Fire Touched (9 page)

Yes,
said Adam in my head.

Yes,
agreed the pack.

In movies, they stop rolling the film after the climactic speech, or they change scenes.

I had things to do.

I knelt beside Adam, but before I could do more, he rolled upright. He rose to his feet with only a little stiffness, then shook himself as if he'd been wet. I could feel the shivers of pain the motion set wracking and howling through his healing wounds, but no one else would.

The others all turned to go, leaving the cleanup for the poor humans whose city I had just claimed—and I already saw a dozen ways that was going to backfire on us. There was a chance that every supernaturally endowed creature in a hundred-mile radius hadn't witnessed my declaration, but I was pretty sure that's what
the walking stick had been doing with its light show. It didn't think, not like that, but I was getting better at reading its intentions anyway. Zee started to turn, hesitated, then turned back. “So that was what they were trying. Stupid
verdammt
troll,” he said.

I paused. “What who was trying when?”

“What the Gray Lords were trying to do when they sent that troll after me.” He didn't say anything for a moment, and when he did, he sounded sad. “There aren't a lot of trolls left, Mercy, not so many that they should have sent this one to die, sad excuse for a troll that he was. And do not mistake me, they meant for him to die—that's what I missed.”

“They meant for him to die?” I asked.

“They would know,” Zee said. “The Gray Lords are not as forgetful as some of the younger ones. They would know that a troll would not kill me.” He sighed and turned back down the bridge and started walking. “You do not send a puppy to kill an old wolf.”

I followed him, Adam at my side. Warren and Darryl flanked us. Tad walked next to his father, near enough to help if he faltered. Aiden trailed behind us. It bothered me to have him behind us, but I had his promise.

Tad said, after a moment, “You didn't kill him, Dad.”

Zee considered it—or maybe he was just trying to appear thoughtful and disguise how slow he was moving. After a bit he nodded. “This is true.
Interessant.
”

“How so?” I asked at Adam's silent prompting.

“I am not at my best,” Zee said. “Things were done.” He dismissed them with a shrug. “It would have taken me a long time to kill him and, without your wolves to keep him on the bridge, the battle might very well have engulfed some of the town.” He glanced around at the police officers, who were all giving us a little space.
“And even had I managed to limit him to the bridge, I would not have been able to keep the humans away as effectively as you managed. Many humans would have died. You have changed this event, and not to their advantage.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Whoever made the decision to send the troll after me, they wanted a train wreck,” he said. “They wanted death and destruction followed by a battle guaranteed to terrify anyone who watched it happen. A battle generated entirely by the fae. Something to remind humankind that they spent most of their existence being frightened of the Good Neighbors for a very good reason.” He looked back at me, then at Adam, who was walking beside me slowly—as slowly as Zee was moving, in fact. “You have changed the game on them. The fae did not come out of this looking wonderful, but the werewolves defeated the troll, and you defied the Gray Lords themselves. You've set the pack up as the defenders of humankind—and proven that you are capable of taking down the monsters of the fae.”

I thought about that awhile. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I was asking Adam, but it was Zee who answered.

“Wer weiß?”
he said. “Only the future will tell us that. But no good ever came from battling the Gray Lords at their own game. You have changed the rules.”

“I would take it as a favor,” I said thoughtfully, “if you and Tad would come to stay with us while Aiden is our guest.”

Zee looked at me. I didn't want him and Tad alone in his house if the Gray Lords were sending trolls after him. He glanced at the boy, who was trailing behind.

“Yes,” Zee said. “I think that would be
wise.”

Tad and Zee followed me to Adam's SUV, with Aiden tagging along behind like a stray puppy uncertain of his welcome. We walked very slowly because Adam was hurt, and so was Zee—and I wasn't certain about Tad. Traffic was still stopped, and people watched us as we walked.

“Hey, Mercy,” someone called, “do you know what's up?”

I looked over, but I recognized neither the voice nor the face of the woman who was standing outside her car, a toddler on her hip.

“Troll on the Cable Bridge,” I told her. “We dealt with it. They're working on getting traffic moving, but I think the bridge is going to need major repairs before anyone can use it.”

“Troll?” A teenager in a minivan filled with other teenagers stuck his head out the window. “You mean like a real troll? Lives under bridges, tries to eat goats? That kind of troll?”

I nodded and smiled but kept walking.

He let out a happy sound. “Trolls versus werewolves. Our werewolves for the win!”

Adam opened his mouth and let his tongue loll out. Someone in the teen's van let out a wolf whistle, and it wasn't because of Adam's big pink tongue.

“Grandma, what big teeth you have,” I murmured.

The corners of his lips turned up, but he closed his mouth.

About halfway back to the car, traffic started moving again, though it wasn't going to be breaking any speed records. After that, we got honked at—which made Zee say something rude in German. Tad grinned and waved at everyone.

“Quit frowning, Dad,” he said. “If you smile, they'll forget all about us in a day. If you go around looking like that, they'll wonder how many other trolls are going to be wandering into the Tri-Cities.”

