Storm Cursed Read online

  “Everything I know,” I warned him, “Adam knows. Everything Adam knows Bran knows.”

  Larry nodded. “Yes, yes, of course. Such is the way of mates. And Bran Cornick, too. The Marrok keeps secrets that make this seem small—unless, I suppose, you are a goblin.”

  “I will tell no one else,” I told him. I looked at Ben and Mary Jo.

  “I swear to keep this secret,” Mary Jo said.

  Ben said, “If it’s not something that will harm people I care about, I will keep your secret.”

  Larry looked at us, all three of us, and sighed. “There was a day when I’d have bound you to silence and you would not have been able to speak, you know.”

  Yes, I thought, too much time with the fae. Or maybe just Larry. “There was a day when” didn’t really mean he’d lost that power, though I knew that many fae held a lot less power than they once had. I thought about keeping my observation to myself. But if we were to share secrets, it would be best to establish an honesty baseline.

  “I suspect you could do that on this day, too,” I told him, and the look on his face told me that it was true—and that he was pleased I had caught him.

  “So why don’t you?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “I am a romantic and an optimist, Mercy Hauptman. I think that my relationship with you and yours, right here and right now, might be the reason my people survive the next hundred years. If I betrayed your trust—the trust that led you to call me to deal with one of my own—if I betrayed that trust, then I would wipe away any chance of real friendship between us, yes?”

  “Yes,” growled Ben, not waiting for me.

  “Good enough,” Larry said. “So I will trust that you three will understand the gravity of what I show you—that you will understand the consequences to my people and to your people, as well as all the humans on this planet, if the fae know what a very few of my people can do. And I trust you will tell no one except for Adam, and that he will tell only Bran Cornick, who will tell no one.” He sighed again. “Unless he thinks it will benefit the werewolves. Ah, well.”

  He turned to the barn and spat out magic in a series of vocalizations that had nothing to do with language—and everything to do with communicating with the ground I stood on and the air I breathed. The noise he made hurt my ears, pleased my eyes with flashes of brilliant lights that were somehow still sound, and made my muscles turn to water.

  Magic and I have a complicated relationship, but this was a new reaction.

  I sat down on the ground so that I didn’t fall. Ben—who was apparently not affected at all—knelt beside me. “Mercy?”

  I shook my head, my attention on the barn where the unnatural shadows receded into normal darkness. Maybe a human would not have been able to tell the difference, but I could.

  Larry dusted his hands together and said, in a voice I hardly recognized as his, because I’d never heard him sound so threatening, “Now, you rotting piece of putrid meat, now tell these good people how you didn’t kill that police officer, how you didn’t kill the wee boy with blinky shoes. Let the Powers take you and save us all some effort.”

  I let Ben help me back to my feet.

  “But they sparkled like stars,” said the voice in the barn, markedly smaller than it had been before. “How could I not dine upon that, great one? How could I let a human, a human, take me captive? How could I suffer that he touch me, who was once first of thirty?”

  “He lied,” said Ben softly. “He is a goblin, is fae, is bound by your contract—and still he was able to lie.”

  Larry nodded. “He hid behind a veil of magic so as not to trigger the curse of the bargain we made—that magic is a version of glamour that the other fae do not have. Yet. A secret that we have held . . .” He sighed and shook his head. “Forever. Until this driveling fool, so stupid he could not avoid a camera, tried to take advantage of my allies.”

  I was silent because I was too busy putting this together with something I’d heard. There had been a fae who had betrayed a bargain she had made with Bran a few years ago. He had trusted her to keep the peace when representatives of the European werewolves had come to Seattle to be told that the Marrok intended to clue the humans in that there were werewolves in the world. She had lied to him. It had always bothered me that that fae could lie—even though Bran said she’d paid for those lies in the end.

  I wondered if that fae, the one from Seattle, had known the goblin’s secrets or had invented her own. If one fae could lie . . .

