The swirling water started small, but grew until the whole river circled beneath the bridge like traffic negotiating the stupid roundabouts that had been showing up where the four-way stop signs used to be. Gradually, the water moved faster, climbing the banks on the outside edge as the center dropped.
The pressure of the water made the bridge groan, I could hear it from where we stood. Overhead, a helicopter flew in and hovered.
Adam said something that I, consumed by the force of Beauclaire’s magic, missed, his voice just another rumble in my ears and chest.
I heard Goreu’s reply, though it didn’t make much sense to me at the time. “Our helicopter. We called the news agencies about ten minutes ago, but we wanted to make sure this was recorded for the media. We’ll give the footage to the local stations and let them disseminate it. That worked well enough for your killing of the troll.” He looked at me. “She is sensitive to magic.”
Adam grunted rather than answering, and Goreu smiled at him. For a moment, he looked less human to me, too, and I had the feeling that the real Goreu was a lot bigger than his glamour would suggest. But the bridge groaned again, and all my attention returned to the sight before us.
The water on the outside of the whirlpool was level with the bridge deck, much higher than the banks of the river, though Beauclaire’s magic kept all the water where he wanted it. Beyond the whirlpool, the Columbia’s waves grew choppy and white-edged, but the level of the river didn’t appear to be affected.
The whirlpool quit growing, but it continued to speed up and drain the middle to feed the edge until I could see bare ground beneath the bridge. The circle grew until the entire section between the two towers was empty of water. The bridge was shaking under the force of the water that now hit the railed edge before rushing over or under the bridge with twisting force.
Beauclaire spoke another word—and for a moment my eyes wouldn’t focus. When I could see again, there was no more dirt beneath the bridge. There was just . . . nothing, a hole, so deep that, from our perspective, I could not see the bottom.
The fae cannot lie. Beauclaire had told me he could drown cities, but until this moment, I hadn’t really understood what that meant. And this was nowhere near the limits of his power. He might have been able to fake his relaxed stance, but I could feel the magic he channeled to the river and the earth, and there was no end to it.
It took maybe three more minutes, and the bridge gave in to the twisting water, breaking free of its supports and foundations. The noise was tremendous, Uncle Mike’s shook, and I could hear someone’s car alarm go off. For a moment, just after it was ripped from the bank, the bridge held its structure. Then it collapsed, torn apart by the water and by gravity. Some of the bridge dropped into the hole immediately, some of it was carried by the water to bang back into the supports that had held it up. Battered by water and by debris, the supports for the towers slid into the black hole beneath. The water swirled and spat bits of cement, metal, blacktop, and long, snapping cables into the hole until the water ran clean and nothing more fell out.
Beauclaire said another word, a release of some sort, because it was easier for me to breathe again. The hole in the earth closed up, and this time I could watch it happen, the soil building up from the outside and working in until there was nothing but disturbed dirt and rocks where the hole had been.
Beauclaire said another word, and the water slowed, the whirlpool edge leveled, and the center filled with water. Eventually, the Columbia quit swirling altogether and flowed with deceptive mildness in the same path it had taken an hour ago—except that now it didn’t flow past a bridge. It looked beautiful and peaceful. I could see people, some of them in uniform, on both sides of the river, and they were all staring, just like me.
Adam turned me around so he could see my face. He wiped my cheeks with his thumbs—that’s when I realized there were tears running down my face. I didn’t know why I’d been crying, I wasn’t sad—just overwhelmed by Beauclaire’s magic.
He bent down to me. Are you all right?
His voice slid through the mating bond, caressed me, and cleared my head. I felt like I could take a clean breath for the first time since Beauclaire had called his magic.
“I’m fine,” I told him out loud, because if I spoke through our bond, he would hear too much, and I was afraid that the echoes of magic still rattling my bones might cross and hurt him. I didn’t know why it was a worry, just that it was, and I had learned to trust my instincts.
