Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(87)

I held out the walking stick. “Here. Coyote said he taught it a few things.”

Beauclaire looked at me. “I don’t know Coyote,” he said. “Maybe I will have to remedy that.”

Adam’s lips curled up in satisfaction. “I would pay money,” he said.

Beauclaire, who still hadn’t reached for the walking stick, narrowed his eyes at my mate.

“Oh?”

“You never get quite what you expect from Coyote,” I told him. “He was amazingly helpful this time, so I expect that something horrible will happen to us in the near future.” I wished I hadn’t said that as soon as the words left my mouth. I already knew that something horrible was coming. I wiggled the walking stick. “Would you take this already?”

“Of your free will,” he said.

I rolled my eyes as I repeated the phrase. “Of my own free will, I give you this walking stick”—and I kept going, though that was the end of the usual phrase I’d spoken every time I’d tried to give the walking stick back to a fae—“fashioned by Lugh, woken by the oakman, and changed by blood, changed by death, changed by spirit. Change comes to all things until the greatest change, which is death. This I entrust to your care.”

I tried to pretend that I’d intended to say all that from the very beginning, tried to ignore the way the walking stick was warmer than it should be in my hands and felt almost eager, as if it wanted to go to Lugh’s son. Adam knew I was acting, I could tell because the pressure of his hand on my back changed. Other than a sharp look, Beauclaire didn’t seem to have heard anything he wasn’t expecting.

I wished I knew whether it had been the walking stick or Coyote who had put those words in my mouth. It might even have been Stefan, for all I knew, but he should be asleep, and it hadn’t sounded like something he’d have said.

Beauclaire took the walking stick, closed his eyes, and frowned at it. “This is a fake.”

“No,” I said. Coyote could have passed a fake walking stick to me, though that wasn’t quite in his character. But a fake walking stick would have stayed safely at Honey’s, tucked inside the locked tack room in the barn, where I’d left it.

Anger built in his face, and he tossed the walking stick back at me. He didn’t mean to hurt me because he didn’t throw it like a weapon. I could probably have caught it—but Adam caught it instead.

“Are you implying that we are lying to you?” Adam asked gently. He twirled the walking stick like a baton.

I put a hand on his and stilled the stick. “Thank you,” I told him when he let me stop him. “The walking stick has been just a little too happy to hurt people lately.”

He sucked in a breath as I took it out of his hands, then he opened and closed them a couple of times. He glanced up at the sky. “A few more days until the full moon,” he told me.

Werewolves were edgy around moon time. Edgier, anyway. I couldn’t help but wonder if the walking stick hadn’t helped his anger along just a bit.

“Mr. Beauclaire,” I said. “This is the walking stick that Coyote gave me after he showed it how to hide itself better. I left it this morning in a safe, locked in a place miles away from here. It fell out of my SUV just now.”

I handed it to him again, but I thought that it wasn’t as happy to go to him as it had been before. It felt rejected. Sulky.

“Behave,” I told it. Adam looked at me.

Beauclaire turned it around in his hands, felt over the silver knob, then ran his hands over the stick itself. He half closed his eyes and did it again. He gave them another of his indecipherable looks. “I told you that I would not apologize, but that was before I rejected the prize I sent you to get. This is my father’s walking stick, though it has changed from the last time I held it a thousand years ago, more or less. I did not expect that it would. His small magics tend to be more stable than the larger ones, which have, up to this point, showed themselves to be more adaptable.”

He met my eyes. “Mercedes Athena Thompson.”

“Hauptman,” added Adam.

“Hauptman. I apologize for my disbelief. I apologize for not recognizing the truth of what you told me. I apologize for not listening.” He paused, looked at the walking stick again, and his eyebrow rose, almost as if it had said something to him.

He gave me a faint, ironic smile. “My thanks for retrieving this one from the”—he paused—“sanctuary that you had found for it. I owe you a favor of your choice.”

“No,” I said. “No. You don’t. I know about favors from the fae.”

“That,” he said austerely, “is not for you to accept or reject.”

“Information, then,” I said. “Do you know anything about Guayota?”

He shook his head. “I have heard about your trouble. The fae do not live on the Canary Islands, and I know nothing more than that he is a volcano spirit taking flesh. Zee’s young one has been asking around without luck, I believe.” He hesitated. Gave me a look that said, There is another question to ask me here. But I can’t tell you unless you ask. Something about Tad.

“If I ask you to help us defeat Guayota?”

He smiled grimly. “If I were the Dark Smith of Drontheim, I would offer to help and leave you so far in my debt that you would be my puppet until the end of your days.”