Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson Book 13)
Soul Taken: Chapter 4

We pulled in to replace lights on at home. I’d been looking forward to going directly to bed, though it had been unlikely Jesse would have gone to bed before she found out what happened tonight.

Adam parked in our usual spot, looked at the cars, and said, “Looks like Jesse has friends over.”

One of the cars belonged to Jesse’s best friend, Izzy, and the other was Tad’s. Looking at Tad’s car, I sighed theatrically.

Adam raised an eyebrow.

“I miss Tad,” I told him mournfully. “Zee scared away the last assistant I hired before he’d worked a full shift.”

Four weeks, three people who no longer wanted to work for me. I really regretted the first two.

The last one I was pretty sure I’d have had to fire in a few days anyway, because he didn’t know how to fix things without directions. People like that don’t make good mechanics. They can work at a new shop, where all they have to do is replace the part that a computer tells them needs to be replaced.

But working on old cars is generally a matter of understanding why cars run and what can interfere with that. Fixing them can be quirky. I have used bread tabs and dental floss when the new parts don’t fit a forty-year-old car the way they would have fit the car when it was new.

“If Zee is going to scare all of your help away, you should make him hire the next one,” Adam told me, not for the first time.

Tad, my former assistant and Zee’s son, had taken a new job.

“I have to take it,” Tad had assured me earnestly when he’d turned in his notice, which was handwritten on the back of a shop receipt. “They were very persuasive—and it comes with a free education. If I don’t take it, I might have a partial college education forever and be stuck in a job like this.”

Tad had once had a full-ride scholarship to an Ivy League university back East. He’d left it unfinished and never told me why. More interestingly, he’d never told Zee why, either.

I thought that Tad hadn’t talked to me because he was worried I might tell his dad, which was sound reasoning. I didn’t think he was worried about what I’d do. But if I ever found out who had sent our Tad home with his optimistically sunny view of the world ripped away as if it had never been there . . . maybe he was worried about what I’d do, too. I might not be a powerful fae like his father, but I was pretty good at revenge.

When he’d left me the first time, replaceing a good assistant to man the phones, do the billing, and help out in the shop hadn’t been too difficult. But then Zee had only been coming in now and then when I got behind or he got bored. Since matters had heated up around the Tri-Cities, Zee came every day.

“To keep an eye on things,” he’d told me.

To keep a watch out for Tad and me, I understood. He wasn’t unhappy that Tad had taken a new job, under the circumstances, but he was old and cranky and had very little patience. It took more than a few weeks to see through the crusty interior to the (very small and well-hidden) kindness beneath. I hoped I could replace someone before I woke up one day to discover I was the new assistant.

I glanced at Jesse’s car as we walked by it, and I took stock of it reflexively. It still needed a new paint job, but we’d sprayed the exposed metal with an undercoat that would stop the rust even if it gave the old car a somewhat leprous appearance. There were no new dings, no key marks, no spray paint.

As the daughter of the local Alpha, Jesse had watched her world get smaller and smaller as our enemies had grown more numerous and more powerful. She was human and a target for anyone who wanted to attack our pack.

Jesse had altered her plans to go to school in Seattle on her own, knowing that we could no longer spare the manpower to give her the protection she’d need living in a different city. There was a pack in Seattle, but since we had been separated from the Marrok’s care, they could not help us. Jesse had also turned down her best friend’s offer to co-rent an apartment next to the local Washington State University campus because she was afraid that our pack trouble would affect Izzy, too.

It wasn’t just supernatural attacks she had to deal with. Adam was a celebrity, local and otherwise. And everyone in the Tri-Cities knew him and his family (Jesse and me) by sight.

The first week of classes, a group of students organized by the anti-supernatural organization Bright Future had begun following her around with protest signs everywhere she went. While they were doing that, someone vandalized her car with a can of spray paint. Parking lot cameras caught an unhelpful image of a hooded figure in jeans and tennis shoes.

Jesse told us about the car because she hadn’t been able to get the paint off before she had to come home. But Izzy, who had been witness to some of the rest of the harassment, called Tad and told him about all of it.

Tad showed up while I was still trying to get the spray paint off. I know a few ways to get paint off, but it’s tricky to do that without removing the car paint, too. Tad was better at it than I was, but when we’d finished, a new paint job was inevitable. I’d called and made arrangements, but my painter does show cars and was a couple of months out.

