Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(95)

We saw them off. They drove an Accord with a V6. I don’t know what happened to the bug I’d repaired for James.

Once they were gone, we dusted ourselves off and looked at our available rides home.

“My car is fine,” Jesse said cheerfully. “Dad, you and Mercy have got to take better care of your stuff. Do you think that money grows on trees?”



* * *



? ? ?

Joel took a few hours to downgrade from his tibicena form to the presa Canario. But the more-mortal dog showed no signs of having been shot. A few hours later—without help from Aiden—Joel was able to wear his human self for the rest of the night. Despite Adam’s belief that Joel’s unexpectedly long stint as a human was a result of the time Joel had spent in tibicena form, any number of the pack offered to shoot him again—or get Libby, the sharpshooting heroine of the hour, to do it.

I called Beauclaire and told him most of what happened to Rumpelstiltskin. And warned him that Underhill was amassing power for something.

“Yes,” he said, “we have noticed.”

I almost said, Thanks for the warning, but not thanking the fae is a good general rule for people who want to live a healthy and free life. The same could probably be said for sarcasm.

Instead I said, carefully, “The clues that you gave to me when we talked were instrumental in allowing me to identify Rumpelstiltskin.”

“I am happy that I was of service,” he said.

“May I ask one question?”

“Of course.”

“Why did Rumpelstiltskin’s magic not feel like fae magic to me?”

“He is of an older lineage. Most of them were gone when I first came to the earth—and that was a good long time ago. The reason he survives is probably because of the friendship he developed with Underhill.”

“Friendship?” I said.

“Not all relationships look alike,” he said.

“Indeed,” I agreed. “Are we friends?” I probably should have waited until I’d had a good night’s sleep before calling him, I thought. That was not a safe question.

He laughed. “Perhaps tentative allies? Definitions are not always useful, are they? Mercedes, thank you for dealing with the smoke weaver. We will open our gates at dawn and allow our people to go about their business.”

He had thanked me. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

“Good,” I said.

I called Marsilia next, but she did not pick up the phone. Five minutes later she called Adam.

He told her basically the same story I’d just conveyed to Beauclaire—edited for the audience.

“Ah, that explains Stefan’s sudden improvement,” she told him. “We despaired of his survival the past few nights, but he held on.”

I remembered how bad he had been when I’d seen him in my otherness. “Can we go see him?”

She heard me. “No. He wouldn’t want you to see him this way. I will call you as soon as he is better—or should he worsen again.”

And I had to be satisfied with that.

Like Stefan, Ben didn’t just step back into who he had been before the weaver had taken him. Being in someone else’s power was pretty much a reliving of his worst nightmare. He had four weeks of vacation time built up at work, and he took those and stayed with us.

The goblins found Harolford’s body in a shallow grave near the river. Dead from a silver bullet wound, presumably Libby’s. I asked, but all of the witnesses were pretty sure that Fiona could not have known who it was that shot him.

The goblins did not bring us the body. They texted photos to Adam’s phone. When Adam asked what they’d done with it, Larry the goblin king laughed and said, “Finders keepers,” before he disconnected.

Fiona was still a problem.

We stayed on high alert and bunked up for the three days following the banishing of the smoke weaver. But when Charles called with news that Fiona had been sighted in Wichita, Adam told everyone to go back to normal.

“People can only stay alert for so long,” he told me. “And she is only one werewolf.”

“Charles is only one werewolf,” I told him, and he laughed.

Adam was doing . . . “better” was the wrong word. More stable was probably closer to the answer. There had been no further appearances of the monster, and when the moon hunt came, Adam wore his wolf’s form just as he usually did.

But I had seen his wolf fading, and I worried. The pack was uneasy, though no violence broke out. Adam still would not open our bond. But he put back on some of the weight he had lost and he did not seem to be getting worse, so I bided my time. I had a date circled on the calendar—and if matters did not change, I was going to have another conversation with Bran.

A month went by. Jesse started school and began looking for an apartment. Aiden started school, too.

We enrolled him in sixth grade, which was a compromise. He would look younger than most of his schoolmates but not so much so as to be an outcast. Tutoring by Jesse and the pack had brought his math skills up to high school level, but his reading skills were below sixth-grade level. The translation spell did not help him read or write in English.

We had none of the paperwork for him, but Adam and I sat down with the school district superintendent and told him the whole story, a heavily edited version of the whole story. We didn’t tell him about the fire, just that we’d found Aiden in Underhill, where he’d been trapped for a very long time. We didn’t tell him that Aiden could burn the school down if he wanted to. I figured that most kids in sixth grade could burn down a school if they wanted to anyway—they would just have to work a little harder at it than Aiden would.