Silver Borne mt-5

by Patricia Briggs

  “Get somewhere you won’t be overheard,” he said.

  I stepped through the open door of Jesse’s room—which was empty—shut the door, and turned on the music again. Adam was sleeping like the dead; it might last five minutes or several hours. No one else would hear anything.

  “Okay.”

  “I know you can’t talk to me about the woman who took our Gabriel,” Zee said. “So you’ll just have to hear me out.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I have Phin’s grandmother here, and we need to talk. But no werewolves.”

  “Why is that?” It wasn’t about the kidnapping, so I figured it was a safe thing to say without ticking off the fairy queen.

  “Because she’s scared to death of them, was nearly killed by them. She can’t even look at one without a panic attack. And you don’t want to be around this lady when she has a panic attack.”

  I wondered if I’d have been as sympathetic if I didn’t have my own panic attacks. “Fine. Where?”

  “Good question. Your house is no more,” he said. “She doesn’t live here, so she doesn’t have a place. My house is no good. She won’t go where there are so many fae.”

  “What about the garage?”

  “In fifteen,” he agreed. “Do you have anything that belongs to Gabriel?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. How specific would the spell be? Better to play it safe. “I can’t answer that question.”

  “Get something.”

  A woman’s voice said, “Something that is his. Something he is connected to, that matters to him or that has belonged to him for a long time.”

  “You heard her?” Zee asked.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Good.”

  He hung up.

  I didn’t have anything like that. Gabriel was incredibly organized; he didn’t just leave stuff lying around.

  I looked around the room. Jesse would have something. It was either that or go face down Sylvia.

  Thinking of Sylvia made me realize that I should have called her as soon as I found out about Gabriel. I would rather be stripped naked and walked through the mall with a pink feather boa. I would rather be boiled in oil. Rancid oil.

  I could call her on the way to the garage. First I needed to find Jesse, in the hope that she had something of Gabriel’s I could use.

  Conveniently, Jesse walked into her room just when I was about to leave and hunt her down. “I’m looking for Samuel,” she said. “He went walkabout. Ben says he ought to be fed because he didn’t eat anything this morning, and for some reason Ben’s pretty frantic about it. I didn’t expect to find Samuel here—but I didn’t expect to find you here, either.”

  “I was just coming to find you.”

  She looked at me, then at her stereo. “You like Bullet for My Valentine?” she asked. “Just like you were sharing my Eyes Set to Kill CD with Mary Jo earlier?”

  “Sarcasm isn’t lost on me,” I told her. “You could tone it down and I’d still get the point. I was having a private conversation.”

  She gave me a tight smile. “Let me guess. Stuff I shouldn’t know because I’m a girl. I’m only human. I can’t be risked.”

  “You know how to use a gun?” I hadn’t meant to ask that. I’d meant to just ask her for something of Gabriel’s. But I knew what it was like to sit around while people were in trouble, and you couldn’t do anything about it.

  At my question, she stilled—just like her father did when something important was going on. “I have a sweet forty-cal 1911 Dad got me for my last birthday,” she said. “Tell me you found Gabriel?”

  And the intensity of her voice made my decision for me. They were young—he was trying not to be serious because he was aiming for college; she was trying not to be serious because she knew he felt that way. Nothing might ever come out of it, but she cared a lot for him. That gave her a great big stake in this mess—and if she could shoot, she could protect herself.

  Jesse was her father’s daughter. Smart, quick-witted, and tough. And yet I already had one of my fragile humans in danger, and I was considering another.

  But I couldn’t talk to the fae or the werewolves about Gabriel, and writing, as my attempt to write down everything for Adam had demonstrated, was too time-consuming. I needed Jesse.

  I pulled Jesse all the way into the room and shut the door. “Zee called and wants me to meet him at the garage in fifteen minutes. He has a fae who is terrified of werewolves who can help us. We need to find something that belongs to Gabriel that he’s pretty attached to. I don’t think she intends to hunt for him by scent, so it can be something hard like a ring instead of just things that carry smell, like a sock or shirt.”

  “I get to come?”

