Silver Borne mt-5

by Patricia Briggs

  Wrapped and no longer in danger of dripping bits of myself all over, I walked back to Sam. He was still where I’d left him, staring as hard as he could at something I could no longer see.

  It hadn’t been a hard bite, and I wouldn’t let myself be afraid of Sam. My foster father’s SIG was in its holster across my shoulder, full of regular ammunition that generally worked just fine on fae—and did nothing to werewolves but make them mad. I tuned out Charles’s warning voice and put the hand of my uninjured arm on Sam’s neck. I refused to believe he was regressing into a vicious killer. A bite did not a killer make.

  “Damn it all, Sam, why’d you bite me?” If I yelled at him, I couldn’t be afraid of him. So I yelled at him.

  Sam glanced at me, then knocked one of the fallen books aside with one paw. It was a cloth-bound copy of Felix Salten’s Bambi’s Children. In the glamour version of the shop, there had been no books on the floor. He’d bitten me on purpose—hadn’t I asked him if he could break the glamour, too? Evidently, the bite was his answer. My blood must have allowed him to see what I did, some sort of sympathetic magic or something.

  “Cool,” I said. “That’s cool.” Pushing out of my head the knowledge that neither Samuel nor Sam, my friend, would have bitten me so casually, I turned my attention to the bookstore.

  I have a pretty good memory for scents, and I picked up Phin’s without any trouble. If I’d been looking for purely human assailants, I’d have been in trouble. This was a bookstore and had had a lot of people running through it. There weren’t many fae aside from Phin, who barely qualified to my nose. However, several of the fae had been here recently, without many people in to cover up their trail.

  “I’ve got Phin, the old woman from this afternoon, and three other fae,” I told Sam.

  Sam raised himself on the edge of one of the dominoed bookcases and put his nose against the back, moving and sniffing until he’d found what he wanted. He stepped back in obvious invitation.

  Without touching it, I bent until my nose was nearly touching the wood. I smelled it, too, right where someone had put their magic-laden hand on the wood and pushed the bookcase over.

  “That’s one of them,” I told Sam. “Some kind of woodland fae, I think—air and growing things.”

  I followed Sam’s lead and sniffed and crawled and sniffed some more until we had a handle of sorts on what had happened here. I’d have done it easier if I took coyote form. But if someone came upon us, I’d have a better chance of explaining myself and keeping things calm if I was human. Calm was good, because I didn’t want Sam eating anyone he shouldn’t.

  I told myself all these good reasons to keep my human shape on because they were good reasons. But I knew the real reason was because that bite had made me concerned that Sam would forget that I was his friend if I were running around as a coyote instead of a human who could remind him of it.

  “So,” I told him, my hand on my hips as I surveyed a patch of blood belonging to Phin. “They came in the door, and the last one locked it behind him. Let’s call him Fishy Boy, because he’s a water fae of some sort. He seems to be the one running the show because all the damage to the store was done by the other two.”

  Sam’s icy gaze speared me, and I looked down and away—like the salute of a fencer. Acknowledging his state as the big bad wolf without submitting to it. It must have been enough, because he didn’t act any more aggressive.

  Again with the dominance stuff, it wasn’t something Sam usually indulged in unless he was really upset or meeting a wolf for the first time. When you are the top dog for long enough, I guess you don’t feel like you have to rub people’s noses in it.

  If he hadn’t bitten me, I’d have just dropped my eyes, but that didn’t feel safe anymore. Not after he bit me. I needed to remind him that I was an Alpha’s mate, predator and not prey.

  A week, Charles had said, based on one example who had been a lot younger than Samuel was. I was starting to worry that he’d been optimistic—which is something I’ve never felt compelled to accuse Charles of being. How much time did Sam have?

