Mercedes Thompson 03: Iron Kissed

by Patricia Briggs

  Chapter 9

  Wednesday night I ate dinner at my favorite Chinese place in Richland then drove out to Tim’s house. Since O’Donnell’s killer was almost certainly fae, I didn’t know how much good it would do me to attend a Bright Future meeting—but maybe someone would know something important. I only had until Friday to prove Zee innocent or Tad would be putting his life on the line, too.

  The more time I had to think about it, though, the more sense it made for Tad to come back. I certainly wasn’t getting any nearer to figuring out anything. Tad, being fae, could go to the reservation and ask questions—if the Gray Lords didn’t kill him for his disobedience. Maybe I could persuade Nemane that it was in the fae’s best interest that Zee’s son come home to help me save his father. Maybe.

  Tim’s address was in West Richland, a few miles from Kyle’s. It was in a block so new that several houses didn’t have lawns yet, and I could see two buildings under construction on the next block over.

  Half of the front was beige brick and the rest was adobe the color of oatmeal. It looked upscale and expensive, but it was missing the touches that made Kyle’s house a mansion rather than a house. No stained glass, no marble or oak garage doors.

  Which meant that it was still several orders of magnitude nicer than my old trailer even with its new siding.

  There were four cars parked in the driveway and a ’72 once-red Mustang with a lime green left fender parked on the street in front. I pulled in behind it because it’s not often I find a car that makes the Rabbit look good.

  As I got out of the car, I waved at the woman who was peering out at me from behind a sheer curtain in the house across the street. She jerked a window shade down.

  I rang the doorbell and waited for the stocking-footed person who was hopping down a carpeted staircase to open the door. When it opened, I wasn’t surprised to see a girl in her late teens or very early twenties. Her footsteps had sounded like a woman—men tend to clomp, thunder, or like Adam, move so silently you can barely hear them.

  She was dressed in a thin T-shirt that sported crossed bones, like a pirate flag, but instead of a human skull it boasted a faded panda head with exes for eyes. She was a little overweight, but the extra pounds suited her, rounding her face and softening her strong features. Under the distinctive aura of Juicy Fruit, I recognized her scent from O’Donnell’s house.

  “I’m Mercy Thompson,” I told her. “Tim invited me.”

  She looked me over with sharp eyes and then gave me a welcoming smile. “I’m Courtney. He said you might be coming. We’re not started yet—still waiting for Tim and Austin to get back with goodies. Come on in.”

  She was one of those women cursed with a little girl’s voice. When she was fifty, she’d still sound like she was thirteen.

  As I followed her up the stairs, I did the polite thing. “I’m sorry to intrude on this meeting. Tim told me that one of your members was just killed.”

  “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer man,” she said airily, but then stopped on the stair landing. “All right, that didn’t need to be said, sorry. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t know him.”

  “Well, he started our chapter of Bright Future and he was all right to the guys, but he only had one use for women and I was getting tired of fighting him off all the time.” Her eyes really focused on me for the first time, “Hey, Tim said you were Hispanic, but you aren’t, are you?”

  I shook my head. “My father was an Indian rodeo rider.”

  “Yeah?” Her voice was mildly inquiring. She wanted to know more, but didn’t want to pry.

  I was starting to like her. Somewhere under all the bubbles, I was pretty sure she was hiding a sharp brain. “Yeah.”

  “A rodeo rider? That’s pretty cool. Is he still?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. He died before I was born. Left my mother a pregnant unwed teenager. I was raised w—” I’d been spending too much time with Adam’s pack and not enough with real people, I thought as I hastily replaced werewolf with whitebread American. Happily she wasn’t a werewolf, and didn’t sense my lie.

  “Wish I was Native American,” she said a little wistfully as she started back up the stairs. “Then all the guys would go for me—it’s that mysterious Indian thing, you know?”

  Not really, but I laughed because she meant me to. “Nothing mysterious about me.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe not, but if I were an Indian, I’d be mysterious.”