The next morning, Tad was waiting next to Jesse’s car when she came out to drive to school. The ensuing argument got pretty heated. I was in the living room, but my hearing is very good. I didn’t start out deliberately eavesdropping, but I didn’t try to tune it out, either. Adam came in about halfway through the argument, just about when things got interesting.

That’s how we learned that the car had been the tip of the iceberg. The only reason Adam stayed in the house was that when Jesse drove to school, Tad was in the passenger seat.

I don’t know, don’t want to know, what Tad did, but Izzy told me that the people with signs only made a brief appearance that morning, and did not reappear again after Tad spoke to them. When the three of them walked to Jesse’s car at the end of the day, it was in the same condition it had been in when they parked it.

That night, the pack made a formal offer of employment to Tad. It took some string-pulling to get Tad enrolled late, but we managed. Adam said that the school’s reluctance to bend the rules of entry had only been pro forma. Tad’s grades were high enough that he qualified—and the school hadn’t known what to do with the protesters. They were more than happy to let us propose a solution that suited everyone; it just took a couple of days to manage that within the established rules.

Tad had cheerfully accepted Jesse’s somewhat scattered approach to her first semester at college. I was pretty sure she’d added the women’s studies Comparative Sexuality class to see how far she could push him. Tad rolled with whatever she threw at him. After dealing with Zee his whole life, Jesse was easy.

I didn’t know what would happen once she picked a major, but maybe matters would quiet down so it would be enough for Tad to be on the same campus rather than needing to be on the same class schedule. For now, at least, Tad and Jesse were fine.

“It’s a Tuesday,” I said to Adam. “Isn’t it a little late for them to still be up?”

“Wednesday morning now,” said Adam. “Did Jesse say anything to you about having plans?”

“No.”

We’d warned her about the Sherwood problem before heading to Uncle Mike’s. If she’d had plans, it was entirely understandable that she’d forgotten to tell us about them. Adam opened the front door, and laughter and the scent of fresh-buttered popcorn rolled out of the kitchen. They didn’t seem to notice our entrance.

Adam winked at me and then announced, “Parental curfew,” in a drill sergeant’s voice that could have awakened the dead.

There was the sound of a chair scraping the floor, then Jesse bolted out of the kitchen and threw herself at her dad. She had, for the time being, eschewed her usual bright-colored hair dye. Her newly natural honey-brown hair, which was making its first appearance since she was about thirteen, made her look uncomfortably like a real grown-up. She didn’t look less adult in her frantic relief.

Adam hugged her hard. “All is well,” he told her, which was true as far as it went. But Jesse was used to that; her dad had been the pack Alpha since the day she was born.

“The thing that we thought might end up with Adam dead looks like it will work out okay,” I told her dryly as her feet hit the ground again. “We have another situation to replace it that might end up with Adam dead. Or me dead. Or maybe the whole pack. But at least we solved one deadly situation before we picked up another one.”

“Business as usual,” said Tad, who’d exited the kitchen with a little less speed than Jesse.

He was only tall when compared to his dad, but he had a sort of lanky grace that made him look taller. His ears stuck out, and his nose was flattened as if he’d spent time in a boxing ring. He was still attractive, but it was an effect of expression rather than bone structure. Of course, his appearance was a matter of choice rather than genetics. He was half-fae and half-human, but powerful enough that he could adopt a glamour like the full-blooded fae in order to hide his other-than-human appearance.

Izzy, full name Isabella Norman, tagged along behind Tad. She was slender and doll-sized, with curly brown hair—and was a lot tougher than she looked. She and Jesse had been casual friends for a long time. When Jesse started taking heat from other high school students as her father’s position as the werewolf pack Alpha became better known, Izzy had jumped into the breach. For that alone I would have liked her, but she was also a genuinely good person.

She wrapped a hand under Tad’s arm and leaned around him so she could see us better. “Hey, Mr. H, Ms. H, glad you’re both still alive. Mom wants to know if you want more of the orange essential oil—it’s on special this month.”

“I’ll take two,” I said. I’d been experimenting with using it in my baking. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it was awful.

“Don’t you have school?” Adam asked, addressing all three of them.

