Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson #9)(96)

“Close your eyes and lean on me?” I asked. He did. And I took him over the same root—and he picked his feet up and stepped over the root because he paid attention to his environment.

But he followed me right off the cliff. Or where he thought the cliff would be, anyway.

With Adam leaning against me, I took Aiden by the arm, held the staff in my free hand, and took them in the direction the staff dictated.

“The ground feels hard,” Aiden said after a few minutes.

“Yes,” I said. “Don’t think too hard about it. Just walk.”

It wasn’t that the cavern floor was flat. Finding a path where the three of us could walk abreast wasn’t always practical. Once, traveling on a worn wooden bridge over a river, I had to leave one of them behind and escort them across one at a time. But mostly I could push Aiden ahead of me and keep Adam against my side as the green light in the walking stick got brighter and brighter.

We stopped to eat . . . lunch? Dinner? I couldn’t tell. We just needed food. Before I took off Aiden’s blindfold, I cautiously released my hold on the walking stick, leaving it balanced for a moment on its own. In the time it took for the stick to fall back into my hand, the light dimmed, and we appeared to be in a rocky ravine. But no one was standing in midair or anything.

“Okay,” I said. “You can take your blindfold off.”

Adam stepped away from me and shook himself.

Aiden and I had meal preparation down pat. I’d open the bag of freeze-dried food and fill it with water, and he’d heat it up—no fire needed. The first three bags went to Adam, who needed a lot of calories. When I’d eaten as much of my food as I could, I opened up the packet and held it down for Adam to finish off. But Adam was standing alert, taking in deep breaths of air.

I stood up and gripped my walking stick and sucked in air to see if I could catch the scent that had alerted Adam.

“What is it?” asked Aiden.

“Fae,” I said, only that moment certain.

He frowned at me. “Which fae?”

“I think she means us,” said the Widow Queen, appearing out of thin air. She was accompanied by three others, two men and a woman. None of them were familiar to me except for the Widow Queen. All of them wore armor, though not the kind of armor I’d have expected. Theirs was the sort that soldiers or police might wear, except for the colors. Most police SWAT teams wore black or blue, not silver, gold, green, or, in the Widow Queen’s case, lavender. Kevlar, I thought, didn’t have any cold-iron components. These fae were traditional enough that they carried swords strapped to their hips or over their shoulders. I didn’t see any guns.


“Good afternoon, Aiden,” the Widow Queen said. “Have you retrieved it yet?”

He stared at her mutely. I could scent his fear.

“Retrieved what?” I asked, stepping closer to him.

“The artifact, child,” she said to me. “The artifact.”

I put a hand on Aiden’s shoulder. “Are you here as a representative of the Gray Lords, to receive the artifact in fulfillment of our bargain?” I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that, but it was best to get everyone’s cards on the table to avoid a misunderstanding.

“They want to make peace with the humans,” she sneered. “That is a fool’s game. A game of attrition that we can only lose as we watch them reproduce like rabbits while we ever so slowly die off. Making peace with cockroaches makes more sense. The trick is to kill them off or, better yet, get them to kill themselves off for us.” She smiled. “I’m very good at that last one.”

“I take that as a no,” I said. “So why do you want the artifact when you don’t even know what it is?”

“I’m not the only fae or even the only Gray Lord who despises humans,” she said. “But I need a bigger power base to gain the support of the fae for my plans. They need to see me as a Power, someone who can back up her ideas with action. An artifact retrieved from Underhill, stolen from under the noses of the Council of the Gray Lords, would do nicely. As long as I do it before you hand it over, the other Gray Lords can do nothing but wring their hands. Retrieving artifacts that have fallen into human hands is an acceptable venture and not a crime at all.”

“I see,” I said.

“If you hand it over to me,” she said, “I’ll let you live.”

“It will void the bargain,” Aiden told me in a low voice.

I nodded. We had promised to do everything in our power to bring back an artifact. Handing it over just because we were outgunned wouldn’t qualify. I couldn’t remember all of the exact words, but I was pretty sure “even unto death” was in there.

“Why bring them?” I asked, nodding at her three minions. “You are a Gray Lord. It sounds like you’re going to take a stab at ruling the fae all by yourself—and you can’t take on the three of us without help?”

“She cannot use magic to attack us,” said Aiden suddenly. “Before Underhill let them come back, she made them swear not to use their magic here.”

“It matters not,” the Widow Queen said. “You are both unarmed, and the werewolf is no match for the four of us by himself.”

Aiden nodded. “Maybe that would be so,” he said, “if you were right about that unarmed part.” Aiden sucked in a breath and gestured with his hand. Flame spilled out of his fingers and— I didn’t see what he did with it; I was too busy dodging a bronze broadsword wielded by the man in green.