He looked at Goreu, standing patiently beside Beauclaire. Sometime while Adam and I were talking, he had regained his usual, unremarkable, glamoured appearance.
“You said two things,” Adam said. “This was the first—a demonstration of what the fae can do. So that no one thinks that you were driven to treat with us because we killed your troll, and you’re scared. I found your demonstration very convincing.”
“The mortals and their government will be very grateful to you for achieving a neutral territory where they can be safe,” Goreu said. “The second thing is that you need to find a reason for us to treat with you.”
“The Fire Touched would work,” Beauclaire said. “I would guarantee his safety and his well-being.”
“Since he left our care, Underhill has been more difficult,” said Goreu. “She didn’t seem to mind while he was on the reservation grounds, but when he left, she was unhappy.”
Beauclaire shook his head. “She didn’t care that Neuth and Órlaith tortured him,” he clarified. “She only cared when he left her influence. Had I realized that, I would have taken him under my protection in the first place. But it would have cost me political power I needed at the moment, to step in to rescue a human—no matter how altered. So—” He stopped speaking.
“Don’t worry,” said Goreu. “I knew you helped the Dark Smith and his son escape with the Fire Touched. No one had to tell me—who else would have done it? Don’t worry, most of them are blinded by the fact that the Dark Smith killed your father. They wouldn’t forgive someone’s sneezing on them, and couldn’t comprehend you in a million years, my friend.”
“We won’t send the boy back,” I said.
“Do you doubt me?” asked Beauclaire. He didn’t sound offended, but it scared me all the same. It didn’t change my opinion, but it did scare me.
“No,” I said firmly. “But he wakes up screaming in terror on the nights he can sleep. He’s afraid of you—all of you. If you’d stopped the Widow Queen and her ilk when he first escaped Underhill, if someone, if anyone had cared for him, he wouldn’t have come to us. I don’t think that he’ll go back willingly. And I think he has suffered enough. I won’t encourage him to go back. I trust you and your word, Beauclaire. But I don’t think that he will survive if he’s forced back to you. I won’t force him, and I won’t allow anyone else to, either.”
Beauclaire turned to Adam. “Does she speak for you?”
“She speaks for herself,” said Adam. “But I agree. He cannot go back.”
“You will risk the survival of the pack for the happiness of a boy who will not be harmed,” said Goreu. There was no judgment in his voice. “A boy who is not a child at all.”
I looked at Adam.
He smiled. “My wolves would not thank me for sending a scared kid to the people in his nightmares just to keep them safe. Safety is not always the key. He belongs to the pack now, and we take care of our own.”
And that right there was one of the differences between Adam and Bran. Bran kept his eye on the end game. Adam understood the end game all right, but to him, the people mattered more than the game.
The werewolves needed Bran, who could make the tough choices to make sure they survived. I needed Adam because he would never abandon someone who loved him, the way that Bran had abandoned us. Abandoned me. Twice. I swallowed and reminded myself I was a grown-up. But I was so grateful that I had Adam. “Na
me something else,” said Adam.
Goreu turned to Beauclaire, and said, “I told you that would not happen.” He looked at Adam. “I’m afraid, then, it is up to you.”
“You can’t give us a better clue about what we could offer you?” Adam said.
“Ask Zee,” said Goreu. “Our people are hungry for magic, and Zee has been collecting the weapons he has made.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Now, that makes sense. We find ourselves on opposite sides in a conflict—and to stop it, we give you a powerful magical artifact, a weapon?”
Goreu grinned at my logic. “It might work.”
Uncle Mike, who’d been a silent witness to it all, shook his head. “That old man has been destroying his toys ever since his wife died. I’m not sure he has anything big enough to matter.”
I looked at him, and Uncle Mike shrugged. “He was forced to marry her, and he thought it would be easy so he allowed it. Then he fell in love for the first time in . . . for the first time, I think. When she died—he was very angry. Angry at the Gray Lords who made him make himself vulnerable. So he started to destroy any of his own work that came back to him—and most of it does, eventually. He also destroys other things when he can, too. The Gray Lords would stop him if they could.” He gave the two Gray Lords present a merry look. “But they can’t. So they pretend not to notice.”