“Not until eleven tomorrow,” Jesse said. “And we are working on an assignment, anyway.”

“The Harvester,” said Izzy in a tone suitably sepulchral. Then she grinned and said, “You know, the new horror movie? The one written by that Danson guy who graduated from Pasco High? Apparently he went to school with our English Lit teacher, from kindergarten through college. We were given the assignment of watching it and reporting on it.”

“The screenwriter claims that it’s based on a local urban myth,” said Tad with a grin. His hand covered Izzy’s where she touched his arm.

Aha, I thought. They’re dating. No wonder she’d called Tad when Jesse had been in trouble.

“The problem, ladies and gentlemen,” announced Jesse in a voice meant to mimic their instructor’s, “is that there is no urban myth of that sort around here. Have fun picking it apart.”

“I don’t think he likes his old schoolmate much,” murmured Tad with laughing eyes. “Jealousy is a terrible thing.”

“I get the impression that it’s not jealousy,” said Jesse. “It feels more personal than that. Like maybe Danson stole Dr. Holbearth’s girlfriend.” She paused. “Or they dated and had a bad breakup.”

“The Harvester had a pre-opening midnight showing tonight,” said Izzy. “We thought we’d get a running start on our assignment. And also miss out on the crowds.” She shook her head. “One out of two isn’t bad. That theater was packed.”

Tad’s eyes caught mine meaningfully, then traveled to Jesse. He and Izzy had taken Jesse out to distract her from her worries over her father, I interpreted. I gave him a little nod of thanks.

“It was so bad,” Jesse said. “I mean even worse than the usual B-horror-movie bad. The villain, for no discernible motive I could figure out, dressed up like a scarecrow, took a scythe down from an old barn in the back of the farm he’d just bought, and started killing people in ways designed to be as bloody and disgusting as possible.”

“It was a sickle,” said Tad in the patient tone of someone who has said that before.

“And it was supposed to be possessed,” Izzy said. “The old woman, the first victim, she said as much. ‘That old scythe is hainted.’ ”

“ ‘Hainted’?” I said. “The movie is supposed to take place here, right? Isn’t a ‘haint’ a Southern term for a ghost? Like Georgia Southern. Southeastern Washington is still in the Pacific Northwest.”

“Oh, that’s what she said,” Jesse exclaimed. “I couldn’t tell what she was talking about. Well, if they knew the stupid thing was haunted, why did they leave it hanging around in a barn? Why didn’t they just burn down the barn with the scythe in it?”

“They did eventually,” Tad pointed out. “If the barn burned in the beginning of the movie, they wouldn’t have had a possessed guy armed with the sickle slicing people in half all over the place.”

“He beheaded a couple of them,” said Izzy. “Is it still slicing them in half when it’s more like removing ten percent or so?”

“All I know is that I’ll never get that hundred and eight minutes of my life back,” Jesse said. “Are you really sure it was a sickle? Everyone in the movie called it a scythe.”

“ ‘Sickle’ doesn’t sound as cool as ‘scythe,’ ” Izzy said, frowning at Tad.

“When the son of an iron-kissed fae who is the most famous smith in all of mythology tells you what a tool is called, you should believe him over someone reading a part,” Adam advised. He wasn’t smiling, but his dimple was making an appearance.

“A scythe is what Death wields,” I told them. “Long-handled. Like a pike or that weird thing Adam’s alter ego Captain Larson uses in ISTDPB4.” ISTDPB4 (Instant Spoils: The Dread Pirate’s Booty Four) was an interactive computer game that the whole pack played together on a regular basis. “A sickle has a handle that fits your hand—like a sword someone bent in a circle.”

“What’s an iron-kissed fae?” asked Izzy. “And Zee is famous?”

“Infamous,” I corrected.

Zee’s history wasn’t a secret, precisely. Though I didn’t go out of my way to talk about it. But Izzy was all but family, and if she was dating Tad, she should know what she was getting into.

“Thanks,” Tad told Adam and me dryly before addressing Izzy. “My father is one of a small group of fae who can handle iron and steel. Dad made a few famous weapons back in the day under one name or the other.” He flapped his free hand airily and went on in a casual tone, “Killed a few famous kings, a saint . . .” He cleared his throat and said, “A god or two, maybe. That kind of thing. Stories get exaggerated with time. Most of the fae who are older than a couple of centuries have stories told about them.”

