Bone Crossed (Mercy Thompson #4)(29)

"Spoilsport," said the fae woman.

"Mary Jo is precious to our pack," I told her, bowing my head. "Her loss would have left a wound for many months to come. Your healing is a rare and marvelous gift."

Mary Jo gasped, and Paul forgot he was angry with me. He wasn't anything special to her or she to him. She was sweet on a very nice wolf named Henry, and Paul was married to a human I'd never met. But Mary Jo was pack.

I would have turned to her, too, but the fae held my eyes. Her thin-lipped mouth curved into a cold smile.

"This is the one, isn't it?"

"Yes," agreed Uncle Mike cautiously. He was a friend, usually. His caution told me two things. This fae might hurt me, and Uncle Mike, even in the center of his power, his tavern, didn't think he could stop her.

She looked me up and down with the air of an experienced cook at Saturday Market, examining tomatoes for blemishes. "I thought there would not be another coyote so rash as to climb the snow elf.

You owe me nothing for this, Green Man."

I'd heard Uncle Mike called Green Man before. I still wasn't sure exactly what it meant.

And when the fae reached those long fingers out and touched me, I wasn't worried about much other than my own furry hide.

"I did it because of you, coyote. Do you know how much chaos you have caused? The Morrigan says that is your gift. Rash, quick, and lucky, just like Coyote himself. But that old Trickster dies in his adventures - but you won't be able to put yourself back together with the dawn."

I didn't say anything. I'd thought her to be just another of the Tri-Cities fae, denizens (mostly) of Fairyland, the fae reservation just outside of Walla Walla, built either to keep us safe from the fae, or the fae safe from the rest of us. Her healing Mary Jo had given me a clue - healing with magic is no common or weak gift among the fae.

Uncle Mike's caution told me she was scary powerful.

"We'll have more words at a later date, Green Man." She looked back at me. "Who are you, little coyote, to cause the Great Ones such consternation? You broke our laws, yet your defiance of our ruling has been greatly to our benefit. Siebold Adlebertsmiter is innocent and all the trouble was caused by humans. You must be punished - and rewarded."

She laughed as if I was pretty amusing. "Consider yourself rewarded."

The light that had continued to swirl around her feet uneasily stirred and darkened until it was a dark stone circle about three feet around and six inches thick. It solidified under her feet, lifting her half a foot in the air like Aladdin's carpet. The sides curved upward and formed a dish - the memory of an old story supplied the rest. Not a dish but a mortar. A giant mortar.

And she was gone. Not the way that Stefan could go, but just so swiftly my eyes couldn't follow her. I'd seen a fae fly through solid matter before, so it wasn't a surprise that she did so. Which was good, because I'd just had one terrible surprise, I didn't need any more.

The first rule about the fae is that you don't want to attract their attention - but they don't tell you what to do once you have.

"I thought Baba Yaga was a witch," I told Uncle Mike hollowly. Who else would be flying around in a giant mortar?

"Witches aren't immortal," he told me. "Of course she's not a witch."

Baba Yaga is featured in the stories of a dozen countries scattered around Eastern Europe. She's not the hero in most of them. She eats children.

I glanced over at Adam, but he was still focused on Mary Jo. She was shaking like someone on the verge of hypothermia, but seemed to be alive still.

"What about that bag," I asked. "What if someone picks it up from the river?"

"A few minutes of running water will remove any magic from a spell set in fabric," Uncle Mike told me.

"It was a trap for the wolves," I told him. I knew that because it had tasted like vampire. "No one else except for the mobile mountain was affected... Why him and none of the rest? And what in the world is a snow elf? I've never heard of one." As far as I'd ever known, "elf" was one of those generic terms coined by mundanes as a way to refer to the fae.

"The government," said Uncle Mike, after a moment to consider what he wanted to tell me (getting the fae to share information is harder than getting a drop of water from a stone), "requires us to register and tell them what kind of fae we are. So we chose something that appeals to us. For some it is an old title or name, for others... we make it up, just like the humans have made up names for us for centuries. My favorite is the infamous 'Jack-Be-Nimble. I don't know what that is, but we have at least a dozen in our reservation."

I couldn't help but grin. Our government didn't know they had a tiger by the tail - and the tiger wasn't going to tell them anytime soon. "So he made up the snow elf bit?"

"Are you going to argue with him? As to why the bag aimed at the wolf worked - "

"I have another true form," said a soft, Norse-accented voice behind me. There weren't very many people who could sneak up on me - my coyote senses keep me pretty aware of my environment - but I sure hadn't heard him.

It was the snow elf, or whatever he was, of course. He was a couple of inches shorter than me - which he could have fixed as easily as Zee could have gotten rid of his bald spot. I supposed someone whose true form - at least one of them - was ten feet tall didn't mind being short.