Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  But that wasn’t the only thing. Or even the first.

  As soon as I caught the glitter of the moon’s light in the shine of its feathers, I smelled it—as if it hadn’t been there until then.

  Ravens smell of the carrion they eat overlaying a musty sharp scent they share with crows and magpies. This one smelled of rain, forest, and good black garden soil in the spring. Then there was its size.

  The Tri-Cities has some awfully big ravens, but nothing like this bird. It was taller than the coyote I was; easily as big as a golden eagle.

  And every hair on my body stood up to attention as a wave of magic swept through the room.

  It took a sudden hop forward, which moved its head into the faint light that trickled through the windows. There was a spot of white on its head, like a drop of snow. But what caught most of my attention were its eyes: bloodred, like a white rabbit’s, they glittered eerily as it stared right at me…and through me, as if it were blind.

  For the first time in my life I was afraid to drop my eyes. Werewolves put great value on eye contact—and I’d blithely used that all my life. I have no trouble dropping my eyes, acknowledging anyone’s superiority and then doing whatever I please. Among the werewolves, once dominance was acknowledged, the dominant werewolf could, by custom, do no more than cuff me out of his way…while I then ignored him or plotted how to get back at him as I chose.

  But this wasn’t a werewolf, and I was consumed with the conviction that if I moved at all, it would destroy me—though it was not making any sign of aggression.

  I value my instincts, so I stayed motionless.

  It opened its mouth and gave a rattling cry, like old bones shaken roughly in a wooden box. Then it dismissed me from its notice. It strode to the corner and knocked the walking stick to the floor. The raven took the old thing into its mouth and without so much as a glance over its shoulder took flight through the wall.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was well on the way back home—in human shape and driving my car.

  Being not exactly human myself and raised by werewolves, I’d thought I’d seen just about everything: witches, vampires, ghosts, and a half dozen other things that aren’t supposed to exist. But that bird had been real, as solid as me—I’d seen its ribs rise and fall as it breathed and I’d touched that walking stick myself.

  I’d never seen one solid object go through another solid object—not without some pretty impressive CGI graphics or David Copperfield.

  Magic, despite Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, just doesn’t work like that. If the bird had faded, become immaterial or something before it hit the wall, I might have accepted that as magic.

  Maybe, just maybe, I’d been like the rest of the world, accepting the fae at their face value. Acting like they were something familiar, that they were constrained by rules I could understand and feel comfortable with.

  If anyone should have known better, it would be me. After all, I well understood that what the public knew about the werewolves was just the polished tip of a nasty iceberg. I knew that the fae were, if anything, worse about secrecy than the wolves. Though Zee had been my friend for a decade, I knew very little about the fae side of his life. I knew he was a Steelers fan, that his human wife had died of cancer shortly before I met him, and that he liked tartar sauce on his fries—but I didn’t know what he looked like beneath his glamour.

  There were lights on at my house when I pulled the Rabbit into the driveway and parked it next to Samuel’s Mercedes and a strange Ford Explorer. I’d been hoping Samuel would be home and awake, so I could use him as a sounding board—but the SUV put paid to that idea.

  I frowned at it. It was two in the morning, an odd time for visitors. Most visitors.

  I took in a deep breath through my nose, but couldn’t catch a whiff of vampire—or anything else. Even the night air smelled duller than usual. Probably just a leftover from the shift from coyote to human. My human nose was better than most people’s but quite a bit less sensitive than the coyote’s, so changing to human was a little like taking out a hearing aid. Still…

  Vampires could hide their scent from me if they chose to.

  I shivered in the warm night air. I think I would have stayed out there all night, except that I heard the murmur of guitar. I couldn’t see Samuel playing for Marsilia, the mistress of the vampire seethe, so I climbed up the steps and went in.

  Uncle Mike sat on the overstuffed chair Samuel had replaced my old flea-market find with. Samuel was half-stretched out on the couch like a mountain lion. He played idle bits of music on his guitar. He might look relaxed, but I knew him too well. The cat who was purring on the back of the couch, just behind Samuel’s head, was the only relaxed person in the room.

