Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson #5)

Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson #5) Page 7

I TOOK SAM WITH ME TO THE BOOKSTORE THAT NIGHT, which was inconvenient.

I suppose we both could have stayed home, but I wanted in to look at Phin's bookstore. The woman had been searching for something; maybe I could figure out what it had been. Maybe I'd find Phin there, happy and healthy. Maybe I wouldn't sit home all night, worrying about things I couldn't change.

I couldn't leave Sam by himself, not after my little talk with Charles. But he wasn't the best partner to bring with me to break into the store.

People would overlook a woman wandering around the Uptown mall in Richland even after most of the stores were closed. It wasn't that late, a little after nine at night. The crime rate is relatively low in Richland - and most of what crime there is tends to be committed by gang members or teenagers. Sam . . .

I imagined the hypothetical conversation as I drove down the interstate.

Officer: "Tell me, did you see anything unusual last night?"

Random witness: "There was this big white dog. Huge. And really white, stood out in the darkness like a beacon."

Yep. Sam made matters more difficult. So I would just act like I knew what I was doing and hope no one ever called the police to investigate.

"I don't know what I hope to discover in the bookstore," I said. "There is hardly going to be a note telling me where Phin is, right? Still, it's a start. If we don't find anything, maybe we'll go break into his apartment. It's better than sitting around at home, right?"

And the pack was meeting at Adam's house that night. I knew why he'd called the meeting. He wanted to find out who'd been playing games with me. He'd called me to tell me what he was doing - and asked me to stay away because he hadn't had a chance to show me how to defend myself from pack members crawling around in my head.

I should have gone over anyway, confronted my enemies. But it was different when all your enemies could do was kill you.

"I don't want to stay home knowing how much of a coward I am," I told Sam. "I should have gone to Adam's when I saw them all arrive."

He grunted.

"But the thought of them being able to make me do something I would never . . ."

I was pretty sure that it hadn't just been lack of opportunity that kept Adam from teaching me how to protect myself. He'd said that if he'd known what was happening at the time when whoever it was started influencing me, he could have discovered their identity. I think he planned on trying to force a confession tonight - and if he couldn't, he would wait until they tried it again. If that was his motivation, I approved in spirit, but at the same time, I really didn't want to wait around until someone tried to make me do their bidding again.

I parked in the corner of the Uptown parking lot where an all-night restaurant was located. There weren't a lot of cars there but enough that the Rabbit didn't stand out.

I opened Sam's door and he sniffed the air carefully.

"Are you scenting for the fae woman who was here today?" I asked.

He didn't give me any kind of answer, just shook himself and looked at me expectantly - as if he really were the dog we were pretending he was. Was he slower? Did his tail droop more than usual? Or was I letting Charles's words make me paranoid?

I glanced at him and was pretty sure it was both. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you aren't right. He wasn't quite as responsive, either, as if it took him a moment to translate words into meanings.

I didn't notice anyone who seemed to be watching us as we crossed the parking lot - but we were out where people could see us. All I could do was act as if I weren't breaking into the shop. It took me two full minutes to crack the lock on the door of the bookstore, which was about one and a half minutes longer than I was comfortable standing there with my back to the parking lot and the busy street beyond. I was hopeful that someone from the street couldn't tell that I was playing with my lockpicks instead of fumbling with a stiff lock. There was a bar that was still open about three stores over, but no one had come or gone while I struggled. Sheer good luck, something I couldn't always count on. I was going to have to get some practice in if I kept having to break into buildings.

The door handle turned, and I started to move on to the dead bolt, when I realized that the door had popped open when I'd unlocked the handle. Someone hadn't engaged the dead bolt.

I held the door for Sam, then slipped inside myself. He couldn't shut the door - and if there was something unfriendly in the store, he was better able to deal with it.

I turned the dead bolt and looked around. My eyesight is good in the dark, so we didn't need to attract even more attention by turning on the light. It was darker in the store than it was outside and the windows were already tinted, so it would be hard for anyone looking to see anything but the reflection of the outside lights.

At first I observed a neat and tidy store that smelled of incense and old books. Paper holds the memory of any strong scent, so in a used bookstore, it wasn't uncommon to get little trickles of food, tobacco, and perfume. I took a deep breath to see if I could find anything that stood out.

