Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

Three cars down from where Adam had parked there was a white Subaru Forester with California plates. I remember cars, a hazard of my job. I tugged Adam to a stop and examined it more carefully.

Subaru Foresters weren’t uncommon—there were three others in the parking lot. But I’d followed this one for miles last winter. I sniffed at the driver’s-side door and smelled a familiar vampire.

“Thomas Hao,” I said. I’d fought beside Thomas a couple of months ago, and we’d helped Marsilia destroy a nasty vampire. I wondered if Marsilia had known who he was when she turned him over to us this morning. I considered the goblin’s half lie about not being the one who saw the vampire and decided she did.

“This should be interesting,” said Adam after a moment, but he’d relaxed a little, and so had I.

Thomas Hao was the Master of San Francisco. That’s all I’d known about him the last time we met. But it turned out that he was something of an enigma, even by vampire standards. Like Blackwood, the vampire I’d helped kill in Spokane, Hao ruled without other vampires in his city. Unlike Blackwood, Hao was the opposite of crazy. He’d never had a large seethe, but a couple of years ago he’d shooed the few vampires he controlled out to other seethes and remained in San Francisco alone. No one knew why, though there were lots of stories about Thomas Hao, about what happened when someone made a move against him. I’d seen him hold off two very powerful, very old monsters all by himself.

There was no question that Thomas was a very dangerous vampire. But he was also a man of principle and logic, not driven by ambition. It wasn’t just me who thought so. As vampires went, Hao was almost a good man. I liked him.

It didn’t take long to find his room. We got on the elevator that smelled of him and hit every button on the way up. His room was on the top floor. We followed Thomas’s scent down the hall.

“There is a fae here, too,” I whispered. I’d first scented her downstairs, and her track followed Hao’s too closely for coincidence.

Adam nodded and knocked softly at the door where Thomas’s scent had led us. No need to bother the neighbors, and a vampire would hear us.

“A moment,” said Thomas’s voice. It would not have carried to human ears, so he wasn’t expecting room service.

The vampire opened the door and regarded us for a moment. He was dressed in a brown silk button-down shirt and black jeans. His feet were bare, and his hair was damp. I never had been able to read his face, but I could read his body language. Whoever he’d been expecting, it had not been us.

He was not a big man, but in vampires, that didn’t mean much. His hair was cut short and expensively. He smelled of the fae woman whose scent trail had paralleled his, as if he might have been touching her just before he answered the door.

He stepped back and gestured us in, closing the door behind us when we accepted his wordless invitation. His room was a suite with a pair of chairs and a couch in the living area and a view that, in the daylight, would be of the Columbia River. There was a door toward the back of the room, and it was shut.

“Please,” he said to us, “take a seat. May I get you some refreshments? If you do not enjoy alcohol, there is soda, I believe, as well as water.”

Polite vampire. It was a good thing that Adam and I had come, that we hadn’t sent a pair of werewolves who could have misread Thomas and tried to issue threats—assuming Thomas would have been polite to other werewolves.

“Water,” Adam said. “Thank you.”

Thomas looked at me. “Water is good for me, too,” I said. “Thank you.” We all had good manners here, yes, we did.

He served us the water and took a glass and filled it from an already opened bottle of red wine. He took a sip of wine and smiled politely. “To what do I owe this visit?”

“I’m afraid that is our question,” Adam replied.

“You were expecting Marsilia or Wulfe, right?” I asked.

“I called them when we got in,” he said. “And Wulfe assured me that someone would be over before long. I did not expect to see the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack and his wife running errands.”

Marsilia had known who was here all right.

“Errands,” said Adam thoughtfully.

None of us had taken a seat, I realized.

“Marsilia can’t send us on errands,” I told Thomas. “We inherited this job.” I thought about that. “‘Inherited’ is the wrong word. Co-opted. Not quite the right word, either. Had it dumped on us unexpectedly.”

Thomas frowned thoughtfully. “I saw a news program earlier,” he said. “You killed a troll and proclaimed the Tri-Cities your territory.”

He was looking at me. I cleared my throat. “I didn’t kill the troll. That was Adam and some of the pack. And, technically speaking, the whole of the Tri-Cities has always been our territory.”

I caught something in Thomas’s gaze, and I realized that he was highly amused—though it didn’t show on his face except for a quirk of his eyebrow. But I was positive I was right.

“As you saw”—I was going to have to find the news clip myself so I would know exactly what people knew about it—“I made a true but unpolitic declaration on the bridge yesterday. The fallout of that is still settling.” I pinched the bridge of my nose hard to distract myself from that thought. No need to panic in front of a vampire. Adam’s hand touched the small of my back.