Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(63)

“I was assured of her demise five or six years ago,” he agreed. He could remember that I had not glitter-bombed his office when I was fifteen, but he didn’t remember how long ago Fiona had died?

“Did you have her killed?” I asked, remembering the bitterness in Fiona’s voice.

“I would have,” he told me. “But no. She was working for a witch and the deal went bad.”

“Deals with witches frequently go bad,” I muttered.

“Exactly so,” he said gently. “You should tell Adam that the Palsics and Chen Li Qiang I would prefer saved if possible. Kent? Other than which pack he is affiliated or not affiliated with, I haven’t heard anything about Kent since the sixties, which I find concerning. Either he is hiding from me, or he has settled down into a boring life with a small blip when he joined the rebels in Galveston.”

“We don’t work for you anymore,” I said dryly. “You can’t just dictate to us.”

“Why am I helping you, then?” he asked equally dryly.

He had a point. And we’d try to do what he asked as far as the Palsics and Chen were concerned. I’d seen Carlos’s face when he talked about Chen. And I’d found myself liking James Palsic. I didn’t know about Nonnie—she hadn’t done or said anything remarkable, but it might be nice to have another woman in the pack. But I’d had to give Bran a hard time about his assumption that we’d obey his orders, if only for form’s sake.

“Okay,” I conceded. “I will inform Adam that you suggest that we should kill Fiona—and her mate?”

“Mate?” Bran asked.

“Harolford,” I told him.

“I’d forgotten about Harolford,” he said. “But by all means kill Harolford, too. Just remember that Fiona is the more dangerous of the two.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “We’ll do our best to absorb the Palsics and Chen into the pack and make up our own minds about Kent.”

“Good girl,” he said, and I could hear the squeak of his chair and knew he was leaning back in it. That was how you always knew he was happy with you.

And if I was pleased about making him happy, I was sure as shooting not going to let him know that.

“So have I solved one of your problems?” he asked.

“Nope,” I told him promptly. “But you’ve told me how you see it—and you have more information than we do. And I know that you are rooting for this experiment—our pack, the fae, and the vampires working together for the good of all—to work, so you are on our side in this. Which means we will take your advice seriously. And that, oh Marrok, makes it easier for us to solve our own problem.”

“Good,” he said, sounding pleased again. Making me think for myself, was he? As long as I thought what he wanted me to think, he liked it when I thought for myself.

“Now, about your problem with Wulfe.” His voice grew darker and arctic.

Just from that tone, I realized that someone had told Bran that Wulfe had been the reason that Bonarata, the king of the vampires (or at least the de facto ruler of the vampires), had captured me and taken me to Europe. Bonarata had asked Wulfe who the most dangerous person in the Tri-Cities was. Wulfe, who has an abysmal sense of humor as well as an almost fae-like ability to lie with the truth, told Bonarata that it was me. I am still not quite sure of the logic that Wulfe used.

“I think you can leave Wulfe to Adam and me,” I said hastily. “He’s just playing, I think. He saved my life. I don’t mean that he’s one of the good guys, but . . .” I drew in a breath and centered myself.

I didn’t want Bran to come destroy Wulfe, because it would be wrong. He had done nothing, up to this point, that deserved aiming Bran at him. Besides, I tried really hard not to aim Bran at anyone. I had a policy of not using nuclear devices to take out pesky flies because that tended to yield mixed results. I tamped down the small voice that wondered if even Bran could take on Wulfe. I needed Bran to be immortal and unstoppable.

Right this moment, I had to convince Bran not to kill Wulfe.

“I hurt him—badly, I think,” I told Bran. “He was trying to help us for whatever twisted reason guides him—maybe because Marsilia asked him, maybe because he was bored. But he was trying to help us and got caught in the backlash of me trying to lay the spirits of zombies to rest. It broke something inside him.”

Bran muttered something that might have been, “I can break something inside him, too.”

“Bonarata broke him for real a long time ago,” I told Bran. “Wulfe is a wizard and a vampire and a witch.” That last might be a secret. I certainly hadn’t known it before the Night of the Zombies, as Ben liked to call it. But I needed Bran to understand about Wulfe so he didn’t just have him eliminated the way he’d just assigned us to eliminate Fiona. “He has spilled blood for Bonarata and for Marsilia for centuries. Tortured and killed for centuries.”

Into my dramatic pause, Bran said, with palpable irony, “Yes, Mercy, I know.”

“And his witchcraft is white.”

This time the pause was his.

“Exactly,” I said. “He is a lost soul wandering in the darkness . . .”

“Drivel,” said Bran, who had written that particular line for a rather beautiful song I’d heard him sing once. I think the song was a few centuries old—but he had written it.