Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

Ben stepped back from the job and stretched. He had a long cut the length of his face from the tip of his eye, down his jaw, and onto his collarbone. It had mostly healed up, and he looked as though he’d been in a car wreck several days earlier. “My croaking fat frog will shag my fucking Aunt Fanny before I’ll go now,” he said. “Until we get matters straightened out with the fae, I’m living right the fucking hell here.”

And, as if in answer, the lights all over the world—or at least our part of the world—turned on as the power company figured out how to fix whatever the fae had done.

Ben took a bow and accepted the applause of the pack.

—

We spent the next couple of days repairing what we could and carting away what we couldn’t. Adam’s contractor friend was optimistic that the stucco on the front of the house could be saved.

Adam and I were repairing a planting bed crushed by the granite boulder when it landed on Paul, who was mostly back on his feet now. We were discussing the merits of a rosebush in place of the dogwood, which was not as tough as Paul and had suffered unrecoverable damage, when the house phone rang.

“I’ve got it,” called Jesse. I heard her voice as she answered the phone but didn’t catch what she said. Then she called brightly, “Hey, Dad. Baba Yaga is on the phone for you.”

I followed him into the kitchen, where Jesse stood with the handset. She gave it to him. Then she looked at me and raised her eyebrows in an exaggerated fashion that made her eyes bulge, and mouthed, “Baba Yaga. Really?”

I nodded and mouthed, “Really.”

She hugged herself and, as she passed by me on her way out of the room, she whispered, “Now, how many people have gotten to say that? ‘Hey, Dad. Baba Yaga is on the phone for you’?”

Aiden was coming in as she was going out. Fighting together seemed to have broken the cold war and initiated a detente between Jesse and Aiden.

Her tone was relaxed as she said, “Hey, short stuff. Offended anyone bigger than you lately?”

“Everyone is bigger than me, Daisy Duke,” he said.

His attempt at teasing was lame, but he was making an effort. Last night, the werewolves had run a Dukes of Hazzard marathon in Aiden’s honor. The whole pack were trying their best to help him climb into the modern era with the help of TV shows and movies. It might have been more effective if they’d chosen something filmed in this decade, but their hearts were in the right place. I hoped that Aiden didn’t think that cars really could jump rivers and barns and whatever.

He seemed to know that he’d gotten it wrong with the Daisy, but he cleared his throat and tried again. “Bigger is easy. Finding someone smaller to offend is a real challenge.”

“I’m sure you’re up for that, too,” Jesse said, teasing him back. “You show some real aptitude in that area.”

He grinned at her, but then he turned his attention to me. “The witch is calling for a meeting with the fae, right?”

Jesse paused, and they both looked at me.

“That’s what it sounds like,” I agreed.

“You need to take me to this meeting,” he said. “Zee says that Underhill won’t leave them alone. They can’t afford for me to escape.”

“We’re not giving you to them,” I told him.

“Excuse me,” said Adam. He covered the mouthpiece, looked Aiden in the eyes, and said, “You stay here. No question.”

Aiden opened his mouth to argue, but Adam stared him down. Only when Aiden dropped his eyes did Adam go back to his call.

—

We agreed to meet at Uncle Mike’s. It was as close as we could come to neutral territory. The once bar was in east Pasco near the river, on the edge of the industrial district. The bar had been shut down for more than half a year. I expected it to smell musty or unused. But when Uncle Mike opened the door, his face somber, it smelled exactly the way it always did: alcohol, sawdust, peanuts, and the scents of hundreds of individuals. The last were faded and mixed into a musk from which it would have been impossible to coax a single thread free. And it smelled of magic.

When it had been open, the light had been kept low. But all the lights were on, and it was nearly as bright as it would have been had there been windows. Most of the tables were stacked in a pyramid in one corner of the room, large tables on the bottom, smaller on top. The chairs were mostly stacked, too, awaiting the day when the bar reopened.

One of the big tables had been set in the middle of the mostly empty room, and chairs were set around it.

“The others are here,” said Uncle Mike, “in the back. I’ll get them.”

He left us, Adam and me, alone in the room. The rest of the pack, all of them, were at our house protecting Aiden and Jesse. Darryl hadn’t been happy that we weren’t taking any extra wolves with us. But the fae had no reason to kill us, and the pack could protect Aiden and keep him safe. Or else, I’d been happy to point out to Darryl, nothing we could do would keep anyone safe at all.

Uncle Mike returned, escorting Beauclaire and the bald man whom Margaret had forced to her will. Goreu. The discrepancy between what I would have expected from a knight of the round table, fictional though it was, and Goreu left me bitterly and irrationally disappointed. They’d brought the good fairy and the bad fairy. I looked at Beauclaire and frowned at him. He looked cool and composed, as he had every time I’d seen him. Maybe we were meeting the bad fairy and the worse fairy. I had expected to be facing more. We apparently weren’t, Adam and I, as important as Margaret. I might have been offended, except the fewer Gray Lords we sat down with, the more likely we would be to walk away alive.