Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(90)

“Moving to the New World was a desperate move, revealing themselves to mankind again was a desperate move, creating the reservations was an even more desperate move. The latter paid off, or so they thought. In the wilds of western North America, where cold iron doesn’t have the weight of history that it has here, they were able to reopen the ways to Underhill in the territories they controlled. Places where cold iron and Christianity had no hold. So they flipped the bird at the humans and retreated, expecting that they could run from this world.”

Arrested, Bonarata absorbed that. When Adam started to speak, the vampire held up a hand. “I had not heard . . . a moment, please.”

Adam went back to eating. Maybe if he weren’t hungry, if he hadn’t been a soldier, the tension in the room would have ruined his appetite. Maybe.

“They opened the old ways,” Bonarata said, “but they did not find what they expected.”

Adam nodded. “Exactly. Underhill wasn’t happy with them—wasn’t entirely sane—and had no intention of allowing them to return and reign in their old, arrogant fashion.”

“Leaving the fae trapped in a cage of their own making,” the vampire said.

Adam nodded. “They had some choices. One of them was to go out fighting. Even a hundred years ago, they might have won a war with the humans, though I doubt it. They have the power, but the fae just don’t have the numbers—and a fair percentage of them would rather kill other fae first, then go kill the humans. Now? With modern weapons? I don’t think it is a fight they can win, and neither do most of them. But the fae still have the kind of power that could make it a war with no winners.” He brought his fists up together, made a quiet explosive sound, and opened his fists like fireworks. “Everybody dies. Some of the fae find this a very attractive option, death in the glory of battle.”

Bonarata snorted inelegantly. “Morons,” he said. “Where is the glory if there is no one left to tell the story?”

“Thankfully, most of the Gray Lords agree with you,” Adam said. “They had locked themselves in their fortress. But the fae are not vampires or werewolves, who can live in peace with their brethren.” His wolf laughed at that. Fae living together in peace? Werewolves maybe, if the Marrok were there to bang heads together. Vampires? Still, one must flatter one’s host, and the vampires were better, generally, at living together than the fae were.

“If they kept their people trapped in the reservations for much longer, they would die at their own hands.” Adam only voiced what was obvious to everyone here who knew the fae. “They were already starting to murder and torture their own—out of sheer boredom, I think.”

“If they are to return to the world, they have to negotiate with humans again,” Bonarata mused. “But now they have thoroughly schooled their hosts in exactly how scary, how powerful they really are. How could they reestablish communications after that?” He gave Adam a doubtful look, clearly indicating he didn’t think Adam was up to the task.

“I don’t think you understand just what Adam is to the humans,” Marsilia said. “He was a celebrity werewolf almost from the first moment the werewolves came out. He’s good to look at, and he understands how to walk in the halls of power. He was respected by the military-industrial complex of the US before it was known that he was a werewolf. He was a person trusted by high-level military and political people. So he helped to weave relationships between the werewolves and humans.” Here Marsilia paused to smile wryly. “And then Mercy took a handful of Adam’s pack and killed a troll to save the humans. They risked their lives and were hurt in a battle they could have avoided. But they put themselves between the fae bad guys and the humans and turned themselves into heroes. They are celebrities.”

“Stupid of us,” Adam said. “Because it gave the Gray Lords an idea.”

“You were set up,” Bonarata said sitting forward. In a hushed, power-filled voice, he said, “They set you up. Set you up to be a hero, pretended to be afraid of you so that the humans would believe you could make the fae behave.”

Bonarata was being surprisingly reasonable for a man who had just lost one of his pets. Elizaveta had said the collar was almost out of power, hadn’t she? And the witch who had made it was no longer working for Bonarata. Maybe Lenka’s death hadn’t been as unplanned as it had seemed.

“The fact is,” Adam said, addressing the issue at hand, “no one believes the fae are afraid of me. Not the fae. Not the humans. Certainly not me. What they believe, because we have done it, is that we will fight to the death to protect the humans in our territory. But, I can tell you that if a fae steps wrong in my city, I won’t have to lift a finger to destroy him, because the fae themselves will do it for me. We have a treaty signed in blood to that effect.”

Marsilia cleared her throat, and Adam thought back over his words.

“Destroy him or her,” he said. “The humans believe that we can protect them—and we can. They are mistaken, a little, because they don’t know about that treaty, about why we can protect them. The fae know that the Gray Lords will kill to protect that treaty. And the fae are afraid of the Gray Lords.”

“Most important,” Marsilia said, “is that the humans don’t just think Adam and his pack can protect them—they know that Adam will protect them. He is a superhero—like Wolverine or Spider-Man.”