She'd tortured him and his menagerie on trumped-up charges so that the rebels would approach him and reveal themselves. He'd served her for centuries, so she knew he wouldn't join the cuckoos who'd been foisted upon her by a vampire whose name had never been given to me - I called him Gauntlet Boy. Gauntlet, because the only time I'd seen him, he'd been wearing gauntlets. Boy - because vampires scared me spitless.
She'd been partially successful. He hadn't joined the rebellion - which Marsilia quashed with his help. But he also hadn't looked upon the deaths of the people he protected as justifiable. Vampires vary a lot in how much they care for the humans who they feed from. Stefan's menagerie were his friends, or at least dear pets he cared for.
So he wasn't part of the seethe, and, vampire or not, Stefan had been my friend since I'd come to the Tri-Cities. However, thanks to Marsilia's ungentle machinations, I'd been seeing more of the vampire and less of my friend in him lately, and I didn't like it. I didn't like it enough that I seriously considered not contacting him for help.
The enemy was powerful, and we needed our allies. I was getting tired, and the weariness tamped down the anger and left me scared and alone, even with Ben stretched out in the seat behind me.
So I called Stefan.
It rang three times, and a voice (not Stefan's) said, "Leave a message." There was a beep.
I almost just hung up. But it was unlikely anyone had Stefan's phone under surveillance, and I wasn't calling from a number he would know. So I said, "Could you call me at this number? My phone is dead."
A police car had someone pulled over on the side of the road. My speed had crept up, and I slowed. The coast was not clear to speed just because one police car was occupied.
My phone rang as I passed the cop car, but the Mercedes's windows were very dark. It was unlikely that anyone could see into the interior even if Rosa's phone was so encrusted with plastic gems it ought to emit its own light. Risking a ticket, I answered the phone. "Yes?"
"Mercy?" said Stefan. "What do you need? And why are you calling me on someone else's phone?"
By the time I finished verbally reliving Peter's death, I was shaking with anger and ... terror. So much rode on my playing the game right, and I didn't even know the rules.
At least with that much adrenaline flowing, I wasn't tired anymore - but I also wasn't paying attention to driving. Part of me, the part that remembered I'd totaled the Rabbit a few hours and a lifetime ago, tried to remind me that wrecking Marsilia's car would only make a bad situation worse. But the rest of me was focused on more immediate matters.
"Peter was a good man," said Stefan when I was finished. "I will meet you at Kyle's house."
I glanced at the sky. It was still dark, but the clock in Marsilia's car said it was five thirty in the morning. "You'll be cutting the daylight thing pretty close."
"There is time," he said, his voice as gentle as I'd ever heard it. "I can get home in very short order should I need to. Do not worry about me. We will worry about the others, yes? Hang up now and drive."
I hung up and hoped I'd done the right thing. Exposing the pack's vulnerability to the local vampires wasn't a smart thing to do. Marsilia would happily dance on our graves if the pack and I, especially I, were utterly destroyed. I trusted Stefan. I did. But Stefan was a vampire and I could never forget that.
Kyle's house in West Richland was a generous half-hour drive from Sylvia's apartment in Kennewick. I'd spent a lot of time this night traveling back and forth along the same stretch of highway. To my right, the Columbia was a murky presence as the houses of Kennewick passed by the window to mark my progress.
Had I done the right thing leaving Gabriel and Jesse? It had felt like I was getting them out of harm's way when I'd done it. But what if whoever had taken Adam did think of Sylvia? Gabriel was strong and smart, but he was also an unarmed teenage human. Had I just given our enemies more victims? I thought of the bullet that hit Peter and was pretty sure that the person who had fired it at a helpless man could shoot one of Gabriel's little sisters, too.
Somewhere nearby, Adam was being held. I had no real reason to think that they would be hunting Jesse. Not one. But I was uneasy leaving them without protection.
I called Zee. He hadn't said good-bye when he'd retreated to the fae reservation, just left a note telling me to be patient and not contact him. But he liked Gabriel and Jesse - and adored, though he'd never have admitted it out loud, the little hellions who were Gabriel's sisters.
His cell phone rang and rang as the interstate carried me past Richland. My finger was on the button to end the call when Zee said, grumpily, "Liebling, this is not a good idea."