  “So Fishy Boy grabs Phin, and says, ‘We know youse got it, see.’ ” I used my best Jimmy Cagney voice as I recited the scene as I had pieced together. “And then he nods to his minions—Jolly Green Giants One and Two, because they both smell like green beans to me. Giant One, she pushes over a bookcase that topples a few more.” I couldn’t always tell the sex of the person whose scent trail I was following, but Giant One was definitely female, though not necessarily big. “Two, he’s a little stronger. He gets some loft on his and tosses it about halfway across the room, taking down a couple of more bookcases along the way in a much more destructive fashion.”

  The original bookcase Two had tossed was in pieces, having broken apart when it hit. I could see the action running like a film through my head; the steps had been laid out before my nose, and eyes—with a little imagination thrown in. I wasn’t sure even a werewolf could have picked up a bookcase stuffed full of books.

  “But Phin doesn’t tell right away,” I told Sam.

  I thought about Tad, my morning visitor-with-gun, and the dried blood on the floor. “So Fishy Boy continues working on Phin while the Giant Twins go looking for it in the store. They’re pretty convinced it is here because they took apart everything. I’m thinking that the ripped-up books might just be frustration—because it wasn’t done in a methodical way. I suppose, even so, it could be that they are looking for something that is not a book.” I looked around. “Maybe it could be hidden in a book or behind a book. They stopped because Phin started talking.”

  Sam sneezed a quick agreement—or maybe it was just dust. I was worried it was just dust.

  “Did he know they were coming and call Tad to warn me?” I asked. “Or did they make him call Tad, and he managed to leave a vague warning instead? Either way, isn’t it interesting that he didn’t say what it was I’d borrowed?”

  I tapped my fingers on a bookcase that was still upright. “So maybe they don’t know it was a book, and he was afraid they could hear him—or they could read Tad’s message.”

  Sam sneezed again. I glanced at him and saw the intelligent gleam that told me he was listening—and made me realize that he hadn’t been just a few minutes ago.

  “Maybe they really are after something entirely different. It could even be that Phin got clever and sent them after me to throw them off the trail. He does know that I have more protection than most people.”

  I let go of the bookcase so I could start pacing. “And this is where I’m going to be adding one and one and getting fifty—but bear with me.” I walked twice around the shop and came to a halt where I’d started in the first place.

  “Assume that at some point yesterday, Phin breaks down and tells them exactly who I am: things like who I’m dating and how many people would be angry if they just came after me. This next part is the weakest part of my story, Sam, but my instincts are screaming at me that the incident with Kelly Heart this morning and what happened to Phin are connected—it’s that fae waiting up on the roof that makes me certain of it. I just don’t know exactly why they wanted me dead.”

  Sam growled.

  “Think about it,” I told him, as if I were sure that he was growling at the threat to me. “This isn’t the work of the Gray Lords. If it were, I’d be dead. We know there are at least three of the fae. Four if the woman on the roof of the storage building wasn’t Giant One . . . Five if the old woman I saw here earlier today, who may or may not be Phin’s grandmother, is one of them. But still, I don’t think it’s a huge group. It wouldn’t be a happy thing for them if the werewolves went out hunting them. So they set up an incident, and Kelly Heart’s producer is encouraged—by charm or by harm, as Zee would say—to send Kelly to my garage to find Adam.”

  I stopped and looked out past the parking lot to the headlights of the cars driving by.

  “If they were after Adam, there are better ways to find him than coming to my
garage. He’s not hard to find. He goes to work six days a week, and his home address is a matter of public record. I had put it down to Heart’s producer looking for the best drama . . .”

  I took a deep breath and gauged Sam for his reaction.

  Sam’s stance—intent on my words—told me that he was making the leap with me. Or at least his wolf was. Just how smart was the wolf half of the werewolf?

  “But things didn’t go quite as they planned. I disarmed Heart right off the bat. They could hardly shoot me while I held the gun I was supposed to be shot with, right? But when Adam showed up, then the police, they decided to try to create a little chaos: a feeding frenzy fueled by magic. But Zee took care of that—and spotted their shooter. They had to run from Ben and leave the field.”