  “There’s hot water for cocoa,” said Samuel, without looking away from Uncle Mike. “Why don’t you get yourself some, then come tell us about Zee, who put you on the scent of their murderer so they could go kill him. Then tell me what you’ve been doing tonight that would leave you smelling of blood and magic?”

  Yep, Samuel was ticked at Uncle Mike.

  I riffled through the cupboards until I found the box of emergency cocoa. Not the milk chocolate with marshmallow kind, but the hard stuff, dark chocolate with a bit of jalapeño pepper for flavor. I wasn’t really upset enough now to need it, but it kept me busy while I thought about how I might keep matters peaceable. Real cocoa needs milk, so I put some in a sauce pan and began heating it up.

  I’d left Samuel and the other werewolves this morning knowing only that Zee was in jail and needed a lawyer. Obviously, someone had filled Samuel in a bit since then. Almost certainly not Uncle Mike.

  Probably not Warren, who would know everything from the lawyer’s meeting—I’d told Kyle to go ahead and tell him what I’d told the lawyer. Warren could keep secrets.

  Ah. Warren wouldn’t keep secrets from his pack Alpha, Adam. Adam would see no reason not to tell Samuel the whole story if he asked.

  See that’s the thing about secrets. All you have to do is tell one person—and suddenly everyone knows. Still, if I disappeared, I’d like to know that the werewolves would come looking for me. Hopefully the fae (in the person of Uncle Mike) understood that, and I wasn’t likely to just disappear: if the Gray Lords would arrange a suicide for Zee, one of their own who was of some value, they certainly wouldn’t hesitate to arrange something to happen to me as well. The pack would make that a little more difficult.

  A cup of liquid doesn’t take long to heat. I poured it into a mug; took the first sip, bittersweet and biting; then rejoined the men. My deliberations in the kitchen led me to the couch, where I sat with a whole cushion between me and Samuel so I wouldn’t be assumed (by Samuel) to be taking a side in the antagonism that was stirring in my living room like the inky surface of Loch Ness just before the monster erupts. I didn’t want any eruptions in my living room, thank you. Eruptions meant repair bills and blood. Growing up with werewolves had left me hyperaware of power struggles and things unspoken.

  With another werewolf, a show of support might put the likelihood of violence down a few notches, because he would feel more confident. Samuel didn’t need more confidence. He needed to know that I felt that Uncle Mike had done the right thing by calling me in, no matter what Samuel’s opinion on the matter was.

  “I found a good lawyer for Zee,” I told Uncle Mike.

  “She is a member of the John Lauren Society.” Uncle Mike seemed much more himself than he’d sounded on the phone. That meant that his “cheerful innkeeper” guise was in full swing. I couldn’t tell if he was unhappy with my choice of lawyers or not.

  “Kyle—” I stopped myself and backed up. “I have a friend who is among the best divorce attorneys in the state. When I called him, he suggested this Jean Ryan from Spokane. He told me she was a barracuda in the courtroom, and says that her membership in a fae hate group will actually help. People will think that she must be absolutely convinced of Zee’s innocence to take this case.”


  “Is that true? She believes him innocent?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, but both Kyle and she say it won’t matter. I did my best to convince her.” I took a sip of cocoa and told them everything Ms. Ryan had told me, including her warning that I keep my nose out of police business.

  Samuel’s lips quirked at that. “So how long did you wait before going to O’Donnell’s after she told you not to?”

  I gave him an indignant look. “I wouldn’t have done it before dark. Too many people would have been calling Animal Control if they saw a coyote that far into town, collar or not. I can’t do much investigating from the animal shelter, and they’ve already picked me up once this summer.”

  I looked at Uncle Mike and wondered how to get him to tell me all the things I needed to know. “Did you know that O’Donnell was involved with Citizens for a Bright Future?”

  He sat up straighter. “I’d have thought he would be smarter than that. If the BFA had known, he’d have lost his job.”

  He didn’t say that he’d been unaware of it, I noticed.

