I'D HAVE LOVED TO STAY THERE FOREVER, BUT AFTER A few minutes, I felt the cold sweat break out on my forehead and my throat started to close down. I stepped back before I had to do something more forceful in reaction to the aversion to touch that Tim had left me with.
Only when I was no longer pressed against Adam did I notice we were surrounded by pack.
Okay, four wolves doesn't a pack make. But I hadn't heard them come, and, believe me, when there are five werewolves (including Adam) about, you feel surrounded and overmatched.
Ben was there, a cheerful expression that looked just wrong on his fine-featured face, which was more often angry or bitter than happy. Warren, Adam's third, looked like a cat in the cream. Aurielle, Darryl's mate, appeared neutral, but there was something in her stance that told me she was pretty shaken up.
The fourth wolf was Paul, whom I didn't know very well - but I didn't like what I did know.
Paul, the leader of the "I hate Warren because he's gay" faction of Adam's pack, looked like he'd been sucker punched. I thought I'd just given him a new most-hated person in the pack.
Behind me, Adam laid his hands on my shoulders. "My children," he said formally, "I give you Mercedes Athena Thompson, our newest member."
Much awkwardness ensued.
IF I HADN'T FELT HIM EARLIER, I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT Stefan was still unconscious or dead or whatever from the sun. He lay stiffly on the bed in the cage, like a corpse on a bier.
I turned the light on so I could see him better. Feeding had healed most of the visible damage, though there were still red marks on his cheeks. He looked fifty pounds lighter than he'd been the last time I'd seen him - too much like a concentration camp victim for my peace of mind. He'd been given new clothes to replace his filthy, torn, and stained ones, the ubiquitous replacement clothing every wolf den had lying around - sweats. The ones he wore were gray and hung off his bones.
Adam was conducting what was rapidly developing into a full pack meeting in his living room upstairs.
He'd looked relieved when I'd excused myself to see Stefan - I thought he was worried someone would say something that might hurt my feelings. In that he underestimated the thickness of my hide. People I cared about could hurt my feelings, but almost complete strangers? I could care less about what they thought.
Wolf packs were dictatorships, but when you're dealing with a bunch of Americans brought up on the Bill of Rights, you still had to step a little carefully. New members were generally announced as prospective rather than as faits accomplis. A little care would have been especially appropriate when he was doing something as outrageous as bringing a nonwerewolf into the pack.
I'd never heard of anyone doing that. Nonwerewolf mates weren't part of the pack, not really. They had status, as the mates of wolves, but they weren't pack. Couldn't be made into pack with fifty flesh-and-blood ceremonies - the magic just wouldn't let a human in. Apparently my coyoteness was close enough to wolf that the pack magic was willing to let me in.
Probably Adam should have discussed bringing me in with the Marrok, too.
Cars were pulling up in front of the house, more of the pack. I could feel the weight of them, their unease and confusion. Anger.
I rubbed my arms nervously.
"What's wrong?" asked Stefan in a quiet, sane voice that would have reassured me more if he'd moved or opened his eyes.
"Besides Marsilia?" I asked him.
He looked at me then, his lips curving faintly. "That's enough, I suppose. But Marsilia isn't the reason this house is filling with werewolves."
I sat on the thickly carpeted basement floor and leaned my head against the bars of the cage. The door was shut and locked, the key that sometimes hung on the wall across the hallway gone. Adam would have it. It didn't matter though. I was pretty sure Stefan could leave anytime he chose - the same way he'd appeared in my living room.
"Right." I sighed. "Well that's your fault, too, I expect."
He sat up and leaned forward. "What happened?"
"When you jumped inside my head," I told him, "Adam took offense." I didn't tell him exactly how everything had played out. Prudence suggested Adam wouldn't be pleased with me if I shared pack business with a vampire. "What he did - and you'll have to ask him, I think - brought the pack down on his head."
He frowned in obvious puzzlement, then slow comprehension dawned. "I am sorry, Mercy. You weren't meant to... I didn't mean to." He turned his head away. "I'm not used to being so alone. I was dreaming, and there you were, the only one left with a tie of blood to me. I thought I dreamed that, too."
"She really had them all killed?" I whispered it, remembering some of what he'd given me while he'd been in my head. "All of your..." Sheep wasn't really PC, and I didn't want to tick him off, even if sheep is what all the vampires called the mundane humans they kept to feed off. "All of your people?"
I knew some of them, and liked one or two. For some reason, though, rather than the faces of the people I'd met living, it was the young vampire Danny I remembered, his ghost rocking in the corner of Stefan's kitchen. Stefan hadn't been able to protect him either.
Stefan gave me a sick look. "Disciplining me, she said. But I think it was revenge as much as anything. And I can feed off them from a distance. She wanted me starving when I landed at your feet."
"She wanted you to kill me."
He nodded jerkily. "That's right. And if you hadn't had half of Adam's pack at your house, I would have."
I thought of the obstinate look on his face. "I think she underestimated you," I told him.
