Fire Touched (21 page)

I frowned because she said the name of Órlaith's brother as if I should have known him. “Who?” I asked.

“He was the high king of Ireland,” she said. “He defeated the kings of Ulster.”

I only knew one of the high kings of Ireland named Brian. Okay, I only knew the name of one of the high kings of Ireland, and
his
name was Brian.

“Do you mean Brian Boru?” I asked tentatively. “The one who united all of the Irish against the Vikings?”

She let out a huff of air. “And a good thing it is that my father died before he heard you say that. Boru is a nickname given him years after he died by people who didn't know him. And the Vikings weren't driven out, they were assimilated . . . not that it is important to our current conversation.”

Not being an expert on Irish history, I didn't feel the need to argue. “Okay. So Brian Boru was fae?”

“No. His father married a fae lady who saw to it that he thought her daughter Órlaith was his. She soon grew bored of him and went on her way, but she left her daughter behind.” Margaret huffed. “But that's not what you need to know, is it? Still, despite her chosen appearance, Órlaith is very young for a Gray Lord. Even so, my father said she is too tied to the glories of the past. Her greatest strength is in her ability to persuade people to follow her. My father liked her a great deal.”

“I think she tortured Zee,” I said. “I don't think I'm going to like her.”

She smiled, but it was a sad smile. “My father did not like your Zee. The Dark Smith was not, even by the flexible standards of the fae, a hero.”

I knew that. I
knew
that. But I'd worked side by side with him for most of my adult life. I'd seen him do a lot of small kindnesses, and I suspected that there were some I'd missed because he was embarrassed by them. He was not petty, and
I'd
never seen him be cruel.

I decided it would be safer to change the subject. “So the Widow Queen?”

“Neuth?” Margaret focused her gaze on the dark beyond the windows of the Subaru. “She's not a nice person. Dangerous. She takes pleasure in the misery of others. She despises humankind—despises those weaker than her, and most people are weaker than she is.”

That dovetailed with what Tad had said about her.

“Goreu,” I said.

She looked at me. “My father didn't know him well. Goreu didn't take an active role among the fae until after my father died.
Much of what I know of him comes from the research Thomas did for this trip.” She smiled, as if at some memory. “The vampires follow fae politics for entertainment. Thomas gathered a lot more information about current politics than the Gray Lords would be comfortable with if they knew.” She tapped a finger on the dash. “So Goreu. King Arthur wasn't a king, really, and the stories of the knights of the round table are only very loosely factual. But Arthur was a hero, and Goreu rode with him. He killed a giant. The troll you killed was but a rabbit to the wolf that a giant would have been.” She paused. “But that was a long time ago. Goreu has done nothing important since except for his selection into the Council of the Gray Lords. I wouldn't have thought one of Arthur's men would have stooped to the foulness of those slave bracelets.” She hummed a little; it was on key and pretty. “I also wouldn't have thought a Gray Lord would have been so easily defeated.”

“Nemane.” Her name seemed to hang in the air longer than sound should have. Suddenly it was very dark in the car, the dash lights only a candle in the night.

“The Carrion Crow,” Margaret said slowly, and for the first time I smelled fear rising from her skin. “One of the three fae who could be Morrigan, the goddess of battle. She is smart and very old. And very, very clever. My father respected her—and feared her. The only one of the fae he truly feared. She is capable of playing a very long game. She is patient.” Margaret swallowed. “And bloodthirsty.”

Maybe if we hadn't been in a dark car, driving through the dark, her words wouldn't have been so . . . frightening. Like how a story told by firelight has more power than one told in the light of day. But I hadn't been afraid of her back in the hotel. Neuth, yes, but not Nemane.

I could just be affected by Margaret's fear, but it felt like more
than that. Maybe it was just that we spoke of someone who was a Power and had been a Power for longer than I could imagine, and we spoke of her in the loneliness of the night.

“Okay,” I said. “Now that you've scared us both . . .” I had the sudden conviction that Adam and I were in way over our heads. We had just met with five of the Gray Lords—but those weren't the only Gray Lords on that reservation.