  “He didn’t seem too worried about anyone finding out,” I told him. “There were Bright Future posters all over the walls of one of his rooms.”

  “The BFA doesn’t exactly make a habit of searching their employees’ houses. Their funding just got cut again and the moneys diverted to that mess in the Middle East.” He didn’t sound too upset about the BFA’s troubles.

  I rubbed my tired face. “The search wasn’t as much help as I’d hoped. I didn’t find a scent, except for O’Donnell himself, of anyone who was in the reservation murder scenes. I don’t think that there was anyone with him when he killed the fae.” Except maybe Cologne Man, I thought. I had no way of telling what he really smelled like, though I had not the slightest idea why he’d have worn cologne to kill O’Donnell and not for killing the fae. Surely he wouldn’t expect a werewolf or someone like me to be tracking down O’Donnell’s killer.

  “So your visit was uneventful.” That was Samuel, his voice just a little more intense than the soft, harplike notes he was calling from the guitar. If he kept playing like that, I was going to be asleep before I finished. “Why then do you smell like blood and magic?”

  “I didn’t say it was uneventful. The blood is because the living room of O’Donnell’s house was covered in it.”

  Uncle Mike gave a faint grimace, which I didn’t believe at all. My experience with immortals might be with werewolves, but the fae aren’t a kind and gentle people either. He might have been thrown off his game when Zee was taken into custody, but blood and gore never really bother the old ones.

  “The magic…” I shrugged. “It could have been a number of things. I saw the murder take place.”

  “Magic?” Uncle Mike frowned. “I didn’t know you were a farseer. I thought that magic didn’t work around you.”

  “That would be terrific,” I said. “But no, magic works around me for the most part. I just have some kind of partial immunity to it. Usually the way it works is that the less harmful the magic is, the better the chance it won’t work. The really bad stuff usually does just fine.”

  “She sees ghosts,” said Samuel, impatient with my whining.

  “I see dead people,” I deadpanned back. Oddly, it was Uncle Mike who laughed. I hadn’t thought he’d be a moviegoer.

  “So did these ghosts tell you anything?”

  I shook my head. “No. I just got the playback of the murder with O’Donnell as the only player. I think the killer was after something, though. Did O’Donnell steal from the fae?”

  Uncle Mike’s face went blank and I knew two things. The answer to my question was yes, and Uncle Mike had no intention of telling me what O’Donnell had taken.

  “Just for kicks,” I said instead of waiting in vain for his answer, “how many fae are there who can take on the shape of a raven?”

  “Here?” Uncle Mike shrugged. “Five or six.”

  “There was a raven in O’Donnell’s house and it reeked of fae magic.”

  Uncle Mike gave an abrupt, harsh laugh. “If you’re asking if I sent someone to O’Donnell’s house, the answer is no. If you’re wondering if one of them killed O’Donnell, the answer is still no. None of those with a raven shape have the physical strength to tear off someone’s head.”

  “Could Zee?” I asked. Sometimes if you ask unexpected questions, you get answers.

  His eyebrows rose and his brogue grew thicker. “Sure and why would you ask that? Haven’t I told you he had naught to do with it?”

  I shook my head. “I know Zee didn’t kill him. The police have an expert who told them that he could. I have reasons to doubt her ability—and it might help Zee if I know exactly how far off she is.”

  Uncle Mike took a deep breath and tilted his head to the side. “The Dark Smith of Drontheim might have been able to do what I saw, but that was a long time ago. Most of us have lost a bit of what was once ours over the years of cold iron and Christianity. Zee less than most, though. Maybe he could have. Maybe not.”

  The Dark Smith of Drontheim. He’d said something like that before. Trying to figure out who Zee had once been was one of my favorite hobbies, but the current situation made the small jewel of information taste like ashes. If Zee lost his life over this, who he had once been was irrelevant.

  “Just how many of the fae in the reservation…” I thought about that and reworded it a little. “…or in the Tri-City area could have done that?”

