Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

He took them, looked at me, then glanced over his shoulder at Adam, who was standing beside the black SUV in the parade-rest position that he habitually fell into when waiting for someone. Zee had the hood of the SUV up and was tinkering.

I frowned at Zee. There was nothing wrong with the SUV. I kept all of our cars in excellent running condition.

“You should come visit us in San Francisco,” Thomas said, his voice quiet. “I would be delighted to serve as your escort.” Then he smiled. A real smile. He didn’t have Adam’s dimples, but it was a good smile anyway. “In the purely tourist sense of the word.”

“We’ll do that,” I said. “Margaret and I had fun.”

Margaret opened her eyes and, in a sleepy voice, said, “Take care, Mercy. And thank you. I hope not to need the big guns.”

I laughed. “I think you’ll find that your guns are plenty. Safe travels.”

Thomas turned and headed for the hotel entrance.

I stalked to the SUV, and said, “There is nothing wrong with the SUV.” Zee kept tinkering. I stood on my tiptoes to see what he was doing. “Is there?”

Zee removed himself from under the hood and held up a small device. “Not anymore. Someone’s been tracking you.”

Adam held his hand out, looked at the device, and snorted. He passed it to me. It bore a neat label with the SUV maker’s logo on it. I’d never had to do anything more complicated than an oil change on the SUV. If I’d noticed the little box, I’d have assumed it belonged.

“Feds, I bet,” Adam said. “We are persons of interest.”

“How did you find it?” I asked Zee.

“Nothing you could do, Liebling,” he said. “I felt it transmit. It didn’t bother me much, but since we had a moment here, I thought I’d take a look.”

Adam stuck it under the bumper of the Chevy parked next to the SUV. The Chevy bore all the signs of a rental vehicle, including a license-plate surround that advertised for Enterprise. I patted its trunk. “May someone rent you for a very long drive to Alaska,” I told it.

Adam snorted, then asked Zee, “Could you tell how long it has been there?”

Zee nodded. “Six months, maybe a bit more. Someone wants to keep tabs on you, Adam.”

This time it was my turn to snort. “If I’d known it was there, we could have done something more interesting—like drive out to the middle of the Hanford Reach every full moon and park for the night.” Which we did, mostly. We had other hunting spots, but the Reach was the best. “Sorry I didn’t find it, Adam. I’ll keep a better eye out next time.”

“No worries,” said Adam softly. “I’ll have a talk with a few people I know about boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. It won’t happen again.”

—

We arrived home to find every door and window in the house open, and the smell of burning wool in the air.

“Hey, Boss,” said Warren, as we came through the doorway, his expression somewhere between pained and amused. “We had a little mishap. Aiden was sleeping when his blankets burst into flame. Happily, Mary Jo was here. While we were all trying to figure out what to do—besides hold our ears to try to shut out the fire alarm—she grabbed the fire extinguisher from the garage and put the fire out. Mattress is a goner, but the room’s okay. We have the situation under control.”

About that time, Mary Jo came up the stairs, carrying an armful of sodden, blackened fabric that had at one time been a Pendleton wool blanket. She looked at me, and said, “Life is never boring around here.” Then she grinned at me, an expression she hadn’t turned on me in a very long while. “Your fire demon says that he needs to leave. We convinced him that it would be rude to leave before you got back, but I’m not sure we could have kept him here much longer.”

As she finished speaking, Aiden came up the stairs. His hair was wet, and he was wearing sweats from the pack stores—I made a mental note that we were going to have to get him clothes if he was going to stay here long.

“My apologies,” he said as soon as he reached the landing. He didn’t look at either of us. “I am not safe to be around. I didn’t light fires in my sleep when I was in Underhill—at least, not that I know of. I will find somewhere else to sleep tonight. I appreciate the help you have given me thus far.”

“Why are you planning on leaving?” Adam asked.

That made Aiden raise his face briefly. “I have damaged your home.”

Adam shrugged. “We house werewolves here, Aiden. I don’t think anyone has tried to burn the house down before—”

“No,” I agreed, “that was my house.”

Adam gave me a rueful grimace. “At least you weren’t in it. Werewolves can be very destructive. My contractor sends me Christmas cards and most-valuable-customer presents every year.”

“And this time the damage was confined to a mattress and some bedding,” I told him. “That’s cheap by werewolf standards.”

“The mattress might have been all right,” Mary Jo said, “if Ben hadn’t dumped a five-gallon bucket of water on it. I told him I had it under control with the fire extinguisher. So the mattress isn’t really Aiden’s fault.” She wrinkled her nose. “Excuse me, though, I’m going to get rid of this blanket.”

Aiden opened his mouth, then shut it again.

“No worries,” Adam said. “We’ll just make sure to keep a fire extinguisher around. Until the situation with the fae stabilizes, we’ll have to have twenty-four/seven guards at the house anyway. I’ll just make sure that they keep watch for fire, too.”