"Did she?" He smiled, just a little, and shook his head.
I leaned my head back against the wall. "I'm..." Still angry with you didn't cover it. He was a murderer of innocents, and here I was talking to him, worried about him. I didn't know how to complete that thought, much less the sentence, so I went on to something else.
"So Marsilia knows I killed Andre, and you and Wulfe covered it up?"
He shook his head. "She knows something - she didn't talk much to me. It was only me she punished, so I don't think she knows about Wulfe. And maybe not me..." He looked at me from under the cover of his bangs, which had grown in the last day - I'd heard a heavy feeding could cause that. "I got the feeling I was being punished by association. I was the seethe's contact with you. I was the reason she went to you for help and gave you permission to kill Andre's pet. I was the reason you succeeded. You are my fault."
"She's crazy."
He shook his head. "You don't know her. She's trying to do what is best for her people."
The Tri-City seethe of vampires had mostly been in the area before the towns were established. Marsilia had been sent here as punishment for sleeping around with someone else's favorite. She'd been a person of influence, so had come here with attendants - mostly, as far as I knew, Stefan, Andre - the second vampire I'd killed - and a really creepy character named Wulfe.
Wulfe, who looked like a sixteen-year-old boy, had been a witch or wizard as a human, and sometimes dressed like a medieval peasant. I supposed he could be faking it, but I suspected that he was older than Marsilia, who dated from the Renaissance, so the clothes fit.
Marsilia had been sent here to die, but she hadn't. Instead, she'd seen to it that her people survived. As civilization began to grow, life in the seethe became easier. The fight for survival mostly a thing of the past, Marsilia had settled into a decades-long period of apathy - I'd call it sulking. She had only just begun to take an interest in things going on about her, and as a result, the hierarchy of the seethe was restless. Stefan and Andre had been loyal followers, but there were a couple of other vamps who hadn't been so happy to see Marsilia up and taking charge. I'd met them: Estelle and Bernard, but I didn't know enough about vampires to figure out how much of a threat they were.
The first time I met Marsilia, I'd kind of admired her... at least until she'd enthralled Samuel. That had scared me. Samuel's the second-most-dominant wolf in North America, and she and her vampires took him... easily. That fear had grown with every meeting.
"Not to be argumentative, Stefan," I said. "But she's bug-nuts. She wanted to create another of those... those things that Andre made."
His face closed down. "You don't know what you are talking about. You have no idea what she gave up when she came here, or what she has done for us."
"Maybe not, but I met that creature, and so did you. Nothing good could ever come of making another one." Demonic possession isn't a pretty thing. I inhaled and tried to control my temper. I didn't succeed.
"But you are right. I don't know what makes her tick. I don't know you, either."
He just looked at me, expressionlessly. "You play human very well, driving around like Shaggy in your Mystery Machine. But the man I thought you were could never have killed Andre's victims like that."
"Wulfe killed them." He was making a point, not defending himself. It made me angry; he should feel the need to defend himself.
"You agreed to it. Two people who had already been victimized enough, and you two snapped their necks as if they were nothing more than chickens."
About that time he got angry, too. "I did it for you. Don't you understand? She would have destroyed you if she'd known. They were nothing, less than nothing. Street people who would have died on their own anyway. And she would have killed you!" He was on his feet when he finished.
"They were nothing? How do you know? It wasn't like you had a conversation with them." I stood up, too.
"They would have had to die anyway. They knew about us."
"There we disagree," I told him. "What about your vaunted power over human minds?"
"It only works if the contact with us is very short - a feeding, no more than that."
"They were living, breathing people who were murdered. By you."
"How did you know that Mercy was at Andre's?" Warren's calm voice broke between us like a wave of ice water as he came down the stairs. He walked past me and used the key to open the cage door. "I've been wondering about that for a while."
"What do you mean?" asked Stefan.
"I mean that we knew she'd found Andre because she told Ben, thinking he couldn't tell anyone else because he'd not changed back from his wolf in all the time since the demon-possessed died. Ben changed so he could tell us, but we still couldn't go after her because we didn't know where Andre was. You had no way to know what she was doing. How did you know she was off killing Andre, just in time to cover up the crime?"
Stefan made no move to come out of the cage. He folded his arms and leaned a shoulder against the bars instead as he considered Warren's question.
"It was Wulfe, wasn't it?" I said. "He knew what I was doing because one of the homes I found was his."
"Wulfe," said Warren slowly, after Stefan didn't answer. "Is he the kind of man who would be outraged that Marsilia would call down a demon to infest a vampire? Would he want it stopped at the cost of Andre's destruction? Go to you for help doing it?"
Stefan closed his eyes. "He came to me. Told me Mercy was in trouble and needed help. It was only later that I wondered why he'd done it."
"You've had these thoughts already," Warren said. "So what did you decide?"
"Does it matter?"
"It's always a good thing to know your enemies," answered Warren in his lazy Texas drawl. "Who are yours?"
