Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(22)

She had left us no openings to question her, and I had a lot of questions. How did she know Wulfe was gone? Where was the last place she’d seen him? What was she hiding with her veil and the brimstone? Why had she needed to hide her eyes?

The brimstone was particularly interesting because it meant we couldn’t smell anything but the brimstone: not emotions, not whether she was telling the truth, and not any incriminating scents like blood, either. It was possible that the brimstone could have been part of the magic she’d used to create the smoke effects and not an attempt to mask scents. Possibly she’d used it for both reasons.

I didn’t think she had used the brimstone to lie. I couldn’t use my sense of smell to tell me that, but my instincts were that she was telling the absolute truth. So far as it went.

“Did she not want us to believe her?” I asked when Adam turned onto our road. “I mean, I think she was telling the truth—it had that feel. But the brimstone, the smoke, the veil are all the kinds of things the vampires use to confuse the issue.”

“I think,” Adam said slowly, “that Wulfe is missing, and she needs us to find him. I am sure that the theatrics were partially to clue us in that there are other things at play, possibly things she can’t tell us.”

“Like maybe someone is going to question her?” I asked.

“Or has forbidden her to tell us,” he agreed.

“Bonarata?” I asked, and didn’t like the quiver in my voice at all. Bonarata, Marsilia’s maker, was the only one I could think of who could possibly make Marsilia do his bidding.

Adam reached out and gripped my hand.

“Last I heard he was still in Italy,” he said. “But my information is a couple of weeks old. I’ll check again. I think that you are looking at the right scale. Someone powerful enough to get Marsilia’s tail in a twist, and possibly to capture or manipulate Wulfe.”

I shivered.

“It’s not time to panic yet,” he told me. “Marsilia thinks we can make a difference. She’s not stupid, and she understands power games. We’ll start with Wulfe and work our way to Marsilia’s real problem. It is possible that there are just things she didn’t want to tell us. Marsilia is not beyond being manipulative for her own ends.”

“Keep an open mind?” I said.

He smiled at me. “Usually works better at this stage of the game.”





4





We pulled in to find lights on at home. I’d been looking forward to going directly to bed, though it had been unlikely Jesse would have gone to bed before she found out what happened tonight.

Adam parked in our usual spot, looked at the cars, and said, “Looks like Jesse has friends over.”

One of the cars belonged to Jesse’s best friend, Izzy, and the other was Tad’s. Looking at Tad’s car, I sighed theatrically.

Adam raised an eyebrow.

“I miss Tad,” I told him mournfully. “Zee scared away the last assistant I hired before he’d worked a full shift.”

Four weeks, three people who no longer wanted to work for me. I really regretted the first two.

The last one I was pretty sure I’d have had to fire in a few days anyway, because he didn’t know how to fix things without directions. People like that don’t make good mechanics. They can work at a new shop, where all they have to do is replace the part that a computer tells them needs to be replaced.

But working on old cars is generally a matter of understanding why cars run and what can interfere with that. Fixing them can be quirky. I have used bread tabs and dental floss when the new parts don’t fit a forty-year-old car the way they would have fit the car when it was new.

“If Zee is going to scare all of your help away, you should make him hire the next one,” Adam told me, not for the first time.

Tad, my former assistant and Zee’s son, had taken a new job.

“I have to take it,” Tad had assured me earnestly when he’d turned in his notice, which was handwritten on the back of a shop receipt. “They were very persuasive—and it comes with a free education. If I don’t take it, I might have a partial college education forever and be stuck in a job like this.”

Tad had once had a full-ride scholarship to an Ivy League university back East. He’d left it unfinished and never told me why. More interestingly, he’d never told Zee why, either.

I thought that Tad hadn’t talked to me because he was worried I might tell his dad, which was sound reasoning. I didn’t think he was worried about what I’d do. But if I ever found out who had sent our Tad home with his optimistically sunny view of the world ripped away as if it had never been there . . . maybe he was worried about what I’d do, too. I might not be a powerful fae like his father, but I was pretty good at revenge.

When he’d left me the first time, finding a good assistant to man the phones, do the billing, and help out in the shop hadn’t been too difficult. But then Zee had only been coming in now and then when I got behind or he got bored. Since matters had heated up around the TriCities, Zee came every day.

“To keep an eye on things,” he’d told me.

To keep a watch out for Tad and me, I understood. He wasn’t unhappy that Tad had taken a new job, under the circumstances, but he was old and cranky and had very little patience. It took more than a few weeks to see through the crusty interior to the (very small and well-hidden) kindness beneath. I hoped I could find someone before I woke up one day to discover I was the new assistant.