Just then, though, he frowned at me. “If I am to take you before the Mistress, I’d rather you had dressed up a bit more.”
I looked down and realized I was wearing the clothing I’d had on when I’d gone over to check out Adam’s house. It seemed like a week ago, rather than the night before last. The T-shirt was one Stefan himself had given me for teaching him how to correct the timing on his bus. It read “Happiness is German engineering, Italian cooking, and Belgian chocolate” and bore a large stain from the cocoa I spilled on it. Thinking about how long I’d been wearing it made me realize that it smelled a little bit stronger than it usually did—and not of detergent and fabric softener either.
“We just came back into town late this afternoon,” I apologized. “I haven’t had a chance to go home and change yet. But you’re not much better.”
He looked down at himself, rocking back on his heels and spreading his hands like a vaudeville comic exaggerating his motions for an audience. He was wearing a casual black long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned over a plain white T-shirt, and jeans with a hole over one knee. I’ve never seen him wearing anything more formal, but for some reason his casual clothes always looked . . . wrong somehow, as if he were wearing a costume.
“What, this?” he asked. “This is my best down-at-the-heels vampire look,” he said. “Maybe I should have worn black jeans and a black shirt, but I hate overdoing it.”
“I thought you were picking us up.” I looked around pointedly. “Where’s your car?”
“I came the fast way.” He didn’t explain what that was, but continued, “I see you have your van. There should be plenty of room for the four of us.”
“Zee’s staying here,” I said.
Stefan smiled. “To bring in the troops.”
“Do you know where the people who attacked Adam are?” I asked, rather than commenting on Stefan’s observation.
He shook his head regretfully. “The Mistress didn’t see fit to tell me any more than I conveyed to you.” His face grew still for a moment. “I’m not even certain what she told me was truth. She may know nothing. You might want to find an excuse for not going, Mercy.”
“These visitors have already killed one man and made a mess of Adam’s house,” I told him. “If your Mistress knows where they are, we need to go ask.”
He gave me an oddly formal bow and turned to look at Samuel, giving him a wide smile that managed to keep from displaying his fangs. “I don’t know you. You must be the new wolf in town.”
I made introductions, but it was obvious that Samuel and Stefan were not going to be instant friends—and it wasn’t Stefan’s fault.
I was a little surprised. Both men shared the easygoing charm that usually had other people smiling. But Samuel’s manner was unusually grim. Obviously, he didn’t like vampires.
I hopped in my van and waited while Stefan and Samuel had a very polite argument about where they would sit. Both of them wanted the backseat. I was willing to believe that Stefan was trying to be considerate, but Samuel didn’t want the vampire sitting behind him.
Before he dropped his politeness and told Stefan so, I broke in. “I need Stefan in front so he can tell me where we’re going.”
Zee knocked on my window and, when I turned on the power to roll it down, he gave me the dagger he’d pulled when Stefan first emerged from the shadows, along with a handful of leather that looked to be a sheath and belt.
“Take this,” he said. “The belt ties so you can adjust it to fit you.”
“May I?” Stefan asked diffidently, as he settled himself in the front seat. When Zee gave a curt nod, I handed it over.
The vampire held the blade up and turned it back and forth under the van’s dome light. He started to hand it back to me, but Samuel reached between the seats and took it from him. He tested the sharpness of the edge, pricking himself lightly on the thumb. Sucking in his breath, he jerked his hand away and put his thumb in his mouth.
For a moment nothing happened. Then power washed through the van, not like the power the Alphas could call, nor did it feel like the magic Elizaveta Arkadyevna used. It was akin somehow to the fae power of glamour and tasted like metal and blood in my mouth. After a bare moment, the night was quiet again.
“I would suggest that feeding old blades your blood is not a good idea,” said Stefan mildly.
Zee laughed, a full-throated openmouthed sound that made him throw his head back. “Listen to the vampire, Samuel Bran’s Son. My daughter likes the taste of you a little too well.”
