Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  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 told 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 p
upils 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.

  Jesse reached out and grabbed my knee, but her face didn’t change as the fae woman slowly stood up. She began to breathe hard as she took several steps back, sliding her chair behind her until it bumped into the shelving in back of her, and she couldn’t retreat anymore. Her mouth opened and she began panting, and I realized what I was seeing was a full-blown panic attack done fae-style.

  Zee had said her panic attacks were dangerous.

  “Ariana,” Samuel said, in a voice like Medea’s gentlest purr.

  He didn’t move from the door, giving her space. “Ari. Your father is dead and so are his beasts. I promise you are safe.”

  “Don’t move,” Zee told Jesse and me in a low voice, his eyes on the fae woman. “This could go very badly. I told you not to bring any of the wolves.”

  “I brought myself, old man,” said Samuel. “And I told Ariana that if she ever needed me, I would come. It was a promise and a threat, though I didn’t mean it that way at the time.”

  Alicia Brewster—whom Samuel had apparently known as Ariana—hummed three notes and started to talk.

  “A long time past in a land far from this one,” said Alicia in a storyteller’s voice, “there was a fae daughter who could work magic in silver and so she was named. In a time where fae were dying from cold iron, their magics fading as the One God’s ignorant followers built their churches in our places of power, the metals loved her touch, her magic flourished, and her father grew envious.”

  “He was a nasty piece of work,” said Samuel, his eyes on the woman’s wrinkled face that sometimes wore scars on her cheek or at the corner of her eye. “Mercy would call him a real rat-bastard. He was a forest lord whose greatest magic was to command beasts. When the last of the giants—who were beasts controlled by his magic—died, it left him a forest lord with no great power, and he resented it as Ariana’s power grew. When the fae lost their ability to imprint their magic on things—like your walking staff, Mercy—she could still manage it. People found out.”

  “A great lord of the fae came,” continued Ariana. She didn’t seem to be listening to Samuel, but she waited for him to quit speaking before she started. “He required that she build an abomination—an artifact that would consume the fae magic of his enemies and give it back to him. She refused, but her father accepted and sealed the bargain in blood.”

  She stopped talking, and after a moment Samuel picked up the story. “He beat her, and she still refused. His was a magic sort of like the fairy queen’s, in that he could influence others. It might have been more useful, but he could only influence beasts.”

  “So he turned her into a beast.” Ariana’s voice echoed even though my office was full enough that a gunshot shouldn’t echo, and it was eerie enough that Jesse scooted nearer to me.

  Ariana wasn’t looking at Samuel anymore, but I couldn’t tell where she was looking instead. I don’t think it was a happy place.

  “In those days, the fae’s magic was still strong enough that it was harder to kill them unless you had iron or steel,” said Samuel.

  He didn’t seem worried about Ariana, but Zee was. Zee had gradually moved off his chair until he was crouched between Jesse and the scarred fae woman.

  “He used his powers to torture her,” Samuel said. “He had a pair of hounds who were fae hounds. Their howls would drop a stag in its path, and their gaze could scare a man to death. He set them at her every morning for an hour, knowing that as long as he went not one moment more than an hour, she could not die—because that was part of these fear hounds’ magic.”

  “She broke,” Ariana said hoarsely. “She broke and followed his will as faithfully as his hounds. She knew nothing but his commands, and she built as he desired, forged it of silver and magic and her blood.”

  “You didn’t break,” said Samuel confidently. “You fought him every day.”

  Ariana’s voice changed, and she snapped, “She couldn’t fight him.”

  “You fought him,” Samuel said again. “You fought, and he called his hounds until his magic failed him because he used it one time too often. I had this story from someone who was there, Ariana. You fought him and stopped, leaving the artifact incomplete.”

  “It is my story,” she growled, and she turned those black eyes on Samuel. “She failed. She built it.”

  “Truth belongs to no one,” Samuel told her. “Ariana’s father visited a witch because his magic was insufficient to work his will.” There was something in his voice that made me think that he knew and hated that witch. “He paid the price she demanded for a spell that combined witchcraft with his magic.”

  “His right hand,” said Ariana.

  Samuel waited for her, but she just stared at him.

  “I think he wanted to call his hounds,” Samuel said. “But they had strayed too far for him to influence. He got something quite different.”

  “Werewolves,” said Ariana, then she turned her back to us, hunching her shoulders. I saw that there were scars on her back, too.

  “We attacked because we had to,” Samuel said gently. “But my father was stronger than we were, and resisted. He killed her father. We stopped, but she was so badly hurt. A human would have died or been reborn as one of us. She only suffered.”

  “You doctored her,” I said. “You helped her heal. You saved her.”

  Ariana crumpled—and Samuel leaped over all of us and caught her before she hit the floor. Her body was limp, her eyes closed, and the scars were hidden safely behind her glamour again.

  “Did I?” Samuel asked, looking down at her with his heart in his eyes. “The scar on the top of her shoulder was one I gave her.”

  Hot damn, I thought, watching him. Hot damn, Charles. I found something for Samuel to live for.

  Samuel had been upstairs with Adam when the fairy queen called to tell us what she was looking for. Silver Borne. The mention of the artifact alone was enough to make it impossible for him to yield to his wolf. But it had been when Zee had called me and Ariana spoke that he’d come back to us.

  “You saved her,” I told him. “And you loved her.”

  “She didn’t know, did she?” said Jesse, sounding as caught up in the story as Ariana had been. “You doctored her up, and she fell for you—and you couldn’t tell her what you were. That’s really romantic, Doc.”

  “And tragic,” said Zee sourly.

  “How do you know it’s tragic?” sputtered Jesse.

  The old fae scowled and gestured toward Samuel. “I’m not seeing a happy-ever-after ending here, are you?”

  Samuel pulled the fae woman against him. It looked odd, a young man holding a woman who could have been his grandmother indeed. But fae don’t age, they fade. Her grandmotherly appear
ance was a glamour. The scars were real—but I saw his face and knew that he only cared about the pain they represented.

  “Endings are relative,” I said, and Samuel jerked his head up. “I mean, as long as no one is dead, they get the chance to rewrite their endings, don’t you think? Take it from me, Samuel, a little time can heal some awfully big wounds.”

  “Did she look healed to you?” he said, and his eyes were the color of winter ice.

  “We’re all alive,” said Zee dryly. “And she didn’t disappear on us—which she still has the magic to do. I’d say you have a chance.”

  13

  SAMUEL STARTED TO SAY SOMETHING TO ZEE WHEN the woman he held opened her eyes, which were green again. She gave us all a bewildered look, as if she could not imagine how she’d gotten where she was.

  I knew exactly how she felt.

  As soon as he saw that she was awake, Samuel set her down with careful haste. “I’m sorry, Ari. You were falling . . . I wouldn’t have touched—”

  I had never in my life seen anything like it. Samuel, the son of a Welsh bard, who shared his father’s gift for words, stammering like an infatuated teenager.

  She grabbed Samuel’s sweatshirt and looked up at him in utter astonishment. “Samuel?”

  He stepped away from her, but stopped short of pulling the shirt from her grasp. “I can’t give you space unless you let me go,” he told her.

  “Samuel?” she said, and, though it hadn’t caught my notice before, I realized that her voice had changed sometime in the middle of her panic attack, and sounded way too young for the late-middle-age face she wore. It was also lightly accented, some combination of British and Welsh or a related language. “I thought . . . I looked but I never could find you. You just disappeared and left me nothing. Not a shirt or a name.”