“Okay,” said Sherwood. “So why is it important that Mercy and I aren’t on this list?”
Adam gave me a very apologetic look. “Because the rest of the pack is going to be playing bodyguards for the governmental delegation.”
I twisted so I could look up into Adam’s face. “Can we do that? In a meeting between the government and the fae. Aren’t we supposed to be . . . I don’t know . . . neutral?”
“Yes,” said Adam. “At least if we are to keep to the spirit of the bargain. But the pack isn’t attacking the fae, just trying to keep the humans safe—from all threats.” He didn’t sound happy. “If the fae don’t attack us, we won’t attack them—and that is the essence of our agreement.”
“How did you get maneuvered into splitting hairs that fine?” Sherwood asked.
“How did the pack get wrangled into Hauptman Security business?” I asked. Because it had been HS business that had kept him in late-night meetings recently, not pack business. There were pack members who worked for Adam’s company and more who could be called in to substitute if needed. But most of the pack had their own careers elsewhere, and that was how Adam liked it.
“Remind me to fire the head of my contracts department in New Mexico,” Adam told me. There was heat in his voice that made firing the better of two options for the person in question.
“Okay,” I said.
Adam shook off his anger and continued briskly. “A contract with a small government project gave the US government access, not to Hauptman Security, but to ‘Hauptman Security and all of its adjunct personnel’—which is a phrase that snuck into our government contracts about two years ago so it didn’t raise any flags.”
“The pack isn’t adjunct to Hauptman Security,” I said.
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Adam agreed. “But on this ten-thousand-dollar contract, on page forty-eight, ‘adjunct personnel’ was defined as anyone under my aegis.”
Sherwood rocked back in his chair. “The pack.”
“So the rest of the pack is on guard duty?” I said.
“Protection,” Adam agreed. “This will be pretty high-level. The secretary of state, the vice president, the Senate majority leader, and a few other key people are all coming here with their staff to meet with a triumvirate of Gray Lords. They are trying to put together an agreement that will define the relationship of the fae to the human government of the United States that won’t lead to genocide.”
“Genocide of fae or humans?” asked Sherwood.
“Both,” I told him, because I could do that math. “Or either.”
“And they had to blackmail you into playing bodyguard?” Sherwood asked.
Adam gave him a wolf smile. “Funny that you noticed right off that it is a bad idea. It took me two days and a call to a friend who was fishing in Alaska at the time to convince the general of that.”
The friend was probably the retired military man—someone who’d known what Adam was—who had been in charge of hiring Adam (not Adam’s company, which was strictly security) over the years. I knew that Adam had done a lot of contract work for the government during the Cold War era. I was pretty sure that had included some assassinations, but Adam never talked about what he’d done. All of that had stopped by the time Adam and I had become more than acquaintances, so I didn’t know who his “friend” was.
Sherwood grunted. “That little contractual nudge took a lot of planning.” He said it with regrettable admiration.
“Why didn’t they just hire Hauptman Security?” I asked. “And ask if you could pull the pack into it?”
Adam grunted. “Some of the people in the government want a better guarantee than my word and a paycheck. Because I’m a monster.”
“Wow,” said Sherwood. “A blackmailed monster is just what I’d want guarding my back.”
“Insulting,” I said.
Adam gave me a wry grin. “Exactly. At any rate, we have ironed out a deal. Mercy, you will be in charge of orchestrating the meeting—where and when.” I gave him a horrified look, which he ignored. “I give you Sherwood and Zack as your muscle. The pack will do guard duty for the government and get paid royally for it. When this is done, I’ll get a better contracts lawyer.” He sighed. “Or go back to reading every damned contract myself, which is how I used to do it.”
“What are you thinking?” I asked. “What idiot would put me in charge of a government meeting? I can’t organize a pack barbecue without Kyle. Why isn’t someone else doing it? Marsilia? Or one of the fae? Or one of the government people? I bet they do this all the time.”
“Kyle is a good idea,” said Adam, ignoring my objections. “I’ll see if he will consent to help us out. I can bill the government for him.” It sounded as though that last would make Adam very happy.
“Adam,” I said. “Why am I elected?”
“Because,” said Adam patiently, “you put us in charge of the Tri-Cities, Mercy. Our pack. That means the fae will only meet with the government if our pack hosts the meeting. We need a representative of our pack to be an intermediary between the government and the fae. It’s lucky that the fae are willing to accept you.”
Sherwood, watching me, laughed. “Don’t worry, Mercy. We won’t actually have to do anything difficult. We’re just glorified messengers. All the decisions will be made by the government and the fae.”
I swallowed. It didn’t sound like an easy job. Adam’s hand cupped the back of my head.
“I believe in you, little coyote,” he whispered into my ear.
I gave him an annoyed huff. “I’m not going to start reciting ‘I think I can, I think I can’ anytime real soon now.”
Adam laughed and straightened back up. This time, his hand came off my shoulder. I missed it.
