Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

“She’s not your problem,” he said.

She couldn’t hurt me, but she could hurt Adam. She’d had years of practice to develop her aim. “It’s no trouble,” I said.

He smiled. “That’s a lie.”

“It is my privilege,” I said carefully, trying not to tweak his pride, “to do those things that are easier for me than for you. You do the same for me. Let me deal with her.”

That was the truth.

Adam hesitated. It was in his nature to protect the people around him. I’d been working on him to let me do the same for him.

“If she’s here for you, there’s nothing I can do,” I told him. “But if she’s just here for Jesse, keeping you out of the picture might keep the nastiness quotient down a fair bit—and that will make things easier for Jesse.”

He leaned forward and kissed me. “You know the magic words,” he said.

I bounced on my heels and grinned.

Adam headed for his office as soon as we came in, and I headed for the kitchen, where I could smell breakfast. I’d gotten a few steps farther when I realized that it wasn’t just bacon I could smell cooking. Then I noticed that there was a funny sort of silence in the air.

There were four people in my kitchen. Jesse was plastered against the counter with the same “someone’s gonna die today” look I’d seen on her father’s face a time or two. Adam’s ex-wife Christy stood in front of Jesse with a damp dishcloth in her hand. Aiden was pressed tightly against the refrigerator with his feet about a foot off the floor because one of Darryl’s very large hands was wrapped around his throat. Darryl’s hand was smoking, and his eyes were glowing bright yellow.

All righty.

“Drop the munchkin, Darryl,” I said in as relaxed a voice as I could find. There were too many fragile humans in here to allow this to break out into a real fight. “We promised not to let him get killed for twenty-four hours, right?”

Darryl took a step back, but his hand was still wrapped around Aiden’s throat. Then Darryl shook his hand, and Aiden dropped to his feet, lost his balance, and fell on his rump, a feral snarl on his face as he scrambled out of the vulnerable position.

“If you do what you’re thinking about doing, Aiden,” I said, “I’ll let Darryl loose.”

“Then he’ll die,” said Aiden, who’d managed to find his feet and stood in an angry crouch.

“Mmmhmmm,” I said. I wasn’t sure Aiden wasn’t right, but it’s never good to show fear in front of your enemies. I really, really wished I had some idea of just how powerful Aiden was.

There was a cardboard box of doughnuts on the counter: ah, Spudnuts. Probably Christy had brought them, but I took one out to eat anyway, as it was unlikely she’d poisoned them: she wouldn’t have known which one I’d eat.

I like most doughnuts, especially Spudnut doughnuts—but the glazed one I ended up with, covered with pink sprinkles, was not one of my favorites. But the point of eating was to give everyone time and reason to cool off.

“You kill Darryl, and I don’t think you’re going to walk out of here alive,” I said, conversationally, around a bite of glazed-with-sprinkles doughnut. I ignored Darryl’s indignant grunt when I agreed that Aiden might actually accomplish his death.

“I’ve faced creatures that would kill every living thing in this house without an effort, and I’m still alive,” he said grimly. “Try me.”

“Good doughnuts, Christy,” I said. Jesse put her finger to her lips when her mother would have said something. I licked my fingers—a waste of time until I finished the doughnut. “Look, Aiden, you are counting on our being enough that the Gray Lords back off, right? If the Gray Lords are afraid of us, don’t you think you should at least consider being afraid enough to back down from outright aggression into a position where negotiation can take place? If you aren’t worried about us, I might point out that the Dark Smith of Drontheim is upstairs.”

The tile under Aiden’s feet cracked with a loud pop, but he stood up from his defensive crouch. The tiles surrounding the cracked tile were discolored by the heat he was generating. It was ceramic tile. I wasn’t sure how much heat was required to crack ceramic tile, though I rather suspected that it was less heat than was needed to burn a house to the ground. We all stared at it a moment—even Aiden.

“My floor,” gasped Christy.

Yes. She had picked out the tiles in the kitchen, hadn’t she? I regarded Aiden with a little more favor than I’d felt before.

“Information first,” I said. “Does anyone want to tell me what happened?”

“I was watching the bacon,” Jesse said coolly. “And the next thing I know, the little creep was grabbing my butt.”

I trust I caught my instinctive clench of teeth before anyone saw it. No one touches my daughter without her permission—since Darryl had already made that clear, there was no need for me to come unhinged. Adam, whom I could sense listening from his office—he must have left his door open—apparently felt the same way, because Aiden was still breathing and Adam wasn’t in the kitchen. Yet. I started a countdown in my head.

“They were treating me like a child,” Aiden said.

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Children are victims—I am neither child nor victim, despite what I look like. It was necessary that I do something to remind everyone that I might be in a child’s form, yet I own more years than anyone here.”