Frost Burned (Mercy Thompson #7)(68)

"Ow, ow, ow," I chanted.

"It didn't hurt when she took the silver from me," Adam said, sounding unhappy.

I shut up. I could deal with a little stinging; okay, a lot of stinging. I didn't need to upset Adam.

"Not being Coyote's child with a mystical connection to a werewolf, I have to follow the rules of magic," Zee told Adam. He pulled his hand away from my skin and frowned at the disk of silver he held while I caught my breath. "This is a lot of silver to have scattered in your body, Mercy - and we are not finished yet. And you said that you already rid yourself of some of it?"

Adam nodded. "I saw the bedroom floor." He must have gone to Kyle's first, then, and followed me to Sylvia's. "More silver came out than went in. They gave me five or so good shots of the stuff, but nowhere near the amount on the floor."

"Conservation of matter," said Asil, "would indicate that perhaps she pulled the silver from more than just you. How bad is the pack?"

"Conservation of matter," said Tad astringently, "is a funny concept when expressed by a werewolf. Who knows better that magic makes science blink than a 170-pound man who turns into a 250-pound werewolf?"

"They are not as bad as I'd feared," Adam said slowly, though he acknowledged Tad's comment with a smile. "I hadn't considered that she might have helped the lot of us. Most of them are still pretty sick - but Warren and Darryl are almost back to normal. Still, if there had been that much silver, even scattered through all the pack, we would all be dead."

"But there are still some sick from the silver?" Zee asked.

"Yes."

Zee waved to Tad. "Come over here and put your hand over mine, I'll show you how to do this so you can heal Adam's pack."

"Cool," I said without enthusiasm, but my hackles had smoothed out again. "I get to be a teaching exercise."

Like a dog with a face full of porcupine quills, I found it harder to stand still and let silver be drawn out a second time. But the pain did focus my attention on the present, as did Adam's grim face. I gave him a cheery smile, and his frown deepened.

Zee taught magic the way he taught mechanicking - by making Tad do all the work while he stood behind him and made acerbic corrections. He did it in Old German, and though I can get by in modern German, the old stuff sounds a bit like Welsh spoken by a Swedish man with marbles in his mouth.

In the end, Tad held a dime-sized bit of silver, I rubbed the cramps out of my thighs, and Adam stalked back and forth like an enraged baboon I'd seen once at a zoo. Asil had retreated to the far corner of the room with a book, to keep his presence from inciting Adam further.

"If Tad intends to do this to the werewolves," I said through gritted teeth because every muscle on my body was cramping with equal insistence, "then Adam will have to hold them down."

Adam stalked over to me and began kneading my shoulders. I sighed in relief and let him work on them while I turned my attention to my left calf.

"It won't be so difficult with the wolves," said Zee. "Their bodies are already working to get rid of the silver, and all it will require is a little assistance. They also heal faster."

"I'll keep watch," Adam promised me. "Tad won't take any harm."

"So are the fae planning on taking over the world?" I asked Zee.

He laughed so hard, he couldn't speak for a few minutes. "The short answer is yes," he told me cheerfully.

Asil set aside his book and quit pretending he was not interested.

"But?" I said, and he laughed again.

"Liebchen," he said. "If they could all point their swords in the same direction for more than ten seconds, they just might manage something scary. The reality is that everyone is tired of merely surviving and is looking for a way to thrive in this new world of iron." He shrugged. "I don't know what will happen except that things are changing."

"I heard someone" - Coyote - "say that change is neither good nor bad," I told him.

Behind me, Adam made a wolfish noise that meant disagreement. "The older you are, the more you fear change, even if you think you are in charge. Especially if you think you are in charge. There are a lot of very old fae."

Zee inclined his head to Adam in a move that looked a lot more royal in his own shape than it did when he'd done it while wearing his human-seeming. "As you say. I would tell you that there is nothing to worry about except that there is. There are a lot of fae who hate the humans, Mercy. Some fae hate them for the iron encircling the world, some hate them for the loss of the old Underhill even though we have replaced it, and some hate humans for their ease of procreation." He sighed and looked old. "Hatred is not a useful thing."

"To hear you say that - that is a thing I never thought to hear no matter how old I became." Asil laughed and Zee raised an imperial eyebrow and someone who didn't know him might not have seen the wry humor in his eyes.

"Not useful," Zee said, then looked as though he was listening to something, though my ears didn't pick up anything strange. "But it is powerful. Someone is knocking at my door, I must return." He put his hand on his son's shoulder. "Stay safe."

"And you," Tad said.

And Zee walked through the blackness that filled the mirror's frame as though it were just another doorway. He said something that I heard with my bones and not my ears, and the frame was filled with a mirror once more.