Samuel handed the dagger and its accouterments back to me. “Zee,” he said, then, as if he’d just realized something he continued in German, “Siebold Adelbertkrieger aus dem Schwarzenwald.”
“Siebold Adelbertsmiter from the Walla Walla Fae Preserve,” Zee said mildly.
“Siebold Adelbert’s Smiter from the Black Forest,” I translated, using my required two years of a foreign language course for the first time ever. It didn’t matter; in German or in English, the words, which Sam made sound like a title of honor, still meant nothing to me.
Go to any Irish village and they’ll tell you the names of the fae who interacted with their ancestors. There are rocks and ponds that bear the names of the brownies or kelpies that live there. The German stories tended to concentrate on the heros. Only a few of the German fae, like Lorelei and Rumpelstiltskin, have stories that tell you their names and give you fair warning about the fae you might be dealing with.
Samuel, though, knew something about Zee.
Zee saw the look in my eye and laughed again. “Don’t you start, girl. We live in the present and let the past take care of itself.”
I have a degree in history, which is one of the reasons I’m an auto mechanic. Most of the time, I satisfy my craving for the past by reading historical novels and romances. I’d tried to get Zee to tell me stories before, but like the werewolves, he would not say much. The past holds too many shadows. But armed with a name, I was going to hit the Internet as soon as I finally got to go home.
Zee looked at Stefan, and the laughter faded from his eyes. “The dagger probably won’t help a great deal against vampires, but I’ll feel better if she has something to defend herself.”
Stefan nodded. “It will be allowed.”
The dagger lay on my lap just like any other blade, but I remembered the caress of power and slid it carefully into its sheath.
“Don’t look them in the eyes,” Zee told me abruptly. “That means you, too, Dr. Cornick.”
“Don’t play dominance games with vampires,” said Samuel. “I remember.”
The second half of that old wolf aphorism is “just kill them.” I was happy that he’d left it out.
“Do you have any other warnings, vampire who is Mercy’s friend?” Zee asked Stefan.
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I truly thought the Mistress had harm in mind. Mostly she just grows bored. Mercy is very good at soft answers that don’t promise anything. If the wolf can manage the same, we should all be safe in our beds before dawn.”
chapter 10
I don’t know where I expected the vampires to live. I suppose I’d been influenced by all those late night flicks and imagined a large Victorian mansion in a disreputable part of town. There are a few along the downtown area in Kennewick, most of them polished and painted like old opera stars. And, while there are a few run-down neighborhoods around, they tend to be populated with houses too small to house even a small seethe.
It shouldn’t have surprised me to be driving along a street with Mercedes, Porsches, and BMWs in every elegant cobbled driveway. The road had been cut into the side of a hill that overlooked the town, and for thirty years, doctors, lawyers, and CEOs had been building their four-thousand-square-foot homes on the steeply sloped lots. But, as Stefan told us, the vampires had been there first.
At the end of the main street, a smaller gravel road broke off and cut between a pair of two-story brick edifices. It looked almost lik
e it might be a driveway, but continued past the houses and into the undeveloped area behind them.
We drove through about a quarter mile of the usual eastern Washington scrub—cheat grass, sagebrush, and tackweed mostly—and then up over a small ridge that was just large enough to hide a two-story, sprawling hacienda surrounded by an eight-foot wall. As the road came down the hill our view of the house was limited to what we could see through the double, wrought-iron gates. I thought the sweeping Spanish arches that graced the sides of the building did a wonderful job of disguising the scarcity of windows.
At Stefan’s direction, I parked just outside the walls, where the ground had been leveled. The vampire jumped out and was around to open my door before Samuel got out of the van.
“Should I leave this?” I asked Stefan, holding up Zee’s dagger. On the way, I’d decided that since it was too big to be hidden without fae glamour—which I don’t have—it might be a good thing not to take it in at all.