“He made jewels out of the eyes of the sons of a king who enslaved him,” Jesse said tightly, her tone substantially different from Tad’s breezy delivery.

I knew that story—it wasn’t about Zee. I didn’t think it was about Zee. It was about Wayland Smith, a somewhat mysterious character who appeared in various medieval chronicles. I’d done a paper on him once, in college.

Jesse didn’t read a lot of old Germanic legends, so where had she gotten it?

“And goblets of their skulls,” she continued. “And he served that king and his wife wine out of those jeweled goblets. Beguiling them so they drank from the skulls of their sons.”

The tightness of her voice told me that she’d come upon that story very recently.

“Who told you that?” I asked before Tad could.

“Tilly,” said Jesse, sending a cold chill down my spine. “She doesn’t like Zee or Tad.”

That she didn’t.

Tilly was the name Underhill had given herself when she took on the form of a child so she could play with her human toys. Aiden had been one of those until he escaped.

Tilly might look like a feral eight-year-old girl (or any other age she picked that day), but she was the personification of a land of faerie that had destroyed the courts of the fae and driven them out of her borders, locking her doors against them. The fae claimed that it had been the increasing use of iron that had closed the doors to Underhill in the old country. But I noted that the fae had been locked out, not locked in.

When Aiden had come to live with us, Tilly had installed a door to Underhill on a wall she built on the property line between this house and my old house. And apparently, she’d been telling Jesse stories.

“When did she tell you that?” Adam asked, his voice very calm and quiet.

“Since Aiden left, she’s started showing up when I go outside alone,” Jesse said, answering Adam’s real question. “I asked Aiden. He told me that there wasn’t much she could do given the rules she is constrained by. He advised me not to let you know she was bothering me, because then she’d know she was bothering me. She’d look on it as encouragement. And maybe you’d try to renegotiate the rules. He thinks that she’s as bound up by rules as she is willing to be. Any negotiations are likely to backfire. I thought I should listen to him when he talks about Underhill.”

Adam grunted unhappily. Jesse was right. Aiden was probably right. But I expected that Adam would go have a chat with Tilly the next time she showed up anyway. Hopefully it wouldn’t happen until he’d had a chance to cool off.

“She told you that story was about Zee?” I asked.

Jesse nodded.

“Your dad,” Izzy asked Tad, “can make jewels out of someone’s eyes? And goblets out of children’s skulls? And he drank out of them?” She’d let go of Tad’s arm and taken a step back while I wasn’t paying attention to her.

Maybe if it had happened in the past century, I might have had a different attitude about the story. But that tale was from the Poetic Edda, written a thousand years ago, more or less. It felt like a cautionary tale, not something that happened to real people. I couldn’t see Zee, my old friend, doing something so horrible.

Okay, I could, actually. Because he’d done something similar fairly recently.

“When people live a very long time, they have room to change,” I said, carefully not saying that Zee had changed.

Tad gave me a look that said, Thanks, but please don’t try to help.

“I warned you that my father was not just a grumpy old man,” he told Izzy. “I told you he’d done some very terrible things.”

She gave him a look that would have done credit to a kicked puppy.

I wanted to tell her that even if Zee had been terrible once, he didn’t do things like that anymore. But it would have been a lie. I was pretty sure that parts of the bodies of the Gray Lords who’d held Zee and Tad captive in the fae reservation were still turning up in unexpected places. The fae, even the powerful ones, had started to have a certain tone in their voice when they referred to Zee.

There hadn’t been, as far as I’d heard, any jewels that were formerly eyeballs, though. I hoped that Tilly had been wrong—mistaken, not lying—that that story had been about Wayland, who wasn’t also the same person as the Dark Smith of Drontheim, who had become my Zee.

But I had to admit, if only to myself, that it was altogether too plausible, given the stories I knew about the Dark Smith. One of the Gray Lords had told me that Zee had made Excalibur. There were stories that attributed Excalibur’s making to Wayland.

“But he’s so nice,” said Izzy.

We all stared at her. Zee was my mentor, my friend, and I loved him. But “nice” wasn’t an adjective I’d have used to describe the grumpy old smith. He could be kind, yes, but “nice” implied something less . . . dangerous.

