Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

Margaret nodded.

“Right,” I said. “That’s whose pack she found. He agreed to take me—but she couldn’t come with. She decided that it was the best place for me.” Mom never said exactly what had made her decide to do that, but I figured it was pretty bad, considering the stories she did tell me. I did know that she’d negotiated for visitation rights over Bran’s objections. “So I was raised by a pretty neat couple. She was human, and he was werewolf. She died, and he committed suicide to be with her. I was fourteen, and I didn’t want to live with anyone else, so Bran let me live on my own.” Bran was from an age when fourteen was an adult. “I was raised a coyote in a werewolf pack. I know exactly what it feels like not to have anyone to talk to. Tell me as much or as little as you’d like. I won’t swear not to tell Adam, he’s my mate. But if I’m a well, he’s a . . . bottomless pit.” I glanced at Margaret, then looked back at the road. “When we last left you, you were alone, chained in the dark, and hearing monsters.”

“Thomas found me there,” Margaret said, but she sounded more comfortable. Good. I’d worried that the “monster” talk would throw her. If so, she didn’t stand a chance taking on someone as . . . closed as Thomas. He reminded me of my foster brother Charles, and, for Charles, it had taken an Omega wolf with a backbone of titanium to learn how to make a relationship work. Omega wolves didn’t come around very often; maybe a fairy princess would do.

“He was . . . he was a very, very angry man. I asked for his help. He refused. I asked him what he wanted, and he said . . . no, that’s not right. He wanted. I felt what he wanted as if it were water, and he’d doused me in it, so I could feel his need in my bones. But what he asked for was to feed from me.”

There was a long moment as she weighed what had happened with how much she wanted to tell me. She smiled. “I was frightened—but not so frightened I didn’t see the hurt that caused his anger. I didn’t think he’d be happy to know how easy it was for me to see.”

She took a breath.

“I gave him what he wanted as well as what he asked for, even though he’d done that last because he knew I’d refuse. That I’d give him an excuse to walk off. If I’d known him then as well as I do now, I’d have known there was no way he’d have left me. I’m not sure Thomas knows that.” She gave me an incredulous look. “Talking. Who would have thought talking to someone would be so useful. I bet he, too, needs to know that he would not have left me there.”

Oh, I knew that battle. “Good luck,” I said. “When your man is responsible for the world, heaven forbid they aren’t guilty of every little thing.”

She giggled. Looked at me and broke down in whoops of amusement. “Isn’t that the truth, now,” she said when she quieted, wiping her eyes.

She laughed again and shook her head. “Anyway. We struck a bargain that night, but it was more than either of us expected. There is magic in bargaining with one of my kind that has nothing to do with what I had the power to do or not do. There, that’s some repayment for you. That’s why so many of the fae are willing to strike odd bargains—they can gain power from it. And mine wasn’t the only bargain present that night. Thomas’s father had bargained with the master vampire who made him. Two bargains in the Heart of the Hill—there is power in the deep places of the earth, Mercy. There was also my fire magic, tempered to a stronger force by my royal birth and his . . .” She hesitated. “Some things are his secrets to give. But there is magic in Thomas’s heritage, too. I gave him three gifts. His freedom from the vampire who had bound him—that was Thomas’s own power made manifest. From my magic, I—” She sucked in a breath. “You are easy to talk to. I think that is something else that belongs to Thomas.”

I nodded. “I can live with that.” It was the truth, but I was very curious anyway.

She laughed. “That was almost a lie.” She looked at me. “I tell you what. I’ll tell Thomas what we talked about, and he can tell you if he chooses.”

“I can live with that better,” I said. “Or at least, it isn’t any worse.” But then I got an inkling. A terrible horrible very, very scary inkling.

No normal vampire would have chosen a hotel like the Marriott. There were too many windows—and the ones in their room all faced the east, where the sun would rise.

And Margaret said that her power, like her father’s, came from the sun.

Unbidden, I remembered walking at night once with Stefan, a friend who was a vampire. At one point, he stopped, looked up at the moon, and said, totally out of the blue, “I miss the sun.” And the last word sounded as though it had been dragged up from the depths of his being. If someone asked Stefan what he would wish for, I think that the ability to walk in sunlight would be very high on that list.

Could Thomas walk in the sun?

As soon as I thought that, terror screamed up my backbone. Vampires are evil. Even though I like some of them, I know that they are evil. Symbols of faith can work against them, repel them and cause them pain. Wood works against vampires because it was something that once was living that became dead—sympathetic magic of a sort. But it is sunshine that is the real weapon against vampires.

“Mercy?” Margaret said, her voice concerned.

That was a secret too dangerous for anyone to have. They would hunt him down. Which they? All of “they.” Vampires would hunt him down to steal his secret. Everyone else would hunt him down to kill him to get rid of the fear I had coiled in my stomach.