Blood and fear and rage are a little out of the ordinary.

I stopped where I was and sucked in several deep breaths. Each time the smell grew stronger and stronger.

Fae glamour - a type of illusion - is strongly effective on sight, sound, taste, and touch. I'm told it is sufficient for a human sense of smell, but mine is better than that. By the third breath I smelled the sharp smell of broken wood, and the ammonia-like scent that fae magic sometimes leaves behind.

I closed my eyes, bowed my head, and let my nose be right. My ears cleared with a pop, and when I looked up, the tidy bookcases filled with tidy books had disappeared, leaving destruction in their place.

"Sam." I kept my voice down, though I don't think anyone outside would have heard me if I'd shouted. It was a reflex thing - we were sneaking around, so I needed to be quiet. "Do you smell it? The blood? There's a glamour here. Can you break it, too? Do you see the mess the fae left behind when they searched the place?"

He cocked an ear at me, then looked around. With a movement swifter than thought, he turned and sank his teeth into my arm.

Maybe if I'd thought there was a chance of him attacking me, I could have gotten out of the way or defended myself somehow. Instead, I stared at him dumbly as his fangs slid through skin and into flesh. He released me almost immediately, leaving behind two clean marks that could have been a vampire bite except that they were too far apart and too big. Vampires have smaller fangs.

Blood trickled out of one mark, then the other, dribbling down my forearm. Sam licked it clean, mostly, ignoring my surprised squeak and the way I backed away from him.

He looked around the shop again. I clamped my arm to my mouth - I didn't want to be bleeding anywhere in enemy territory. Witches can use blood and hair and other body parts to do nasty things. I didn't think the fae worked quite the same way, but I didn't want to chance it.

I checked under the counter for tissues and found something better - a first-aid kit. It wasn't as good as the one I had, but it was good enough to have gauze and an Ace bandage.

Wrapped and no longer in danger of dripping bits of myself all over, I walked back to Sam. He was still where I'd left him, staring as hard as he could at something I could no longer see.

It hadn't been a hard bite, and I wouldn't let myself be afraid of Sam. My foster father's SIG was in its holster across my shoulder, full of regular ammunition that generally worked just fine on fae - and did nothing to werewolves but make them mad. I tuned out Charles's warning voice and put the hand of my uninjured arm on Sam's neck. I refused to believe he was regressing into a vicious killer. A bite did not a killer make.

"Damn it all, Sam, why'd you bite me?" If I yelled at him, I couldn't be afraid of him. So I yelled at him.

Sam glanced at me, then knocked one of the fallen books aside with one paw. It was a cloth-bound copy of Felix Salten's Bambi's Children. In the glamour version of the shop, there had been no books on the floor. He'd bitten me on purpose - hadn't I asked him if he could break the glamour, too? Evidently, the bite was his answer. My blood must have allowed him to see what I did, some sort of sympathetic magic or something.

"Cool," I said. "That's cool." Pushing out of my head the knowledge that neither Samuel nor Sam, my friend, would have bitten me so casually, I turned my attention to the bookstore.

I have a pretty good memory for scents, and I picked up Phin's without any trouble. If I'd been looking for purely human assailants, I'd have been in trouble. This was a bookstore and had had a lot of people running through it. There weren't many fae aside from Phin, who barely qualified to my nose. However, several of the fae had been here recently, without many people in to cover up their trail.

"I've got Phin, the old woman from this afternoon, and three other fae," I told Sam.

Sam raised himself on the edge of one of the dominoed bookcases and put his nose against the back, moving and sniffing until he'd found what he wanted. He stepped back in obvious invitation.

Without touching it, I bent until my nose was nearly touching the wood. I smelled it, too, right where someone had put their magic-laden hand on the wood and pushed the bookcase over.

"That's one of them," I told Sam. "Some kind of woodland fae, I think - air and growing things."

I followed Sam's lead and sniffed and crawled and sniffed some more until we had a handle of sorts on what had happened here. I'd have done it easier if I took coyote form. But if someone came upon us, I'd have a better chance of explaining myself and keeping things calm if I was human. Calm was good, because I didn't want Sam eating anyone he shouldn't.