Stefan gave him the look of a baited bear, all frustration and ferocity. "I don't know." He gritted out. Warren smiled coolly, his eyes sharp. "Oh, I think you do. You aren't stupid; you aren't a child. You know how these things work."
"Wulfe used me to get to you," I said. "Then he told Marsilia what you'd done."
Stefan just looked at me.
"With you and Andre out of the way, there is Wulfe, Bernard, and Estelle." I rubbed my hands together and wondered if knowing what had happened would do Stefan any good. It wouldn't change things, and knowing that he'd fallen into Wulfe's trap wasn't going to help Stefan now. Still, as Warren had said, it is a good thing to know your enemies. "And Bernard and Estelle, Marsilia already doesn't trust them, right?"
Stefan nodded. "They work against her where they can, and she knows it. They are of another's making, given as gifts by a vampire not easily refused. She must take care of them, as she would any such gifts - but that doesn't mean she has to trust them. Wulfe... Wulfe is a mystery even to himself, I think.
You believe Wulfe engineered this as a rise to power?" He looked away and didn't speak for a minute, obviously thinking about what I'd said.
Finally, he wrapped his hands around the bars of the open cage. "Wulfe already has power... if he wanted more, it was his for the asking. But it looks like he had a part in my downfall for whatever reason suited him."
"If Marsilia knows that you helped when Mercy killed Andre, why isn't Mercy dead?" Warren asked.
"She was supposed to be," Stefan said savagely. "Why do you think Marsilia starved me until I was no more than a ravening beast, then dropped me into Mercy's living room? You didn't think I did it myself, did you?"
I nodded. "So she thought she'd get it all without cost to her or the seethe? If you'd killed me, she could have claimed you'd escaped while she was punishing you. Too bad you showed up in my house and killed me. But she underestimated you."
"She did not underestimate me," said Stefan. "She knows me." He gave me a look that let me know that my earlier dig about not knowing him had stung. "She just did not plan on you having the Alpha werewolf in your home to spoil her plans."
I'd been there - and I didn't think he would have done it.
Stefan sneered at me when he saw my face. "Don't waste your time on romantic notions about me. I am vampire, and I would have killed you."
"He's cute when he's mad," observed Warren dryly.
Stefan turned his back on us both.
"She's all by herself, and she doesn't even know it," he said in soft anguish.
He wasn't talking about me.
He'd been hurt a lot recently, and I thought he deserved a rest. So I turned to Warren, and asked, "Why aren't you upstairs at the meeting?"
Warren shrugged, his eyes veiled. "The boss will do better without me to rock the boat."
"Paul hates me more than he hates you," I told him smugly.
He threw his head back and laughed - which is what I'd intended. "Wanna bet? I kicked his ass from here to Seattle and back. He's not happy with me."
"You're a wolf. I'm a coyote - there's no comparison."
"Hey," said Warren in mock offense. "You're no threat to his masculinity."
"I'm polluting the pack," I told him. "You're just an aberration."
"That's because you called him a... Stefan?"
I looked around, but the vampire was gone. I hadn't gotten a chance to ask him about the crossed bones on my door.
"Shee-it," exclaimed Warren. "Shee-it."
"DID YOU CALL BRAN?" I ASKED ADAM THE NEXT EVENING, tugging down the short skirt of my favorite green-blue dress until it was as good a barrier between Adam's SUV's leather seats and my naked skin as it was going to be.
He hadn't told me where we were going on our date, but Jesse had called me as soon as he left and described what he was wearing - so I knew I'd need the big guns. Though we share a back fence, the distance by car is significantly longer, and I'd had time to skim into the correct dress before he pulled up at my door.
Adam does suits. He wears suits to work, to pack meetings, to political meetings. Since his hours are about the same as mine, that means six days a week. Still there was a difference between his usual work suits and the one he was wearing tonight. The first were made to announce that this was the man in charge. This one said, "And he's sexy, too." And he was.
"There's no need to call Bran," he told me irritably as he swung the big vehicle onto the highway. "Half the pack probably called Bran as soon as they got home. He'll call me when he's ready."
He was probably right. I hadn't asked, but his grim face when Warren and I emerged from the basement last night - after everyone had left except for Samuel - had told its own story.
Samuel had kissed me on the lips to irritate Adam and ruffled my hair, "There you are, Little Wolf. Still naturally talented at causing trouble, I see."
That was unfair. It had been Stefan and Adam who'd caused this. I informed Samuel of that, but only after he'd escorted me back home.
Adam called me once, earlier in the afternoon, to make sure I remembered he was taking me out. I'd promptly called Jesse with orders to let me know what her father was wearing. I owed her five bucks, but it was worth it to see Adam smiling when I hopped into his SUV.
But my mouth had soon taken care of that. His Explorer still had a heck of a dent on the fender from where one of the wolves had hit it - after being thrown by an angry fae. My fault. So I'd asked him if he had an estimate yet, and he'd growled at me. Then I'd asked about Bran.
So far our date was working out just spiffy.
I went back to playing with my skirt.