Izzy’s back stiffened at the incredulous look Tad gave her, and when she spoke, her voice was defensive. “Last week I had a flat and called Jesse to tell her I’d be late. She said since I was only a mile or so from the garage, she’d see if someone could come help me. Ten minutes later your dad showed up with a new tire. He changed my flat, told me I needed new brakes. He followed me to Mercy’s garage, where he fixed the problem, then gave the whole car a once-over. He wouldn’t let me pay him.” She glanced at me. “Though I suppose I should have been paying you.”

I shook my head. “Up to Zee. I don’t argue with his decisions.”

She continued, “He gave me a free soda—told me I needed fattening up.”

Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, I did not say. I wondered what the old smith had been doing. I would have expected Zee to fix a flat for one of Jesse’s friends. The rest of it made me uneasy. It was out of character for Zee—or maybe I was just freaking out about the story of the jeweled-eyed skull cups.

Izzy glanced at Tad and then away. She looked at Jesse and evidently found that easier. Tad’s face told me that he wasn’t happy about Izzy’s story, either, but it wasn’t worry or concern I saw there; it was banked rage.

Tad wasn’t someone who overreacted. And I didn’t think he was freaked-out about the story of the skull cups. Or maybe he was. The skull cups were not the only thing that Wayland Smith had done in that story.

“He asked me if we were dating,” Izzy told Jesse. “I told him yes. And he smiled at me like he was happy about it.”

She drew in a breath, as if bracing herself, and then looked at Tad. But he’d already replaced his previous expression with one of calm interest.

There was a snap in Izzy’s voice when she said, “And now you tell me that he made jewels out of children’s eyes.”

“That was me,” said Jesse, but Izzy wasn’t listening to her.

“There are a lot of things I could say,” Tad told Izzy. “Most of them add up to he is a force of nature. When one of those is trapped, horrible things can happen.”

She crossed her arms over her body as if she were a little cold, and her voice was softer. “Can I think about this for a while? I know I said I knew what I was getting into. But maybe I should have read more fairy tales.”

He smiled at her, but his eyes were shuttered. “I told you there might be a few times like this.” He looked at Adam and me, glanced at Jesse, and then put a light hand under Izzy’s elbow.

“Let’s go talk outside and let these people get to bed.”

She took a deep breath, put her hand over his—in exactly the reverse gesture that they’d assumed upon entering the room.

“Okay,” she said. As they left through the front door, she turned and said, “Night, Jesse. Good night, Mr. H. Ms. H, I’ll give my mother your order. And”—she paused on the other side of the doorway—“I’m glad you made it out alive again.”

Tad pulled the door shut behind them.

“Me, too,” Jesse said. “I’m glad you made it out alive again, too.”

Adam gave her a one-armed hug, making her stagger a little because he was paying attention to the door—or rather the people who had just walked through it. She might not live here, but Izzy was a staple in the Hauptman household. Adam was protective.

“I know,” Jesse said guiltily. “I shouldn’t have dropped the stupid jewel story on her tonight. I guess my head was still caught up in that horror movie and the worry that my dad was going to be dead when I got home.” She paused. “And I’ve been thinking about that skull story since Tilly told it to me this weekend.”

“I imagine,” I said carefully, “that Tilly could tell a story so that it would linger until it could be released to cause as much harm as she could manage.”

They both looked sharply at me.

I shrugged. “Or maybe she just enjoyed sharing something horrible with you. But I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“Magic?” Jesse asked.

“Don’t ask me,” I said. “Maybe just the power of storytelling. It’s nearly Samhain, isn’t it? When the fae are more powerful?”

Adam frowned at me.

I gave him a grim smile. “Oh, Tilly has been talking to me, too. Interesting that she’s been leaving you alone.”

“Do we have a problem?” he asked.

“With a door to Underhill in our backyard? How could that possibly cause us any problems?” I gave him a look.

He laughed. Sometimes laughing is all that you can do.

We heard two car engines start and drive away.

“I hope it works out,” Jesse said. “Tad is exactly what she needs to give her a little confidence. And he could do with a little coddling and someone to fight dragons for.”

Adam squeezed Jesse more carefully this time. “Better they replace out now,” he told her.

“Still,” Jesse said, “I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.”

