Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson #9)(91)

That made me laugh. “My mom isn’t that bad.”

Adam gave me a look.

I bit my lip, then gave up and laughed again. “Okay, okay. She is. Worse. I’d rather face vampires any day than my mother.”

“I found her charming,” said Zee.

Laughter, I thought with satisfaction, is a terrific way to start an adventure.





13





I stepped in front of Adam when he started to pull his clothes off. Not that Jesse hadn’t seen him naked before. Like me, werewolves have to strip to change. Modesty is for humans. But it wasn’t only modesty that had made me step between Adam and the rest of the room. Werewolves in the middle of shifting could and did protect themselves, but they couldn’t do it well until they were fully in either form. I wasn’t worried, really, that anyone would attack him—we had Baba Yaga’s word on it. It was more the way Adam always walked on the traffic side of me when we walked around town. He didn’t expect anything to happen, but he wanted to be there if it did.


I could feel Adam pulling on the pack bonds for speed. If it hadn’t been for the necessity of signing the bargain, he could have changed at home, could have taken his time. But he couldn’t afford to be weakened in any way for very long on the reservation, so he pulled on the bonds and asked for help.

Beauclaire said, “I’ve never seen a werewolf change.”

“New experiences are hard to come by,” Zee agreed. “Unless you work with Mercy. I’ve been having all sorts of new experiences since I met her.”

Beauclaire smiled appreciatively.

I said, “We decided it would work best to go in with Adam as wolf. Guns don’t work in Underhill.” And wasn’t that too bad. “And we can’t take steel or iron. So our best weapon is going to come in ready to defend us.”

“You will stay human?” he asked.

I shrugged. “At least I can talk to Aiden this way.” The only other time I’d been in Underhill, I’d been in coyote form. The very scary fae I’d met there—a fae that Zee had treated with more caution than he did any of the Gray Lords—had known exactly what I was anyway.

If my coyote skin wouldn’t serve as camouflage, there was no reason not to stay human. I could carry more that way. I wasn’t entirely sure that I could change shape in Underhill. I hadn’t tried before, and Zee worried that only fae magic would work there. But Aiden needed a cheering section and, if the walking stick cooperated, I probably needed to be in human shape to use it.

I also probably should have grabbed the walking stick off the chest of drawers when we left. But it had seemed wrong. When the walking stick chose to come to my aid—it just came. Taking it with me . . . I worried that it wouldn’t work.

Adam’s change took a little less than five minutes. Not as fast as Charles’s—the Marrok’s son, who had been born a werewolf, could sometimes change as fast as I could, between one blink and the next. But it was faster than most werewolves. He shook himself and stretched like a cat, his claws making clicking sounds on the marble floors. Then he walked up to me as Tad gathered his fallen clothing.

I grabbed Aiden’s pack and helped him to settle it comfortably. My pack was a lot heavier. Adam, we decided, needed to be free to move, so I carried most of our supplies. Food for a week, water for a day, and a very light boatload of technology-lightened-and-miniaturized backpacking supplies. Also six hard-boiled eggs from the dozen I’d made at breakfast. Baba Yaga might not have meant anything when she’d told me that hard-boiled was best, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Aiden had a pack, too, but however old he really was, his body was that of a ten-year-old. His pack was mostly his bedroll and freeze-dried food.

We hadn’t brought a tent. Even if it rained, we couldn’t afford to blind ourselves like that when we slept.

“We’re ready now,” I told Beauclaire.

He took us back out to the main room, through two more doors, and into a room that was so utilitarian, it must have belonged to the original building. There was a closet door on one wall, and it was to this he led us.

Zee took a deep breath. “This one wasn’t here last month. There are too many doors to Underhill in too small a space.”

“We know,” said Beauclaire.

“It’s not safe,” said Zee.

“We know that, too.”

Zee snorted. “Well, somebody doesn’t, because she can’t make doorways where she isn’t invited.”

“Is this doorway acceptable?” Beauclaire asked me, ignoring Zee’s taunt.

I looked at Aiden, who shrugged. We both looked at Zee.

“It doesn’t matter where you go in,” he said. “These doorways are all too new to have found an anchor in Underhill. That means they’ll drop you someplace random. Just make sure you are holding on to each other when you go—or you’ll all end up in different parts of Underhill.” Beauclaire opened the door and stepped back. Jesse hugged her father, hugged me, then hugged Aiden.

“Don’t get them killed,” she told Aiden.

“I’ll try not to,” he said earnestly.

“Don’t get stuck,” she said.

“I’ll try not to,” he told her.

“Good enough,” she said. “If you try, Dad will do the rest.”