Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson, #9)(95)

And this was lunchtime. I looked at Aiden pacing and exchanged a glance with Adam.

“Okay,” I said brightly. “While we wait for nighttime, why don’t we tell each other stories?”

So I told him about Bran, the Marrok, and what growing up a coyote in the woods of northwestern Montana had been like. He told me stories about living in Underhill, the creatures terrible and wonderful who made their homes here. Once he warmed up, he was a pretty good storyteller—and I developed a new perspective on Underhill, who had first appeared to him as a small girl, though she sometimes was a great lady or an animal.

She was not evil, just . . . thoughtless. She was like a toddler who breaks her toys because she doesn’t know any better. Doesn’t realize that once they are broken, they will never play with her again. After she had killed Aiden’s friend Willy, she had mourned him for a very long time. But she didn’t learn from her errors—it sounded as though she’d been hardwired to be who she was.

She had damaged Aiden more than she would have been able to if she had truly been evil, I thought. Because sometimes she was funny and good company, and at other times she was vicious. She couldn’t, herself, hurt someone. But she could taint food, turn the weather foul, or attract one of the dangerous ones (Aiden’s term) wherever she wanted. Aiden was alive because Underhill loved him.

Eventually, the storytelling wound down, and we ate dinner. Aiden fell asleep. Adam got up from the rug he’d claimed and sat next to me, his muzzle on my thigh.

She’s not going to let him go easily, he told me.

“I caught that.” I threaded my fingers through his fur. “It’s a good thing that we have the walking stick.” Sometime during the storytelling, the stick had appeared in my lap. “It should show us the way home.”

—

There was, I noticed, a faint green light that danced in the runes etched on the silver of the head of the walking stick. Aiden turned and, when I followed, the glow faded. I stopped and moved the walking stick in the direction we’d been headed. The green glow returned.

It wasn’t the way the walking stick had shown me how to get home last time, but it was clearly unhappy about following Aiden.

“Wrong way,” I said. “Home is this way.”

“Right,” said Aiden. “But we have to go around until we can find a way down.”

Down?

I leaned the walking stick against Adam’s shoulder, unwilling to merely set it on the ground—or hand it to Aiden, though I wasn’t sure why. When I did, I saw that the others had been climbing up a steep mountain—though the whole time I’d been walking on a flat cave floor. The direction the walking stick wanted us to go appeared to be an impassable cliff face.

“I see,” I said. “Come here and give me your t-shirt.”

Aiden’s expression was a little wary, but he pulled his t-shirt off and handed it to me. I blindfolded him and, taking up the staff again, walked him through a tree root I’d seen when I wasn’t holding the staff.

“Okay,” I said. “That worked.”

I turned him around and had him walk the same path. He stumbled over the root—I caught him before he fell. He reached up to take off his blindfold, and I tapped his hand. “Leave it for a minute. Trust me.”

“You just made me trip,” he said.

“You didn’t get hurt,” I told him.

Adam posed a different problem. I wasn’t going to blindfold him. Not when something had been following us. We needed Adam free to act.

“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.