“Izzy’s tougher than she looks,” I said confidently. “She’ll be okay.”

“I hope so.” Jesse turned her attention back to Adam. “And you are really okay?”

“He’s really okay,” I said. “And the only reason I’m not saying that, like Izzy, Adam is tougher than he looks is because—”

“He looks pretty tough,” Jesse agreed, finishing the old joke. She stepped away from her dad again. “So the situation worked itself out?”

“Sherwood didn’t want to kill Adam,” I said. “I told you that would save the day.” I had not been as sure of it as I’d tried to sound.

“Good.” Then she frowned. “Did you replace out who he is? Was he Rasputin?”

“There are photos of Rasputin,” I told her. “And Rasputin doesn’t look like Sherwood at all.” Except a little around the eyes. “We still don’t know who Sherwood is. Was.”

“You didn’t replace out?” Jesse asked. “Really? Weren’t you curious at all?”

“He’s related to Bran,” Adam told her. “Closely. Brother, son, father, uncle—something really close.”

She blinked at him. “To the Marrok? There’s a werewolf related to the Marrok that’s not Charles or Samuel? I haven’t heard of any. Have you?”

For some reason, both of them looked at me.

“No?” I said.

“You were raised in the Marrok’s pack,” Jesse insisted. “Surely someone said something?”

“Not that I recall,” I said. “I’ll call Samuel and bug him.”

“Why not ask Sherwood?” Adam said.

“Did he sound like someone who was going to spill the beans to you?” I queried. “He talks more, but he doesn’t say more. He hasn’t changed that much.” I found that reassuring. “We’ll get it out of him one story at a time.” I thought a moment. “Though I might make him go through the betting book and say yes or no, because apparently the Great Beast of Northumberland is a yes. Still, Samuel is an easier nut to crack.”

“And we haven’t heard from him in a while,” Jesse added.

Jesse had had a bit of a crush on Samuel when she was younger, and the effects lingered. But instead of pursuing the subject of Samuel or Sherwood, she asked, “So what is the new situation that might end in death and destruction?”

“Marsilia gave us a puzzle,” I told her. “We aren’t sure exactly what it means. Nothing horrible tonight.” I paused. “Probably.”

Adam leaned over and kissed Jesse on the forehead. “Bed,” he said firmly, for all the world as if she were still a child.

She smiled at us both. “I’m asleep standing,” she confessed. “Night, you two.”

I waited until she was upstairs in the bathroom brushing her teeth before taking out my phone.

“I’m calling Stefan,” I said quietly. “I got the impression that we might want to get on replaceing Wulfe or following Marsilia’s clues as soon as possible.”

“Good time to call,” Adam said neutrally.

It was two in the morning, but Stefan was a vampire. He wasn’t one of Marsilia’s vampires anymore—but they had ties that went back all the way to the Italian Renaissance, when they had both been human. He’d also been keeping an eye on Wulfe once the other vampire had decided to start stalking me.

Stefan would know what was going on. I was a little surprised he hadn’t contacted me about Wulfe’s disappearance before Marsilia had.

Stefan’s cell phone clicked immediately to voice mail. I didn’t leave a message.

“Maybe he’s talking to someone,” Adam said.

“I’ll try the house,” I said. I didn’t like that he hadn’t answered.

The house phone was picked up after four rings.

“Hello?”

I knew most of Stefan’s people—neither he nor I called them sheep (unless Stefan was feeling particularly bitter). To Stefan they were more than a collection of easy meals and prospective fledglings, and whatever else vampires did with their toys. To Stefan, they were family.

When Marsilia had killed some of his people, as a way of making a show for the spies of Bonarata, Stefan had never forgiven her for it. And he had loved Marsilia—not in a romantic way, I didn’t think, but love nonetheless.

The voice at the other end of the line was husky and hesitant, making it unfamiliar. It might have been Rachel, who was Stefan’s usual spokesperson with the mundane world. Rachel was the one who typically answered the phone if Stefan wasn’t there. It didn’t sound like Rachel, but it could have been. If she’d had a bad cold.

“This is Mercy,” I said, and was treated to a dial tone humming in my ear. I quit trying to pretend there wasn’t something wrong.

I looked at Adam.

“I’ll call Tad back,” Adam said. “As soon as he gets here, we’re headed over to Stefan’s.” He frowned at me. “And you take some more aspirin. No sense being exhausted and in pain.”

