Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(31)

I needed something to do, something to keep my hands and mind busy, to distract me from the sick feeling that I'd done something terrible. Unfortunately I'd stayed late and finished all the work I had at the shop on Friday, thinking I'd be spending most of Saturday at the music festival. I didn't even have a project car to work on. The current project, an old Karmann Ghia, was out getting the upholstery redone.

After pacing restlessly around the house and making a batch of peanut butter cookies, I went to the small third bedroom that served as my study, turned on the computer, and connected to the Internet before I started on brownies.

I answered e-mail from my sister and my mother and then browsed a bit. The brownie I brought into the room with me sat undisturbed on its plate. Just because I make food when I'm upset doesn't mean I can eat it.

I needed something to do. I ran through the conversation with Uncle Mike and decided that he probably really didn't know who had killed O'Donnell - though he was pretty sure it wasn't the ogres, or he wouldn't have mentioned them at all. I knew it wasn't Zee. Uncle Mike didn't think it was the Gray Lords - and I agreed with him. From the fae point of view, O'Donnell's murder was a screwup - a screwup that the Gray Lords could have easily avoided.

The old staff I'd found in the corner of O'Donnell's living room had something to do with the murder, though. It was important enough that the raven...no, what had Uncle Mike called it - the Carrion Crow - had come and taken it, and Uncle Mike hadn't wanted to talk about it.

I looked at the search engine screen that I used as my default page when I surfed the 'Net. Impulsively, I typed staff and fairy then hit the search button.

I got the results I should have expected had I thought about it. So I substituted folklore for fairy, but it wasn't until I tried walking stick (after magic staff and magic stick) that I found myself on a website with a small library of old fairy and folklore books scanned online.

I found my walking stick, or at least a walking stick.

It was given to a farmer who had the habit of leaving bread and milk on his back porch to feed the fairies. While he held that staff, each of his ewes gave birth to two healthy lambs every year and gave the farmer modest, if growing, prosperity. But (and there is always a "but" in fairy tales) one evening while walking over a bridge, the farmer lost his grip on the staff and it fell into the river and was swept away. When he got home, he found that his fields had flooded and killed most of his sheep - thus all the gain he'd gotten from the staff had left with it. He never found the staff again.

It wasn't likely that a staff that ensured all its owner's ewes had two healthy lambs each year was worth murdering people over - especially as O'Donnell's killer hadn't taken it. Either the walking stick I'd found wasn't the same one, it wasn't as important as I had thought it might be, or O'Donnell's killer hadn't been after it. The only thing I was certain of was that O'Donnell had taken it from the murdered forest man.

The victims, even though they were mostly names, had been gradually becoming more real to me: Connora, the forest man, the selkie...It is a habit of humans to put labels on things, Zee always told me. Usually when I was trying to get him to tell me just who or what he was.

Impulsively, I typed in dark smith and Drontheim and found the story Samuel had told me about. I read it twice and sat back in my chair.

Somehow it fit. I could see Zee being perverse enough to create a sword that, once swung, would cut through whatever was in its path - including the person who was using it.

Still, there wasn't a Siebold or an Adelbert in the story. Zee's last name was Adelbertsmiter - smiter of Adelbert. I'd once heard a fae introduce him to another in a hushed voice as "the Adelbertsmiter."

On a whim I looked up Adelbert and laughed involuntarily. The first hit I had was on Saint Adelbert, a Northumbrian missionary who sought to Christianize Norway in the eighth century. All I could find out about him was that he'd died a martyr's death.

Could he be Zee's Adelbert?

The phone rang, interrupting my speculations.

Before I had a chance to say anything, a very British voice said, "Mercy, you'd better get your butt over here."

There was a noise in the background - a roar. It sounded odd and I pulled my ear away from the phone long enough to confirm that I was hearing it from Adam's house as well as through the phone.

"Is that Adam?" I asked.

Ben didn't answer me, just yelped a swearword and hung up the phone.

It was enough to have me sprinting through my house and out my door, the phone still in my hand. I dropped it on the porch.

I was vaulting over the barbed wire fence that separated my three acres from Adam's larger field before it occurred to me to wonder why Ben had called me - and not asked for, say Samuel, who had the advantage of being a werewolf, one of the few more dominant than Adam.

Chapter 6

I didn't bother going around to the front of Adam's house, just opened the kitchen door and ran in. There was no one in the room.

Adam's kitchen had been built to cordon bleu specifications - Adam's daughter, Jesse, had once told me that her father could really cook, but mostly they didn't bother.

As in the rest of his house, Adam's ex-wife had chosen the decor. It had always struck me as odd that, except for the formal living room, which was done in shades of white, the colors in the house were much more welcoming and restful than she had ever been. My own house was decorated in parents' castoffs meet rummage sale with just enough nice stuff (courtesy of Samuel) to make everything else look horrible.