He met my eyes. “Mercedes Athena Thompson.”
“Hauptman,” added Adam.
“Hauptman. I apologize for my disbelief. I apologize for not recognizing the truth of what you told me. I apologize for not listening.” He paused, looked at the walking stick again, and his eyebrow rose, almost as if it had said something to him.
He gave me a faint, ironic smile. “My thanks for retrieving this one from the”—he paused—“sanctuary that you had found for it. I owe you a favor of your choice.”
“No,” I said. “No. You don’t. I know about favors from the fae.”
“That,” he said austerely, “is not for you to accept or reject.”
“Information, then,” I said. “Do you know anything about Guayota?”
He shook his head. “I have heard about your trouble. The fae do not live on the Canary Islands, and I know nothing more than that he is a volcano spirit taking flesh. Zee’s young one has been asking around without luck, I believe.” He hesitated. Gave me a look that said, There is another question to ask me here. But I can’t tell you unless you ask. Something about Tad.
“If I ask you to help us defeat Guayota?”
He smiled grimly. “If I were the Dark Smith of Drontheim, I would offer to help and leave you so far in my debt that you would be my puppet until the end of your days.”
“That’s what I thought,” I told him. “But I needed to ask.”
“Information would be a reasonable balance,” he told me. “You know that the Smith’s son has been requested and required to attend the fae court in the reservation. So that would not be new information to you.”
That there was a fae court was new information. I wondered if it was a court in the sense of a court of law, or a more traditional fae court. And what the answer to that might mean in the future.
But he’d told me the information he was willing to give us. “In repayment of the favor you owe me, is Tad being held prisoner?”
He smiled as if I’d been clever. “I was asked not to speak of this to you, but as I owe you a favor, I can disregard the earlier request. Tad is unhappy, and those who hold him are not listening. He is being held against his will, but those who hold him don’t know Siebold Adelbertsmiter as I do.” He said Zee’s full name with distaste. “I may not like him, but no one can hold such a one as the Dark Smith of Drontheim when he is unwilling. There are too many old fae who forget what they once knew and believe in the old quarrelsome man they see. There will be no need for a rescue attempt, and indeed, such an effort might backfire. You will not be able to contact them, however, until matters play out.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “I think that there is now balance between us. Though I include this as part of our bargain: if you have not heard from the Smith’s son in two months’ time, you may cry out the name you know me by and I will come and tell you how matters stand. I would not be surprised if it takes at least that long.”
Then, walking stick in hand, he gave Adam a respectful nod, got in his car, and drove off.
I took a deep breath. “That’s done.”
Adam shook his head. “Let’s hope so.
We collected our clothing, but it took a while to find the cat. Tracking a cat through a field? No problem. Tracking a cat through the house where the cat lived? That was miserable—and to add insult to injury, when I looked in our bathroom, I found that Christy’s shampoo and conditioner were in our shower. She hadn’t, however, put her makeup back on the counter. Maybe it was because she took her makeup with her to Honey’s house.
Adam found the cat eventually, on top of a bookcase in the living room where she’d been watching us look for her. Crouched behind a large copper pot filled with silk flowers, she was nearly invisible.
I gave the flowers, beautiful dusty gray-blue blooms that contrasted and complemented everything else in the room a little too well, a baleful look.
“Yes,” said Adam, petting my cat as he held her like a baby in his arms. She caught his hands and sank her claws into him just a little before her purring redoubled, and she snuggled deeper against him.
“Yes, what?” I asked.
“Yes, Christy picked out those flowers. The pot, however, was my mother’s. Feel free to fill it with something else. If you leave it empty, it collects dust and dead spiders.” His voice was so full of patience that I knew he found me funny.
Normally, our bond fluctuated on how much information I got from it, swinging pretty widely during the length of a day. But even within a few minutes there was some variation, like a swing moving up and down. One second, I was getting grumpy because he was laughing at me, and the next, I was flooded with this mix of tenderness, love, and amusement all mixed together in a potent bundle that meant happy.
Hard to get grumpy over that.
His smile grew, and the dimple appeared and … and I kissed him. I rested my body against him, at an angle so I didn’t squish the cat, and thought, Here is my happiness. Here is my reason to survive. Here is my home.
“I never forget,” I murmured to him when I could.