"Zee," I told him, "I am completely out of good ideas and am doing my best with the bad ones I have left." I explained the whole thing again. When I finished, I said, "The fae owe us, Adam and me, they owe us for the otterkin and for the fairy queen. Is there some way you could keep a watch over Gabriel's mom's house? You probably won't have to do anything at all. I'm probably being paranoid - it's that kind of night. But all they have keeping them safe is my hope that no one would think to look there - and that reasoning gets weaker and weaker the farther away I get."
"I agree that you are owed a debt," Zee said heavily, at last. "There might be some who would argue that the otterkin's deaths were a tragedy. I am not one of those people. No one can argue that you were sent on an errand for us that put you in danger, and where you took much harm. And no one, not even the most anti-human of us" - the way he said it made me think that he had a specific fae in mind - "can argue you are owed for the downfall of the fairy queen, who caught so many of us in her web and might have taken us all, unaware as we were."
He made a clicking noise with his tongue that I recognized as the sound he made when confronted with a particularly difficult fix on a car. "It brings me sorrow, but at this time it would wipe the slate clean of favors owed to you if they knew that I had even answered this phone - which phone I am not supposed to have at all because it is corrupt human technology." He bit out the last part of the sentence as if he found it annoying. "If I left the reservation to help you, I would bring trouble down upon both of us." His laugh was distinctly unamused. "And if I left the reservation at this point, it might be disastrous on a much larger scale because I am trying to bring reason to chaos, which I cannot do from a distance and may not be able to do even with a sword to someone's throat. I cannot even give you advice without creating issues." He sighed but didn't hang up, so I kept the phone to my ear.
After a long pause, he said, carefully, "I could not tell you to call my house and speak to the one there. I could not tell you to think about the kinds of places that could be fortified to hold a pack of werewolves, which would not be easy. A place where people in pseudo-military garb might not be remarked upon or where they could get in and out unnoticed carrying bodies. There are not many places like that around here, Mercy. There are no peasants who are too afraid of the powers that be to speak out when men carrying guns walk where they should not be."
"You think they're being held somewhere out in the Area?" I asked. The Area was the secured section of land surrounding the Hanford nuclear power plant.
"I am sorry, Liebling. I cannot help you at this time. Perhaps if the talks between the Gray Lords and Bran Cornick go well, we can discuss this again. Until that time, we are forbidden to give aid to anyone associated with the werewolf packs." Another slight pause. "This was very clearly expressed to me. Very clearly." His voice held an edge that was sharper than his knife - and his knife was legendarily sharp.
"If you know anyone who is talking to Bran right now," I said, "would you please have them tell him what's going on here? This information might not help the fae's cause with the Marrok, but you might let someone understand that not passing on this information will be a statement the Marrok will take very seriously. And I will make sure that Bran knows the fae were given this information."
"You phrase your suggestion very well," Zee said, sounding pleased. "I will let the ones who are talking to Bran know all that you have told me." He paused. "I will have to be creative to do it in such a way that they do not know that we have been talking on the phone." He hung up without another word.
I had missed the turn off at Queensgate and had to drive all the way to Benton City, adding more time onto the trip. Rather than travel back down the interstate, I took the back highway, where there should be fewer police, hoping I could make up some time.
As soon as I was on the right road, I called Zee's house. The phone rang and rang. After a few minutes I hung up and tried it again. Zee wouldn't have given me that number for nothing. Maybe he'd rented the house out to someone he thought could help me. Maybe there was another fae who, like Ariana, was powerful enough to defy the Gray Lords. Or maybe the fae had left designated spies outside to keep track of things they couldn't monitor from their barricaded reservations, someone who owed Zee a favor. I was still coming up with fantasy scenarios when someone picked up the phone.
"What?" he snapped impatiently.
"Who is this?" I asked, because, gruff and sharp as that answer had been, he sounded like Tad. Zee's half-human son would not have come back here without letting me know.
"Mercy?" Some of the grumpiness left his voice and I was certain.
"Tad? What are you doing home? How long have you been there, and why didn't you tell me you were home?"
Tad had been his father's right-hand man in the VW shop when he was nine, and I first met him. He'd kept on as my right hand and chief tool wrangler when his father had retired and let me buy the shop. Tad had left to go to an Ivy League school back East giving out scholarships to fae as a way to show how liberal and enlightened they were.
We'd e-mailed once a week since he left, and I called him once a month to keep up. Tad was the little brother I'd never had, and in some ways we were closer than I was to my half sisters. We had more in common: neither of us quite fitting in to either the world of the humans or the world of the supernatural. He because he was only half-fae and I because I was the only shapeshifting coyote in a world full of werewolves and vampires.