchmaking that I almost flubbed it then and there. I shut my mouth and grabbed Jesse’s hand.

  “—help us find Gabriel.” Jesse completed my sentence for me.

  Ariana didn’t move like a human at all when she came back to where we sat, with her chair in hand; she moved like a . . . wolf, bold and graceful and strong. Without a glance at Samuel, she sat down.

  “Ask her about the thing the fairy queen wants,” I told Jesse.

  “Zee said she wants the Silver Borne,” Ariana said. “That is the object of power I built for my father—although it never quite worked as the one who commissioned it would have liked. For many years I thought I had destroyed all my magic by making it.” She closed her eyes and smiled. “I lived as a human, except for my long life span. I married, had children . . .” She glanced at Samuel, who was looking over our heads and out the window. His face was composed, but I could see the pulse beating fast in his throat.

  Ariana continued her story quickly. “It took me nearly a century to make the connection between my lack of magic and the Silver Borne.”

  She gave me a wry smile. “I know. I had no magic anymore, and the last thing I made was something that was supposed to eat magic. You’d think I’d have made the connection. But all I knew was that it wasn’t finished . . . and I couldn’t remember how far I’d gotten when my father called the wolves. After a while it was not as important to me—it was only a broken thing that did nothing. Someone stole it, and I thought, good riddance. I left it to them, and after a few months my magic returned. It was then that I first understood I’d succeeded, in part. It does consume fae magic—but mostly just the magic of the person who currently possesses it.”

  “Why would a fairy queen want it, then?” I asked, then added a belated, “Jesse?”

  “It eats fae magic, Mercy,” said Zee. “How easy to change a formidable opponent to someone more vulnerable than a human—at least a human knows he has no power. Dueling is still allowed among the fae.”

  “Or maybe she doesn’t really understand what it does,” suggested Ariana. “She could believe it does as it was built to do: take power from one fae and give it to another. I’ve heard the stories—and I do not bother to correct them. Now I have answered a question, I have one for you. Mercy, did Phin give that book to you?”

  I took in a breath to answer, and Jesse clamped her hand over my mouth and jumped in. “It would work better if you ask me,” she said. “Then it would be less likely that Mercy breaks her word.” She dropped her hand. “Did Phin give you the book?”

  “But what does the book have to do with it?”

  “Glamour,” said Samuel suddenly. “By all that’s holy, Ari, how did you manage to do that? You disguised that thing as a book, and you gave it to your grandson?”

  “He is mostly human,” she answered him without looking his way. “And I told him to keep it locked away so it wouldn’t eat the magic he has.”

  “What if he’d sold it?” I asked. “Jesse?”

  “It is my blood that it was born in,” Ariana said. “It finds its way back to me eventually. Jesse, please ask her. Did Phin give you the book?”

  “No. I might have bought it if I could have afforded—” I stopped talking because she slumped down and put both hands over her face.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Ariana said, hiccuping and wiping her face with her hands. Samuel surged toward her, then stopped where he was. She’d flinched, just a little.

  “It’s just been such a . . . I was so sure Phin was dead—that they’d killed him trying to get it, and it would be my fault.” She wiped her eyes again. “I’m not usually like this, but Phin is . . . I adore Phin. He is so much like my son who I lost a long time ago . . . And I thought he was dead.”

  “Now you know he lives?” Samuel asked.

  “In fire or in death,” Jesse said, understanding it before any of the rest of us did. “That’s what the fairy queen said. That if she killed Mercy, or if they burned it, it would reveal itself. But if it still belongs to Phin . . .”

  “If they had killed him, the Silver Borne would have revealed itself to them,” Ariana agreed. “They wouldn’t still be looking for it.”

  “Why did you make it that way?” asked Jesse.

  Ariana smiled at her. “I didn’t. But things of power . . . evolve around the limits they are given. That’s why, even though I thought it did nothing, I kept it with me. Because even unfinished, it was a thing of power.”

  “How did you figure out that it . . . Oh.” There was comprehension in Jesse’s voice.

  “Right. It’s a very old thing, and many of its owners hav
e died in various ways. The fire thing came later.” Her face grew contemplative. “And quite spectacularly.”

  “Aren’t you its owner?” Jesse asked.

  “Not if I want to keep my magic—I’m only its maker. That’s why it’s called the Silver Borne.”

  “Ariana means silver in Welsh.” Samuel sat down on the floor and leaned against the end of the nearest metal shelving unit. He’d had a rough couple of days, too—but I hoped that Ariana’s obvious fear of him wouldn’t send him sliding back into despair.

  “Jesse,” I said. “Ask her how we find Gabriel.”

  “What did you bring me that belongs to this young man?” Jesse handed her a white plastic bag. “It’s a sweater he loaned me when I was cold.”

  “Phin told me that his magic was that he could sometimes feel things from objects,” I said. “Things like how old an object is. Psychometry.”

  “Something he inherited from me.” Ariana pulled the sweater out and put it against her face. “Oh dear. This won’t work.”

  “Why not?” Samuel asked. “It is his. I can smell his scent on it from here.”

  “I don’t work off scents,” she told him, her eyes on the sweater. “I work off ties, the threads that bind us to those things that are ours.” She looked at Jesse. “This sweater means far more to you, as a gift of love, than it did to him when he wore it. So I can use it to find you, but not him.” She hesitated. “Does he feel the same way about you?”