Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(46)

"I was not flirting with her," he ground out.

He wasn't usually so easy. I settled in for some real fun.

"She was certainly flirting with you, Dr. Cornick," I said, even though she hadn't been. Still...

"She was not flirting with me either."

"You're speeding again."

He growled.

I patted his leg. "See, you didn't want to be stuck with me for a mate."

He slowed as the highway dumped us in Kennewick and we had to travel on city streets for a while.

"You are horrible," he said.

I smirked. "You accused me of flirting with Tim."

He snorted. "You were flirting. Just because I didn't take him apart doesn't mean you aren't fishing in dangerous waters, Mercy. If it had been Adam with you tonight, that boy would be feeding the fishes - or the wolves. And I am not kidding."

I patted his leg again and took a deep breath. "I didn't mean to let it be a flirtation, I just got caught up in the conversation. I should have been more careful with a vulnerable boy like him."

"He isn't a boy. If he's five years younger than you, I'd be surprised."

"Some people are boys longer than others," I told him. "And that boy and his friend were both in O'Donnell's house not too long before he was killed."

I told Samuel the whole story, from the time Zee picked me up until I'd taken the paper from Tim. If I left anything out, it was because I didn't think it was important. Except, I didn't tell him that Austin Summers was probably the brother of one of the boys who beat up on Jesse. Samuel's temper might be easier than Adam's - but he'd kill both boys without a shred of remorse. In his world, you didn't beat up girls. I'd come up with a suitable punishment, but I didn't think anyone needed to die over it. Not as long as they quit bothering Jesse.

That was the only thing I left out. Both Zee and Uncle Mike had left me to my own devices in this investigation. Okay, they'd told me not to investigate, which amounted to the same thing. Proceeding without any help from the fae made investigating riskier than it would have otherwise been, and Zee was already mad at me for sharing what I had. More wouldn't make him any madder. The time for keeping their secrets strictly to myself was over.

If there was one thing I'd learned over the past few interesting (in the sense of the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times") months, it was that when things started to get dangerous, it was important to have people who knew as much as you did. That way, when I stupidly got myself killed - someone would have a starting place to look for my murderer.

By the time I was finished telling him everything, we were sitting in the living room drinking hot chocolate.

The first thing Samuel said was, "You have a real gift for getting into trouble, don't you? That was one thing I forgot when you left the pack."

"How is any of this my fault?" I asked hotly.

He sighed. "I don't know. Does it matter whose fault it is once you're sitting in the middle of the frying pan?" He gave me a despairing look. "And as my father used to point out, you find your way into that frying pan way too often for it to be purely accidental."

I put aside the urge to defend myself. For over a decade I'd managed to keep to myself, living as a human on the fringe of werewolf society (and that only because, at the Marrok's request, Adam decided to interfere with my life even before he built a house behind mine). It was Adam's trouble that had started everything. Then I'd owed the vampires for helping me with Adam's problems. Clearing that up had left me indebted to the fae.

But I was tired, I had to get up and work tomorrow - and if I started explaining myself, it would be hours before we got back to a useful discussion.

"So, finding myself in the frying pan once again, I came to you for advice," I prodded him. "Like maybe you can tell me why neither Uncle Mike nor Zee wanted to talk about the sea man or how there happened to be a forest and an ocean - a whole ocean - tucked neatly into a backyard and a bathroom. And if any of that could have something to do with O'Donnell's death."

He looked at me.

"Oh, come on," I said. "I saw your face when I told you about the funny things that happened in the rez. You're Welsh, for heaven's sake. You know about the fae."

"You're Indian," he said in a falsetto that I think was supposed to be an imitation of me. "You know how to track animals and build fires with nothing but sticks and twigs."

I gave him a haughty stare. "Actually, I do. Charles - another Indian - taught me."

He waved his hand at me; I recognized the gesture as one of mine. Then he laughed. "All right. All right. But I'm not an expert on the fae just because I'm Welsh."

"So explain that 'ah-ha' expression on your face when I told you about the forest."

"If you went Underhill, you just confirmed one of Da's theories about what the fae are doing with their reservations."

"What do you mean?"

"When the fae first proposed that the government put them on reservations, my father told me he thought that they might be trying to set up territories like they once had in Great Britain and parts of Europe, before the Christians came and started ruining their places of power by building chapels and cathedrals. The fae didn't value their anchors in this world because their magic works so much better Underhill. They didn't defend their places until it was too late. Da believes the last gate to Underhill disappeared in the middle of the sixteenth century, cutting them off from a great deal of their power."