  She led me into a large room already occupied with five men who were tucked into a circle of chairs in the far corner of the room. They were evidently deep into a very involved conversation because they didn’t even look up when we came in. Four of them were young, even younger than Austin and Tim. The fifth looked very university professorish, complete with goatee and brown sport coat.

  Even with people in it, there was an unused air to the room. As if everything had just come fresh from a furniture store. The walls and Berber carpet were in the same color scheme as the house.

  I thought of the vivid colors in Kyle’s house and the pair of life-sized, Greek-inspired, stone statues in the foyer. Kyle called them Dick and Jane and was quite fond of them, though they’d been commissioned by the house’s former owner.

  One was male, the other female, and both of their faces had a dreamy, romantic expression as they looked up toward heaven—an expression that somehow didn’t quite go with the spectacular evidence that the male statue wasn’t thinking heavenly thoughts.

  Kyle dressed Jane’s naked body in a short plaid skirt and an orange halter top. Dick generally wore only a hat—and not on his head. At first it was a top hat—but then Warren went to a thrift store and found a knitted ski cap that hung down about two feet with a six-inch tassel on the end.

  In contrast, Tim’s house had no more personality than an apartment, as if he didn’t have enough confidence in his taste to make the house his own. Even as little as I had talked to him, I knew there was more to him than beige and brown. I don’t know what someone else would think, but to me, his house all but screamed with his desire to fit in.

  It made me like him more: I know what it’s like to not quite fit in.

  The room might have been uninspired, but it was still nice. Everything was good quality without being excessive. One corner of the room had been set up as an office. There was a dorm-sized fridge next to a well-made, but not extravagant, oak computer desk. The long wall opposite the door was dominated by a TV large enough to please Samuel with waist-high speakers on either side of it. Comfy-looking chairs and a couch, all upholstered with a medium brown microfiber designed to look like suede, were scattered in a manner appropriate to a home theater.

  “Sarah couldn’t make it tonight,” Courtney told me as if I should know who Sarah was. “I’m glad you did, otherwise I’d have been the lone woman out. Hey, guys, this is Mercy Thompson, the woman Tim told us might be coming, you know, the one he met at the music festival last weekend.”

  Her voice penetrated where our entrance had not and the men all looked up. Courtney walked me up to them.

  “This is Mr. Fideal,” she said, indicating the older man.

  Close up, his face looked younger than his iron gray hair made him appear. His skin was tanned and healthy and his eyes were a bright blue with the intensity of a six-year-old.

  I didn’t remember his scent from O’Donnell’s house, but it was obvious that he was comfortable in this group—so he must be a regular attendee…

  “Aiden,” he corrected her kindly.

  She laughed and told him, “I just can’t do it.” To me, she explained, “He was my econ teacher—and so he’s forever enshrined upon my heart as Mr. Fideal.”

  If I hadn’t shaken his hand, I don’t know if I would have noticed anything odd about his scent. Though brine is not usually a fragrance I associate with people, he might have had a saltwater aquarium hobby or something.

  But his grip made
my skin buzz with the faint touch of magic. There are things other than fae that carry a feel of magic: witches, vampires, and a few others. But fae magic had a certain feel to it—I was willing to bet that Mr. Fideal was as fae as Zee…or at least as fae as Tad’s bookstore guy.

  I wondered what he was doing at a Bright Future meeting. It might be that he was here to keep track of what they were doing. Or maybe he was a part-breed and didn’t even know what he was. A drop of fae blood could account for those young eyes in the older face and for the faintness of the magic I felt.

  “Good to meet you,” I told him.

  “So you know what I do to earn my bread,” he said in a gruffly friendly voice. “What is it that you do?”

  “I’m a mechanic,” I said.

  “Righteous,” declared Courtney. “My Mustang’s been making odd noises for the last couple of days. Do you think you could take a look at it? I don’t have any money right now—just paid for this semester of school.”

