Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson #9)(24)

“Yes,” Zee said. “I think that would be wise.”





4





Tad and Zee followed me to Adam’s SUV, with Aiden tagging along behind like a stray puppy uncertain of his welcome. We walked very slowly because Adam was hurt, and so was Zee—and I wasn’t certain about Tad. Traffic was still stopped, and people watched us as we walked.

“Hey, Mercy,” someone called, “do you know what’s up?”

I looked over, but I recognized neither the voice nor the face of the woman who was standing outside her car, a toddler on her hip.

“Troll on the Cable Bridge,” I told her. “We dealt with it. They’re working on getting traffic moving, but I think the bridge is going to need major repairs before anyone can use it.”

“Troll?” A teenager in a minivan filled with other teenagers stuck his head out the window. “You mean like a real troll? Lives under bridges, tries to eat goats? That kind of troll?”

I nodded and smiled but kept walking.

He let out a happy sound. “Trolls versus werewolves. Our werewolves for the win!”

Adam opened his mouth and let his tongue loll out. Someone in the teen’s van let out a wolf whistle, and it wasn’t because of Adam’s big pink tongue.

“Grandma, what big teeth you have,” I murmured.

The corners of his lips turned up, but he closed his mouth.

About halfway back to the car, traffic started moving again, though it wasn’t going to be breaking any speed records. After that, we got honked at—which made Zee say something rude in German. Tad grinned and waved at everyone.


“Quit frowning, Dad,” he said. “If you smile, they’ll forget all about us in a day. If you go around looking like that, they’ll wonder how many other trolls are going to be wandering into the Tri-Cities.”

Zee smiled.

Tad rolled his eyes. “Not like that, old man—that will give them nightmares.”

“Be careful what you ask for,” I said.

Tad rubbed the top of my head. “I’ll keep that in mind, short stuff.”

“I told you to feed him more coffee,” I told Zee. “Look what happened when he outgrew me.”

“Children whine too much,” the old fae said. “Just how far away did you park—and why didn’t we get a ride there?”

“Sorry,” I said, meaning it, because I needed to get Adam home so he could change and his shoulder could be checked to make sure it had healed right. Werewolves heal fast, which was good up to a point—but if a bone wasn’t set correctly, it would heal just as it was. Then it would need to be rebroken. “But there is no back way here, and no one could have driven us until the traffic cleared anyway.” And the traffic still wasn’t cleared.

It hadn’t felt like a long way when we were running for the bridge, but with two—possibly three—people who were hurt, it was too long. I’d have offered to run ahead and grab the SUV, but I knew that neither Adam nor Zee would have allowed it unless they were on their deathbeds.

Tad said somberly, “Hey, Mercy? I’m sorry it took us so long to come help with the troll. We didn’t know about it until we saw the traffic backed up. We’d taken refuge in one of the old warehouses in the Lampson scrap yard. I was headed out to find someone with a cell phone I could borrow to call you when I saw the troll.”

“No one died,” I told him, then corrected myself: “None of our pack died. If you hadn’t made it when you did, Adam and I would have been toast. You timed it pretty close, though.”

“It’s all in the timing,” he agreed—then grinned at me. “But close is still good.”

We walked slowly to the SUV, with its soft upholstery for sore bodies. And I felt Aiden’s eyes on me all the way.

Not quite hostile. Not quite. But, my coyote self was certain, not altogether friendly, either.

—

Our house wasn’t really a single-family dwelling. An Alpha’s house was the center of the pack, designed to be part meetinghouse, part hotel, part hospital. Sometimes it was just Adam, Jesse, and me who lived there, but Joel and his wife currently were living in the suite on the main floor. There were two extra bedrooms on the second floor, and I’d sent Zee to one and Tad to the other. Aiden had been, not ungently, settled in the safe room in the basement and told to make himself at home. The safe room had camera surveillance, and the doors were alarmed and lockable. When the doors were locked, the room would hold an out-of-control werewolf. Aiden had merely smiled at the doors.

“These locks won’t hold me,” he’d told me.

“You’re a guest, not a prisoner,” I said, more worried about Adam, who was in our mini-clinic getting checked out, than whether or not our guest liked his accommodations. “This is the last private room in the house. If you’d rather, you can sleep in the rec room, which is set up as a bunk room, too. But I’ll warn you that there are a number of pack who view those rooms as public property.”

“No,” he said after a moment, as if he was trying to figure out how to react. “This is fine. I was just warning you.”

“You gave your word,” I said. “And we gave ours.”

“Yes,” he agreed. Then he relaxed, as if we’d stepped back into something he knew. “So we did. Twenty-four hours.” He gave me an enigmatic smile that did not belong on the face of a child.