Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson #9)(67)

As she finished speaking, Aiden came up the stairs. His hair was wet, and he was wearing sweats from the pack stores—I made a mental note that we were going to have to get him clothes if he was going to stay here long.

“My apologies,” he said as soon as he reached the landing. He didn’t look at either of us. “I am not safe to be around. I didn’t light fires in my sleep when I was in Underhill—at least, not that I know of. I will find somewhere else to sleep tonight. I appreciate the help you have given me thus far.”

“Why are you planning on leaving?” Adam asked.

That made Aiden raise his face briefly. “I have damaged your home.”

Adam shrugged. “We house werewolves here, Aiden. I don’t think anyone has tried to burn the house down before—”

“No,” I agreed, “that was my house.”

Adam gave me a rueful grimace. “At least you weren’t in it. Werewolves can be very destructive. My contractor sends me Christmas cards and most-valuable-customer presents every year.”

“And this time the damage was confined to a mattress and some bedding,” I told him. “That’s cheap by werewolf standards.”

“The mattress might have been all right,” Mary Jo said, “if Ben hadn’t dumped a five-gallon bucket of water on it. I told him I had it under control with the fire extinguisher. So the mattress isn’t really Aiden’s fault.” She wrinkled her nose. “Excuse me, though, I’m going to get rid of this blanket.”

Aiden opened his mouth, then shut it again.

“No worries,” Adam said. “We’ll just make sure to keep a fire extinguisher around. Until the situation with the fae stabilizes, we’ll have to have twenty-four/seven guards at the house anyway. I’ll just make sure that they keep watch for fire, too.”





10





“It’s not quite the biggest crane in the world,” said the Lampson guy to the police officer. He’d introduced himself as Marley.

The Pasco police officer, whom I’d seen before but didn’t know personally, was Ed Thorson. He was the only police officer left on the scene because I’d asked him to get rid of as many people as he could. No one is proud like a dominant werewolf in front of an audience. If there were too many people here, we might end up with him jumping, even if he didn’t intend to do it in the first place.

Above us, nearly forty stories up, on the top of the Transi-Lift LTL-3000, was one of our werewolves. I couldn’t see him, I’m not sure I could have seen him even in the daylight without binoculars, but he’d been seen climbing up it at the end of his shift, and everyone was very sure that he hadn’t climbed back down—or jumped.

Three days had passed since we’d confronted the fae in the hotel meeting room—and we hadn’t heard anything from them. We’d had to step down our security because we just didn’t have enough people to stay at high alert for very long.

Though Adam made sure that there were at least two werewolves at our house at any given time, mostly everyone’s lives had returned to normal. Even Aiden’s setting something on fire when he slept felt normal—one of Adam’s techie guys was working on rewiring some smoke alarms so that instead of shrieking, they just buzzed a little.

Back to normal meant when Adam got called to work after dinner, he left me in charge. So when the police called to tell me that one of our wolves was sitting on the top of the big Lampson crane and they were worried about him jumping, I was the one who got to go fix it. If Darryl, Warren, or George had been our guard wolves, I’d have sent one of them because I’d exchanged about four words with Sherwood Post. “Yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” only counted as four words, even if they’d been said every time I’d tried to strike up a conversation with him. But as luck would have it, Ben and Paul were the watch wolves on duty, neither of whom I could trust not to drive a suicidal werewolf right off the edge—both metaphorically and literally speaking. Sherwood Post had come to us a month ago from the Marrok. He was too quiet, too polite, and missing his left leg. Werewolves heal. They heal broken things, they heal crushed things, and they heal amputated things. But apparently not if witches were involved.


About four or five years ago, there had been a nasty coven of witches in Seattle. Their leader had been killed by the Emerald City Pack. When the pack went to clean out the home of the leader, to make sure that there were no nasty magical surprises left behind, they had found, among other things, an emaciated werewolf in a cage. He was missing his leg.

He hadn’t remembered who he was or where he came from—and neither did any of the packs. He also didn’t remember what had happened to his leg. As best anyone could figure out, he’d been brought over from Europe and traded around among various black witches for years, if not decades.

Bran took him home, eventually coaxing him back into human shape. When he couldn’t do anything that could make Sherwood’s leg regrow—yes, that’s as bad as it sounds—he sent Sherwood to doctors who provided a prosthetic for the human form. The wolf just ran on three legs.

Sherwood took his name from two books that happened to be lying on Bran’s desk when Bran told him to pick a name. That Bran would read Sherwood Anderson was not surprising. I wasn’t sure if I was more amused or horrified that Bran had been reading Emily Post.