Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson #9)(85)

“That was pretty good,” Jesse said, dumping another helping of spaghetti on his plate without his asking. “It would have been better, though, if you’d swallowed before you started to talk. We eat with our mouths closed around here.”

“How do you get the food in?” asked Aiden.

She stopped eating. Opened her mouth, then shut it again.

“Gotcha,” he said happily, still talking with his mouth full.

Adam, I noticed, was looking pretty worn. He hadn’t said much since we’d sat down to eat. Tonight, it was just Jesse, Aiden, Adam, and me.


Joel, who was still experiencing better control of his shapeshifting, had taken his wife out to dinner. No one knew he was a pack member, so they didn’t have to worry about reporters following them around.

Adam was taking the brunt of the attention. The local newspeople knew him, the Feds knew him, and a fair number of the national press knew him from previous stories—and he was handsome and articulate. So he was the one they aimed their questions at.

How had we known what the fae were going to do? Why had they done it? Were they planning on doing it again somewhere else? After the first wave of reporters, Adam drafted a statement, which he read for the local TV stations.

“It was the fae,” Adam told them. “They came to us and told us that they wanted people to understand what we were dealing with. They are not just the boogie monsters hiding in fairy tales. Some of them are more powerful than that, some of them were worshipped as gods by our ancestors for very good reasons. The bridge was chosen because it was highly visible, and because it was easy to clear of people—because the Gray Lords don’t think that killing people will accomplish what they want. And because it was where we killed the troll. Could they do it to a bridge full of rush-hour traffic in the middle of Seattle, Portland, or Washington, DC? Yes. But they could have done that last year or ten years ago, too. They don’t want to. They and we are trying to negotiate a nonviolent end to our situation here in the Tri-Cities, in hopes that it might allow them, and us, and our government to negotiate a nonviolent end to the situation that occurred when our justice system made it clear that justice was for humans only. Thank you.”

And when the Feds came, Adam told them the same thing, mostly word for word except where pronouns needed to be clarified.

The newspeople took their photos of my handsome, sincere mate and wrote up what he could give them. But the Feds . . . they were pushier. We had the whole alphabet soup on our doorstep (figuratively speaking) because terrorist attacks belong to the FBI, and paranormal anything belongs to Cantrip. But the NSA was here, too. Adam told me that two of the people claiming to be Cantrip, and one who was supposed to be FEMA, were actually CIA. He told me he could tell by the way they made the back of his neck itch—he recognized it from Vietnam, where he’d first encountered their kind.

The Feds threatened, cajoled, and stopped just short of arresting Adam. We kept a patrol of werewolves who watched out for the fae. As a side benefit, the wolves kept the Feds off, too.

When the director of Cantrip called to complain about our lack of cooperation, Adam told him exactly where he could shove it and how far. Adam used some of Ben’s favorite phrases to remind them that a rogue Cantrip agent and his rogue-agent pals had killed one of our own not six months ago. That we’d found illegal tracking equipment on our personal vehicle that Cantrip had admitted to placing (when they’d summoned Adam to a closed-door meeting while I was talking Sherwood down from the crane). Cantrip would rot before we ever cooperated with them. And he hung up while the director was still talking.

Five minutes later, the FBI called and asked us to cooperate with Cantrip’s investigation. Adam said, “No.” When the man kept talking at him, Adam threw the phone through the wall.

My husband has a temper. Especially he has a temper when dealing with stupid people. It was why Bran had tried very hard not to use him as a spokesperson. There were no cameras on him when the phone landed in the entryway, so it didn’t matter as far as Adam’s public face.

Our favorite contractor was still working on the damage the fight with the fae had done to the house. One more wall wasn’t going to add that much to the overall bill, so the hole in the wall that the phone made wasn’t important, either. Two more walls, because Aiden had burned down the wall between the safe room and the adjoining bathroom.

The phone survived. That protective case proved that it had been worth the money.

The real reason for Adam’s short temper was frustration. We still hadn’t been able to come up with anything the fae would want or need.

Other than Aiden.

Despite Uncle Mike’s words, I’d have asked Zee, but he and Tad had left the house the morning after the fae attack, and I hadn’t seen them since. Zee’s house was empty—there was no sign that he’d been back there since he’d escaped the reservation.

In the meantime, life went on. Adam got his work done mostly from home to avoid the rush of reporters (and the Feds of whatever alphabet variety). Ben and Warren took turns escorting Jesse to and from school. And we ate breakfast and dinner together. Tonight, it had been spaghetti that I’d made from scratch. The noodles were packaged, though. If Christy had made dinner, the noodles would have been freshly made from scratch, too. I hoped she had met the nice young billionaire of her dreams and decided to stay in the Bahamas. Heck, I even hoped she lived happily for the rest of her life, as long as she did it in the Bahamas.