  “A few,” Uncle Mike said without taking time to reflect. “I’ve been racking my head all day. One of the ogres could have, though I’ll be a Catholic monk if I know why they would want to. And once they get to that point, they’d not have stopped until they’d had a bite or two. None of the ogres were particularly friendly with any of the victims on the reservation—or anyone else, except maybe Zee. There are a few others who might have been capable of it once, but most of them haven’t fared as well as Zee in the modern world.”

  I remembered the power of the sea man.

  “What about the man I met in the selkie’s…” I glanced at Samuel and bit my tongue. That ocean I knew was a secret, and it could have no impact on Zee’s fate. I wouldn’t speak of it in front of Samuel, but that left my sentence hanging in the air.

  “What man?” Samuel’s question was mild, though Uncle Mike’s words, coming right over the top of Samuel, were not.

  I could smell Uncle Mike’s fear, harsh and sudden, like his words. It wasn’t an emotion I associated with him.

  After a quick, wary look around the room, he continued in an urgent whisper, “I don’t know how you managed it, but it will do you no good to speak of the encounter. The one you met could have done it, but he has not bestirred himself this past hundred years.” He took a breath and forced himself to relax. “Trust me, it wasn’t the Gray Lords who killed O’Donnell, Mercedes. His murder was too clumsy to be their work. Tell me more of this fae raven you encountered.”

  I stared at him a moment. Was the sea fae one of the Gray Lords?

  “The raven?” he prompted gently.

  So I told him, backing up a bit to tell him about the staff, then about the raven leaping through the wall with it.

  “How did I miss the staff?” Uncle Mike asked himself, looking thoroughly shaken.

  “It was tucked in a corner,” I told him. “It came from one of the victims’ houses, didn’t it? The one who smoked a pipe and whose back window looked out over a forest.”

  Uncle Mike seemed to come back to himself and he stared at me. “You know too many of our secrets, Mercedes.”

  Samuel set his guitar aside and put himself between us before I had time to register the menace in Uncle Mike’s voice.

  “Careful,” he said, his voice thick with Wales and warning. “Careful, Green Man. She’s put her neck out to help you—shame upon you and your house if she comes to harm by’t.”

  “Two,” Uncle Mike said. “Two of the Gray Lords have seen your face in our busine
ss, Mercy. One might have forgotten, but two never will.” He waved an impatient hand at Samuel. “Oh, stand down, wolf. I’ll not harm your kit. I only spoke the truth. There are things not nearly so benign who will not be happy about her knowing what she knows—and two of them already have.”

  “Two?” I asked in a voice that was smaller than I’d meant it to be.

  “That was no raven you met,” he said grimly. “It was the great Carrion Crow herself.” He gave me a long look. “I wonder why she didn’t kill you.”

  “Maybe she thought I was a coyote,” I said in a small voice.

  Uncle Mike shook his head. “She might be blind, but she perceives more clearly than I, still.”

  There was a brief silence. I don’t know what the others were thinking about, but I was contemplating just how many close calls I’d been having lately. If the vampires didn’t hurry, the fae or some other monster would kill me before she got a chance. What had happened to all the years of carefully keeping to myself and staying out of trouble?

  “You are sure that one of the Gray Lords didn’t kill O’Donnell?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said firmly, then paused. “I hope not. If so, then Zee’s arrest was intended and he is doomed—and probably me as well.” He ran a hand along his chin and something about the gesture made me wonder if he’d once worn a beard. “No. It was not they. They aren’t above a messy kill—but they wouldn’t have left the staff for the police to find. The Carrion Crow came to keep the staff out of human hands—though I’m surprised she didn’t retrieve it sooner.” He gave me a speculative look. “Zee and I weren’t in that living room long, but we’d never have overlooked the staff. I wonder…”

  “What is the staff?” I asked. “I could tell it was magic, but nothing else.”

  “Naught of interest to you, I trust,” said Uncle Mike, coming to his feet. “Naught for you to fuss with when there’s the Carrion Crow about. There’s money in the briefcase…” For the first time I noticed a brown leather case tucked against the arm of his chair. “If it is not enough to cover Zee’s expenses, let me know.”