Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(36)

This time there was nothing beneath my feet, and the blackness reached out and touched me.

Hello, Coyote’s daughter, the void said.





6





“Breathe, damn you,” growled my mate.

I sucked in a breath, because Adam told me to. But the rest of me was still falling, consumed by the darkness. It took another moment for me to understand that I was lying on the tile floor of Stefan’s basement library with the fading taste of empty blackness in my mouth.

I tried to stand up. But when I had stood on that icy snowbank, I’d been in human form, so that’s the body I expected to be in. My four feet all seemed at sixes and sevens, and I scrambled in something approaching panic until Adam helped me up.

I stood shaking, my breath rising in a mist around me, though the earlier frost that had covered the basement was just dampness and a few small puddles now.

Adam was sitting beside me, next to a broken chair. He brushed a hand over his forehead and closed his eyes, his other hand firmly threaded through the hair on the ruff of my neck. I could see the pulse pound in his neck as he breathed out. I wanted to tease him about swearing at me, to distract us both from the last few panicky moments, but I was wearing my coyote self, so I whined at him instead. His fingers tightened on me.

His breath didn’t make a fog. Mine quit after my third breath expelled the last of the air I’d inhaled wherever I’d been. If I’d been anywhere at all.

I glanced at the ruined library for clues to how much time had passed. Daniel was still seated where he’d been, staring off into space. I wondered if he was flying through the darkness with his arms open wide—or if I’d just been knocked unconscious and dreamed the whole thing.

Light footsteps and a sense of motion called my attention to Larry padding out of a dark hallway, a bronze short sword in each hand. The left one dripped a thick black liquid that was the wrong color for blood, though that’s what it smelled like to me.

Larry looked first at me and then at Adam. The blades of his swords caught fire for a moment. When the flames died, the bronze looked freshly burnished and a fine ash drifted to the floor.

“Did you kill her?” Adam asked. I presumed he meant the spell weaver whose web I’d broken.

“Yes. She was mostly dead anyway. I just gave her the coup de grace.” The goblin king frowned at me. “No one told me Mercy is a spell breaker.” His voice was mild, but there was something dangerous in his face.

“No one told her that, either,” Adam said, his voice rough with the wolf riding him. “Possibly because she’s not one. I cannot give you all of our secrets, Goblin King. But let me say that Mercy is Coyote’s daughter, and that means the magic of the dead has difficulty with her most of the time. Magic in general is weird around her.”

Adam opened his eyes, finally, and I saw they were gold. Adam and his wolf had been vying for control an awful lot over the past twelve hours or so. I didn’t think that was a good thing.

Courteously, Larry averted his gaze, though he’d continued to approach until he was a few feet away. He judged it nicely, I thought. An inch closer and Adam would have risen to his feet. Given the color of his eyes, just that much motion could have been enough to shake another werewolf’s control.

“That was not vampiric magic,” Larry said.

“Sometimes . . .” Adam stopped, and his hand tightened on me. There was a long pause before he continued, “Sometimes other kinds of magic don’t work on her. But her resistance to fae magic is very, very hit-and-miss.”

Larry sat on his heels so that he was eye level with both of us, though he still avoided Adam’s gaze.

“Her gamble paid off this time, then,” he said. “That spell would have leveled this house and killed us all.” He met my eyes and said, “Of course, breaking it the way you did might have leveled the city.”

He looked around and took a deep breath, half closing his eyes. “Or not. Reckless and lucky. I like that in an ally.” His lips quirked up. “But not in a mate, eh?” He wasn’t looking at Adam, but that was who the last sentence addressed.

“She puts up with a lot from me, too,” said Adam, his voice sounding almost normal. He loosened his grip on my ruff, his touch becoming a caress. “Did you clear the basement, or do we need to do that still?”

Larry said, “I killed the web weaver, and she was the only one alive down here. Or in the rest of the house. My watcher told me that a white rental van was here at sunset, and Stefan’s people left in it.”

“All of them?”

Larry shrugged. “The two fledgling vampires, my watcher was certain. None of the rest of Stefan’s people are a threat, so she did not note them particularly. We should check upstairs, but there is no one down here. No one came to see what all the noise was about.”

I had mostly recovered from my trip to the freaky cold place while they talked. I thought that we should go before whoever had planted the spider-fae people decided we needed more fun. I sneezed to get Adam’s attention and then looked up at the first-floor doorway.

“Right,” he said. “No sense hanging around here.”

He stood up, sweeping me into his arms as he did so.

“Ready?” he asked.

It was a warning rather than a question no matter how he said it. With no further ado, he tossed me up and through the doorway at the top of the no-longer-in-one-piece stairway.