"Mercy," Adam said, his voice even more growly than it had been.
"What?" If I snapped at him, it was his own fault for getting grumpy at me first.
"If you don't stop playing with that dress, I'm going to rip it right off you, and we won't be heading for dinner."
I looked at him. He was watching the road, and both hands were on the wheel... but once I paid attention, I could see what I'd done to him. Me. With remnants of grease under my fingernails and stitches in my chin.
Maybe I hadn't screwed up the date as badly as all of that. I smoothed the skirt back down, successfully resisting the urge to pull it up farther only because I wasn't sure I could handle what might happen. I thought Adam was joking, but... I turned my head toward my side window and tried to keep the grin off my face.
He drove us to a restaurant that had just opened in the boom-town that was forming in West Pasco. Just a couple of years ago it had been barren desert, but now there were restaurants, a theater, a Lowe's and... a hugeyenormous (Jesse's word) giant-sized Wal-Mart.
"I hope you like Thai." He parked us out in the middle of west nowhere in the parking lot. Paranoia has odd manifestations. It gave me panic attacks and made him park where he could manage a quick getaway. Shared paranoia - could a happily-ever-after be far off for us?
I hopped out of the front seat and said in suitably resolute tones, "I'm sure they have hamburgers."
I shut the door on his appalled face. The locks clicked, and there he was, one arm on either side of me... grinning.
"You like Thai," he said. "Admit it."
I folded my arms and ignored the gibbering idiot who kept shrieking "he's got me trapped, trapped" in the back of my head. It helped that Adam up close is even better than half a car away. And Adam with a grin... well. He has a dimple, just one. That's all he needs.
"Jesse told you, didn't she?" I said grumpily. "Next time I see her, I'm going to expose her for the secret-sharing kid she is. See if I don't."
He laughed... and dropped his arms and backed away, proving he'd seen my erstwhile panic. I grabbed his arm to prove I wasn't scared and towed him around the Explorer toward the restaurant.
The food was excellent. As I pointed out to Adam, they did have hamburgers. Neither of us ordered them, though doubtless they would have been good, too. I could have been eating seaweed and dust, though, and I still would have enjoyed it.
We talked about cars - and how I thought his Explorer was a pile of junk and he thought I was stuck in the seventies in my preference for cars. I pointed out that my Rabbit was a respectable eighties model, as was my Vanagon - and the chances of his SUV being around in thirty years was nil. Especially if his wolves kept getting thrown at it.
We talked about movies and books. He liked biographies, of all things. The only biography I'd ever liked was Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, which I'd read in seventh grade. He didn't read fiction.
We got in an argument about Yeats. Not about his poetry, but about his obsession with the occult. Adam thought it was ridiculous... I thought it was funny that a werewolf would think it so and baited him until he caught me at it.
"Mercy," he said - and his phone rang.
I drank a sip of water and prepared to listen in to his conversation. But, as it turned out, it was very short.
"Hauptman," he answered shortly.
"You'd better get over here, wolf," said an unfamiliar voice and hung up.
He looked down at the number and frowned. I got up and walked around the table so I could look over his shoulder.
"It's someone from Uncle Mike's," I told him, having memorized the number.
Adam threw some money on the table and we trotted out the door. Grim-faced, he threaded the Explorer through the traffic at something more than the speed limit. We had just gotten on the interstate when something happened.... I felt a flash of rage and horror, and someone died. One of the pack.
I put my hand on Adam's leg, digging in with my nails at the roiling sorrow and rage that spun through the pack. He put his foot down and slid through the evening traffic like an eel. Neither of us said a word during the five minutes it took us to reach Uncle Mike's.
The parking lot was full of big SUVs and trucks, the kind most of the fae drive. Adam didn't bother parking, just drove right up until he was near the door and stopped. He didn't wait for me - but he didn't have to. I was right behind him when he brushed by the bouncer who guarded the door.
The bouncer didn't even protest.
Uncle Mike's smelled like beer, hot wings, and popcorn, which would have made it smell like every other bar in the Tri-Cities except that it also smelled like fae. I don't know that they organize themselves that way, but fae usually smell to me like the four elements that the old philosophers proposed: earth, air, fire, and water, with a healthy dose of magic.
None of those smells bothered me... only the blood.
Uncle Mike's commanding voice was backing people up and tightening the crowd until Adam and I were blocked in. That's when Adam lost it and began tossing people around.
Not really a safe thing to do at Uncle Mike's. Most of the fae I've met are no match for a werewolf... but there are ogres and other things that look just like everyone else until they get ticked off.
Even so, it wasn't until Adam began to change, ripping his charcoal suit, that I realized something more was happening than him losing his temper.
"Adam!" It was no use, my voice was lost in the noise of the crowd. I put a hand on his back so I didn't lose him, and I felt it.
Magic.
I jerked my hand back. It didn't feel like fae magic. I looked around for someone who was concentrating just a little too much on Adam but couldn't spot anyone over the crowd.