I told myself all these good reasons to keep my human shape on because they were good reasons. But I knew the real reason was because that bite had made me concerned that Sam would forget that I was his friend if I were running around as a coyote instead of a human who could remind him of it.

"So," I told him, my hand on my hips as I surveyed a patch of blood belonging to Phin. "They came in the door, and the last one locked it behind him. Let's call him Fishy Boy, because he's a water fae of some sort. He seems to be the one running the show because all the damage to the store was done by the other two."

Sam's icy gaze speared me, and I looked down and away - like the salute of a fencer. Acknowledging his state as the big bad wolf without submitting to it. It must have been enough, because he didn't act any more aggressive.

Again with the dominance stuff, it wasn't something Sam usually indulged in unless he was really upset or meeting a wolf for the first time. When you are the top dog for long enough, I guess you don't feel like you have to rub people's noses in it.

If he hadn't bitten me, I'd have just dropped my eyes, but that didn't feel safe anymore. Not after he bit me. I needed to remind him that I was an Alpha's mate, predator and not prey.

A week, Charles had said, based on one example who had been a lot younger than Samuel was. I was starting to worry that he'd been optimistic - which is something I've never felt compelled to accuse Charles of being. How much time did Sam have?

"So Fishy Boy grabs Phin, and says, 'We know youse got it, see.' " I used my best Jimmy Cagney voice as I recited the scene as I had pieced together. "And then he nods to his minions - Jolly Green Giants One and Two, because they both smell like green beans to me. Giant One, she pushes over a bookcase that topples a few more." I couldn't always tell the sex of the person whose scent trail I was following, but Giant One was definitely female, though not necessarily big. "Two, he's a little stronger. He gets some loft on his and tosses it about halfway across the room, taking down a couple of more bookcases along the way in a much more destructive fashion."

The original bookcase Two had tossed was in pieces, having broken apart when it hit. I could see the action running like a film through my head; the steps had been laid out before my nose, and eyes - with a little imagination thrown in. I wasn't sure even a werewolf could have picked up a bookcase stuffed full of books.

"But Phin doesn't tell right away," I told Sam.

I thought about Tad, my morning visitor-with-gun, and the dried blood on the floor. "So Fishy Boy continues working on Phin while the Giant Twins go looking for it in the store. They're pretty convinced it is here because they took apart everything. I'm thinking that the ripped-up books might just be frustration - because it wasn't done in a methodical way. I suppose, even so, it could be that they are looking for something that is not a book." I looked around. "Maybe it could be hidden in a book or behind a book. They stopped because Phin started talking."

Sam sneezed a quick agreement - or maybe it was just dust. I was worried it was just dust.

"Did he know they were coming and call Tad to warn me?" I asked. "Or did they make him call Tad, and he managed to leave a vague warning instead? Either way, isn't it interesting that he didn't say what it was I'd borrowed?"

I tapped my fingers on a bookcase that was still upright. "So maybe they don't know it was a book, and he was afraid they could hear him - or they could read Tad's message."

Sam sneezed again. I glanced at him and saw the intelligent gleam that told me he was listening - and made me realize that he hadn't been just a few minutes ago.

"Maybe they really are after something entirely different. It could even be that Phin got clever and sent them after me to throw them off the trail. He does know that I have more protection than most people."

I let go of the bookcase so I could start pacing. "And this is where I'm going to be adding one and one and getting fifty - but bear with me." I walked twice around the shop and came to a halt where I'd started in the first place.

"Assume that at some point yesterday, Phin breaks down and tells them exactly who I am: things like who I'm dating and how many people would be angry if they just came after me. This next part is the weakest part of my story, Sam, but my instincts are screaming at me that the incident with Kelly Heart this morning and what happened to Phin are connected - it's that fae waiting up on the roof that makes me certain of it. I just don't know exactly why they wanted me dead."

Sam growled.