“Forget?”
“Forget who you are to me,” I said, petting him with my fingertips because I could, because he was mine. “I’ll be fretting about Christy, worrying about the pack, hoping Christy trips and spills her cardaywatsafanday stew—”
“Carbonnade à la flamande,” said Adam.
“—all over the floor, then I look at you.”
“Mmmm?”
“Yep,” I said, putting my nose against him and breathing him in. “Mmmm.”
I was just considering the empty bedroom upstairs and weighing it against the possibility that Guayota would choose that moment to attack when someone knocked at the door.
We broke apart.
“You have the cat,” I said. “I don’t want to spend another hour looking for her. I’ll get the door.”
“Be careful,” was all Adam said.
I checked through the peephole, carefully, because there had been that one movie on bad-movie night where someone had been killed because he’d put his eye to the peephole, and the bad guy had stuck a fencing sword through the hole and into the victim’s eye. We’d stopped the film to argue whether or not it was possible to do—and I remained forever scarred by the scene.
It was Rachel, one of Stefan’s menagerie, one of his sheep. Stefan was gentler on the people he fed from than other vampires I’d come into contact with. He found broken people or people who needed something from him so that the exchange—their blood and the course of their lives for whatever a vampire might provide them—was, if not even, a little more balanced. Most members of a vampire’s menagerie died slowly, but Stefan’s people, mostly, thrived under his care. Or they had until Marsilia had happened to them.
I opened the door.
Rachel, like Stefan himself, had gained a little weight back. She didn’t look like a crack addict anymore, but she didn’t look really healthy, either. Her skin was pale, and there were shadows in her eyes. She didn’t look young anymore—and she was around Jesse’s age. But she was back in her goth costume—black lacy top, black jeans, and long black gloves that disguised the two fingers Marsilia—or Wulfe—had cut off her right hand.
“Hey, Mercy,” she said. “I’ve been chasing all over looking for you—I assume you know that someone tried to blow up your garage? I gave up about noon, did the shopping and a few errands, and decided to try again before I drove home. This is for you.” She handed me an envelope with my name in elegant script.
I opened it and found a lined note card with an address: 21980 Harbor Landing Road, Pasco. And, underneath the address, in the same flowery script: Sorry.
“Hel-lo, handsome,” purred Rachel. “Man with cat is one of my fantasies.”
I didn’t look up. “He’s taken, Rachel, sorry. She’s underage, Adam, and—you’re taken. Rachel, this is my husband, Adam. Adam this is Stefan’s—” His what? “Sheep” wasn’t any word I’d ever use to describe someone I liked, no matter how accurate it was. “Stefan’s.”
“‘Sheep’ is the word you’re looking for,” said Rachel. “I’d better get going before the ice cream melts. ’Bye, Mercy. ’Bye, Mercy’s husband.”
She turned and trotted out to her car, a nondescript little Ford I hadn’t seen before. She waved and took off in a peel of rubber and gravel that made me wince a little as the splatter of small rocks rained down on the SUV.
I twirled the card in my fingers before handing it reluctantly to Adam.
“Here,” I said, more casually than I felt. “I think we’d better call Ariana and Elizaveta, don’t you think? Someone has got to know how to make werewolves fireproof.”
Warren met us at the door to Honey’s house.
“Hey, boss,” he said, drawling like there was nothing wrong, but I could tell that he was upset by the set of his shoulders. “We were taking Gary Laughingdog to the bus station like you asked—and Kyle says to tell you thank you for making him aid and abet an escaped convict like that—when he started having convulsions in the backseat. We pulled over, and he was unconscious, so we brought him back. He hasn’t woken up, and Kyle is pretty well resigned to losing his license to practice law.”
I gave the cat carrier to Adam and set down the bag of Medea necessities I carried. The cat box and kitty litter were still in the car, and so was my .44 S&W, which I’d retrieved from the house. “Here. You take the cat and Warren. I’ll take Kyle,” I said.
Adam gave me a look.
“Sorry. You heap big Alpha dog,” I told him. “I’ll let you call it next time. But I’m right, and you already know it. Kyle will just make you mad on purpose—and Warren will listen better to you than me about relationships because he’d feel comfortable storming away from me when I said something he didn’t want to hear. Where is Kyle?” I directed my question at Warren.