Marsilia ruled the vampires in the Tri-Cities. We had a long-standing agreement that I would provide whatever maintenance her cars needed and she would keep her vampires from attacking me. She had destroyed Stefan, who had been her loyal wingman, for her own needs. If that had been the extent of it, I thought Stefan would have forgiven her for that. But to do it, she’d gone after the people Stefan kept in his household to feed upon, his sheep. Most vampires would not have cared, but Stefan believed in taking care and responsibility for his people.
I pursed my lips, took a deep breath, and turned to face him. “How about an exchange of favors?” I proposed. “I came here for information—and I am happy to fix the Mystery Machine to get it.”
“What do you need?” he asked.
The yard light did a decent job of illuminating Stefan. He looked good. Back to his usual self, even. He was tall and lean, but not skinny now. And he looked entirely human again, something in the way he balanced on his feet and the energy with which he moved. For a while he’d moved more like a vampire—some of the very young or the very old have this odd jerkiness to their movements, like somewhere there might be a puppeteer making them move.
Stefan also looked like a cat contemplating a strange dog.
I laughed. “Nothing to put that look on your face. I just stopped in to ask a question. If we can turn that into an exchange that gets you out of a dilemma, that’s all the better.”
He relaxed fractionally. “What did you need to know? Or do we need privacy for it?”
“I just need to know whatever you can tell me about Frost. I don’t think that we need privacy.”
“Frost?” said Stefan. “He is dead, Mercy.” Then, very un-Stefan-like, he stumbled a little. “All the way dead, I mean.”
“I know that—I accomplished his demise,” I said, putting him out of his apparent misery. I’d have thought a vampire as old as he was would have gotten around the awkwardness of how to announce the extinction of a vampire. Maybe that awkwardness was more about what was between us, though. “Or at least I was there when Adam finished him off—but Adam wouldn’t have been there without me. However you’d prefer.”
Frost had been finished, I was pretty sure, before Adam got there to complete the business. But there was no arguing that Adam had ended Frost with absolute finality.
“But here’s the thing,” I said. “I stumbled into someone who smells a lot like Frost recently. Since it is the only identifier anyone has picked up in the whole mess, I decided it might help to get more information.”
“Today’s mystery?” asked Stefan.
And because he was a friend, and because Marsilia needed to know about the attack on Elizaveta’s family and I wasn’t about to call her, I told Stefan about my morning, stopping just after the werewolf zombie in the basement—and I tidied up the zombie wolf’s attack and end without much detail, leaving out Sherwood’s spectacular performance entirely. His secrets didn’t belong to me.
Unlike with Zee, I left out the upcoming meeting between the fae and the government. I would have been surprised if the vampires didn’t know about the meeting—the vampires had ties pretty high up in politics. But if they didn’t know, they weren’t going to learn about it from me.
I also didn’t tell him about the evidence that Elizaveta and her brood were working black magic—just as I had not told Zee. That was pack business. We paid her a retainer for her services. We had been supporting her while she tortured unwilling subjects for the power she used to aid us.
“Elizaveta’s family is gone?” he murmured.
I couldn’t tell what he felt about that.
“Yes.”
“And you and Adam were attacked by a zombie werewolf at your home and”—he did air quotes—“‘the werewolves took care of him.’”
“Not a lie,” I told him. I don’t lie very often, so I’d been very brief instead. “I can’t tell you things that aren’t mine to tell.”
He watched me for a moment, and then his face relaxed and he nodded. “Okay.” Looking away, he continued, “You could have called on me for help with the goblin.”
I knew what he meant. Just as I bore bonds to my mate and to our pack, I also had a bond to Stefan. Through it, he could control me, not just my actions, but my thoughts. He could take away my ability to make decisions for myself. All I could do was trust that he would not do that, that he would continue as he had since I’d asked for his help against another vampire.
That was why I’d been avoiding him.
He didn’t deserve my first response, so I kept my mouth shut until I could give him the real truth.
Finally I said, “I didn’t think about it. It was pack business, so I took a pair of werewolves. He was a goblin, so I called Larry.”
