Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(54)

He nodded his head abruptly, and I relaxed.

“Unless he dated while he was back East in college, Tad hasn’t had a serious girlfriend before,” said Adam thoughtfully. “I get where you are coming from.”

There was so much sympathy in his voice that I craned my neck around so I could see him.

“You didn’t follow Jesse around,” I said.

Adam didn’t reply.

“I am disappointed in both of you,” said George solemnly. Then he ruined it by saying, “Zee, you have great magics at your beck and call and you followed Tad around like a mere mortal. Adam, you have all the spy-tech anyone could ask for, and a whole pack of werewolves to call upon.”

“Tech would have been a betrayal,” Adam said. “If Jesse’d caught me skulking around, she’d have had my hide. But if she found out I was watching her with cameras . . . she would never trust me again.”

I’d been watching Zee’s face.

“He caught you,” I said, amazed. Thoughtlessly, I put my feet on the ground so I could lean forward, but then pulled them back up again. “Tad caught you when you followed them to the theater.”

Zee’s face and his whole body stiffened for an instant, then he relaxed and a huge grin lit his face. “That boy is smart like his mama,” he said. “I am proud.”

And that’s why he’d given in when I confronted him about Izzy. Tad knew about the car thing, too. I relaxed further. Zee couldn’t do anything to Izzy without Tad finding out. And that made Izzy a whole lot safer.

“You were going to tell us about the Harvester?” I suggested.

“Of course,” said Zee, his smile fading. “This is a film about a man possessed by a sickle—which, for some reason I do not understand, they called a scythe.”

“We heard about that,” Adam commented.

“Ja, gut,” Zee said. “In the movie, this sickle drives the man to kill—and then to stalk and kill in more and more elaborate ways, ja?”

“Okay,” I said.

“There was such a sickle,” Zee said heavily. “I do not know how it came here, to this place. But about forty years ago, some damned fool boy found it—or was given it. This sickle is sentient—like your walking stick, Mercy. But it is more than that. It conscripts people to its purpose. This boy, he started killing people.”

“People?” George asked with a frown.

Zee nodded. “But the victims were carefully chosen. Magic in their blood, but not too much. No one tied with a larger group—no vampires, no black witches, no greater fae. A few lesser fae, goblins, white witches, a weak gray witch, half-bloods of any of the preternatural folk.”

“Are you saying that this sickle is sentient enough to make those kinds of calculations?” Adam asked.

“I am telling what happened,” said Zee curtly.

“We don’t have enough bodies to have a pattern,” George said. “A witch, yes. But the second victim is human.”

Zee didn’t address that directly. “There was a policeman. In those days we hid ourselves, but there are mortals whose eyes are open. They do not try to find mundane explanations for inexplicable things. This policeman was one of those. When he saw bodies slashed to pieces as if someone were harvesting wheat . . . he did not look at them and think a normal human had killed them. His involvement concerned someone who decided to do something about the situation. She had an inkling about what was happening, and so did I come to the TriCities. The sickle was not of my making, but she didn’t know that.”

Zee shrugged and straightened a few tools on one of the rolling carts, his face casually turned away from the rest of us. I wondered if it was indignation at answering a summons, but I didn’t think that he’d have hidden that.

My phone rang.

I dug it out of my pocket, but I was watching Zee and caught a glimpse of his expression.

Avarice was one of the deadly sins, wasn’t it?

I glanced at my phone’s screen. The caller’s number was unavailable. Thinking about what I’d seen on Zee’s face, I hit the green button.

“Hello?” I’d called Samuel this morning, looking for information on Sherwood. He hadn’t picked up, so I’d left a message. Sometimes his calls registered as unavailable.

“Hello?” I said.

Silence. Telemarketing companies sometimes auto-dialed and ended up with more calls than their people could handle at once. They usually hung up after a few seconds. This one didn’t.

I couldn’t hear anyone breathing, but I could hear something. Faint whispers of the wind and traffic. Something set the hair on the back of my neck crawling. I knew it wasn’t Samuel on the other end. I don’t know how or why, but it didn’t feel like Samuel.

“Stefan?” I asked.

With a click the call disconnected.

“Mercy?” Adam asked.

I shook my head. Now that I’d disconnected, I couldn’t put my finger on why I’d gotten so freaked-out. I flexed my hands and they hurt. I shivered.

“Mercy? Was it Stefan?” Adam’s voice centered me.

“It’s nothing. Paranoia.” I waved my hand, taking in the daylight streaming through the skylights. “It’s daytime. Stefan would be asleep—and he’s not likely to call me and then not talk.” Some vampires could function during the day. Wulfe could. “It was a telemarketer.” By then I was able to make the last sentence a truthful one. “Anyone spiked by spider-fae-from-hell gets to be paranoid for a few hours.”