"Think about it," I told him, as if I were sure that he was growling at the threat to me. "This isn't the work of the Gray Lords. If it were, I'd be dead. We know there are at least three of the fae. Four if the woman on the roof of the storage building wasn't Giant One . . . Five if the old woman I saw here earlier today, who may or may not be Phin's grandmother, is one of them. But still, I don't think it's a huge group. It wouldn't be a happy thing for them if the werewolves went out hunting them. So they set up an incident, and Kelly Heart's producer is encouraged - by charm or by harm, as Zee would say - to send Kelly to my garage to find Adam."

I stopped and looked out past the parking lot to the headlights of the cars driving by.

"If they were after Adam, there are better ways to find him than coming to my garage. He's not hard to find. He goes to work six days a week, and his home address is a matter of public record. I had put it down to Heart's producer looking for the best drama . . ."

I took a deep breath and gauged Sam for his reaction.

Sam's stance - intent on my words - told me that he was making the leap with me. Or at least his wolf was. Just how smart was the wolf half of the werewolf?

"But things didn't go quite as they planned. I disarmed Heart right off the bat. They could hardly shoot me while I held the gun I was supposed to be shot with, right? But when Adam showed up, then the police, they decided to try to create a little chaos: a feeding frenzy fueled by magic. But Zee took care of that - and spotted their shooter. They had to run from Ben and leave the field."

I rubbed my damp palms on my thighs. "It sounds far-fetched, I know. But there is the book and the phone call to Tad that ties me to the fae who came into Phin's bookshop and destroyed it. They beat Phin until he bled, then took off with him. Violence and fae - just like this morning. And the only common factor is me. Coincidences happen, I know. Maybe I'm just egocentric, thinking it's all about me."

I waited in the bookstore until I realized I was waiting for Samuel to say something. But Samuel wasn't here: it was just Sam and me.

"Okay, that's enough make-believe for me." I dusted off my jeans. I'd have been hoping that I was wrong, but the way my life had been going the past year - this almost sounded tame. No vampires or ghosts, right? No Gray Lords who terrified even other fae. If I was wrong, I was afraid that it was only because the reality was even worse. "Let's keep looking. I'd feel really dumb if Phin turns out to be hidden in the basement."

Sam found a door behind about three bookcases. Happily, it opened away from us, so we just had to scramble over the top to drop to a landing. Straight ahead was a brick wall; to the right of the door we'd entered through was a set of narrow and steep stairs that led down into a pit of inky blackness: the bookstore had a basement.

I didn't think that anyone would notice if I turned on the lights here because I was pretty sure that there weren't any windows in the basement. I'd have noticed.

It took me a minute to find the light switch. Sam, apparently unfazed by the darkness, had already continued down on his own when my hand found the right place.

With light to guide my way, I could see that the basement was mostly a storage facility with cardboard boxes set in piles. It reminded me of the hospital's X-ray storage room in that there was obvious order to the stacks. The ceiling height was deeper than usual for basements this near the river, but I could detect no trace of dampness.

Just to the right of the stairway, a section had been used as an office. A Persian rug delineated the space and stretched out beneath an old-fashioned oak desk complete with clamp-on desk lamp. There was a large framed oil painting of an English-type garden placed just in front of the desk, where someone sitting might use it as a mock window.

At one time the desk had held a computer monitor. I could tell because the monitor was lying in pieces on the cement floor next to the rug. There were more broken things on the ground - what looked to be the remains of a scentless jar candle, a mug that might have held the pens and pencils that had scattered when they hit the cement, and an office chair minus a wheel and the backrest.

"Be careful," I told Sam. "You'll end up with glass in your paws."

The stack of boxes nearest the desk was the only one that had been disturbed. Five or six boxes had been knocked around, spilling their contents on the floor.

"No blood here," I told him, and tried not to be relieved. I did not want to discover Phin's body. Not while I was alone with Sam, the wolf. "They were just looking - and not very seriously at that. Maybe they were interrupted, or this is how far they got when Phin finally broke down and started to talk."

"Fee fie foe feral," said a man's voice, hitting my ears like the blast of a barge's horn. "I smell the blood of a little girl." He rhymed "girl" with "feral," something only possible because of his cockney-accented English. "Be she hot, be she cold, I'll wager this, me lads - she won't get more old."