Zee smiled.

Tad rolled his eyes. “Not like that, old man—that will give them nightmares.”

“Be careful what you ask for,” I said.

Tad rubbed the top of my head. “I'll keep that in mind, short stuff.”

“I told you to feed him more coffee,” I told Zee. “Look what happened when he outgrew me.”

“Children whine too much,” the old fae said. “Just how far away did you park—and why didn't we get a ride there?”

“Sorry,” I said, meaning it, because I needed to get Adam home so he could change and his shoulder could be checked to make sure it had healed right. Werewolves heal fast, which was good up to a point—but if a bone wasn't set correctly, it would heal just as it was. Then it would need to be rebroken. “But there is no back
way here, and no one could have driven us until the traffic cleared anyway.” And the traffic still wasn't cleared.

It hadn't felt like a long way when we were running for the bridge, but with two—possibly three—people who were hurt, it was too long. I'd have offered to run ahead and grab the SUV, but I knew that neither Adam nor Zee would have allowed it unless they were on their deathbeds.

Tad said somberly, “Hey, Mercy? I'm sorry it took us so long to come help with the troll. We didn't know about it until we saw the traffic backed up. We'd taken refuge in one of the old warehouses in the Lampson scrap yard. I was headed out to find someone with a cell phone I could borrow to call you when I saw the troll.”

“No one died,” I told him, then corrected myself: “None of our pack died. If you hadn't made it when you did, Adam and I would have been toast. You timed it pretty close, though.”

“It's all in the timing,” he agreed—then grinned at me. “But close is still good.”

We walked slowly to the SUV, with its soft upholstery for sore bodies. And I felt Aiden's eyes on me all the way.

Not quite hostile. Not quite. But, my coyote self was certain, not altogether friendly, either.

—

Our house wasn't really a single-family dwelling. An Alpha's house was the center of the pack, designed to be part meetinghouse, part hotel, part hospital. Sometimes it was just Adam, Jesse, and me who lived there, but Joel and his wife currently were living in the suite on the main floor. There were two extra bedrooms on the second floor, and I'd sent Zee to one and
Tad to the other. Aiden had been, not ungently, settled in the safe room in the basement and told to make himself at home. The safe room had camera surveillance, and the doors were alarmed and lockable. When the doors were locked, the room would hold an out-of-control werewolf. Aiden had merely smiled at the doors.

“These locks won't hold me,” he'd told me.

“You're a guest, not a prisoner,” I said, more worried about Adam, who was in our mini-clinic getting checked out, than whether or not our guest liked his accommodations. “This is the last private room in the house. If you'd rather, you can sleep in the rec room, which is set up as a bunk room, too. But I'll warn you that there are a number of pack who view those rooms as public property.”

“No,” he said after a moment, as if he was trying to figure out how to react. “This is fine. I was just warning you.”

“You gave your word,” I said. “And we gave ours.”

“Yes,” he agreed. Then he relaxed, as if we'd stepped back into something he knew. “So we did. Twenty-four hours.” He gave me an enigmatic smile that did not belong on the face of a child.

The safe room was next door to the clinic. We both heard the crack of breaking bones. I froze, my stomach clenched. Adam's control was back in place because I had felt nothing through our link.

Aiden jumped like a startled cat and showed the whites of his eyes.

“Our Alpha's shoulder healed wrong,” I told him, feeling sick. “They had to rebreak it.”

We both listened to the silence. “Tough man,” he said, finally.

“Oh, yes,” I agreed. “If you'll excuse me?”

“Of course.”

But Warren stopped me as I headed to the clinic. Before I could say “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” I found myself chopping
vegetables while Warren and his very-human partner, Kyle, barbecued hamburgers outside. We were setting up a barbecue dinner because, evidently, in between sadistic-but-necessary medical procedures, Adam had called for a meeting of the pack.

—

In the front of the meeting room, the only spot of the room clear of chairs, Adam settled one hip on the library table that usually held whatever notes he'd brought with him. Tonight there weren't any notes. If we were going to talk about Aiden and my offer of sanctuary to anyone who came to us for help, I guess he wouldn't need notes, would he? My stomach was clenched. I was causing trouble for him again.

Medea hopped on the table and stropped her stub-tailed body against Adam, claiming him in front of the room of werewolves. He rubbed her under her chin absently, his attention elsewhere.

The meeting room was upstairs, adjacent to the family bedrooms. I'd asked Adam why he hadn't put it downstairs with the rest of the public rooms.

“A pack needs to be family,” he'd said simply. “If I don't welcome them into my life, into my home, there will always be a distance between us. They need to trust me, to trust that I will take care of them—how can they do that if I treat them like business associates?”

The meeting room was packed with chairs, the kind you see in a high school band room or at a hotel banquet. More or less comfortable to sit in and strong enough to hold a heavy person, but stackable so we could get them out of the way if we needed to.

