Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(98)

Even after looking into him, I wasn’t sure. I pulled my mind back to the explanation I owed Adam.

“I see”—I clutched his hand with my suddenly clammy one—“into their souls. When I remember it—it comes like a visual. But I can tell you things about them that the visual shouldn’t tell me. It feels like my senses are confused. Like I can taste music or hear colors. I looked at Wulfe and I know things about his past that looking at him shouldn’t be able to tell me.”

“As a person who tried LSD a few times,” Adam said, “I probably understand better than you might think.”

“You?” I asked, genuinely shocked. Not that people did LSD, but that Adam had.

“Vietnam,” he said shortly, as if that was an answer—and maybe it was. “But I understand how perception can get miscategorized.”

“It’s like what happened with Aubrey,” I said. “Except they aren’t dead. Mary Jo—” I hesitated. What I saw when I looked at her, at Kyle, was something I had no right to know, let alone repeat.

“Do you think it’s permanent?” Adam asked.

I slumped in the seat. “No idea.”

We drove in silence for a while, past the fairgrounds.

“Can we stop by my shop?” I asked.

We’d have to backtrack to do it now.

“Do you want to see Zee?” There was no emphasis on the “see,” but we both knew what he meant.

“No,” I told him honestly. “If I use this to look at him, I don’t think he’d ever forgive me. But I think I have to. Because if we get the Soul Taker, the only thing I can think of to do with it is give it to Zee. And I just don’t know if that’s a good idea or not.”

Adam didn’t say anything.

“The Soul Taker is really bad news,” I said in a small voice. “It scared Coyote.”

“When did—” Adam began, but broke off. “Never mind. That doesn’t matter right now. Zee is the only person you think can deal with this artifact.” He grunted. “All things considered, he’s still the only person I’d ask to deal with it, too.”

“Larry left the Soul Taker with Bonarata rather than tell Zee where it was,” I said. “And Bonarata was so ignorant that he gave Wulfe to it. I have to tell you right now that the Soul Taker riding Wulfe scares the pants off me.”

Adam still hadn’t turned around, and we were now closer to home than to the garage.

“Did you change your mind about Wulfe after you saw him?” asked Adam.

“No,” I said.

“How about Mary Jo or Kyle?”

I saw where he was going. “No.”

“You know enough about Zee to decide what to do,” Adam said, and I could breathe again because he was right.

He didn’t take me to the garage. We drove home instead. There were no other cars parked at the house, so Jesse was still out.

Adam got out first because he wasn’t stiff from sitting after a fight. I heard him laugh as I slid gingerly out of the vehicle—but I didn’t see why he was laughing until I shut the SUV’s door.

Some joker had left a pumpkin pie on the porch step. It was store-bought, one of those in a clear plastic keeper. In orange Sharpie they’d scrawled For Mercy, with apologies, from Her Little Pumpkin.

I picked it up and took it inside. There were three small pumpkins sitting on the stairway. One of them had a three-by-five index card with Score is 1–0. Want to try again? A second had a big spider drawn on it with marker. The third was covered with itty-bitty spiders.

I could have sniffed them to figure out who it was—even if they’d used gloves, they had transported the loot in a car. But that would have been cheating.

I walked past the stairway and into the kitchen. I set the pie on the table next to Medea, who was not supposed to be on the table. She rolled over on her back without any sign of guilt, and I rubbed her belly.

“You are a weird cat,” I told her, as her stump tail swatted back and forth with pleasure as if she were a dog.

Adam came up behind me and put the stairway pumpkins on the table next to the cat and the pie. He wrapped his arms around me and said, “What can I do to help?”

I turned around and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, finding his lips by feel because I kept my eyes closed. As his mouth caressed mine—and then changed into something fiercer—I felt the tension that had invaded my body ever since I saw the encyclopedias in the bathroom ease into a different kind of tension.

Passion didn’t make my stomach hurt, didn’t make me want to curl up under the blankets like a child afraid of the dark. Passion—at least passion with Adam—made me feel brave.

“That,” I said. “Yes. That’s good. Nudge.”

“Upstairs.” His voice was gravelly and sent a zing up my spine because my body knew what happened to it when Adam sounded like that.

I nodded and he picked me up—I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t wince at the feel of his arm across the cut on my back and the flexing of stiff muscles. I was pretty sure that I’d pulled something in my lower back, because it spasmed when I twisted.

Adam was observant by nature and training, so it didn’t surprise me when he took me to our bathroom instead of our bed. He undressed me carefully. When my shirt tried to stick to the cut, he held a wet washcloth over it until it pulled free.