All I could see was two feet on the stairs. I'd had no warning that the man was in the building at all - and from Sam's sudden movement, he hadn't heard or smelled anything either. I had no idea that fae could hide themselves like that. No telling whether he'd been there all the time, or if he'd followed us in.

The fae was wearing big, black boots, the kind that should go clomp-clomp-clomp. And he was in no hurry to come down and kill us - which told me that he was one of the kind that enjoyed the hunt.

He wasn't a giant, despite my facetious naming of the two forest fae, because the giants were beast-minded, more instinct than intelligent. The beast-minded fae who had survived the rise of metal-wielding humans had died at the hands of the Gray Lords. Instinctive behaviors weren't good enough to make sure you'd hide your nature from the humans, and for centuries the fae had tried to pretend that they had never existed outside of folklore and fairy tales. But from the size of those feet, he was big enough.

Sam caught my attention by bumping his head against my hip - then ducked under the desk. He planned on taking the fae by surprise. Good to know Sam was still with me.

"That's possibly the worst doggerel verse I've heard since I was thirteen and wrote a poem for an English assignment," I told the waiting fae as I walked around so I could look up the stairs.

The one who stood at the top of the stairs was maybe six feet or a little under, though his feet were five inches longer than I've ever seen on any normal human. He had curly red hair and a pleasantly cheerful face - if you didn't look too hard at his eyes. He was wearing slacks and a red shirt with a blue tie that matched the red canvas apron that covered his clothes. Embroidered across the top of the apron was the name of a grocery store.

In his right hand he held a butcher knife.

He smelled of the iron and sweetness that was blood, with an undertone that made him the second of the Jolly Green Giants who'd trashed the place. The damned strong one who'd hefted a filled bookcase.

"Ah," he said, "a hintruder. How droll." He loosened his neck by pulling his head to one side, then the other. His accent was so heavy it was hard to decipher. Intruder, I thought, not hintruder.

"Droll?" I tried it, then shook my head. "Fateful, rather. At least for you." When in doubt, sound confident - it confuses the guys who are about to wipe the floor with you. It helped that I had a secret weapon. "What have you done with Phin?"

"Phin?" He came down three steps and paused with a smile. I think he was waiting for me to run - or, like a bored cat, drawing out the pleasure of the kill. A lot of fae are predators by nature, and among the things they like to eat are people.

"Phin is the owner of this bookstore." My voice was steady. I don't think I was getting braver, but after all the things that had happened lately, being frightened had lost its novelty.

"Maybe oye et 'im." He smiled. His teeth were sharper than a human's - and there were more of them.

"Maybe you're a fae and can't lie," I told him. "So you should stick to the facts instead of trying my patience with 'maybes.' Like where is Phin?"

He raised his left hand and gestured at me. Faint green sparkles stretched out between us and hung in the air for a moment until one touched me. It fell and took the others with it. They glittered on the floor, then winked out.

"What are you?" he asked, tilting his head like a puzzled wolf. "You ain't witch. Oi can feels witches in moy 'ead."

"Stop right there," I said, pulling the SIG from its holster.

"Are you threatening me with that?" He laughed.

So I shot him. Three times over the heart. It knocked him back but not down. I remembered, from my reading of Phin's book, that not all the fae have their organs in exactly the same places that we do. Maybe I should have aimed for his head. I raised the gun to make certain of my target and watched him sink through the wooden stairs like a ghost. He left the butcher knife and his apron behind.

Stone hands rose from the floor and grabbed my ankles, pulling my feet out from under me. I fell too fast to react.

I WOKE UP LYING IN THE DARK AND HURTING ALL OVER, but especially on the back of my head. My ankles were also sore when I tried to move them. I blinked, but I still couldn't see anything - which is very unusual for me.

I smelled blood, and felt something ridged under my shoulder. Old sensory memory, left over from late-night studying in college, told me it was a pen. I waited for more recent memory to kick in - the last thing I remembered was the fae grabbing my ankles. When nothing more made itself known, I decided that there were no memories to come back. I must have been knocked out when my head hit the cement.

Odd as it might seem, I was still alive even though I'd been lying helpless before the fae.

I almost sat up, but there was a sound I couldn't place, a wet sound. Not a drip, but a slop, slop, slop. Rip. Slop, slop, slop.

