Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(16)

I snorted. “You underestimate your mother’s ability to get people to perform in the Stupid Olympics for her.”

“Hah,” she said. “Maybe.”

“I didn’t come up to talk about that,” I said, waving my hand. “From what Adam said, all of the offending parties have apologized for being stupid without proving they won’t be stupid again. Which is all you can expect from people who are basically truthful.”

She smiled. “To be fair, Mom can get me to compete in the Stupid Olympics, too. I can’t afford to be too judgmental. But if someone is keeping achievement award points, for the record, I think Auriele won, hands down.” Her mouth tightened, but she continued, “So what did you come up here for?”

“Gabriel left you a note when he moved out of my place.” I held out the key to the house and then tossed it on the bed. “Your father didn’t see it, I don’t think. I left it where it was and didn’t open it.”

Her face paled and her nose reddened. She wiped her eyes carefully so as not to smudge her eyeliner. I could have told her that was a lost cause. “This day just couldn’t get any better,” she muttered.

“I never challenge the fates that way,” I told her.

She smiled absently and focused on my face. “Did you and Dad have a fight?”

I glanced at the mirror on the top of her bureau. Jesse wasn’t the only one who looked like she’d spent some time crying.

Damn it.

“Not as such,” I said.

I caught myself before I told her that Adam was working out some issues—though he’d been frustratingly unclear about exactly what those issues were. I wasn’t going to invite her into our marriage any more than I’d discuss things with Zee and Tad.

“I hope you set him straight,” Jesse told me. “He’s been unreasonable and grouchy for long enough.”

“Can’t argue with that,” I muttered, wondering if I was breaking my rule about involving Jesse in my relationship with her dad if she was the one doing the commenting.

“So why have you been crying?” Jesse asked. “Did he say something?”

No. At least not the way she meant it. Her father was shutting me out, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. That had been only one of the reasons I’d broken down and cried all over Adam tonight.

I said, “Dennis and Anna Cather are dead.” And I teared up again, damn it, this time for my friends.

We hadn’t done a lot together after Adam and I got married. Part of that had been the change in proximity. Though Adam’s house was no farther from theirs than my old one had been, it was on a different street—no more driving past their house every day on the way to work and waving at them as they ate breakfast on their front porch. Like me, they had been early risers.

Mostly, though, I’d limited our interactions out of concern for them. For years I’d flown under the radar of the bigger nasties around. Once I’d married Adam, flying low had no longer been an option. I was exposed to the supernatural community—and even among normal people I drew attention. I didn’t want to give the bad guys any more targets than necessary, so I’d restricted the amount of time I spent among people who couldn’t defend themselves from the kinds of enemies I now attracted—like the Hardesty witches as only the most recent example.

I don’t know why I hadn’t considered that angle on their deaths earlier. I’d been thinking it had something to do with Underhill’s door. Had the Cathers been targeted because they were connected to me?

Jesse jumped off the bed to hug me. “Mercy. Oh jeez. Anna and Dennis? What happened? Car wreck?”

She hadn’t known them well, but she knew who they were.

I hugged her back and stepped away. “Stop that or I’ll turn into a wet noodle and I need to keep it together.”

She gave me a sympathetic nod. “Boy, do I know how that feels. Joel sent his wife up. Lucia’s a hugger, which is awesome, but that’s why my eyes look like this. I managed to deflect her with helping me clean or else I’d still be bawling.” Which explained the mystery of how fast Jesse’s room had been cleaned. “What happened to Anna and Dennis?”

“Magic,” I told her, and then I gave her the full story as I knew it. If there was something running around that could cause Dennis to kill Anna, I wanted everyone I cared about to know about it.

“Witches?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Wrong kind of magic, I think. At least it doesn’t feel like any witchcraft I’ve ever been around. And there aren’t any witches around here anymore.” Not that we knew about, anyway. We’d killed them all. “It didn’t smell like fae magic, either.”

“Well, that shoots down my other thought,” she said. “With a door to Underhill in our own freaking backyard, I thought maybe something other than Aiden’s dangerous best friend had come strolling out.”

“I wouldn’t rule anything out about Underhill,” I said darkly. “But it’s a lot harder to get out of Underhill than into her.” I looked at the key that Jesse had clenched in her fist—and thought about her going past Underhill’s door to get to my mobile home.

“I hate to say this,” I told Jesse, “but I think that maybe you might want to wait until daylight before you go over to the house to retrieve the letter.”