“Fair enough,” he acknowledged. “But it could have killed you when it came out of the barn. You are no match for a goblin. You could have called me.” And he could have come. Like his former Mistress, Marsilia, Stefan could teleport. I’d never heard of any other vampires who could do that.
He paced away from me and stood, arms crossed, with his back to me. “Once you married Adam, you pulled yourself out of your weight class. Someday I will be looking at your dead body, because you were too stubborn to call me.”
There was real anger in his voice. I thought about telling him that it wasn’t his job to protect me—but I actually didn’t know the vampire protocol about situations like ours. I thought about telling him I could protect myself—but he was right.
“If I had thought about it,” I told him, “I might have called you. But that would have been a mistake. Marsilia leaves you alone now.”
He laughed and it sounded harsh, like broken dreams.
“She allows you to stay here, Stefan. In relative safety. Instead of forcing you to move into another vampire’s territory. She allows you to be independent when you might not have that luxury elsewhere.”
He nodded. “She is generous,” he told me, meaning the opposite.
“If she thinks that your first loyalty is to our pack—or me . . . especially me—she will not abide it.” I held up a finger to make him pause. “And if the pack thinks that I have a tame vampire that I call upon whenever things might get hairy, it will be equally bad for me.”
I put a hand on his arm and he stiffened. “But I am very happy to come over to your house and ask you to help me solve mysteries.”
He drew in a deep breath he didn’t need. Then he turned around and let his arms drop to his side. My hand fell away when he moved.
“All right,” he said. “All right, Mercy. We are friends as well as allies? But I am not pack—nor should I be.”
And I realized that Stefan was lonely. Werewolves are like that. They need a pack to belong to, to be safe with. Some of them don’t like it much, but that doesn’t change the nature of the beast. I knew vampires lived in seethes, but it had never occurred to me that one of the reasons they did so was that they, like the wolves, needed to belong.
There was not much I could do about that. Stefan did not want to be a member of the pack—and the pack would not, could not, make him a member.
Stefan was apparently finished with that conversation, because when he spoke again it was on a different topic. “I don’t know a lot more about Frost than you do. He showed up as a Power maybe twenty or thirty years ago—I don’t keep track of time on that level, so I’m not sure. He seemed to be acting as a minion of Bonarata for most of that, so I watched Bonarata, and not him.” Bonarata was the Lord of Night, ruler of the European vampires, who had, I was assured, long tentacles of power that dug deeply on this continent, too.
Stefan frowned deeply. “I don’t know who made him or why. I don’t know who his affiliates are. But I should be able to find out.”
“What nationality is he?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I had assumed that he was European, given that he initially came as an agent of Bonarata. I can find that out, too.” Stefan rubbed his hands briskly together. “Give me some time to run some things down. I do think it is interesting that a vampire who has power over the dead and a witch who creates zombie goats share a close familial scent. If he was born a witch and someone turned him—that someone needs to be stopped.”
“Creates miniature zombie goats,” I corrected him.
He nodded at me. “‘Zombie goat’ sounds satanic.”
There are reasons that Stefan and I became friends.
* * *
• • •
My phone rang when I was about halfway home from Stefan’s house.
I glanced down at my cell phone, which was faceup on the passenger seat. Whoever was calling wasn’t a number my phone knew, but it was a Benton City number. Benton City is not a hotbed of robocallers trying to sell auto warranties or time-shares. I let the phone ring three times before I gave in to curiosity and pulled over to the side of the road.
“Ms. Hauptman? This is Arnoldo Salas. You were at my house this morning with the zombie goats.”
“Mr. Salas,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“There is a car that has been driving back and forth in front of my house. It matches the car my boy saw yesterday. I do not know if it means anything. Maybe whoever is driving the car is lost—we get that here a lot.”
“And maybe we should get you some help right now,” I said. “Okay. Don’t go outside your house. Don’t answer your door if anyone knocks. I will call you from this phone when I get there.”
I called Adam and got his voice mail. I called Warren and got his voice mail.
I called Stefan.
* * *
• • •
“What do you think that you and I can do against a witch?” asked Stefan, sounding not overly concerned.
I glanced over at him. He was driving his two-year-old baby blue BMW because my Jetta now only had one usable seat.