  “Much better that they, too, believe that they cannot,” murmured Larry to me, though I don’t think I said anything out loud.

  “So why now?” asked Mary Jo suspiciously. “That . . .” She hastily changed the word she was going to use. “That goblin in there is right. He isn’t worth giving up a secret this big.”

  Larry shook his head. “We are an odd bunch, we goblins,” he told her. “So little power compared to the rest of the fae. And yet some of us have gifts they would envy if they knew. I? I can sometimes sense important events in time.” He looked at me. “I think that it is going to be important that you know that this goblin could lie to you. I don’t know why or when. I don’t know that it will be important to me. But I do think that your trust in me, Mercy, in my people, might be the saving of us all. And if I give you my people’s most closely guarded secret, I believe you will remember that.”

  I blinked at him.

  He flashed me a smile full of teeth and then looked at the wolves. “Want to join me in the hunt?”

  “Absolutely,” said Ben with an eager breath.

  “That’s what we’re here for,” agreed Mary Jo. She sounded more resigned than excited, but I could feel her intensity.

  Larry glanced at me.

  “I know,” I said, resigned. “I’m not up to his weight. How about I guard the door in case you let him get by you.”

  “We won’t let him get by us,” said Mary Jo, stung.

  Ben grunted. “Now you’ve screwed the pooch,” he told her. “Never tempt fate.”

  No one felt like waiting around for the ten or fifteen minutes it would take for the werewolves to change, so all of them were in human form when they entered the barn. I could see them moving in a cautious triangle until darkness obscured them from my sight.

  I unsheathed my cutlass and listened to the doomed goblin scream my name. There were some downsides to being called Mercy. First, I was really tired of that Shakespeare monologue. Everyone I’d ever dated, not excepting Adam, quoted it to me at some point. Did they think I’d never heard it before? Second, it sometimes left me standing in the dark, listening to someone being killed while they cried out to me.

  For Mercy.

  This one deserved what was about to happen to him, but I still tried to tune out the noises in the barn.

  “She said, she promised I could come here for safety,” cried the goblin frantically before it shrieked—a noise that ceased in the middle of a crescendo. “She promised.”

  She who? I thought.

  I didn’t have time to wonder about it because his words were followed by a wave of magic that weakened my knees. The ground rumbled and shook as chaff and dust billowed out of the barn. Four-foot-by-eight-foot bales of hay crowded out of the entrance to the barn like some giant child’s blocks knocked over by a careless blow. The ground vibrated under my feet as they continued to fall for a few seconds more.

  I didn’t think even a thousand-pound bale would kill a werewolf—and I hadn’t felt the hit from the pack bonds that would tell me if someone was dead or (less reliably) badly injured. But those bales had been stacked pretty high.

  I started toward the barn but stopped when the fugitive goblin emerged from the barn, crawling over a bale. He wasn’t running but moving silently, his attention behind him. He was taller than Larry, his build nearly human, but his bare feet were oddly formed
—more like a dog’s feet than a human’s, with long toes unshielded by sock or shoe. If he was using glamour, he wasn’t using it to try to look human despite the sweatpants he wore.

  I took the cutlass in my left hand and drew my Sig with my right. The practical part of me knew that I should just shoot, but shooting someone in the back who had not (yet) tried to hurt me seemed wrong.

  I could hear Ben now, swearing a blue streak in between coughs. He didn’t sound hurt—just angry. A small part of me listened for Mary Jo or Larry, but the rest of me was focused on the goblin.

  This goblin killed a child, I reminded myself grimly, raising my arm.

  I don’t know if I would have shot him in the back or not because he turned his head and noticed me, spinning gracefully around to face me.

  He hesitated and I shot him twice in the body and once in the head. The body shots made him flinch but there were no wounds in his chest where I shot him. Maybe I should have brought the .44 Magnum—but then I couldn’t have shot one-handed with any degree of accuracy. The third bullet, aimed at his forehead, bounced off some sort of invisible shield and zinged off on a different trajectory.