  “You get to come to this meeting,” I told her. “I need you. But you need to understand that I will not be exchanging Gabriel for you. I’m not going to get you hurt.” I gave her the best smile I could manage because the fae scare the pants off me. “I need you. But I need you to listen to me when I send you home, too.”

  She watched me with her father’s eyes, and I saw the moment when she decided. “Okay. Shall we tell them we’re going out to get you stuff that you need because your house burned down yesterday?”

  “Secret girl stuff,” I said. “Remember they can tell if you lie. So when this is all done, I’m going to go get a gallon of chocolate mint chip ice cream.”

  “Secret girl stuff,” she said. “And if they try to send Warren with us because for some reason they think he ought to be interested in girlie things—which really makes no sense, since Kyle likes men, after all, the more manly the better—what do we do?”

  “Preemptive strike,” I told her. “Let’s find Warren first and send him up to keep an eye on your father, who is sleeping.”

  And then Sam crawled out from under the bed.

  * * *

  IT WORKED. WE MADE IT ALL THE WAY OUT TO MY CAR with only Sam beside us. All the wolves in the house were fine with Jesse and me going out together—because we had Sam.

  “You have to stay here, Sam,” I said. And then stopped. Looked at him. Really looked at him.

  Sam the wolf wouldn’t have turned his back while everyone was trying to fix Mary Jo—and he wouldn’t have looked like he felt guilty about it. Because Sam the wolf wasn’t a doctor—he was a wolf. This morning, Darryl had recognized pretty quickly that Samuel was in trouble. But in the garage, not one of the wolves even looked funny at Sam. Because it had been Samuel.

  “Welcome back,” I said, trying to act like it was no big thing. I didn’t know why he’d decided to take charge again—or if it was a good thing—but I figured the less drama about it, the happier Samuel would be. But . . .

  “You can’t come with us,” I told him. “You heard Zee. We’re going to see a lady who—” I stopped. “How do the fae manage this lying-without-lying stuff? It really sucks. Look, Samuel, we’re going to see the lady who is scared to death of wolves. You have to stay here. You can’t come as a wolf, and you don’t have any clothes.”

  He just stood there looking at me.

  “Stubborn,” I said.

  “We’re going to be late,” said Jesse. “And Darryl is looking out the window and frowning at us.”

  I grabbed my purse out of my car and held the back door of Adam’s truck open for Samuel. “There should be jeans and sweats and stuff in a pack in the backseat if you want to dress,” I told Samuel. “And when we get to the garage, you need to stay outside and leave her to us. Hopefully, we’ll find out . . . what we need to find out . . . and I expect that we’ll be really glad we have you with us then.”

  * * *

  ON THE WAY TO THE GARAGE, I CALLED SYLVIA. SHE might insist on bringing the police into it—but I hoped I could talk her out of that. Her phone rang until the answering machine picked up.

  “Sylvia, this is Mercy—I have news about Gabriel. You need to call me as soon—”

  “I told you,” she said, comin
g on the line. “My family doesn’t want to talk to you. And if Gabriel chooses you over his family—”

  “He’s been kidnapped,” I told her, before she could say something that would break her heart later. She wasn’t as tough as she liked to pretend—I knew, because I pretended to be tougher than I was a lot, too.

  Into the silence that followed, I said, “Apparently he walked to the garage last night and tried to take one of the cars—which he has my permanent permission to do. You’d know better than I why he’d do that and where he was going. I have a friend who is in trouble and that trouble crashed down on Gabriel.”

  “Your kind of trouble, right?” she asked. “Let me guess. Werewolf trouble.”

  “Not werewolf trouble,” I said, abruptly irritated with her assumption that all werewolves were horrible. Me, she could be mad at, but she would have to hold her tongue around me about the wolves.

  “Tell Maia that her werewolf buddy is going to put his neck in the noose trying to save her big brother, who got himself kidnapped by the bad guys.” Because I knew that Samuel—my Samuel who was at that very moment dressing in the backseat—would never stand by and watch a human get hurt. He was the only werewolf I knew who cared that much about mundane humans, just because they were mundane humans. Most werewolves, even the ones who liked being werewolves, actively resented, if not hated, normal people for being what they could no longer be.

  Sylvia was silent. I supposed the information that Gabriel was in trouble was finally catching up to her.