Stefan shrugged, his hands patting lightly on his thighs as if he heard music I didn’t. It was a habitual thing with him; he was seldom absolutely still.
“Carrying an artifact this old could make them respect you more,” said Samuel, who’d come around the van. “Wear it.”
“I was worried about setting the wrong tone,” I explained.
“I don’t expect things to get violent tonight,” said Stefan. “The dagger is not going to start anything.” He grinned at me. “It is illegal in this state, though. You’ll have to remember to take it off when you leave.”
So I wrapped the leather belt around my hips a few times. There was a handmade buckle without a pin on one end, and I wove the other end of the belt through and tied it off.
“It’s too loose,” said Stefan, reaching for it—but Samuel got there first.
“Tighten it around your waist,” he said, adjusting it for me. “Then pull it over your hips so the weight of the blade doesn’t slide the whole thing down around your ankles.”
When he was satisfied, he stepped away.
“I’m not the enemy,” Stefan told him mildly.
“We know that,” I said.
Stefan patted my shoulder, but continued, “I am not your enemy, Wolf. I’ve risked more than you know by taking both of you under my protection. The Mistress wanted to send others for you—and I don’t think you’d have enjoyed that.”
“Why take the risk?” Samuel asked. “Why take us under your protection? I know something of what that means. You don’t know me—and Mercy is just your mechanic.”
Stefan laughed, his hand still on my shoulder. “Mercy is my friend, Dr. Cornick. My mother taught me to take care of my friends, didn’t yours?”
He was lying. I don’t know how I was so certain of it, but I was.
Some werewolves can tell if a person is lying. I can only do it if it is someone I know really well, and I’m paying attention. It has to do with the change in the normal sounds a person makes—breathing and pulse, things like that. Usually I’m not paying that much attention. I’ve never been able to tell a thing about Stefan, not even the usual emotions that carry such distinctive smells. And Stefan’s pulse and breathing tended to be erratic. I sometimes thought he only breathed because he knew how uncomfortable he made people when he didn’t.
Nonetheless, I knew he had lied.
“You just lied to us,” I told him. “Why are you helping us?” I pulled out from under his hand so I could turn and face him, putting Samuel at my back.
“We don’t have time for this,” Stefan said, and some of the usual liveliness faded from his face.
“I need to know if we can trust you,” I told him. “Or at least how far we can trust you.”
He made one of those grand stage magician gestures, throwing his hands up and tossing his head—but I felt a fine cloak of real magic settling around us. Like Zee, it tasted of earth, but there were darker things in Stefan’s spell than anything the gremlin had done around me.
“Fine,” he said. “Just don’t blame me when she’s in a rotten mood because we kept her waiting. You called me tonight with a question.”
“What did you just do?” asked Samuel quietly.
Stefan let fall an exasperated sigh. “I made certain that the three of us are the only ones participating in this conversation, because there are things that hear very well in the night.”
He turned his attention back to me. “When I called our accountant she put me right through to our Mistress—which is not standard procedure. Our Mistress was obviously more interested in your Dr. Cornick than she was with your question. She came to me and had me call you back—she didn’t intend me to escort you. She didn’t want you to have even that much protection, but once I offered, she could not contradict me. I am here, Mercy, because I want to know what is going on that stirs my Mistress from the lethargy that has been her usual state since she was exiled here. I need to know if it is a good thing, or something very bad for me and my kind.”
I nodded. “All right.”
“But I would have done it for friendship’s sake,” he added.
Unexpectedly, Samuel laughed a little bitterly. “Of course. We all do things for our Mercy for friendship’s sake,” he said.
Stefan didn’t take us through the front gates, which were large enough to drive a semi through, but led the way around the side to a small, open door in the wall.
In contrast to the undeveloped scrub outside the gates, the interior grounds were elaborate. Even in November, the grass, under the moon’s waxing light, was dark and luxurious. A few roses peeked out from protected areas near the house, and the last of the mums still had a few blooms. It was a formal French-style garden, with organized beds and meticulous grooming. Had the house been a Victorian- or Tudor-style home, it would have looked lovely. Next to a Spanish-style adobe house it just looked odd.
