Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson 13)

She beckoned me outside.

I looked at the cat. “I don’t think this is going to be good,” I said, but I went out, sandwich in hand. If the Harvester came back, he would be occupied with Tilly and not me.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” I asked as I closed the kitchen door behind me.

She had a lumpy mass of rough fabric sewn with thick thread that might have been gut sitting on the table beside her. Something roundish about the size of a small cantaloupe was inside the makeshift bag.

“You are going to get the Soul Taker,” she said with more confidence than I felt. “And I have a gift for you to give the old Smith, with my compliments. I’d give him the other, but I can’t remember where it was left.” She held a finger up to her cheek and dimpled at me. Someone had been watching too many Shirley Temple movies.

I finished my sandwich, taking my time, then wiped my hands on my pants. When I started toward her, she pushed the bag in my direction.

“You bring the Soul Taker to me,” she said, her voice no longer sounding like a child’s voice, “and I will see that it troubles you no more. You bring me the Soul Taker, and I will see that no harm comes to you and yours for a mortal generation. You bring me the Soul Taker, and I will owe you a favor commensurate with the gift of the sickle.”

She opened the bag, pulling the fabric back so that it worked as a presentation cloth for the object it had held. Then she lit a lantern—or created one, because I hadn’t noticed a lantern before this. Maybe she thought that I hadn’t figured out what it was and I needed the light.

I looked her in the eyes—then flinched away when I remembered I shouldn’t do it. But it had been only Tilly’s dirty face I saw. She smiled slyly at me when I met her eyes a second time. “Is it that I don’t have a soul, do you think?”

“I think that it would take more than the magic of an old artifact to let me see into you,” I said.

She laughed delightedly. “I do like you,” she said.

I stared at the thing on the table. “If I take it to him, you will extend the agreement—the one that allows you to have a door in our backyard and pledges that you harm no one who lives in our home—to my house over there.” I waved at the single-wide. “So I can rent it to someone without worrying about the tenant.”

If one of the fae asked me to do something, it was expected that I ask something in return. I didn’t let on that it was important to me—just a balance for the delivery service.

“Agreed,” she said easily, unwittingly making Tad’s life safer and easier. She probably wasn’t going to be happy about it, but it was a valid bargain. “And the other?” she didn’t bother to hide her eagerness.

I picked up the cup—it was neither as large nor as heavy as it looked, though it appeared to be molded out of pure silver. There was no question it was a work of art—exquisitely beautiful, even if it was in the shape of a skull. I’d instinctively lifted it with my hand cupped beneath the round part, and it felt comfortable there.

I’d pictured it with lower jaw attached, but it was only the single complete piece of skull, though the socket where the bottom jaw fit was clearly visible. The teeth from the upper jaw were a little irregular and one eyetooth was missing. I couldn’t tell what color the gems set in the eye sockets were at first. But when I tipped the cup, the lantern made the gems flash blue.

“You think of him as a mentor. As one who fixes machines. You think he is your friend,” Tilly said. Interesting that she didn’t name him. She wasn’t usually worried about drawing his attention.

“I do,” I agreed.

“He searches for artifacts to bring back the magic that was once his,” she told me.

That was also true, though a little misleading. I expected deceptive truths with Tilly. Collecting his own weaponry had been a casual hobby of his for as long as I’d known him. I had the impression that it was more in the nature of gathering his children around him. I hadn’t been aware that he was collecting wild artifacts as well until he’d told me. He wasn’t mining them for lost power.

I was pretty sure.

“You don’t know him.” Tilly watched my face closely. “A decade to one of his kind is a mere breath to one of yours. You look at this.” She bobbed her forefinger toward the cup I held. “You look at this, Mercedes Thompson Hauptman, and you remember what he is—the Dark Smith of Drontheim, who killed his own daughter.”

She paused, but I didn’t react. That story I knew.

She frowned at me in obvious disappointment before continuing. “Wayland Smith, who forced a king to drink from the skull of his child. You remember what he is, the truth I have given you. Then you bring the Soul Taker to me. It is not the only powerful artifact I have kept safe—and kept others safe from.”

She scooted off the table and grabbed the empty bag, taking it with her as she skipped back to the door in the wall. Only then did it occur to me that she hadn’t touched the cup herself. It didn’t feel dangerous in my hand.

Even though I’d heard the kitchen door open, I didn’t turn my back to Tilly until she was gone, her door shut behind her.

Adam didn’t speak as I brought the skull cup into the kitchen and set it among the pumpkins with a clink. He put an arm across the top of my shoulders as we contemplated the delicate detail that made the gruesome object beautiful. The gems were deep blue, cabochon, and the size of a robin’s egg—sapphires, I assumed. But I wasn’t an expert; they could have been something else—gemified eyeballs, at any rate. They were a little smaller than the eyes that originally fit in the sockets. I supposed they had shrunk when Zee had changed them.

“I know where Bonarata has our vampires,” I told Adam. Wulfe had given me the clue when he’d asked me if I remembered Frost. “We need to go there tonight. Just you and me, I think. I don’t want to give Bonarata reason to declare a war—and I don’t want any of our wolves to accidentally pick up the Soul Taker.”

He pulled out a chair and I did the same. We spent the next ten minutes making plans. I was glad I hadn’t explained how anxious the Soul Taker was to kill me and gather every person tied to me. If I had, he might not have agreed to go alone with me tonight, and I had a strong feeling—a Coyote-urging-me kind of feeling—that we needed to do this now.

Adam had dressed before coming downstairs, so I left him penning a note to Jesse while I went up to put more appropriate clothes on. I didn’t know where the katana had ended up. Presumably one of the others had grabbed it—or it was still in Marsilia’s unused master bedroom.