Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

She passed a couple of doors on her left before opening the door on her right, discreetly marked WALLA WALLA. She waited while we flowed around her to precede her into the room. There was a conference table and someone, maybe the hotel, had put bright bouquets of carnations in shades of red on either end of the long table. Five people were already seated on the side of the table that faced the entry door, two more stood against the far wall in parade rest. All of the fae were wearing their human glamour.

I knew some of them. Beauclaire, the handsome former lawyer who’d declared fae independence, was seated on the far left. Next to him was a dark-haired woman whose sunglasses concealed her blind eyes—Nemane, the Morrigan, who’d once been the Irish goddess of battle. I didn’t know the man next to her. He was pale-skinned, bald, and fine-boned, with bulging eyes and broken blood vessels on the sides of his nose that were so bad it was almost hard to focus on anything else. Next to him was an extraordinarily beautiful woman with childlike features, porcelain skin, and deep red lips. The final seated person was a middle-aged woman who was comfortably plump and clothed in a badly fitting, three-piece business suit in salmon pink. Her hair was gray and brown, and her features were absolutely unremarkable.

The two people who stood before the wall were Uncle Mike and Edythe, who I still thought of as Yo-yo Girl because the first time I’d seen her, she’d been playing with a yo-yo. Edythe looked like a young girl—like Aiden, she appeared to be somewhere between nine and eleven. Unlike Aiden, she chose that guise because she enjoyed looking like a victim. Which she very much wasn’t. I’d seen her do some scary stuff and watched other fae skittle out of her path. She met my eyes and gave me an ironic lift of an eyebrow. Apparently, Margaret’s magic wasn’t working for her. The two Gray Lords who knew me looked past me without the hesitation that they’d have given if they’d really seen me, and so did Uncle Mike. I filed Edythe’s immunity in the mental file I kept marked Why Edythe/Yo-yo Girl Is Scary. It was a big file.

Margaret looked at the five people seated on the opposite side of the table, letting her gaze linger meaningfully on the last two. “You told me there would be three of you,” Margaret said coolly. “Do the fae negotiate in falsehoods now?”

“It’s my fault, Margaret,” said the beautiful woman in a husky voice that I’d last heard coming out of Adam’s phone a few hours earlier. “I was visiting this reservation and heard that you were expected. My associate”—she touched the middle-aged woman’s arm lightly—“and I asked to be included for old times’ sake. I once knew your father very well, and I couldn’t resist the chance to see his daughter.”

Margaret spread her hands, as if to display herself. “As you now do.”

“You look bad,” said the man who sat in the middle seat. His voice, high and fussy, fit his outwardly meek appearance. “You need to come home with us, and we will see you restored to your proper self. It’s been several years since the incident, hasn’t it? So it is obvious that you need help to recover from your ordeal.”

Margaret directed her attention at him even as she waved a hand over her shoulder at us, and we four spread out on the wall behind her. The door was on the far left-hand side of the wall, so we didn’t have to worry about anyone’s coming in from outside between us.

She walked with painful slowness—more slowly than I’d seen her move before, in fact. When she reached the table, she pulled out a chair left of the middle, directly in front of Nemane. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate, or if the chair was closer to the door so she didn’t have to walk so far.

She took her time seating herself and arranging her crutches so that everyone in the room could see just how crippled she was. Only when she was comfortably seated in the leather executive chair did she speak.

“Incident,” she said. “What a curious word. ‘Incident.’ So . . . bland and small. I truly appreciate your words, Goreu, but I think not. I am healing at precisely the correct rate for full recovery.”

Goreu. I should remember something about that name. I’d been reading a lot of stories about the fae lately. Goreu sounded like it should be French, but I was thinking it came from The Mabinogion, which was Welsh.

“You are fae,” said the beautiful woman. “You belong to us.”

I couldn’t see Margaret’s expression, since I was directly behind her, but a raised eyebrow was evident in her voice anyway. “Curious choice of words. I do not belong to you.”

“You are fae, child,” said Nemane. She took a deep breath through her nose, tilted her head in a birdlike gesture—and smiled at me. She couldn’t see me. But Nemane didn’t need her eyes for much. She chose not to say anything. My dealings with her had been almost friendly, but she wasn’t an ally. Instead of asking Margaret why she’d brought the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack and his mate to a fae meeting, she said carefully, “Neuth chose her words poorly. You belong with us.”

“You think so, do you?” asked Margaret. “I disagree. Which I have explained in several letters, e-mails, and one . . . no, two phone calls, if you count the one where I hung up on the Council representative. I am here, now, to explain it in person. I will not go. I will not put myself in your power. I have been under the power of the fae before, and I will not do it again.”

“You are fae,” Beauclaire began carefully, but Goreu went on the attack before Beauclaire could make his point.