I did, however, see a little canvas bag hanging from the rafters just behind us. About the same place Adam started using physical force to move through the crowd. The ceilings in Uncle Mike's are about fourteen feet in the air. I wasn't going to reach that bag without a ladder - and I wasn't going to be able to find a ladder anytime soon.
A slender, almost effeminate man walked under the bag as I watched. He jerked to a halt, then threw back his head and roared. A sound so huge that it drowned out all of the noise in the building, shaking the rafters. His glamour, the illusion that made him look human, shattered, and I swear I could almost see a pile of sparkling dust spread out from him.
He was huge, an unearthly mass of gray and blue, still vaguely human-shaped, but his face looked like it had melted, leaving only vague bumps where his nose should have been. His mouth was pretty easy to spot - it would be hard to miss all those big teeth. Silvery eyes, too small for that huge face, glared out from under sparkly blue eyebrows. He shook himself, and the sparkly dust scattered again, melting as it touched warmer surfaces. He was shedding snow.
In the silence that followed, a small cranky voice said, "Freakin' snow elf." I couldn't see the speaker, but it sounded like it was coming from somewhere right next to the newly emerged monster.
He roared again and reached down, hauling a woman up by the hair. She was more angry than scared and pulled a weapon out of somewhere and cut her own hair, dropping down and out of my sight again.
The thing - I'd never heard of a snow elf - shook the hair he held and threw it behind him.
I glanced back at Adam, but in the short moments since I'd last looked, he'd disappeared, leaving behind only a trail of bloody bodies, most of them still standing and ticked off. I looked at the snow elf and the bag above his head.
No one was watching me, not with a rampaging werewolf and an abominable snowman in the room. I stripped off the dress and bra, stepped out of my shoes and underwear as fast as I could. I'm not a werewolf; my coyote shape comes between one breath and the next, and brings exhilaration and not pain. The snow elf was still standing underneath the bag when I jumped up, landed on someone's shoulders, and looked for him.
The crowd was so tight it was like being at a Metallica concert, and I had a road of heads and shoulders right to the snow elf - who was ten feet tall at the very least and stuck up a whole person's worth over the rest of the people.
He saw me coming and grabbed for me, but I'm fast and he missed. Actually, he probably missed because he didn't know I was going to jump on his shoulder and launch myself at the little bag, rather than because of any speed or dexterity on my part. That damned mountain of a fae was fast, too.
The magic buzzed angrily at me as I snatched the bag in my jaws. I dangled for a moment before the string that held it broke. I fell and waited for the giant hands of the snow elf to crush me, but it was Uncle Mike himself who snatched me out of the air and tossed me toward the door.
As soon as I grabbed the bag, I knew I was right about it being some sort of vicious spell aimed at the wolves. I didn't know how Uncle Mike knew it, too, but he snarled, "Take that thing out of here," before he melted back into the crowd.
Like a Dr. Seuss poem, I scrambled under, around, and through before I got out the door. I'd have felt better if I hadn't known that someone I knew - because I knew most of Adam's pack at least by face - was dead. I'd have felt better if I had known Adam was all right. I'd have settled for just not having the towering mountain of enraged... snow elf following me at full speed.
I'd never met anyone who called himself an elf, so I supposed my view was skewed by Peter Jackson's version of Tolkien's fair folk. The thing following me like a freight train didn't fit my understanding of the word at all.
Later, if I survived, I might derive some amusement from the face of the bouncer, who suddenly realized what was coming at him - just before he broke and ran. I passed him as we both jumped the short step to the pavement outside the door. He ran with me a couple of steps before he figured out who the snow elf was chasing and took a sharp right.
The doorway slowed the monster down. He hit it with his shoulder, taking the whole entryway wall with him as he left the building. He threw the chunk of wall at me, but I hopped through the half-open doorway a second time, just before it hit the ground. I crossed the street at full speed and narrowly missed being hit by a semi on its way to the industrial district just past Uncle Mike's. Safe on the far side, I glanced behind me, then stopped.
The man the snow elf had been was on his knees at the edge of the parking lot, shaking his head as if he was slightly dazed. He looked up at me. The silvery eyes were the same.
"Are you all right?" he asked. "Sorry, so sorry. I haven't felt like that since... since my last battle. I didn't hurt you, did I?" His gaze caught on the chunks of wall and door that were left from when his missile had missed me.
The effects of the little bag were evidently limited by distance.
I dropped the bag on the ground and shook myself and gave him an "all's well" yip. I wasn't sure he got the message, but he didn't try to cross the road after me. I'd have changed back, but my clothes - my favorite dress, a pair of expensive (even at half-off) Italian sandals, and my underwear - were still in the bar somewhere. I'm not modest, but the snow elf and I didn't know each other well enough for me to want be naked in front of him.
He was dazedly trying to pick up the mess he'd made when people started leaving. One of Uncle Mike's people, easily distinguished from the patrons by the distinctive green doublet, stood on the edge of the parking lot and waved his hands at me in a pushing motion. I thought it was the bouncer who'd been at the door, but I'd have to have seen his face frozen in terror again to be certain of it.