“I have every confidence that you could do just fine if we put you in charge of everything,” he told me. “But Sherwood is right. It is mostly a ceremonial position with a lot of running around. The government will make their own arrangements for lodging and”—he grimaced—“security. As will the fae. Mostly you will be in charge of finding a venue that’s acceptable to everyone. And, once we have the dates, you’ll reserve the meeting place, show up on time, and give a very short speech that probably both the fae and the government will insist on editing.”
“How will this play with the fae?” I asked. “Not my bit in this. I mean, really, how will they think about the pack playing security for the government? Not just how we’re going to spin it. We are supposed to be a neutral party, right?”
“I checked with Beauclaire,” Adam said. “Not all of my meetings have been with the government. He thinks we can squeak by.”
Beauclaire was a Gray Lord, one we had a working relationship with. As close to a working relationship as you could have with someone who, I had reason to believe, could raise the sea and bring down mountains.
“Whatever the public thinks,” I said, “the fae know that the only reason our compact works is because the fae want it to work. We don’t have the horsepower to make a real stand against the whole might of the fae. Or, probably, even one of the Gray Lords. Not without the support of the Marrok.”
“Which they don’t know that we have,” said Sherwood.
“Which we don’t have,” I said gently.
“He loves you,” Sherwood said, his voice certain.
I nodded. “He does.” Bran had more than demonstrated that he thought of me as a daughter. “But he loves the werewolves more. He has fought for centuries for them.” I sought for words and found them in an unexpected place. “To give them ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ He can’t help us without risking that.”
“He would risk the werewolves for you,” Adam said.
He had risked everything for me. That knowledge had healed a wound going back to when he had driven me from his pack, from the only home I’d ever kn
own, when I was sixteen. Bran had not abandoned me.
But that was a dangerous secret. Only a few people knew what Bran had done, and we needed to keep it that way. The fae especially couldn’t know that Bran still felt responsible for me. They were a feudal society, for the most part. If they thought that our ties with Bran were still in place, then they would look upon our treaty with them as a treaty with all of the werewolves.
Our treaty with the fae had to stay small, only our territory, only our pack. That meant that Sherwood and the rest of the pack needed to believe we were on our own, too.
“Bran won’t help us,” I said firmly, believing it. Bran wouldn’t help us because he wouldn’t need to. “And that keeps him, and us, out of a power struggle between werewolf and fae that could escalate into a war that everyone loses. If we screw up here, the fae won’t go after the rest of the werewolves on the planet for it. Our separation from the other packs in North America makes everyone safer.”
Sherwood made a noise, but then said, “Therefore we don’t have the support of the Marrok. We only have ourselves to count on.”
It didn’t smell like he thought he was lying, precisely. That “therefore” was a wiggle word. He believed that the Marrok would help us if needed, but he understood that it would be a bad thing if other people thought so, too.
“And a treaty with the fae, in which they agree to abide by our rules within the bounds of our territory,” said Adam. “Beauclaire understood that guarding the humans is the business of my security firm, which has retained most of the members of my pack. He agrees that Mercy is acceptable to act as our liaison and our ringmaster. Since any fae who harms a human here is breaking the agreement the fae have signed, we, the pack, are not being put into a position where our honor would be compromised. Instead, Beauclaire assures me, I am a good businessman and dealmaker for getting the government to pay me to do something that we are already bound, by our word to the fae, to do anyway.”
Adam sounded a little bemused. I didn’t blame him. Being coerced didn’t sound like a smart business decision to me. But the fae had a twisted view of a lot of things.
“Are you charging them more, since they are taking not just your regular security detail but also most of the pack?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “I also added a premium for being a bunch of jack . . . rabbits.”
“You can say ‘jackass’ in front of me,” said Sherwood, batting his eyelashes.
“You swear in front of my wife again,” purred Adam, “and we’ll discuss what I will say in front of you.”
Sometimes I forgot how old my mate was. In most ways he was thoroughly modern. But he always opened the door for me, pulled out my chair at restaurants—and avoided swearing in front of me. None of which I minded.
Sherwood slid to the front of the couch—so he could get out of it in a hurry—and it wasn’t to run away. The events of this morning had left both werewolves on edge. It wasn’t beyond the pair of them to engage in what Adam liked to call “a good tussle” to blow off steam.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Does that mean that the government can force the pack to work for them whenever they want to?”
Adam said, “Point to you. That’s what the contract says, and it says it with no out date. However, I told them I would give in this one time—because of the importance of these negotiations. But I also told them that I’d take them to court to fight that contract if they didn’t add an addendum limiting them to this one time.”
“Slippery slope giving in to them at all,” said Sherwood.
“You make sure to fire that contract lawyer,” I told Adam. “Because the real problem if this came to a court battle isn’t privacy for the government; it’s making the fae think that we won’t keep our word.”
Adam nodded tiredly. “And if the government ever figures that out, it might give them the idea that if they want to get the best of us, they just need to go to Los Alamos, talk to one of my business directors, and get them to sign off on a contract with an obscure and useful clause.”
