Fire Touched (15 page)

“Margaret Flanagan,” said Thomas, pulling his gaze from Adam's with an effort, “may I make you known to Adam Hauptman, Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack, and his mate, Mercedes Thompson Hauptman. Adam and Mercy, may I make known to you my friend, Margaret Flanagan.” His voice was thick as he fought for control.

The fae woman inclined her head in a motion that reminded me forcefully of Thomas's gestures. “I have heard Thomas speak of you, Ms. Hauptman. He said you fought well—high praise from him.”

She sounded cool and gracious, not to mention very Irish. Thomas smiled at Adam and me in clear warning. He was marking his territory.

“I should have stayed in the other room,” she told us, but she was watching Thomas with . . . some odd combination of affection and worry. “Doubtless, Thomas will scold when you have left. He chooses to forget that though my body is still weak, my power is not. I appreciate that you gave him the courtesy of removing yourself as a threat, Mr. Hauptman. I am in your debt.”

The vampire whirled on her. “No. You should know better than that, Sunshine,” he growled. “The last time you owed someone, it turned out badly.”

“Did it?” she asked. He stared at her. “I don't think it did, Thomas.”

“No debt necessary,” said Adam. “Just common courtesy—and I know what it is to try to protect someone who insists on putting themselves at risk.” He didn't look at me, but he didn't need to.

“Nonetheless,” she insisted, “Thomas is important to me, and he would regret your deaths.”

“Why didn't you go to the reservations when all of the rest of
the fae had to?” I asked, to change the topic before Adam could respond to that.

“I am
the Flanagan
, Mercy,” she said without arrogance. “As was my father, the Dragon Under the Hill. They have not the authority to tell me where to go or what to do. The courts of the fae are long gone, but my father was king, and that means power of the like many have forgotten. He saved the world, and they let him die while they sat congratulating themselves on how well the fae were blending in with the humans in this new land. They let him die because they were afraid of him. He died very, very slowly, and there are some on the reservation here to whom I would extend that same courtesy if I am given the opportunity.”

Adam and Thomas had fallen silent while she talked, her voice as pleasant as if she'd been discussing the weather. If someone had asked me at that moment who was the most dangerous person in the room—the werewolf alpha, the powerful vampire, or the skinny and broken fae—I wouldn't have hesitated to name her. I didn't know what her mojo was—her talk of courts, kings, and dragons went largely over my head—but
she
was certain that she could take out the Gray Lords. I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

“Good to know,” I said.

She smoothed her skirt. “I am the Flanagan, and that means they
asked
me to come. I have decided that it would be better to make some things clear in person.” Her gray eyes were chilly.

—

“He's in love with her,” said Adam. “Poor fool.”

The sun was sneaking out to greet the day as we drove home. I twisted around until I could see his face.

“A blind man could see that,” I said. “Why ‘poor fool'?”

“Because he hasn't made a move on her,” he said. “I recognize that half-crazed desire to say, ‘Mine, mine, mine,' tempered by love that would never do that without a permission that will never come.”

“Yours came,” I told him.

He snorted.

“Hey,” I said, holding up the chain on my neck where my wedding ring held court next to one of his dog tags and my lamb charm.

“Nudge?” he said.

I looked at the cars traveling beside us as we trekked down the interstate. “Here? Seriously?”

“Permission that will never come,” he said.

“That's not funny,” I said.

He took my hand and gently tugged it away from my necklace and kissed it. “Yes, it is.” He winked at me. “But yes, it only seemed like forever before you gave in. It left me with sympathy for other guys in that situation.”

I thought about how the fae woman had put herself in our debt, something not lightly done by any fae, because Adam had backed down and allowed Thomas space.

“She's not uninterested,” I said, settling back in my seat. “Did you parse what she said about her place in the power structure of the fae? It didn't sound like the Elphame court of the fairy queen.” I'd met a fairy queen: a fae with the rare ability to make anyone with less power than she had into a follower—a form of magical slavery.