I picked up the bag and backed away from the road a dozen yards, until my butt hit the side of an old warehouse fifty yards from the road.
Uncle Mike's parking lot gradually emptied, with Uncle Mike's minions directing traffic and helping the snow elf with his cleanup efforts. Adam's car sat in lonely splendor.
So did Mary Jo's Jeep. The one I'd given a free tune-up to when she'd taken her shift at
guard-the-wimpy-coyote duty. I like Mary Jo. She's a firefighter, five-foot-three-and-a-half of solid muscle and solider nerve.
One of the pack was dead. In the sudden quiet of the night, I could feel the wave of mourning spreading through the pack as the others acknowledged the absence of one of their own. They knew who it was, but I wasn't familiar enough with the pack magic to be certain. I only had Mary Jo's car. There were just six cars left in the patron's parking lot when Uncle Mike strode out of the hole that used to be a door. He clapped a hand on the snow elf's shoulder and patted him before hopping over a cement parking curb and crossing the street toward me. He had my dress in his hands.
I changed and grabbed the dress and pulled it on. No bra, no underwear, but at least I wasn't naked. I kicked the bag toward Uncle Mike. "What happened?"
He bent and picked up the bag. His face tightened, and he made a low, huffing sound... rather more like a lion or big cat of some kind than anything I'd ever heard out of him before.
"Cobweb," he said, "come throw this nasty bit of magic in the river for me, would you?"
Something small and bright, about the size of a lightning bug (there are none in the Tri-Cities) hovered over the bag for a moment, then it, and the bag, disappeared.
"It affected you, too?" I asked.
I don't know what kind of a fae Uncle Mike is. Something powerful enough to control a tavern full of drunken fae seven nights a week.
"No," he said. "Just that it was put in my territory, and I did not sense it."
He dusted off his hands, and his face regained its usual cheerful mien, but I'd seen beneath that facade a few times so his mask of affable tavern keeper didn't reassure me the way it once would have. You have to remember never to believe what you see with the fae.
"Smart coyote," he told me. "I didn't even check to see if there was a cause for their snarling, just assumed they were being nasty-tempered, the way werewolves are - and left it too late before I waded in."
"What happened?" I asked again, but when he didn't answer immediately, I gave him an impatient flick of my hand and ran bare-footed back across the street, through the parking lot, and into the bar.
Inside, with the missing section of wall behind me, it didn't look so bad: a big, empty tavern after a couple of football teams had gotten drunk and partied all night. Teams with really big players, I thought, looking at the beam that the snow elf had taken out with his head - elephants, maybe.
Adam, fully in human form again, sat with his back against the stage riser on the far side of the room, his arms folded over his chest. Somone had found him a pair of cutoffs to wear. Not like he was angry... just closed-up.
Next to him were two of his other wolves, Paul and one of Paul's cronies. Paul looked sick, and the other man, whose name escaped me, was curled around a very still form.
I couldn't see who it was, but I knew. Mary Jo's car in the parking lot told me. There was blood all over all of them. Adam's hands were covered, as was Paul's shirt. The other man was drenched in it.
The wolves weren't the only ones bleeding. There seemed to be a triage of sorts going on at the opposite end of the building. I recognized the woman who had cut her hair to free herself, but she seemed to be one of the aid-givers rather than a victim.
Adam looked up and saw me, his face very bleak.
There was glass on the floor, and my feet were bare - but it would have taken more than that to keep me from them.
Paul's friend was sobbing. "I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to. I'm so sorry." He was rocking the body he held, Mary Jo's body, as he apologized over and over again.
I couldn't get close to Adam without wading between Paul and his friend. I stopped while still out of reach. It didn't seem like a really good idea to give Paul an easy target just yet.
Uncle Mike had followed me in, but he'd gone to the other huddle of beings in that too-empty room first, and when he came over to us, he had the shorn woman in tow. Like me, he stopped before he intruded on their space.
"My apologies, Alpha," he said. "My guests are entitled to an evening of safety, and someone broke hospitality to bespell your wolves. Will you let us repair the damage if we can?" He waved at Mary Jo. Adam's face changed from grim to intent in about half a breath. He stood up and took Mary Jo from the wolf who held her. "Paul," he said, when the man wouldn't let go.
Paul stirred and took his friend's hands, pulling them away. The man... Stan, I thought, though it might have been Sean, jerked once, then collapsed against Paul.
In the meantime, the woman was protesting in a rapid flow of Russian. I couldn't understand the words, but I heard her refusal clearly in her face and body language.
"Who are they going to tell?" Uncle Mike snapped. "They're werewolves. If they go to the press and reveal that there's a fae who can heal mortal wounds, we can go to the press and tell the interested humans just how much of the horrors of the werewolf have been carefully hidden from them."
She turned to look at the wolves, a snarl on her face - and then she just stopped when she saw me. Her pupils dilated until the whole of her eyes were black.
