Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson, #9)(91)

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.”

“Safe journey,” said Zee.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” said Tad.

“I love you, too,” I said, and, holding on to Adam with one hand and Aiden with the other, crossed over into Underhill.

—

We had to go down three cement steps to get to the ground. When Aiden went back and shut the door behind us, I turned to see that the door was set in the back of a building that looked like the back of the building we’d gone into.

But my bones hummed with the magic—it was like standing on a washing machine permanently caught in the spin cycle.

“It’s a good idea to shut doors behind you in Underhill,” Aiden told me. “People who are chasing you usually go somewhere else.”

He looked around, his breathing a little fast, and his weight shifted from foot to foot like a deer waiting to see where the danger emerged, so he could flee in the opposite direction as fast as he could.

We had emerged into an anticlimactic, bland landscape that looked very much like the area around the reservation. We were on the top of a small hill at the base of larger hills. Below us was a grassy valley with a river running through it. If it hadn’t been for the lack of civilization—roads, wires, squashed beer cans—it could have been anywhere near Walla Walla.