Something was eating. Once I worked that out, I could smell death and all the undignified things it brought to a body. I waited a long time, listening to the sounds of something with sharp teeth feeding, before I forced myself to move.

It didn't really matter who had died. If it was Sam, I stood no chance against something that could kill a werewolf after I shot him three times in the chest - whether his heart was there or not, it still should have hurt him.

If it wasn't Sam . . . either he would kill me, too, or we'd both walk out of the basement. But I had to wait until I'd considered every possibility before I rolled stiffly to my feet.

The sound didn't change as I shuffled around, crunching glass under my feet until the edge of my shoe caught the edge of the rug. I used the rug to find the desk and fumbled around until I could turn on the desk light.

It wasn't very bright, but it showed me that the lighting fixtures on the ceiling had been torn loose and were dangling by wires. The neat stacks of boxes were mostly gone, leaving tumbled books, ripped-up cardboard, and shreds of paper in their place. There was also blood. A lot of it.

Some of the fae bleed odd colors, but this was all a dark red that pooled black in the dim light a yard or so from the edge of the rug where the kill had been made. It hadn't been too long because the edge of the pool of fluid was still wet. But the victor had dragged the body over a pile of book boxes and found a secluded place hidden behind several leaning stacks in the far corner of the basement where the weak light I held wouldn't penetrate.

"Sam?" I asked. "Sam?"

The sound of feeding paused. Then a shadow darker than the things around it flowed over the stacks and crouched on top of the remaining piles of books, flattened to keep from bumping into the ceiling. For a moment, I thought it was the fae, because the wolf was so drenched in blood that he was almost black. Then white eyes caught my desk light, and Sam growled.

"SO," I ASKED SAM AS WE HEADED BACK TOWARD KENNEWICK, "what do you think we can do to resurrect the love of life in your human half? Because I don't think that this is working. You almost lost it there, my friend."

Sam whined softly and put his head on my lap. I'd cleaned both of us in Phin's bathroom as best I could. His white fur was more pink than white still, and he was soaking wet. Thank goodness the Rabbit had a powerful heater.

"Well, if you don't know," I muttered, "how am I supposed to figure it out?"

He pressed his head harder on my thigh.

He'd almost killed me tonight. I'd seen the intent in his eyes as he'd raised his hindquarters - and knocked over the boxes he was perched on, already precariously tipped during his battle with the fae.

It was the kind of mistake that Samuel would never have made, and it had thrown off his attack. He'd landed short of me, on top of the broken office chair. He'd put a foot through the space between the arm and the seat and during the struggle to free himself had remembered that we were friends.

From the lowered tail and head, I think he'd scared himself almost as much as he'd scared me.

We'd spent a long time in that bookstore, so the traffic had subsided somewhat, though it was still pretty busy.

I took my right hand off the steering wheel and ran my fingers through the fur behind Sam's ears. His whole body relaxed as I rubbed. "We'll manage it," I told him. "Don't you worry. I'm a lot more stubborn than Samuel is. Let's go home and dry us both off. Then I think . . . it's time to call Zee - "

MERCY!

Adam's voice in my head screamed at such volume that I couldn't move. A blasting yet soundless noise that grew and grew until . . . there was nothing at all. The cry left me with a headache that made the one I'd woken up with in Phin's basement seem like a pinprick.

"Sam," I said urgently, both hands on the wheel again - for all the good it was going to do me. I'd only just barely kept from hitting the brakes as hard as I could, which doubtless would have caused a big pileup on the busy highway behind me. On the other hand, I could hardly keep traveling the way I was. "Sam. Sam, I can't see."

A mouth closed on my right wrist and tugged down and then back. As soon as he was guiding me straight, I put on my brake, gently, and rolled to a stop.

The Rabbit shook as cars blasted past us, but no one honked, so we must have made it to the shoulder. After some indefinable amount of time, the pain faded finally and left me shaken and sweating and feeling as if I'd been run over by a semi.

"We have to get home," I said, restarting the car. My hands were shaking as I put the Rabbit in gear and made a beeline toward Finley.

I'd left Adam to deal with his pack. If something had happened to him, I'd never forgive myself for my cowardice.