Adam shook his head. “No. It's a real court system. I've only heard a little of the fae courts. They were gone before the fae traveled to this continent. Nothing to impress the Gray Lords—except that it is a measure of the power her father and, evidently, she holds. They wouldn't be asking her to join them; they'd be issuing orders if they weren't convinced of her power.”

“Like Ariana,” I said.

“For different reasons,” Adam agreed. “Ariana made herself unwelcome because of what she held. No Gray Lord is going to want to be around something that can siphon his magic away—or any fae who could have created it. Thomas's fae is powerful. Did you smell what I did?”

“Fire,” I agreed. “Like Aiden—only more so. We're sure knee-deep in fiery things right now.”

“You think it's more than coincidence?” asked Adam. It is a mark of how much he loved me that his voice was merely bland, not cutting. Adam believed in God all right, and they were not best buddies.

“Mmmm,” I said. “Karma or coincidence, or something, maybe. Doesn't really matter.”

We pulled into the driveway, and I examined the silver Accord parked in Adam's usual spot and managed not to growl. What was Adam's ex-wife doing here this early? In two more weeks, she was supposedly moving back to Oregon, where she had a new condo and her old job waiting for her. I would celebrate when she actually left and not a moment before then.

I hopped out of the SUV and noticed that a lot of the cars and trucks that had been parked here when Adam and I left were gone. It took me a moment to remember that this morning was a Monday.

Adam would work from home, as he often did, but most of our pack had more mundane employment that involved schedules. Before my shop was trashed, I'd had a place to be and a reason to remember what day of the week it was, too.

Adam paused by Christy's car. He looked tired.

“Why don't you get started arranging guards for Hao,” I said. “I'll go see why Christy came over today.”

We'd discovered that if he wasn't standing there, Christy and I could come to a meeting of minds. There would be snark and snarling, but in the end we could deal with each other. Mostly, I suspected, because without Adam's presence to remind her that I'd won the prize she'd tossed away, she remembered to be afraid of what I might do if she made my life too unpleasant. It was a pretty good return for a box of blue dye, if I did say so myself.

“She's not your problem,” he said.

She couldn't hurt me, but she could hurt Adam. She'd had years of practice to develop her aim. “It's no trouble,” I said.

He smiled. “That's a lie.”

“It is my privilege,” I said carefully, trying not to tweak his pride, “to do those things that are easier for me than for you. You do the same for me. Let me deal with her.”

That was the truth.

Adam hesitated. It was in his nature to protect the people around him. I'd been working on him to let me do the same for him.

“If she's here for you, there's nothing I can do,” I told him. “But if she's just here for Jesse, keeping you out of the picture might keep the nastiness quotient down a fair bit—and that will make things easier for Jesse.”

He leaned forward and kissed me. “You know the magic words,” he said.

I bounced on my heels and grinned.

Adam headed for his office as soon as we came in, and I headed for the kitchen, where I could smell breakfast. I'd gotten a few steps farther when I realized that it wasn't just bacon I could smell cooking. Then I noticed that there was a funny sort of silence in the air.

There were four people in my kitchen. Jesse was plastered
against the counter with the same “someone's gonna die today” look I'd seen on her father's face a time or two. Adam's ex-wife Christy stood in front of Jesse with a damp dishcloth in her hand. Aiden was pressed tightly against the refrigerator with his feet about a foot off the floor because one of Darryl's very large hands was wrapped around his throat. Darryl's hand was smoking, and his eyes were glowing bright yellow.

All righty.

“Drop the munchkin, Darryl,” I said in as relaxed a voice as I could find. There were too many fragile humans in here to allow this to break out into a real fight. “We promised not to let him get killed for twenty-four hours, right?”

Darryl took a step back, but his hand was still wrapped around Aiden's throat. Then Darryl shook his hand, and Aiden dropped to his feet, lost his balance, and fell on his rump, a feral snarl on his face as he scrambled out of the vulnerable position.

“If you do what you're thinking about doing, Aiden,” I said, “I'll let Darryl loose.”