"You," she said. Then she laughed, a cackling sound that made the skin on the back of my neck crawl.
"Of course it would be you."
For some reason the sight of me seemed to stop her protests. She walked to Mary Jo, who hung limply from Adam's curled arms. Like the snow elf had before her, the fae shed her glamour, but hers dripped from her head and down to her feet, where it puddled for a moment, as if it were made of liquid instead of magic.
She was tall, taller than Adam, taller than Uncle Mike, but her arms were reed-thin, and the fingers that touched Mary Jo were odd. It took me a moment to see that each one had an extra joint and a small pad on the underside, like a gecko's.
Her face... was ugly. As the glamour faded, her eyes shrank and her nose grew and hung over her narrow-lipped mouth like the gnarled limb of an old oak.
From her body, as the glamour cleared away, a soft violet light gathered and flowed upward from her feet to her shoulders, then down her arms to her hands. Her padded fingers turned Mary Jo's head and touched her under the chin where someone (probably Paul's repentant friend) had ripped out her throat.
The light never touched me... but I felt it anyway. Like the first light of the morning, or the spray of the salt sea on my face, it delighted my skin. I heard Adam draw in a sharp breath, but he didn't look away from Mary Jo. After a few minutes, Mary Jo's tank top started glowing white in the pale purple light of the fae's magic. The blood that had made it look dark in the dimmed lights of the bar was gone.
The fae jerked her hands away. "It is done," she told Adam. "I have healed her body, but you must give her pulse and breath. Only if she has not yet gone on will she return - I am no god to be giving life and death."
"CPR," translated Uncle Mike laconically.
Adam dropped to his knees, set Mary Jo on the ground, and tilted her head back and began.
"What about brain damage?" I asked.
The fae turned to me. "I healed her body. If they inspire her heart and lungs soon, there will be no damage to her."
Paul's friend was sitting at Adam's side, but Paul got up and opened his mouth.
"Don't," I said urgently.
His eyes flashed at being given an order by me. I should have just let Paul do it, but I was part of the pack now, willy-nilly - and that meant keeping the pack safe.
"You can't thank fae," I told him. "Unless you want to live the rest of your very long life in servitude to them."
"Spoilsport," said the fae woman.
"Mary Jo is precious to our pack," I told her, bowing my head. "Her loss would have left a wound for many months to come. Your healing is a rare and marvelous gift."
Mary Jo gasped, and Paul forgot he was angry with me. He wasn't anything special to her or she to him. She was sweet on a very nice wolf named Henry, and Paul was married to a human I'd never met. But Mary Jo was pack.
I would have turned to her, too, but the fae held my eyes. Her thin-lipped mouth curved into a cold smile.
"This is the one, isn't it?"
"Yes," agreed Uncle Mike cautiously. He was a friend, usually. His caution told me two things. This fae might hurt me, and Uncle Mike, even in the center of his power, his tavern, didn't think he could stop her.
She looked me up and down with the air of an experienced cook at Saturday Market, examining tomatoes for blemishes. "I thought there would not be another coyote so rash as to climb the snow elf.
You owe me nothing for this, Green Man."
I'd heard Uncle Mike called Green Man before. I still wasn't sure exactly what it meant.
And when the fae reached those long fingers out and touched me, I wasn't worried about much other than my own furry hide.
"I did it because of you, coyote. Do you know how much chaos you have caused? The Morrigan says that is your gift. Rash, quick, and lucky, just like Coyote himself. But that old Trickster dies in his adventures - but you won't be able to put yourself back together with the dawn."
I didn't say anything. I'd thought her to be just another of the Tri-Cities fae, denizens (mostly) of Fairyland, the fae reservation just outside of Walla Walla, built either to keep us safe from the fae, or the fae safe from the rest of us. Her healing Mary Jo had given me a clue - healing with magic is no common or weak gift among the fae.
Uncle Mike's caution told me she was scary powerful.
"We'll have more words at a later date, Green Man." She looked back at me. "Who are you, little coyote, to cause the Great Ones such consternation? You broke our laws, yet your defiance of our ruling has been greatly to our benefit. Siebold Adlebertsmiter is innocent and all the trouble was caused by humans. You must be punished - and rewarded."
She laughed as if I was pretty amusing. "Consider yourself rewarded."
The light that had continued to swirl around her feet uneasily stirred and darkened until it was a dark stone circle about three feet around and six inches thick. It solidified under her feet, lifting her half a foot in the air like Aladdin's carpet. The sides curved upward and formed a dish - the memory of an old story supplied the rest. Not a dish but a mortar. A giant mortar.
And she was gone. Not the way that Stefan could go, but just so swiftly my eyes couldn't follow her. I'd seen a fae fly through solid matter before, so it wasn't a surprise that she did so. Which was good, because I'd just had one terrible surprise, I didn't need any more.
The first rule about the fae is that you don't want to attract their attention - but they don't tell you what to do once you have.
"I thought Baba Yaga was a witch," I told Uncle Mike hollowly. Who else would be flying around in a giant mortar?