—
“This is weird,” said Jesse at dinner two days later. “Last week, I was a social pariah at school. Hell—”
Her father cleared his throat.
“Heck,” she said. “Heck. Since the troll died? I could run for class president and win.”
“Don’t fret,” Aiden said, eating the spaghetti I’d made as if he was afraid it would run off his plate, “I’m sure you’ll be a pariah again soon enough.”
“That was pretty good,” Jesse said, dumping another helping of spaghetti on his plate without his asking. “It would have been better, though, if you’d swallowed before you started to talk. We eat with our mouths closed around here.”
“How do you get the food in?” asked Aiden.
She stopped eating. Opened her mouth, then shut it again.
“Gotcha,” he said happily, still talking with his mouth full.
Adam, I noticed, was looking pretty worn. He hadn’t said much since we’d sat down to eat. Tonight, it was just Jesse, Aiden, Adam, and me.
Joel, who was still experiencing better control of his shapeshifting, had taken his wife out to dinner. No one knew he was a pack member, so they didn’t have to worry about reporters following them around.
Adam was taking the brunt of the attention. The local newspeople knew him, the Feds knew him, and a fair number of the national press knew him from previous stories—and he was handsome and articulate. So he was the one they aimed their questions at.
How had we known what the fae were going to do? Why had they done it? Were they planning on doing it again somewhere else? After the first wave of reporters, Adam drafted a statement, which he read for the local TV stations.
“It was the fae,” Adam told them. “They came to us and told us that they wanted people to understand what we were dealing with. They are not just the boogie monsters hiding in fairy tales. Some of them are more powerful than that, some of them were worshipped as gods by our ancestors for very good reasons. The bridge was chosen because it was highly visible, and because it was easy to clear of people—because the Gray Lords don’t think that killing people will accomplish what they want. And because it was where we killed the troll. Could they do it to a bridge full of rush-hour traffic in the middle of Seattle, Portland, or Washington, DC? Yes. But they could have done that last year or ten years ago, too. They don’t want to. They and we are trying to negotiate a nonviolent end to our situation here in the Tri-Cities, in hopes that it might allow them, and us, and our government to negotiate a nonviolent end to the situation that occurred when our justice system made it clear that justice was for humans only. Thank you.”
And when the Feds came, Adam told them the same thing, mostly word for word except where pronouns needed to be clarified.
The newspeople took their photos of my handsome, sincere mate and wrote up what he could give them. But the Feds . . . they were pushier. We had the whole alphabet soup on our doorstep (figuratively speaking) because terrorist attacks belong to the FBI, and paranormal anything belongs to Cantrip. But the NSA was here, too. Adam told me that two of the people claiming to be Cantrip, and one who was supposed to be FEMA, were actually CIA. He told me he could tell by the way they made the back of his neck itch—he recognized it from Vietnam, where he’d first encountered their kind.
The Feds threatened, cajoled, and stopped just short of arresting Adam. We kept a patrol of werewolves who watched out for the fae. As a side benefit, the wolves kept the Feds off, too.
When the director of Cantrip called to complain about our lack of cooperation, Adam told him exactly where he could shove it and how far. Adam used some of Ben’s favorite phrases to remind them that a rogue Cantrip agent and his rogue-agent pals had killed one of our own not six months ago. That we’d found illegal tracking equipment on our personal vehicle that Cantrip had admitted to placing (when they’d summoned Adam to a closed-door meeting while I was talking Sherwood down from the crane). Cantrip would rot before we ever cooperated with them. And he hung up while the director was still talking.
Five minutes later, the FBI called and asked us to cooperate with Cantrip’s investigation. Adam said, “No.” When the man kept talking at him, Adam threw the phone through the wall.