  “Gabriel is alive,” I told her. “And we’ve managed to make sure his kidnappers know that his continued health is important to their goals. Police wouldn’t help, Sylvia. They just don’t have the tools to deal with these people. All that bringing the police into it will do is make things worse and get someone killed.” Like Phin. “My werewolf friend is a little better equipped. I promise I’ll let you know when I find out something more—or if you or the police can help.” And I hung up.

  “Wow,” said Jesse. “I’ve never heard anyone hand Sylvia her head like that. Even Gabriel is a little afraid of her, I think.” She settled back into her seat. “Good for you. Maybe it’ll make her think. I mean, werewolves are scary, they are dangerous—but . . .”

  “They’re our scary-dangerous werewolves, and they only eat people they don’t like.”

  She flashed a quick smile at me. “I guess that’s what I meant. Maybe, when you put it that way, I can understand how she got so upset. But it seems to me that what she was saying when she made Gabriel quit working with you was that she didn’t trust Gabriel’s judgement. As if he were stupid and would work someplace that was dangerous.”

  “Someplace he might get kidnapped by a band of nasty fae?” I asked dryly, but then I went on. “As if he were her son whose diapers she’d changed. You have to forgive parents for acting like parents even though their children aren’t four years old anymore. As a not-unrelated example, when your dad finds out I took you to meet a strange fae, he’s going to have my hide.”

  She did grin then. “All you have to do is let him yell at you, then sleep with him. Men will forgive you anything for sex.”

  “Jessica Tamarind Hauptman, who taught you that?” I said in mock horror. Funny how she made me feel better at snapping at a mother whose son had just been kidnapped by a fairy queen . . . It sounded like “The Snow Queen” when I put it that way. I hoped that we didn’t find Gabriel like poor Gerda found her Kai in the story—with a shard of ice in his heart.

  * * *

  ZEE’S TRUCK WAS ALREADY AT THE GARAGE WHEN I got there. The Bug I’d loaned Sylvia was parked where she’d left it, but it was trashed. Someone had pulled the driver’s side door off its hinges, the front window was smashed, and there was blood on the seat of the car.

  Samuel wasn’t through changing.

  “Stay here,” I told him, and got out of Adam’s truck.

  “He’s not a dog,” Jesse said on the way to the shop.

  “I know.” I sighed. “And he’s not going to listen to me anyway. Let’s get this done as fast as possible.”

  Zee had moved the chairs around in the office, pulling them out of their usual line so that three of them were facing one another—all that was missing was a kitchen table. When he saw Jesse with me, he looked a little surprised but pulled out another chair.

  “I’m the facilitator,” Jesse explained. “She can talk to me instead of you.”

  I wasn’t surprised to see that Zee’s companion was the older woman from the bookstore—though I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a complete stranger either. She was subtly different from the grandmotherly woman I’d met earlier. The kind of difference that made Little Red Riding Hood say, “What big teeth you have, Grandmother.”

  “Mercy,” Zee said, “you may call this woman Alicia Brewster. Alicia, this is Mercedes Thompson and”—he paused—“Jesse.”

  He gave me a look. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

  “Having her here will speed things up,” I said. “When we’re finished, she’s going home.”

  “All right,” he said, and sat down next to Alicia.

  “You came to my grandson’s store looking for him,” the fae woman said to me without acknowledging the introductions. “And to return what you’d borrowed.”

  I looked at Jesse. “When I saw Alicia at Phin’s store, I was trying to bring Phin’s book back to him. He’d called Tad—Zee’s son—to have him ask me to take care of it. It was odd, that phone call, and the fae who’d moved in next door to Phin was odder. By the time I got to the bookstore, I was ready to believe that there was a problem. When I saw Alicia at the counter, and she couldn’t tell me anything about where Phin was or when he was coming back, I decided that I wasn’t going to give her the book to return to him. I also decided that someone needed to see if they could figure out where Phin was.”

  “So you came back at night and looked for him at the store?”

  “I thought,” I said to Jesse, “that we were coming here to find out where Gabriel is and how to rescue him.”

  “And I choose to ask questions of you first so that I may decide how much I want to tell you,” Alicia said.