"Witches aren't immortal," he told me. "Of course she's not a witch."
Baba Yaga is featured in the stories of a dozen countries scattered around Eastern Europe. She's not the hero in most of them. She eats children.
I glanced over at Adam, but he was still focused on Mary Jo. She was shaking like someone on the verge of hypothermia, but seemed to be alive still.
"What about that bag," I asked. "What if someone picks it up from the river?"
"A few minutes of running water will remove any magic from a spell set in fabric," Uncle Mike told me.
"It was a trap for the wolves," I told him. I knew that because it had tasted like vampire. "No one else except for the mobile mountain was affected... Why him and none of the rest? And what in the world is a snow elf? I've never heard of one." As far as I'd ever known, "elf" was one of those generic terms coined by mundanes as a way to refer to the fae.
"The government," said Uncle Mike, after a moment to consider what he wanted to tell me (getting the fae to share information is harder than getting a drop of water from a stone), "requires us to register and tell them what kind of fae we are. So we chose something that appeals to us. For some it is an old title or name, for others... we make it up, just like the humans have made up names for us for centuries. My favorite is the infamous 'Jack-Be-Nimble. I don't know what that is, but we have at least a dozen in our reservation."
I couldn't help but grin. Our government didn't know they had a tiger by the tail - and the tiger wasn't going to tell them anytime soon. "So he made up the snow elf bit?"
"Are you going to argue with him? As to why the bag aimed at the wolf worked - "
"I have another true form," said a soft, Norse-accented voice behind me. There weren't very many people who could sneak up on me - my coyote senses keep me pretty aware of my environment - but I sure hadn't heard him.
It was the snow elf, or whatever he was, of course. He was a couple of inches shorter than me - which he could have fixed as easily as Zee could have gotten rid of his bald spot. I supposed someone whose true form - at least one of them - was ten feet tall didn't mind being short.
He looked at me and bowed, one of those abrupt and stiff movements of head and neck that brings to mind martial artists. "I'm glad you are fast," he said.
I shook the hand he held out to me, which was cool and dry. "I'm glad I'm fast, too," I told him with honest sincerity.
He looked at Uncle Mike. "Do you know who set it? And if it was aimed at the werewolves or at me?"
Adam was listening to the conversation. I wasn't sure how I knew, because it looked like he was totally involved with his battered wolves. But there was something in the tension of his shoulders.
Uncle Mike shook his head. "I was too concerned with getting it away from you. Berserker wolves are bad enough, but a berserker snow elf loose in downtown Pasco is something I don't want to see."
I knew. The bag had smelled of vampire.
The snow elf knelt beside Mary Jo and touched her shoulder. Adam pulled her gently away, setting her in Paul's lap, and put himself between her and the snow elf.
"Mine," he said.
The elf raised his hands and smiled mildly, but there was a bite to his words. "No harm, Alpha. I meant no trouble. My days of roaming the mountains with a wolf pack at my beck and call are long over."
Adam nodded, keeping his eyes on the enemy. "That may be. But she is one of mine. And I am not one of yours."
"Enough," said Uncle Mike. "One fight a night is good enough. Go home, Ymir."
The kneeling elf looked at Uncle Mike, and the skin grew tight around his eyes for a moment before he smiled brightly. I noticed that his teeth were very white, if a little crooked. He stood up, using just the muscles of his thighs, like a martial artist. "It has been a long night." He made a slow turn that encompassed not just Uncle Mike, the wolves, and me, but everyone else in the room - who I just realized were all watching us... or maybe they were watching the snow elf. "Of course it is time to go. I'll see you all."
No one said anything until he was out of the building.
"Well," said Uncle Mike, sounding more Irish than usual. "Such a night."
MARY JO WAS MOVING BUT STILL DAZED WHEN WE GOT her outside. So Adam instructed Paul and his friend (whose name, as it happened, was Alec and not Sean or Stan at all) to take her to Adam's house. Paul packed Mary Jo in the back of her car with Alec and started to get in.
He looked at my feet. "You shouldn't be out here barefoot," he told the ground. Then he shut the car door, turned the key as he turned on the lights, and left.
"He meant thank you," said Adam. "I'll say it, too. I can think of a lot of things I'd rather do than try to defend Paul from Baba Yaga."
"I should have let her have him," I told Adam. "It would have made your life easier."
He grinned, then stretched his neck. "This could have been a very, very bad night."
I was looking over his shoulder at his SUV. "Would you settle for just a little bad? Your insurance doesn't have an exception for snow elves, right?"
It had looked all right at first, then I thought it just had a flat tire. But now I could see the right rear tire was bent up at a forty-five-degree angle.
Adam pulled out his cell phone. "That doesn't even register on my scale of bad tonight," he told me. He put his free arm around my shoulder, pulling me against him as his daughter answered the phone. He wasn't wearing a shirt.
"Hey, Jesse," he said. "It's been a wild night, and we need you to come pick us up at Uncle Mike's."
