Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

“It’s a good pick,” I told him. “Not a weapon, but valuable all the same.”

“She never abandoned me,” he told me. “She gets very lonely.” He looked up at me. “Am I doing the right thing?”

“You aren’t doing anything wrong,” I told him. “There might be other right things you could do, but that’s not the same as doing something wrong. She isn’t alone anymore.”

He snorted. “The fae. They don’t appreciate her—they use her like a slave, with no more thought to her than they give their shoes—less.”

And that didn’t sound like someone repeating a rant they’d heard once too often, I thought.

“We’ll tell Beauclaire that’s how she feels about the fae. Maybe they can do something about it,” I told him. “If you want to stay here, that’s something different. But thinking that you are the only one who can possibly keep her company—that’s a trap.”

—

We ate lunch from our packs and drank from our canteens.

“Is there a reason that we need to sleep here instead of heading out?” I asked, gathering our garbage and, after putting it into a plastic bag, stuffing it into the pack.

“It might take us a while to find a door to leave,” he said. “I can hurry it along a bit—that’s the real trick. Underhill can’t seal the doors from the inside, but she can make it hard to find them. That’s why she locked the fae out, and not in.” He got to his feet and paced a bit. “Night’s dangerous, more dangerous, here. It’s safer if we leave at first light in the morning.”

And this was lunchtime. I looked at Aiden pacing and exchanged a glance with Adam.

“Okay,” I said brightly. “While we wait for nighttime, why don’t we tell each other stories?”

So I told him about Bran, the Marrok, and what growing up a coyote in the woods of northwestern Montana had been like. He told me stories about living in Underhill, the creatures terrible and wonderful who made their homes here. Once he warmed up, he was a pretty good storyteller—and I developed a new perspective on Underhill, who had first appeared to him as a small girl, though she sometimes was a great lady or an animal.

She was not evil, just . . . thoughtless. She was like a toddler who breaks her toys because she doesn’t know any better. Doesn’t realize that once they are broken, they will never play with her again. After she had killed Aiden’s friend Willy, she had mourned him for a very long time. But she didn’t learn from her errors—it sounded as though she’d been hardwired to be who she was.

She had damaged Aiden more than she would have been able to if she had truly been evil, I thought. Because sometimes she was funny and good company, and at other times she was vicious. She couldn’t, herself, hurt someone. But she could taint food, turn the weather foul, or attract one of the dangerous ones (Aiden’s term) wherever she wanted. Aiden was alive because Underhill loved him.

Eventually, the storytelling wound down, and we ate dinner. Aiden fell asleep. Adam got up from the rug he’d claimed and sat next to me, his muzzle on my thigh.

She’s not going to let him go easily, he told me.

“I caught that.” I threaded my fingers through his fur. “It’s a good thing that we have the walking stick.” Sometime during the storytelling, the stick had appeared in my lap. “It should show us the way home.”

—

There was, I noticed, a faint green light that danced in the runes etched on the silver of the head of the walking stick. Aiden turned and, when I followed, the glow faded. I stopped and moved the walking stick in the direction we’d been headed. The green glow returned.

It wasn’t the way the walking stick had shown me how to get home last time, but it was clearly unhappy about following Aiden.

“Wrong way,” I said. “Home is this way.”

“Right,” said Aiden. “But we have to go around until we can find a way down.”

Down?

I leaned the walking stick against Adam’s shoulder, unwilling to merely set it on the ground—or hand it to Aiden, though I wasn’t sure why. When I did, I saw that the others had been climbing up a steep mountain—though the whole time I’d been walking on a flat cave floor. The direction the walking stick wanted us to go appeared to be an impassable cliff face.

“I see,” I said. “Come here and give me your t-shirt.”

Aiden’s expression was a little wary, but he pulled his t-shirt off and handed it to me. I blindfolded him and, taking up the staff again, walked him through a tree root I’d seen when I wasn’t holding the staff.

“Okay,” I said. “That worked.”

I turned him around and had him walk the same path. He stumbled over the root—I caught him before he fell. He reached up to take off his blindfold, and I tapped his hand. “Leave it for a minute. Trust me.”

“You just made me trip,” he said.

“You didn’t get hurt,” I told him.

Adam posed a different problem. I wasn’t going to blindfold him. Not when something had been following us. We needed Adam free to act.

“Close your eyes and lean on me?” I asked. He did. And I took him over the same root—and he picked his feet up and stepped over the root because he paid attention to his environment.

But he followed me right off the cliff. Or where he thought the cliff would be, anyway.