“When I saw her sitting there . . .” Margaret said. “I was very grateful for Thomas at my back.”

There was still one we hadn't spoken of.

“Beauclaire,” I said. I knew him best of the Gray Lords and liked what I knew.

She smiled and relaxed. “My father said that Lugh's son likes to be underestimated. It helps him that so many of the fae remember his father, Lugh, and judge the son from that scale. Lugh . . . Lugh was everything they say he was. Sometimes the humans called him a god, and they weren't far wrong.” She didn't exactly stiffen, but she eyed me. “He was good, glorious, and kind—and your Dark Smith killed him.”

I knew that. Zee had killed him because Lugh had, like many very old creatures, started to become a monster. It was why Zee and Beauclaire did not deal well together—and another reason I'd been surprised when he helped Zee escape.

“Beauclaire and Nemane are allies,” she said. I'd picked that up from tonight's meeting. “From what happened when Adam spoke, I think that those two have a use for you and your pack. Zee distracted Órlaith and Neuth. Goreu was still recovering from the slave bracelet. But Nemane and Beauclaire could have responded to Adam when he spoke. By not doing so, they gave legitimacy to Adam's claim—unless they rule against it out loud, all of Faery must respect
the borders of your territory. That tells me that Adam's claim played right into whatever those two have planned.”

“Okay,” I said. Being part of any fae's plans wasn't a good thing. I'd have to warn Adam. And speaking of warning . . . “You should know that Edythe didn't have any trouble seeing through your glamour.”

Margaret frowned. “Edythe?”

“There were two guards the Gray Lords brought with them,” I said. “She was the one that looked like a girl.”

“They weren't guards,” she said. “The Gray Lords don't use guards. They were servants, to be sent to fetch food or whatever else was required.” She frowned. “She saw through the glamour?”

I nodded.

“There are some who see truth,” Margaret said. “But it is a rare gift. It may be that gift was the reason they brought her to the meeting. Interesting that she didn't speak when she saw who accompanied us.”

“I'm not a threat,” I said. “And I'm the only one she looked at.”

“Okay,” she said. She dusted her hands on her thighs and took a deep breath. “So tell me how you got an Alpha werewolf to treat you like a partner instead of a princess who needs protecting.”

I pursed my lips. “I can tell you that, but I don't think it will be useful in your situation. By the time I'd met Adam, I'd spent my whole life proving myself, Margaret. I knew who I was and what I could do—and I didn't let anyone make me less.”

“Damn it,” she said. “I hoped that you could give me some useful advice. I don't know many women—have never known many women. And your situation seemed so similar.”

It hadn't been, really. Not the beginning of Adam and me—but . . . “A couple of months ago, this volcano god—a great manitou—came
after Adam's ex-wife,” I told her. “We defeated him, but in the process, I was badly injured. Our pack doctor told Adam I was going to die.”

“But you didn't,” said Margaret.

I drew in a breath. “I
was
dying, no question. Only by the weirdest circumstances ever did I survive. Not quite dumb luck, but unexpected enough that it was worse really.” Coyote counted as weird circumstances—and he was unpredictable.

“It took a while for me to recover completely. Adam, who has been very, very good about not indulging his wolf's need to be overprotective, has had to deal with his perceived failure to protect me. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night to listen to me breathe.” I didn't tell her about the nightmares, or the times when he pulled me close to him to listen to my heart, and his skin was damp with the sweat of fear. Or that sometimes, in the darkness of our room, he cried. Those moments weren't for public consumption. “But Thomas didn't fail to keep you safe, so the situation isn't completely analogous.”

Margaret said nothing, but I felt like she was going to, so I kept quiet.

“That is,” she said, “I think, very much what is between Thomas and me.” She paused. “I don't talk about him to other people. He wouldn't like it. But I need advice, and I don't know how I'm going to get it without giving you the whole picture.”

I didn't say anything.

“Excuse me,” she said. She took out her cell phone and began texting. The phone chimed as her message was returned. She texted back and forth a bit more.

