Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson #9)(65)

I nodded. “I can live with that.” It was the truth, but I was very curious anyway.

She laughed. “That was almost a lie.” She looked at me. “I tell you what. I’ll tell Thomas what we talked about, and he can tell you if he chooses.”

“I can live with that better,” I said. “Or at least, it isn’t any worse.” But then I got an inkling. A terrible horrible very, very scary inkling.

No normal vampire would have chosen a hotel like the Marriott. There were too many windows—and the ones in their room all faced the east, where the sun would rise.


And Margaret said that her power, like her father’s, came from the sun.

Unbidden, I remembered walking at night once with Stefan, a friend who was a vampire. At one point, he stopped, looked up at the moon, and said, totally out of the blue, “I miss the sun.” And the last word sounded as though it had been dragged up from the depths of his being. If someone asked Stefan what he would wish for, I think that the ability to walk in sunlight would be very high on that list.

Could Thomas walk in the sun?

As soon as I thought that, terror screamed up my backbone. Vampires are evil. Even though I like some of them, I know that they are evil. Symbols of faith can work against them, repel them and cause them pain. Wood works against vampires because it was something that once was living that became dead—sympathetic magic of a sort. But it is sunshine that is the real weapon against vampires.

“Mercy?” Margaret said, her voice concerned.

That was a secret too dangerous for anyone to have. They would hunt him down. Which they? All of “they.” Vampires would hunt him down to steal his secret. Everyone else would hunt him down to kill him to get rid of the fear I had coiled in my stomach.

“Don’t ask him,” I said, my voice hoarse. “This gift from your power, I think I know what it was.” Thomas called her Sunshine, I remembered. “That’s a secret too big for acquaintances, no matter how friendly. When we’re friends, we can pretend you told me then. For now we can say that I have an idea—and I’m going to pretend I’m wrong because that would make Thomas the scariest vampire I’ve ever heard of.”

We drove for a few miles in silence.

Then she said, “Thomas isn’t a monster—though he’d disagree with me on that. I don’t know how he managed it, with his father, who was the single coldest being I have ever known, but he’s a good man.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t as sure of it as she was. I cleared my throat. “So the third thing you gave him was your blood.”

“It sealed the bargain,” she said. “That’s what my father said. For the next seventeen years, I always knew where he was, whether he was . . . well, not happy. Thomas doesn’t do happy very much. But he was content. Or if he was unhappy or cold or whatever . . . He says that he did not feel the same connection—not the same way.”

“That’s backward to the way a vampire’s feeding usually works,” I said. I knew that because apparently my . . . Stefan felt that way about me. He knew when I was sad or hurt. He’d known when I had nearly died. I knew that because he’d shown up at the hospital and sat with me all through the night. I’d been pretty high on pain meds, but Adam had told me that Stefan hadn’t said a word the whole time.

Margaret nodded. “Backward, yes. That’s what my father said. Then he said he thought it was the thing that Thomas gave me back for my gifts. Thomas was raised to be a guardian, to protect his father’s interests. When his father betrayed him, he still guarded, but he no longer believed in what he was doing. He gave me himself, everything of what he was, when we sealed the bargain with blood.” Voice tight, she said, “My father said that the vampire usually takes ownership of those he feeds from, but Thomas reversed that in an effort to balance our bargain.”

“That’s . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to be offensive.

“Messed up,” she said. “I know. If I think of it as a gift of service, it helps. But I used him—and now . . . we’re so lopsided. It’s like he thinks of himself as my devoted . . .”

“Slave?” I suggested. “Servant?”

She laughed, wiping tears from her eyes again. “Can you imagine Thomas as a slave? He’d have the person who thought he was his master committing suicide in an hour, all the while helping out with solicitous advice on the proper length of blade. And even as the knife slid in, the master would think it was all his own idea.”

“Guard dog,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “That one. It’s as if he sees me as this fragile thing to be protected.” She paused. “That’s not quite right. It’s not as though he doesn’t respect me, respect my power. But he sees me as different from him. Separate.” She sighed. “I hoped you could help me.”

I thought about it. Sometimes simple is best when dealing with men. It’s not that they are simple. Simple and Adam didn’t belong in the same room. But dealing with them . . . that was simple.

“So seduce him,” I said.

“I’d love to,” she all but wailed. “But how?”


Okay. Seducing Adam wasn’t exactly . . . difficult. It was fun, actually, just how much I could get him to react with subtle cues. A nudge. He did it back to me, too—with interest. But Thomas was more like Charles. Thomas needed a sledgehammer first.