Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(85)

“Tell me,” Adam said.

“I can’t tell you his name—I think that might attract his attention in the wrong way.”

“But you’ve worked it out?” he asked.

I nodded. “Maybe. Probably. He’s not powerful as the fae go.”

Adam gave me a look.

“Really. Outside of the power that Underhill gave him, he is one of the lesser fae.”

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“The fae are creatures whose lives are bound by rules. That they cannot lie being the core rule all of them must follow.” I handed him a protein bar. “Here, eat this.”

“I never thought of them that way,” Adam said, taking the bar and starting in on it. I immediately felt a little calmer.

“That’s because you usually deal with the powerful fae,” I told him. “The Gray Lords, Zee, Baba Yaga, and the like. The powerful fae have a lot fewer rules and they are bendy.”

“Okay,” he said. “Yes, I’ve noticed that.”

“The other important thing to remember about the rules is that they constrain all the fae. But only the fae.” I frowned. “Dang it. I think that the rule about lying has to be an exception, because we know that the fae actually can lie—they just suffer a horrible fate if they do.”

“Maybe that is the rule,” Adam suggested. “If a fae lies, they will suffer a horrible fate.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling better. “That fits. And the fae can’t lie without suffering a horrible fate. But we could lie to a fae.”

“Only if we have a death wish,” said Adam. “But I know what you mean. I could tell Zee that you love orange juice. Which he knows isn’t true. But I could say the words and not suffer a horrible fate.”

“Right,” I told him.

“The weaker the fae, the more rules they have?” Adam asked, pulling the conversation back to the point.

“Yes.” I looked up and realized he was taking the most direct route to the address we’d been given. “Could we make a stop at home before we go see what the smoke weaver has done to James Palsic?”

His eyebrows went up, but he made a minor course correction that would take us home first. I unwrapped another protein bar and handed it to him. His lip quirked up, but he took the bar.

I watched him eat and thought about how I wanted to frame the information I’d put together. I needed him to believe me so that he would agree to the plan I’d devoted a lot of time to yesterday while I had been fixing cars. Because that plan required a certain amount of risk on my part—which was something that was hard for Adam. But I was the only person who could do it.

“Take brownies,” I said. “The lowest caste of brownies have very specific rules. They must find good people. Once they do, they clean their homes or do work for them—and this makes the brownies happy. But they can do these things only so long as the people they are working for never see them and never say anything about them. They must be given milk and bread—but cannot be thanked aloud. If they are seen, thanked, or not fed, the brownies have to move on and find someone else to serve. They have no choice about any of it.”

“What rules does the smoke weaver have?” Adam asked.

“He has to make bargains,” I told him. “If one is offered to him properly, he has to accept. That’s how Underhill caught him in the first place. And there’s a rule about his name, too. People who know it can’t tell anyone what it is. Before Underhill got ahold of him, he had only one power, to transform one thing into another. It is an impressive power—but it is also very limited.”

“Tell that to James Palsic,” said Adam.

“Yes, well.” I waved that away. It shouldn’t matter to my plan. I hoped. “Tilly told me that the intent of her upgrade was that he would have an easier time making himself look like a specific person. It made me think that was a problem for him before she changed him. Like maybe he couldn’t make himself look very much like a person at all.”

Sorting through the implications of Tilly’s story had taken me most of yesterday.

“The way to defeat him is to use the rules that he has to follow,” I said. Baba Yaga had told me something of the sort.

“I can already tell,” Adam said, “that I’m not going to like this.”

“Here,” I said. “Eat another protein bar.”



* * *



? ? ?

I drove Jesse’s car to the address that Nonnie Palsic had given me. Adam would collect what I needed from home and then follow me out; hopefully it wouldn’t take too long.

It wasn’t that far from our house—maybe ten minutes in a direction I seldom took, one of those out-of-the-way places that didn’t lie on a direct route between our house and anywhere I was likely to need to go. It was out in the hill country between the Tri-Cities and Oregon where there was no water available for irrigation and not enough houses that the city would pipe water out. This late in the summer the hills were a pale dirt brown dusted with sparse remains of grass.

I turned up a well-tended gravel road and followed it for a quarter of a mile that twisted around with the lay of the land, no houses in sight. It took a final turn, climbed a steep grade, and popped out on the top of a hill, where it ended in an asphalt circular driveway laid out before a huge house. The house had been carefully placed to hide itself from the highway below without impacting the panoramic views. A narrow ring of bright green grass circled the house, and there were a few raised flower beds that were unplanted.