  “I do mostly VWs,” I told her, taking a card out of my purse and handing it to her. “You’d be better off taking it to a Ford mechanic, but you can bring it by my shop if you want. I can’t do it for free. My hourly rates are better than most places, but since I don’t work on a lot of Fords, it’ll probably take me longer to fix.”

  I heard the front door open. A moment later Tim and Austin arrived with a case of beer and a couple of white plastic grocery bags filled with chips. They were greeted with cheers and mobbed for food and beer.

  Tim set his burdens down on a small table next to the door and escaped being buried by foraging young men. He looked at me for a moment without smiling. “I thought you might bring your boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend anymore,” I said—and the relief of that made me smile.

  Courtney saw my relief and misread it. “Oh, honey,” she said. “One of those, eh? Better off without them. Here, have a beer.”

  I shook my head, softening my refusal with a smile. “I never learned to like the stuff.” And I intended to keep my wits about me to catch any clues that came my way, though my already-not-high hopes of that had been falling by the minute. I’d thought I was going to infiltrate an organized hate group, not a bunch of beer-swilling college kids and their teacher.

  I was willing to swear there wasn’t a murdering bastard among them.

  “How about a Diet Coke,” Tim said in a friendly voice. “I used to have a six-pack of ginger ale and another of root beer in the fridge, but I bet these turkeys have already finished them off.”

  He got a bunch of denying catcalls back that seemed to please him. Good for you, I thought, and quit feeling sorry for him because he didn’t have a purple wall or a statue wearing a hat. Find your own group to fit in with.

  “Diet Coke would be great,” I told him. “Your house is pretty impressive.”

  That pleased him even more than the catcalls had. “I had it built after my parents died. I couldn’t stand to stay in that old empty place alone.”

  Since Tim stayed to talk, Courtney was actually the one who got the pop for me. She handed it over and then patted Tim on the head. “What Tim isn’t telling you is that his parents were rich. They died in a freak car accident a few years back and gave Tim an estate and life insurance that left him set for life.”

  His face tightened in embarrassment at her rather bold announcement in front of a relative stranger. “I’d rather have had my parents,” he said stiffly, though he must have gotten over whatever grief he’d felt, because all he smelled of was irritation.

  She laughed. “I knew your father, honey. No one would rather have had him than money. Your mother was a sweetie, though.”

  He thought about getting mad, then shrugged it off. “Courtney and I are kissing cousins,” he told me. “It makes her pushy—and I’ve learned to tolerate her.”

  She grinned at me and took a long pull of her beer.

  Over her shoulder I could see that the others had pulled the chairs around into a loose semicircle and were starting to get settled down with munchies propped on a couple of small, strategically placed tables.

  Tim took a seat that someone else had moved and motioned to me to sit beside him, while Courtney went to scrounge her own chair.

  Since it was his house, I’d kind of expected him to take the lead, but it was Austin Summers who stood in front and let out a loud whistle.

  I wish he’d warned me. My ears were still ringing when he began talking.

  “Let’s get started. Who has business to address?”

  It only took a very few minutes to discern that Austin was the leader. I’d seen the possibilities of his dominance at the pizza party, but I’d been talking to Tim instead of watching Austin. Here his role was as established as Adam’s was in his pack.

  Aiden Fideal, the fae teacher, was either second in line or third behind Courtney. I had a hard time deciding—because so did they. From the uncertainness of their placement, I was pretty sure that O’Donnell had occupied that spot previously. A petty tyrant like O’Donnell wouldn’t have accepted Austin’s leadership easily. If Austin had been fae, I’d have put him on the top of my suspect list—but he was more human than I.

  Tim faded into the background as the meeting continued. Not because he didn’t say anything, but because no one listened to him unless his remarks were repeated by either Courtney or Austin.

  After a while I started to put some things together from chance remarks.