“He says I should talk to you,” she said. “He” was obviously Thomas. “He says Adam says that you are a deep well. That secrets are safe in your keeping.” She gave me a considering look.

“That's me,” I said. “Damp. Also, cold and dank.”

She laughed. “All right.” She quit laughing and looked out into the darkness. “I met Thomas when I was thirteen in Butte, Montana. Butte was . . . not what it is now—small and forgotten. Gold, then silver, and finally copper, which, in the age where all the cities of the world were stringing copper wire for electricity, meant money, and money is power. The people who flocked to the boomtown were not just human. My father came, hoping to set up a new court, I think. But his people weren't the only fae, and there was conflict.”

She hummed a little, reached out, and turned on the radio. Classical music filled the car, replaced by country and then eighties rock before she turned it off.

“My father's enemies used me against him. They stole me away and chained me in the mining tunnels.” Her restless fingers played with the fabric of her slacks. “The mining tunnels in Butte were five thousand feet below the earth and more, a mile deep. My father and I, our power comes from the sun.”

Silence stretched.

“Which is ironic, given that you love a vampire,” I said, trying to help her.

“Not . . . not as ironic as you might think.” She played a little more with her slacks.

“So you were trapped there for decades?”

She shook her head, gave me a quick smile, then went back to her narrative. “Not that time. For a couple of days only. But it gave my father's enemies the idea for what they did to me later. It was still dark and frightening. I was hungry and alone, and I heard a sound.”

She swallowed. “I don't have any friends,” she said. “Except for Thomas. I don't quite know how to go about this.”

She didn't know me, and it was hard to tell someone you don't know about private things. “My foster parents both died when I was fourteen,” I told her, breaking the awkward silence. Then I realized that was the wrong part of the story to start with. “Let me backtrack. My mother was a buckle bunny when she was sixteen.”

“Buckle bunny?”

I nodded. “That means she followed the rodeo and slept with rodeo cowboys. I guess her parents were a real freak show. She left home when she was fifteen or sixteen. She took the truck and horse trailer she'd paid for and her quarter-horse mare and hit the road. Traveled wherever there was a rodeo and barrel raced. She was good enough she made money at it. But she was lonely, so she chased after the cowboys.” I paused. “Rodeo cowboys aren't universally horrible, but they are macho, and some of them, usually not the more successful, are brutal with their animals and with women. She had hooked up with this bronc rider in Wyoming, and he got drunk and pretty rough one night. They'd been sleeping in his horse trailer—”

“In a horse trailer?” Margaret asked.

“Some of them have campers in the front,” I said. “I guess his did. Anyway, the fight spilled to the outside and attracted attention. My mother is a lot shorter than me. She was sixteen, and he was twenty-eight and big for a bronc rider. He outweighed her by a hundred pounds or more. He was snake mean when he was drunk, and the other rodeo riders were afraid of him.”

It had been a long time since I'd told this story to anyone. Even knowing what I knew about my father now, it was still pretty cool.

“But my mom was nobody's punching bag, and she doesn't believe in fighting fair. She kicked his butt in front of his friends. Then she
turned around to get her stuff out of his trailer, and he got to his feet and came after her while her back was turned.” I could see by the tension in Margaret's shoulders that the story was getting to her.

“There was this Native American, a Blackfeet man from Montana.” Which he sort of had been, and sort of hadn't been. “He rode bulls, Mom said, and those bull riders are all a little crazy to do what they do. Anyway, he coldcocked that man before he got close to my mother again.”

I smiled as I got to the best part. “And my mom punched him in the stomach. She said, ‘I have a gun, you stupid son of a bitch. I could have
shot
him, and no one would have said it was anything but self-defense. Now he's going to get to beat up some other woman, and it will be your fault.'”

Margaret laughed.

“I know, right?” I said. “Mom is scary. Even Adam walks softly around her. She and that bull rider hooked up for a couple of months. Then one day, he just didn't come home. Died in a car wreck.” He'd been hunting vampires, and they'd caught up with him. “Mom was pregnant with me. Imagine her surprise when she came in to change my diapers and found a coyote puppy in my crib.”