  I rubbed my damp palms on my thighs. “It sounds far-fetched, I know. But there is the book and the phone call to Tad that ties me to the fae who came into Phin’s bookshop and destroyed it. They beat Phin until he bled, then took off with him. Violence and fae—just like this morning. And the only common factor is me. Coincidences happen, I know. Maybe I’m just egocentric, thinking it’s all about me.”

  I waited in the bookstore until I realized I was waiting for Samuel to say something. But Samuel wasn’t here: it was just Sam and me.

  “Okay, that’s enough make-believe for me.” I dusted off my jeans. I’d have been hoping that I was wrong, but the way my life had been going the past year—this almost sounded tame. No vampires or ghosts, right? No Gray Lords who terrified even other fae. If I was wrong, I was afraid that it was only because the reality was even worse. “Let’s keep looking. I’d feel really dumb if Phin turns out to be hidden in the basement.”

  Sam found a door behind about three bookcases. Happily, it opened away from us, so we just had to scramble over the top to drop to a landing. Straight ahead was a brick wall; to the right of the door we’d entered through was a set of narrow and steep stairs that led down into a pit of inky blackness: the bookstore had a basement.

  I didn’t think that anyone would notice if I turned on the lights here because I was pretty sure that there weren’t any windows in the basement. I’d have noticed.

  It took me a minute to find the light switch. Sam, apparently unfazed by the darkness, had already continued down on his own when my hand found the right place.

  With light to guide my way, I could see that the basement was mostly a storage facility with cardboard boxes set in piles. It reminded me of the hospital’s X-ray storage room in that there was obvious order to the stacks. The ceiling height was deeper than usual for basements this near the river, but I could detect no trace of dampness.

  Just to the right of the stairway, a section had been used as an office. A Persian rug delineated the space and stretched out beneath an old-fashioned oak desk complete with clamp-on desk lamp. There was a large framed oil painting of an English-type garden placed just in front of the desk, where someone sitting might use it as a mock window.

  At one time the desk had held a computer monitor. I could tell because the monitor was lying in pieces on the cement floor next to the rug. There were more broken things on the ground—what looked to be the remains of a scentless jar candle, a mug that might have held the pens and pencils that had scattered when they hit the cement, and an office chair minus a wheel and the backrest.

  “Be careful,” I told Sam. “You’ll end up with glass in your paws.”

  The stack of boxes nearest the desk was the only one that had been disturbed. Five or six boxes had been knocked around, spilling their contents on the floor.

  “No blood here,” I told him, and tried not to be relieved. I did not want to discover Phin’s body. Not while I was alone with Sam, the wolf. “They were just looking—and not very seriously at that. Maybe they were interrupted, or this is how far they got when Phin finally broke down and started to talk.”

  “Fee fie foe feral,” said a man’s voice, hitting my ears like the blast of a barge’s horn. “I smell the blood of a little girl.” He rhymed “girl” with “feral,” something only possible because of his cockney-accented English. “Be she hot, be she cold, I’ll wager this, me lads—she won’t get more old.”

  All I could see was two feet on the stairs. I’d had no warning that the man was in the building at all—and from Sam’s sudden movement, he hadn’t heard or smelled anything either. I had no idea that fae could hide themselves like that. No telling whether he’d been there all the time, or if he’d followed us in.

  The fae was wearing big, black boots, the kind that should go clomp-clomp-clomp. And he was in no hurry to come down and kill us—which told me that he was one of the kind that enjoyed the hunt.

  He wasn’t a giant, despite my facetious naming of the two forest fae, because the giants were beast-minded, more instinct than intelligent. The beast-minded fae who had survived the rise of metal-wielding humans had died at the hands of the Gray Lords. Instinctive behaviors weren’t good enough to make sure you’d hide your nature from the humans, and for centuries the fae had tried to pretend that they had never existed outside of folklore and fairy tales. But from the size of those feet, he was big enough.

  Sam caught my attention by bumping his head against my hip—then ducked under the desk. He planned on taking the fae by surprise. Good to know Sam was still with me.

  “That’s possibly the worst doggerel verse I’ve heard since I was thirteen and wrote a poem for an English assignment,” I told the waiting fae as I walked around so I could look up the stairs.