  He dropped his head a little, like a bull getting ready to charge, and laughed. “Little coyote. I was the first of thirty. Do you think you and your toy can stop—”

  I shot him again. Twice. The first hit him just left of the center of his chest instead of bouncing off, so whatever magic he’d worked required effort rather than being an impenetrable shield he could keep up forever. But the second shot that should have hit him in the same place missed him entirely.

  He didn’t dodge the bullet. Bullets are very fast. He was just faster than I was. Between the time it took me to reacquire the target and pull the trigger, he’d moved out of the path of my aim and charged at me.

  I dropped my gun—not by choice—rolled out of the way, and tried to nail him with the cutlass at the same time. I succeeded at the first two, but my left hand is not as quick as my right. He had no trouble sliding away from my blade, even putting in an unnecessary somersault in the air and landing on his feet like a performer in Cirque du Soleil.

  It might have given him the opportunity to show off, but my cutlass swipe did keep him far enough away from me that I could roll back to my feet.

  I have speed. It is my best superpower. I am as quick as the werewolves, probably as fast as the vampires. I was not as fast as that goblin was. It was a good thing, then, that I didn’t have to defeat him. All I had to do was keep him from escaping until the others emerged from the barn.

  Unhappily for me, from the sounds I was hearing from the barn, it might take a while for my compatriots to fight their way free of the hay. Mary Jo and Larry were alive, I’d heard their voices, so that was something.

  The goblin smiled at me. “Ah, it has teeth, does it?” He displayed his own, sharper and greener than human teeth. “That’s fine. I like a bite or two with my dinner.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as he made a little throwing gesture toward me. Magic, I thought, though I couldn’t tell what it had done. I couldn’t afford to worry about it either, because, smiling broadly, he whipped out a long copper knife, maybe two-thirds the length of my cutlass, and struck.

  I met his blade—his attack had been ludicrously forthright and slow, especially given the speed he’d already demonstrated. Almost, I thought, as though whatever magic he’d thrown at me should have taken care of the need to pay attention to my blade.

  Steel bit into the copper as I absorbed the interesting and surprising news that, for once, my weird semi-immunity to magic seemed to have (finally) worked on something that was really trying to hurt me.

  The impact of the blades made him hiss in what sounded like surprise. But he didn’t hesitate, changing his trajectory and his weapon in midattack. He opened his mouth and lunged for my throat with his big, sharp teeth.

  Not for nothing had I endured a month of pirate-loving, self-styled-expert werewolves determined that I would wield the blade as well as any aspirant to Anne Bonny’s title of Pirate Queen ever had.

  I freed my blade from the weak final throes of his knife attack and backhanded him with the cross guard in the same motion. Sadly, the cross guard was silver (because werewolves) and not iron like the blade. Cold iron, even in the form of steel, would have gotten his attention.

  My blow knocked him back, but he grabbed me by the shoulder and knee and took me down to the ground.

  Down to the ground is bad when you are dealing with humans. When dealing with creatures of preternatural strength, it is deadly. I managed, somehow, to bring up the cutlass between us without cutting myself. The flat side of it pressed against me from hip to opposite shoulder. Which meant it did the same thing to him in reverse.

  Iron is a problem for most fae to one degree or another, but it varies. The goblin screeched, a sound that made my ears ring, and the smell of scorched flesh abruptly hit my nose.

  I was hopeful for a moment, but there was no flash fire. All the blade did was singe him a bit.

  My martial arts instructor, my human one, recommends against going for a man’s testicles under most circumstances, despite the advice of movies and novels. Most men over the age of puberty have a lifetime of protecting that area, so it is difficult to get a clean shot. And if you don’t nail the man hard enough to incapacitate him, all you’ve done is really tick him off.

  The same thing, evidently, is true of goblins and steel.

  “Thou wilst die,” he growled at me, pinning me with one arm and lifting the battered knife he still held with the other. Expecting, as most reasonable homicidal goblins would, that since I was not strong enough to break free, I would have to just lie there and die.