Adam glanced at his watch, so I knew he was waiting for a few latecomers. He looked almost normal except for the grim tint to his mouth that I blamed on his shoulder. He moved both arms
freely, but I knew it must still hurt. As Alpha, he could draw upon the whole pack for power, so he healed faster than any of the rest of the werewolves. But he'd been hurt pretty badly.

I hadn't had a chance to talk to him, though. If I were a paranoid person, I'd have said he had been avoiding me. I worried that he resented me for making him have this meeting.

Next time I felt the urge to make pronouncements, I'd set down the stupid walking stick before I opened my mouth. I wasn't sure, even now, that it had been the walking stick's fault. I wasn't certain I'd been wrong—but I did know I'd been overly theatric.

Beside me, Warren patted my leg. Warren, bless him, had saved a spot for me right by the door—so I could escape first, he'd told me. But also, I thought, beside him, to show his support for me when I came under fire.

“Didn't the pack used to have meetings a lot more often than we do now?” I asked him. “We have pack breakfast Sundays, but other than that, or some emergency, the whole pack only meets before the full-moon hunt. But I seem to remember a lot more meetings when I used to only live on the other side of the back fence.”

Warren laughed soundlessly; I could feel his body shake next to me.

“Oh, meetings,” he said after a moment. “Yes, there were meetings. You can always tell if Adam is ticked off with the pack by the number of meetings we have. Some days, when someone was really stupid, we had meetings twice on the same day. I think it's his military background. There are a lot of us who are grateful to you for keeping him happy—saves on our gas bill, and some of us even have time for date nights once in a while. Or hobbies.”

I saw Adam's lips quirk before he blanked his face again.
Etiquette among werewolves was that you tried to ignore private conversations. But like everyone else in the room, he could hear us just fine.

Ben entered with Zack and Joel, both of whom still looked a little shaky, but Zack was by far the most battered. The hit with the Miata had fractured his pelvis and four ribs. Werewolves are tough, but Zack was as far from an Alpha as he could get; he'd be in pain for days yet. Ben kept a hand under Zack's arm. The cool expression on Ben's face meant that he was still working as their . . . babysitter? Escort? Something. On his own, he might still have decided to make sure they were safe, but he'd have had his happy mask on and come in making rude comments designed to get a rise out of someone. Under orders, he tended to be much more businesslike, especially lately.

Ben had watched over Joel at the barbecue, too, making sure he got plenty to eat. Zack had been in our mini-clinic with Adam, getting patched up.

As soon as Ben entered, Adam nodded to Darryl, who shut the meeting-room door and went back to his seat in the front of the room. I felt the pack magic surround us, sliding over walls and doors and windows, encasing us in secrecy so that no one outside this room could hear us. It would block our ability to hear anything going on outside, too.

I'd have been more worried about that last, given that we had a stranger in the house, but Tad had promised, out of Jesse's hearing, to keep Adam's human-fragile daughter busy and safe “while the werewolves discussed what to do with their fae . . . guests.”

Adam crossed his arms, and said, “Do we have anyone who would like to start?”

Mary Jo shot to her feet, body tense, though her eyes were lowered.

“Not you, I think,” said Adam thoughtfully. I'd never seen him refuse to allow a wolf their say in a meeting. “Someone else.”

Mary Jo's mouth squinched down until it was hard to be sure it was there. But she sat down without saying anything because there had been something in that thoughtful voice, an edge that was not calm, not quiet, no matter how relaxed Adam's posture was.

A wave of . . . unease swept through the room as Adam's werewolf gold eyes passed over them. Adam was well and truly angry. I wondered if there was some way I could fix it. I'd set the pack up against the whole of the fae. I had no trouble fighting with Adam when I knew I was right. Over this? I found myself wishing I hadn't eaten the half of the burger I'd consumed at the barbecue to appease Kyle, who had, he said in his usual sardonic fashion, cooked it just for me. Warren must have told him what I'd done because the two of them had mother-henned me just as Ben had Joel.

Now that food sat, an indigestible lump, in my stomach.

Ben stood up, his body language casual, confident that he, at least, wasn't the subject of Adam's ire. This time.

Adam raised an eyebrow.

Ben took that as permission. “Tad told me that his father will be fine, and it was probably better just to leave him alone unless he asks for help. He also assured me that his father is more than capable of dealing with . . .” Ben stumbled.

“Aiden,” said Zack. “Probably not his real name, 'cause it means ‘little fire.'”

“Welsh?” Warren asked.

“Irish, I think,” said Zack. “Which doesn't mean it couldn't also be ‘fire' in Cornish, or Welsh, or a hundred and one related languages.” I'd known English wasn't Zack's original language any more than Zack was his real name. When he'd first come to us, he'd
hesitated answering to it, as if he had to remind himself that “Zack” meant someone was addressing him. It wasn't unusual for wolves, especially old ones, to adopt new names. I wouldn't have picked him out as Irish. Maybe he'd just spent some time in Ireland, the same way he'd spent some time in the US. Maybe I was overanalyzing, and he just knew that “Aiden” meant “little fire” because he'd read it in a book somewhere.