Grapevines, bare in their winter guise, lined the wall. In the moonlight they looked like a row of dead men, hanging arms spread wide and crucified on the frames that supported them.
I shivered and moved closer to Samuel’s warmth. He gave me an odd look, doubtless scenting my unease, but set his hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer.
We followed a cobbled path past a swimming pool, covered for the winter, around the corner of the house to a broad swath of lawn. Across the lawn there was a two-story guesthouse almost a third the size of the main house. It was to this smaller building that Stefan led us.
He knocked twice at the door, then opened and waved us into an entry hall decorated aggressively in the colors and textures of the American Southwest, complete with clay pots and kachina dolls. But even the decor was overwhelmed by the smell of mostly unfamiliar flowers and herbs rather than the scents of the desert.
I sneezed, and Samuel wrinkled his nose. Perhaps all the potpourri was designed to confuse our noses—but it was only strong, not caustic. I didn’t enjoy it, but it didn’t stop me from smelling old leather and rotting fabrics. I took a quick, unobtrusive look around, but I couldn’t see anything to account for the smell of rot; everything looked new.
“We’ll wait for her in the sitting room,” Stefan said, leading the way through the soaring ceilings of a living room and into a hall.
The room he took us to was half again the size of the biggest room in my trailer. From what I’d seen of the house, though, it was cozy. We’d left behind the Southwest theme for the most part, though the colors were still warm earth tones.
The seats were comfortable, if you like soft fluffy furniture. Stefan settled into a chair with every sign of relaxation as the furniture swallowed him. I scooted toward the front edge of the love seat, which was marginally firmer, but the cushions would still slow me down a little if I had to move quickly.
Samuel sat in a chair that matched Stefan’s, but rose to his feet as soon as he started to sink. He stalked behind my love seat and looked out of the large window that dominated the room. It was the first window I’d seen in the house.
&
nbsp; Moonlight streamed in, sending loving beams over his face. He closed his eyes and basked in it, and I could tell it was calling to him, even though the moon was not full. She didn’t speak to me, but Samuel had once described her song to me in the words of a poet. The expression of bliss on his face while he listened to her music made him beautiful.
I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“Oh, aren’t you lovely?” said a voice; a throaty, lightly European voice that preceded a woman dressed in a high-cut, semiformal dress of gold silk that looked rather odd combined with jogging shoes and calf-high athletic socks.
Her reddish blond curls were pulled up with elegant whimsy and lots of bobby pins, revealing dangling diamond earrings that matched the elaborate necklace at her throat. There were faint lines around her eyes and mouth.
She smelled a little like Stefan, so I had to assume she was a vampire, but the lines on her face surprised me. Stefan looked scarcely twenty, and I’d somehow assumed that the undead were like the werewolves, whose cells repaired themselves and removed damage of age, disease, and experience.
The woman padded into the room and made a beeline for Samuel, who turned to regard her gravely. When she leaned against him and stood on tiptoe to lightly lick his neck, he slid a hand up around to the base of her skull and looked at Stefan.
I shifted a little farther toward the edge of my seat and twisted so I could watch them over the back of the love seat. I wasn’t too worried about Samuel—he was poised to break her neck. Maybe a human couldn’t have managed it, but he wasn’t human.
“Lilly, my Lilly fair.” Stefan sighed, his voice puncturing the tension in the room. “Don’t lick the guests, darling. Bad manners.”
She paused, her nose resting against Samuel. I gripped the hilt of Zee’s dagger and hoped I didn’t have to use it. Samuel could protect himself, I hoped, but he didn’t like hurting women—and Stefan’s Lilly looked very feminine.
“She said we had guests for entertainment.” Lilly sounded like a petulant child who knows the promised trip to the toy store is about to be delayed.
Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly Page 17