Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson 13)

Adam, staring intently across the room, said, “By the fireplace.”

I looked, but it didn’t appear any different to me than it always had.

The old stone fireplace took up most of the far wall of the room, maybe twenty feet from where we sat. The gray stone was blackened around the hearth, with soot streaks reaching all the way to the ceiling. It had the appearance of something ancient, something that had been heating this room for centuries, though I knew that the building that housed Uncle Mike’s had been built in the early 1950s.

I inhaled to ask Adam what he’d seen and caught a familiar scent.

“Sulfur,” said Zack.

“Brimstone,” I said. The difference between sulfur and brimstone was not chemical but magical.

Brimstone meant witches. I was, as usual, armed with the cutlass the pack had given me. But I had no intention of getting that close to a witch if I could help it. I pulled my carry gun. I held the 1911 in a two-handed grip, keeping it pointed at the floor until I had a better target. It took an effort to keep my hands steady, and I found it uncomfortably hard to breathe.

I wasn’t ready to face witches again.

I didn’t have nightmares every day anymore, but there were still nights when I had to drive to the burnt-out remains of Elizaveta’s home to see where the witches had died before I could go back to sleep. Last Friday there had been a For Sale sign next to the driveway. I wondered if I had a moral obligation to tell someone just how many dead bodies—some of them human—were buried there. I was sure that no one would ever find the ones Zee had buried, but I had the feeling that the witches wouldn’t have done quite so thorough a job of it.

Adam had his gun drawn, too. I hadn’t been paying attention to see when he’d drawn it. Zack had a knife as long as his forearm. The only one who wasn’t obviously holding a weapon was Sherwood, but a werewolf is never really unarmed. At that point I finally noticed what Adam had seen, a slight stirring over the blackened remains of the last fire someone had lit.

“I see smoke,” Zack said, “but nothing is burning.”

We could have rushed over, but Adam was staying put. We all waited beside him, almost like we were a team and Adam was our Alpha. I could feel the pack bonds rise and settle around us in preparation for battle. Sherwood felt to me as he always felt. The bonds thought Adam was the Alpha, too.

Black smoke began to trickle out of the firebox mouth, then flowed out and down, as if it were a little heavier than the air around it. The cloud of smoke ebbed and writhed in reaction to something—at first I thought it was just the invisible air currents in the room. But gradually it gathered in a rough circle on the battered floor in front of the hearth, a purposeful shape. As more smoke entered the room, the circling darkness grew higher and more dense, forming a rough cylindrical shape that stretched up until it was as tall as the big mantelpiece that topped the fireplace.

Then she stepped out of the smoke.

She was clothed from head to foot in black, like the charcoal color of the smoke. There was some magic about that, too, because my first impression was that she was wearing a Victorian era widow’s dress complete with lace veil and feathered hat. But when I blinked, the clothes were made of smoke that wrapped around her like black velvet. The big ostrich feather drifted off into nothingness around the edges.

The brimstone blunted the effectiveness of my nose, and the smoke blurred the edges of her body. I could not tell who or what she was until she reached up with hands covered in black tatted lace—or lacelike smoke—and pulled the veil up to reveal Marsilia, Mistress of our local vampire seethe.

There was something different about her. Her eyes were closed, and the golden glory of her hair was veiled. Against the blackness, her flawless features could have been made of porcelain rather than flesh. Arched brows so pale that they were almost invisible teamed with the high cheekbones to frame her closed eyes.

She usually darkened her brows and her lashes, I thought, though makeup was generally the last thing I noticed about anyone. But the effect of all that paleness was startling, and not at all the impression she usually made. I caught a glimpse of something just below her jaw—a dark mark. A wound, maybe. But before I could be certain, the smoke drifted up her neck again. Something about the too-white face and the encircling darkness reminded me of a porcelain death mask.

She looked vulnerable.

Marsilia didn’t do vulnerable. And this dramatic entrance was unlike her, too. She could do drama, but this was drama without a point. We all knew her, knew that she was scary—so why the smoke and brimstone?

I tried to tamp down my adrenaline as I coughed to clear my throat. There was no need to overreact.

Marsilia was our ally. She was not a witch. Though she was scary, and she disliked me, she did not feature in my current nightmares. And still, staring at that pale, perfect face, I did not put my gun away. This was not like her, and that worried me.

Marsilia was an old vampire, and old vampires, like most old supernatural creatures, picked up talents and bits of magic throughout their lives. Marsilia could teleport. I hadn’t known that she could do this smoke-thingy, and I didn’t know why she’d bothered. Surely if she were trying to be scary, teleporting directly in was as scary as anything else she could have done.

Maybe she’d figured out who Sherwood was, too, and this show was for him. She was old; maybe she’d known all along who he was and had been waiting for us to figure it out.

She stood with her eyes closed for as much as three seconds. No one spoke because Adam did not. I’d have thought that seeing Marsilia would have lessened his tension—Marsilia and he liked each other—but it didn’t seem to.

Without opening her eyes, she pulled the veil back down to hide her face again. Only with her face behind the black smokey lace did she turn her head fully toward us. I saw the glint of something that might have been her eyes, though it was more red than brown.

“Where is my Wulfe?” she asked.

For a second I thought she was speaking about one of our pack—none of whom belonged to her. Then I realized she was talking about her second. W-U-L-F-E, not W-O-L-F.

Wulfe was a very old vampire, older than Marsilia. He was witchborn and a wizard, which meant that he wielded two entirely unrelated forms of magic in addition to whatever magical power just being an old vampire brought him. He was also bug-nuts. The combination of power and unpredictability made him the single scariest vampire I’d ever met—and I’d met Iacopo Bonarata, who ruled Europe.

Lately Wulfe had been stalking me.