  Hah.

  I shifted to coyote and, while he struggled to parse what had just happened, I wiggled out of his hold, leaving my clothing behind but not my weapon. A little foolishly (I was told later), I snagged the cutlass in my teeth as I ran.

  I grabbed it by the hilt. No one outside of those cheesy old movies or computer games would really grab the blade itself unless they were very, very certain that the blade was a dull movie prop.

  I dashed to the barn, putting a hay bale to my back. Then I regained my human form and, naked, took the cutlass in my right hand and faced the goblin. He’d regained his feet while I’d run. He snarled something uncomplimentary and bounded toward me, the battered copper blade raised high.

  I raised my blade to a guard position—and then Larry jumped over my head and landed light-footed on the ground about six feet in front of me. Which put him directly in the path of the charging goblin. He had no weapon that I could see.

  “Mine,” Larry said in a voice so power-laden it could have belonged to the Marrok.

  Before the other goblin could do more than slow his charge, his scarred face blank with horror, Larry reached out, grabbed the goblin by shoulder and leg—a move very like what the goblin had used on me, but even more effective. And brutal. The goblin king used the other’s forward momentum to swing him high—and jerk his shoulders and legs in the opposite direction than they go.

  It was a move requiring skill and strength that I wasn’t sure any of the werewolves could have duplicated. In one move, Larry broke the other goblin’s back and dislocated his hip with a twin pop that sounded like a pair of guns going off.

  He dropped the goblin on the ground and let him writhe for a moment. Then, with a snake-quick movement, he stopped the screaming by breaking the downed goblin’s neck.

  “Well, fuck,” said Ben from on top of the hay bale behind me. “Larry, you wanker, stealing all the fun.”

  I twisted to look. Mary Jo and Ben were both standing on top of the bale that Larry had jumped from. Mary Jo had a cut on her ribs and blood on one hip, though the wound it had come from had already healed over.

  A slice on Ben’s cheekbone was
fading, but his shirt flapped loosely from the top of his shoulder to the bottom seam. There was a piece of muscle missing from his pectoral. The skin had settled over the top of the injury, but I knew that it would take a few days for the muscle to fill in.

  I turned my attention back to the most dangerous of us here.

  Larry was, as far as I could see, unharmed.

  “So that’s done,” Larry told me cheerfully, as if he hadn’t just brutally killed someone, shedding that aura of power he’d gathered so easily it was disconcerting. Bran, the Marrok, could do that, too.

  Larry stared down at the body a moment, frowned, then pulled a long-bladed bronze knife from somewhere on his person. He grabbed the goblin by his hair and sliced the head off the body. It seemed like overkill. Maybe, I thought, Larry needed to make sure that the other goblin was dead.

  The knife must have been extra sharp because he looked like he didn’t make any more effort than someone cutting up a watermelon. He dropped the head on the ground, cleaned off his knife, then pointed it at the head.

  To me he said, “Take that to your human law enforcement. Tell them that the goblin king showed up and brought justice for their lost child and the guardian who gave his life so valiantly. Tell them I regret that I could not do more than ensure that this one will do no more harm.”

  “I thought you didn’t call yourself the goblin king,” I said.

  He shrugged and sheathed his knife through an opening in his pant leg—it looked like a dangerous way to sheathe something that sharp. “Good publicity is good publicity. It was recently pointed out to me that I am what I am; it doesn’t matter what title someone outside our community tapes to my forehead, eh? The goblin king is something humans know about.”

  “You are coming out to the public, then, mate?” Ben asked.

  Larry grinned—and it looked right except for the seriousness of his eyes. “We are already out to the public, dude.” The stronger than normal emphasis on the “dude” made me think it was an answer to Ben’s “mate.” “But, yes. We are going to do some publicity work for ourselves here. Make ourselves a Power with allies—and then we are not so likely to end up food for the Gray Lords. Speaking of food . . .”