“Then he'll die,” said Aiden, who'd managed to find his feet and stood in an angry crouch.

“Mmmhmmm,” I said. I wasn't sure Aiden wasn't right, but it's never good to show fear in front of your enemies. I really, really wished I had some idea of just how powerful Aiden was.

There was a cardboard box of doughnuts on the counter: ah, Spudnuts. Probably Christy had brought them, but I took one out to eat anyway, as it was unlikely she'd poisoned them: she wouldn't have known which one I'd eat.

I like most doughnuts, especially Spudnut doughnuts—but the glazed one I ended up with, covered with pink sprinkles, was not
one of my favorites. But the point of eating was to give everyone time and reason to cool off.

“You kill Darryl, and I don't think you're going to walk out of here alive,” I said, conversationally, around a bite of glazed-with-sprinkles doughnut. I ignored Darryl's indignant grunt when I agreed that Aiden might actually accomplish his death.

“I've faced creatures that would kill every living thing in this house without an effort, and I'm still alive,” he said grimly. “Try me.”

“Good doughnuts, Christy,” I said. Jesse put her finger to her lips when her mother would have said something. I licked my fingers—a waste of time until I finished the doughnut. “Look, Aiden, you are counting on our being enough that the Gray Lords back off, right? If the Gray Lords are afraid of us, don't you think you should at least consider being afraid enough to back down from outright aggression into a position where negotiation can take place? If you aren't worried about
us
, I might point out that the Dark Smith of Drontheim is upstairs.”

The tile under Aiden's feet cracked with a loud pop, but he stood up from his defensive crouch. The tiles surrounding the cracked tile were discolored by the heat he was generating. It was ceramic tile. I wasn't sure how much heat was required to crack ceramic tile, though I rather suspected that it was less heat than was needed to burn a house to the ground. We all stared at it a moment—even Aiden.

“My floor,” gasped Christy.

Yes. She had picked out the tiles in the kitchen, hadn't she? I regarded Aiden with a little more favor than I'd felt before.

“Information first,” I said. “Does anyone want to tell me what happened?”

“I was watching the bacon,” Jesse said coolly. “And the next thing I know, the little creep was grabbing my butt.”

I trust I caught my instinctive clench of teeth before anyone saw it. No one touches my daughter without her permission—since Darryl had already made that clear, there was no need for me to come unhinged. Adam, whom I could sense listening from his office—he must have left his door open—apparently felt the same way, because Aiden was still breathing and Adam wasn't in the kitchen. Yet. I started a countdown in my head.

“They were treating me like a child,” Aiden said.

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Children are victims—I am neither child nor victim, despite what I look like. It was necessary that I do something to remind everyone that I might be in a child's form, yet I own more years than anyone here.”

I blinked at him, so totally nonplussed that I was robbed of anger. That was an excuse I'd never heard before.

“So,” Jesse said in the same cool voice, evidently not as distractible as I was, “not regarding him as a child, I smacked his face with the spatula.”

That was my Jesse. She'd hit him hard, too, because, now that the flush of color he'd acquired while Darryl was strangling him had faded, I could see the rectangular red mark on his face.

“Mom had just come in with doughnuts, and we were talking, or I'd have seen him sneaking up on me.” She paused her story to answer the question on my face. “I don't know why she's here, Mercy, she hasn't had a chance to say. She yelled at him—and that brought Darryl.”

Succinct, I thought, a little out of order, but with all the essential information.

“Grab my daughter's butt again, and you draw back a stump,” growled Adam as he strode into the room two seconds after I expected him. He thanked Darryl with a nod but never took his eyes off the fae. “And I don't care what you were trying to prove.”

“She's your daughter?” The anger drained away from Aiden, leaving him looking like we'd just pulled the rug out from under him. “She was making
food
,” he said. “And I saw her carrying food and drink yesterday. I thought her but a servant.” He looked around, and indignation replaced his look of helpless confusion. “She called that woman ‘Mother,' and I knew you were mated to this woman.” He gestured toward me. “How was I to know that you had two wives?”