  The one who stood at the top of the stairs was maybe six feet or a little under, though his feet were five inches longer than I’ve ever seen on any normal human. He had curly red hair and a pleasantly cheerful face—if you didn’t look too hard at his eyes. He was wearing slacks and a red shirt with a blue tie that matched the red canvas apron that covered his clothes. Embroidered across the top of the apron was the name of a grocery store.

  In his right hand he held a butcher knife.

  He smelled of the iron and sweetness that was blood, with an undertone that made him the second of the Jolly Green Giants who’d trashed the place. The damned strong one who’d hefted a filled bookcase.

  “Ah,” he said, “a hintruder. How droll.” He loosened his neck by pulling his head to one side, then the other. His accent was so heavy it was hard to decipher. Intruder, I thought, not hintruder.

  “Droll?” I tried it, then shook my head. “Fateful, rather. At least for you.” When in doubt, sound confident—it confuses the guys who are about to wipe the floor with you. It helped that I had a secret weapon. “What have you done with Phin?”

  “Phin?” He came down three steps and paused with a smile. I think he was waiting for me to run—or, like a bored cat, drawing out the pleasure of the kill. A lot of fae are predators by nature, and among the things they like to eat are people.

  “Phin is the owner of this bookstore.” My voice was steady. I don’t think I was getting braver, but after all the things that had happened lately, being frightened had lost its novelty.

  “Maybe oye et ’im.” He smiled. His teeth were sharper than a human’s—and there were more of them.

  “Maybe you’re a fae and can’t lie,” I told him. “So you should stick to the facts instead of trying my patience with ‘maybes.’ Like where is Phin?”

  He raised his left hand and gestured at me. Faint green sparkles stretched out between us and hung in the air for a moment until one touched me. It fell and took the others with it. They glittered on the floor, then winked out.

  “What are you?” he asked, tilting his head like a puzzled wolf. “You ain’t witch. Oi can feels witches in moy ’ead.”

  “Stop right there,” I said, pulling the SIG from its holster.

  “Are you threatening me with that?” He laughed.

  So I shot him. Three times over the heart. It knocked him back but not down. I remembered, from my reading of Phin’s book, that not all the fae have their organs
in exactly the same places that we do. Maybe I should have aimed for his head. I raised the gun to make certain of my target and watched him sink through the wooden stairs like a ghost. He left the butcher knife and his apron behind.

  Stone hands rose from the floor and grabbed my ankles, pulling my feet out from under me. I fell too fast to react.

  * * *

  I WOKE UP LYING IN THE DARK AND HURTING ALL OVER, but especially on the back of my head. My ankles were also sore when I tried to move them. I blinked, but I still couldn’t see anything—which is very unusual for me.

  I smelled blood, and felt something ridged under my shoulder. Old sensory memory, left over from late-night studying in college, told me it was a pen. I waited for more recent memory to kick in—the last thing I remembered was the fae grabbing my ankles. When nothing more made itself known, I decided that there were no memories to come back. I must have been knocked out when my head hit the cement.

  Odd as it might seem, I was still alive even though I’d been lying helpless before the fae.

  I almost sat up, but there was a sound I couldn’t place, a wet sound. Not a drip, but a slop, slop, slop. Rip. Slop, slop, slop.

  Something was eating. Once I worked that out, I could smell death and all the undignified things it brought to a body. I waited a long time, listening to the sounds of something with sharp teeth feeding, before I forced myself to move.

  It didn’t really matter who had died. If it was Sam, I stood no chance against something that could kill a werewolf after I shot him three times in the chest—whether his heart was there or not, it still should have hurt him.

  If it wasn’t Sam . . . either he would kill me, too, or we’d both walk out of the basement. But I had to wait until I’d considered every possibility before I rolled stiffly to my feet.

  The sound didn’t change as I shuffled around, crunching glass under my feet until the edge of my shoe caught the edge of the rug. I used the rug to find the desk and fumbled around until I could turn on the desk light.