My husband has a temper. Especially he has a temper when dealing with stupid people. It was why Bran had tried very hard not to use him as a spokesperson. There were no cameras on him when the phone landed in the entryway, so it didn’t matter as far as Adam’s public face.
Our favorite contractor was still working on the damage the fight with the fae had done to the house. One more wall wasn’t going to add that much to the overall bill, so the hole in the wall that the phone made wasn’t important, either. Two more walls, because Aiden had burned down the wall between the safe room and the adjoining bathroom.
The phone survived. That protective case proved that it had been worth the money.
The real reason for Adam’s short temper was frustration. We still hadn’t been able to come up with anything the fae would want or need.
Other than Aiden.
Despite Uncle Mike’s words, I’d have asked Zee, but he and Tad had left the house the morning after the fae attack, and I hadn’t seen them since. Zee’s house was empty—there was no sign that he’d been back there since he’d escaped the reservation.
In the meantime, life went on. Adam got his work done mostly from home to avoid the rush of reporters (and the Feds of whatever alphabet variety). Ben and Warren took turns escorting Jesse to and from school. And we ate breakfast and dinner together. Tonight, it had been spaghetti that I’d made from scratch. The noodles were packaged, though. If Christy had made dinner, the noodles would have been freshly made from scratch, too. I hoped she had met the nice young billionaire of her dreams and decided to stay in the Bahamas. Heck, I even hoped she lived happily for the rest of her life, as long as she did it in the Bahamas.
The phone rang while Adam and I were cleaning up the dishes. He started the dishwasher while I answered the phone. He had gotten less and less polite since the Sinking of the Cable Bridge, so I had started answering the phones first when I could.
“Hauptmans’,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“Mercy,” said Baba Yaga’s voice. “That is not a question you should ask until you know who you’re talking to.”
Adam spun to look at me, and his response stopped Jesse and Aiden in their tracks. I raised an eyebrow, and he made a rolling motion with his hand. I was, it seemed, to carry on with the conversation.
<
br /> “Just because I asked what I could do, doesn’t imply I would do it,” I said peaceably. “Hello, Baba Yaga. What can I do for you?”
“Well, you could have called me,” she said. “Here I all but gave you an engraved invitation . . . no, no. I did give you an engraved invitation, didn’t I? I gave you my card and told you to call me when you needed information. And yet here I sit uncalled.”
The kids couldn’t hear what she was saying, but Adam could. He nodded at me.
“Okay, then,” I said, and asked her the question we hadn’t been able to find an answer to: “What can we do for the fae that will allow the Gray Lords to sign a treaty with our pack that sets up the Tri-Cities as neutral territory?”
“You could give them the fire-touched boy,” said Baba Yaga brightly. “I am sure that Beauclaire gave you his word that the boy would be safe. Beauclaire would die before breaking that word.”
She placed a slight emphasis on her last sentence. She thought that if we sent Aiden into Beauclaire’s hands, he would die keeping Aiden safe. Not that he would die before letting anything happen to him—but that he would die. Or she wanted me to think that. I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“I think we can agree that we don’t want Beauclaire dead,” I said.
“Oh, I think we can indeed agree to that,” she replied.
“So we won’t give Aiden back to the fae,” I said. “Since we didn’t intend to do so, we’re doubly convinced that would be the wrong thing to do. What do you suggest?”
“You could steal the sword of Siebold Adelbertsmiter,” she said. “The blade that cuts through anything and takes any shape it desires. The one he used a few days ago to kill his fellow fae. I assure you that the fae would consider that a gift worth signing a treaty that benefits them far more than it benefits you.”
“No,” I said. “No. I couldn’t steal the sword or any other artifact from Zee. It would not be possible. Besides, he’s off somewhere. I will ask him if he has something the fae would consider worth signing the treaty for, but, as Uncle Mike said, I do know he’s been destroying anything he thought too dangerous. Anything he doesn’t think too dangerous, the fae probably wouldn’t want.”
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