  O’Donnell might have started Bright Future in the Tri-Cities, but he hadn’t had much luck until he’d found Austin. They had met in a class at the community college a couple of years earlier. O’Donnell was taking advantage of the BFA program that paid for continuing education for the reservation guards. Austin divided his time between Washington State University and CBC and was almost through with a computer degree.

  Tim, who had no need to find work, was older than most of them.

  “Tim has a masters in computer science from Washington State,” Courtney whispered to me. “That’s how he met Austin, in a computer class. Tim still takes a couple of classes from CBC or WSU every semester. It keeps him busy.”

  Austin, Tim, and most of the students had belonged to a college club—which seemed to have had something to do with writing computer games. Mr. Fideal had been the faculty advisor for that club. When Austin got interested in Bright Future, he’d preempted the club. CBC had dissociated itself with the group when it became obvious the nature of their business had changed—but Mr. Fideal had kept the privilege of dropping in occasionally.

  The first bit of business for Bright Future this meeting was to send a bouquet to O’Donnell’s funeral as soon as the time for it was arranged by his family. Tim accepted the assumption that he would pay for the flowers without comment.

  Business concluded, one young man got up and presented methods sure to protect you from the fae, among them salt, steel, nails in your shoes, and putting your underwear on inside out.

  In the question-and-answer session that followed, I finally couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore. “You talk as if all the fae are the same. I know that there are some fae that can handle iron and it would seem to me that the sea fae, like selkies, wouldn’t have a problem with salt.”

  The presenter, a shy giant of a young man, gave me a smile, and answered with far more articulation than he’d managed during his presentation. “You’re right, of course. Part of the problem is that we know that some of the stories have been embellished past all recognition. And the fae aren’t exactly jumping up and down to tell us just what kind of fae are left—the registration process is a joke. O’Donnell, who had access to all the paperwork on the fae in the reservation, said that he knew for a fact that at least one in three lied when answering what they were. But part of what we’re trying to do is sift through the garbage for the gold.”

  “I thought the fae couldn’t lie,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know about that, exactly.”

&nbs
p; Tim spoke up. “A lot of them made up a Gaelic-or German-sounding word and used that to fill out the form. If I said I was a Heeberskeeter, I wouldn’t be lying since I just invented the word. The treaties that set up the reservation system didn’t allow any questions asked about the way the registration forms were filled out.”

  By the time the meeting was wrapping up, I was convinced that none of these kids had anything to do with O’Donnell’s killing spree and subsequent murder. I’d never attended the meeting of any hate group—being half-Indian and not quite human, I’d have been pretty out of place. But I hadn’t been expecting a meeting conducted with all the passion and violence of a chess club. Okay, less passion and violence than a chess club.

  I even agreed with most of what they said. I might like a few individual fae, but I knew enough to be afraid. Hard to blame these kids for seeing through the fae politicians and speech making. As Tim had told me, all they had to do was read the stories.

  Tim walked me to my car after the meeting.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said, opening my door for me. “What did you think?”

  I smiled tightly to disguise my dislike of the way he’d grabbed my door before I had. It felt intrusive—though Samuel and Adam, both products of an earlier era, opened doors for me, too, and they didn’t bother me.

  I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, though, so all I said was, “I like your friends…and I hope you aren’t right about the threat the fae present.”

  “You don’t think we’re a bunch of overeducated, under-socialized geeks running around yelling the sky is falling?”

  “That sounds like a quote.”

  He smiled a little. “Directly from the Herald.”

  “Ouch. And no, I don’t.”

  I bent to get in the car and noticed that the walking stick was back, lying across the two front seats. I had to move it so I could sit down.

  I glanced at Tim after I moved it, but he didn’t seem to recognize the stick. Maybe O’Donnell had kept it out of sight during the Bright Future meetings; maybe it had kept itself out of sight. Nor did Tim seem to see anything odd about a person who had a walking stick in the front seat of their car. People tend to expect VW mechanics to be a little odd.