—

I didn’t take aspirin, of course; it was ibuprofen. Adam was of a generation that used “aspirin” to refer to any painkiller. The NSAID knocked the edge off my headache, but I suspected I’d need sleep to really deal with it. Too bad it was growing doubtful that sleep was in my near future.

Stefan’s house was in Kennewick proper, about a twenty-minute drive from our home. I called Zee—he was used to me calling in the middle of the night.

“Still working,” I said, trying not to think about skull cups. “Can you open tomorrow?”

“Yes,” he said, and hung up.

Adam called his security company and told them he’d be gone for a week, though available in an emergency. I thought about that for a minute and called Zee back.

“Can you handle the shop this week?” I asked, expecting the same yes and click of a disconnect.

“It is bad, then,” said Zee instead.

“Probably,” I told him. “Signs point to all hell is about to break loose.”

Zee snorted. “Situation normal, you mean,” he said, echoing his son’s earlier observation. “Ah, well. At least I can count upon not being bored in the near future.” He disconnected.

I was pretty sure that meant he was good to run the shop for the week.

“Zee is right. This is becoming a habit.” Adam frowned. “Maybe we should make arrangements for the new normal. Would you object to moving Sherwood into your old house? Without Joel and Aiden, it isn’t safe to leave Jesse home alone, and it’s not fair to expect Tad to play bodyguard more than he already does.”

My house, a single-wide manufactured home that had replaced the one that burned to the ground, shared a back fence (now partially a wall, thanks to Tilly) with Adam’s house, even though they were more than a football field apart because they both were on acreage. My house had sat empty since Gabriel, my previous assistant, had left for college.

The house next to it was empty, too, having been the scene of a pair of brutal murders, though as of last Friday, there was a hopeful For Sale sign on it. I wondered if it was still haunted.

My house was. Which was one of the reasons it was empty. The other one was that though the door to Underhill on our back fence allowed Tilly access to our house, it was also on the back fence of my house. I wasn’t willing to rent the place to someone who couldn’t protect themselves from Tilly, and that somewhat restricted the pool of renters.

“If Sherwood is willing,” I said. Sherwood could probably protect himself better than we could protect ourselves. “He’s just renting the place he’s living in, right?”

“Your house would be an upgrade,” Adam said. “But living that close might push us to the fight that we just narrowly avoided. I’ll ask and trust his judgment.”

“It’s a little like replaceing out King Arthur has been a member of the pack in disguise,” I said.

“He’s not King Arthur,” Adam said with a growl in his voice.

“Probably not,” I agreed in a hushed voice. Maybe a better person would have stopped when faced with that growl instead of being inspired to push their luck a little further. “But it’s exciting. Maybe he knew King Arthur. Or Robin Hood.” I sighed happily. “All of the history he has packed in his head.”

“I am not jealous,” Adam informed me. “I know when I’m being teased.”

I laughed and turned to rest my forehead against his shoulder. “Do you suppose he will give me an autograph?”

“I’ll autograph you,” Adam murmured.

“Only if I get to autograph you, too,” I purred happily. Flirting didn’t have to make much sense. “Werewolves are hard to tattoo, so I’ll use Jesse’s glitter pens. Do you want hot pink or baby blue?”

He laughed because he thought I was joking. He was probably right, though I might have done it if Jesse’s mom, Adam’s ex-wife, hadn’t finally moved back to Eugene. Though I doubted that she’d have paid attention even if I’d scrawled Mine in glow-in-the-dark lettering across Adam’s forehead, there had been days it would have made me feel better.

“What’s wrong?” Adam asked.

I lifted my head. “Nothing, why?”

“You quit laughing.”

“I love you,” I told him.

“I love you, too,” he answered. “Why did that make you quit laughing?”

“We were talking about jealousy,” I said. “And marking territory. You’re probably lucky Christy finally moved when she did, or you might have ended up with my name written across your face in Sharpie.”

He grabbed my hand. “Your name is written across my heart,” he said, because he could say things like that and have them sound serious. When I tried, I sounded like someone trying out for a Hallmark movie.

I kissed his shoulder. “You just don’t want to wake up with Sharpie on your face.”

“It would look unprofessional,” he agreed.