He took a breath and let it out. “The government, in the embodiment of Piotrowski, is anxious to move while the fae are willing to meet. It wasn’t in their interest to fight me. So I got more money and an addendum to that contract that ends any obligation my pack has to the government directly after the meeting is held. It isn’t always a bad thing that the government doesn’t know the fae as well as they might. As well as we do.”
We all fell silent, contemplating the complexities of a close personal relationship with the fae.
Finally, Adam slapped his hands together and dusted them. “But that’s a problem for another day. I think we have sufficient problems at hand.”
“Right?” I said. “How many of you think that the attack on Elizaveta has something to do with this meeting?”
We all raised our hands, including Adam.
“That goblin this morning could have been involved, too,” I said. “He told us that ‘she’ told him that he could come here, that we would keep him safe from the authorities—or words to that effect.”
“Checking our response time?” asked Sherwood.
I yawned. “Or exhausting our resources.”
“Or we are jumping to unwarranted conclusions,” cautioned Adam. “Getting from ‘she’ to ‘a witch’ to ‘the witches who attacked Elizaveta’s family’ is a leap of Olympian scale. And adding that this meeting has nothing to do with witches at all . . . and yet.”
“Right?” I said.
“Coincidences sometimes happen,” Sherwood said heavily. “But when they happen around witches, they aren’t usually coincidences.”
* * *
• • •
When I got to work, finally, the imaginary parking lot full of cars with scheduled appointments that I hadn’t been there to repair wasn’t there. The customer parking lot was empty, as were the three repair bays.
Maybe Tad had called everyone and told them not to come in—but that didn’t sound like Tad. Answers came when I opened the office door and saw Zee at the computer inputting invoices.
Siebold Adelbertsmiter looked like a wiry old man, balding and nimble for his age. Looks, in his case, were very deceiving. Zee was an ancient fae smith, a gremlin, if you read his official government ID. Since gremlins were an invention of the twentieth century and Zee had been ancient when Columbus was commissioned to find a new route to Asia, I had my doubts. But I seldom contradicted Zee on matters that didn’t involve me.
He glanced up at me but didn’t stop the rapid keystrokes. “Your inventory is too low,” he said. “You will be out of parts this time next week.”
“I have a large order coming in day after tomorrow,” I said.
He grunted. “You are charging too much for labor. It is more than the dealership.”
“They charge what their faraway masters tell them a job should take. We charge actual time. Since I was trained by the best mechanic in the world, I am a lot faster. My right hand is arguably better and faster than I am, since his father is that same mechanic. Our clients usually get out cheaper—and they know that our repairs are solid.”
Zee grunted again.
Since he’d given me that same speech in the past—not quite verbatim, but close enough—I assumed that grunt was a grunt of approval.
“It is good,” he said after a moment, “when children prove they actually listen to their elders.”
“It is good,” I said carefully, because the old fae was as prickly as an Alpha werewolf about people noticing weaknesses, “to see someone who can really type. It takes me twice the time to do those entries as it does you.”
He huffed, but we both knew that not very long ago, his hands had been in no shape for quick typing. He’d been held and tortured by the fae who had been trying to find out just how powerful Zee’s half-human son was. That was why I hadn’t c
alled him in to help Tad this morning. My comment amounted to “I’m glad to see you’re feeling better” in such a way that he wouldn’t take offense.
“This shop,” he said, changing the subject away from his hands. “Everything works correctly. It has no character.”
“Give it a few months,” I said. “Things will start breaking down just when we need them. It will be back to usual before you know it.”
He looked at me over the rims of the wire-framed glasses that he wore when doing close work. I was pretty sure they were an affectation. “Are you patronizing me?”
I hitched a hip on the padded stool that was on the customer side of the counter. “Nope.” I looked around at the clean walls and neatly organized matching shelving units. Even the bays smelled clean and new. “This shop makes me feel itchy, too.”
He hit the enter key and set his work aside. He took off his glasses and set them on the counter.
“You do not smell like a goblin,” he said.
Zee could smell goblins? I mean, I could smell goblins, and the werewolves could smell goblins, but I didn’t know that Zee could smell goblins.
“That was this morning,” I told him. “Very early this morning. I’ve showered since then. The more recent thing was a zombie werewolf set loose in the basement of my house.”
I gave him a general rundown of everything that had happened. Except for the secret part—that Elizaveta and her family had all been practicing black magic. I didn’t leave out the fae-government meeting. Zee was in a precarious place with the Gray Lords. They had wronged him and he’d avenged himself on the responsible parties. I wasn’t sure how safe he was, and I wouldn’t leave out any information about the Gray Lords for fear that it could affect his safety.
“Witches,” Zee said when I was done, ignoring the information about the meeting, which told me that he’d probably already known. “I have not had much to do with witches. In the old days, if one became troublesome, I killed them. Mostly they died off on their own before I felt the need to bestir myself.”
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