  That implied heavily that if I chose not to answer her questions, she’d tell us nothing. If she knew anything. I looked at Zee, who shrugged and lifted his hands an inch off his lap—he had no influence with her.

  My other option was to wait for the fairy queen’s call.

  “All right,” I told Jesse. “You already know that Sam and I went to check out the bookstore at night to find out if something happened to Phin. We found that his store had been trashed by a water fae and two forest fae of some sort.”

  “There was a glamour in the store,” said Alicia. “A strong glamour that I couldn’t penetrate, though I knew it was there. I was so afraid that my grandson’s body was lying next to me, and I could not sense it.”

  “There’s a cost for magic,” said Zee, folding his age-spotted hands over his little potbelly. “Glamour has less than most now, but there is still a cost for sight and sound, a cost for physical dimensions. There are few fae with good noses, so less effort is spent there and more on the other senses. Magic works . . .” He glanced my way.

  “ ‘Oddly’ is what I usually say,” I told him.

  “Oddly on Mercedes. Some works fine, some not so well. But she has a keen nose, and that allows her to penetrate glamours. I’ve seen her break through a glamour set by a Gray Lord. This one we are after is no Gray Lord.”

  “Phin bled on that floor, Jesse,” I said. “I don’t have much hope that he survived his encounter. But we didn’t find his body. We went down to the basement—which was also trashed—and while we were down there, one of the fae who had destroyed the store turned up on the stairs.”

  “That’s the one who was dead in the basement,” Alicia said in an odd tone. “The one someone started to eat.”

  “Sam’s not been himself lately,” I tol
d Jesse. “The fae knocked me cold, and when I woke up Sam had killed him and . . .”

  “Sam,” the fae said softly—and her hands clenched on her lap. “You have friends who are werewolves, Zee tells me. This Sam is a werewolf?”

  “Sam is a werewolf and my friend,” I told her. Maybe my tone was a little sharp, but I was getting tired of people attacking Samuel. “Who saved my life by killing the not-so-jolly green giant. I’m okay with it if he helped himself to a little snack.” If it squicked my thou-shalt-not-be-a-cannibal button, that was a button my mother gave me, not the werewolves. He hadn’t violated any werewolf taboos—eating your prey is better than leaving the bodies lying around.

  Alicia didn’t seem to be too upset about my snapping at her, though.

  “Samuel Cornick,” she said, her eyes catching mine. “Samuel Marrokson, Samuel Branson, Samuel Whitewolf, Samuel Swift-foot, Samuel Deathbringer, Samuel Avenger.” I couldn’t remember what color her eyes had been in the bookstore, but I knew it hadn’t been green. Not hazel, not a human color at all, but a brilliant grass green that darkened to blue and brightened.

  “That would be me,” said Samuel, standing in the doorway. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt and had managed to find a pair of jeans that were only a little baggy. “Hello, Ari. It’s been a few centuries.” His voice was soft. “I didn’t know you had a talent for true naming.”

  She looked at him, and I saw the pupils of her eyes widen past her changeable irises until her eyes were as black as a starless night. And then her glamour went all funky.

  I’ve seen fae drop their glamour before. Sometimes it’s cool, with colors sliding and mixing; sometimes it’s like when I shapeshift—just blink and the man in front of you suddenly has antennae and six-inch-long hair growing from his hands.

  But this was different. It reminded me of an electrical appliance shorting out, complete with quiet fizzling noises. A patch of skin appeared on her arm that had been covered by the sweater she wore, and on the patch of skin was a little scar. Then there was a sound and the sweater reappeared and there was a six-inch-by-four-inch section of skin revealed on her thigh, but most of that space was taken up by a horrendous scar that looked deep and stiff—a wound that healed badly enough that it probably interfered with her ability to use her leg. After an instant it disappeared, and three scarred areas appeared on her face, hand, and neck. Her skin tone around the scars was darker than the one she wore to hide from the world. The color was nothing outlandish, a few shades darker than mine or lighter than Darryl’s, but to my eyes the texture was softer than human skin. It appeared as if the old wounds were presenting themselves to us—or rather to Samuel, because she never took her attention off him.