Beauclaire was medium tall but built on graceful lines that didn’t quite hide the whipcord muscle beneath. Warren, Adam’s third, was built along the same lines.
He didn’t look like a sun god, a storm god, or a trickster, as Lugh was variously reputed to be. Beauclaire had been a lawyer before his dramatic YouTube moment, and that was what he looked like now.
Of course, fae could look like whatever they wanted to.
When I stepped back and gestured him into the living room, he moved like a man who knew how to fight—balanced and alert. I believed that more than I believed the lawyer appearance.
He walked into the living room, but he didn’t stop there since the main floor of the house has a circular flow. He continued through the dining room and around the corner into the kitchen, where he pulled up a chair with his back to the wall and sat down.
I was fairly sure that his choice was important—the fae place a great deal of emphasis on symbolism. Maybe he picked the kitchen because guests came to the house and sat in the living room. Family and friends sat in the kitchen. If so, maybe he was trying to present himself as a friend—or point out that I didn’t have the power to keep him out of the center of my own home. It was too subtle to be certain, so I ignored it altogether. Trying too hard to figure out the meaning in what the fae say or do would send anyone to Straightjacket Land.
“Ms. Hauptman,” he said after I sat down opposite him, “It is my understanding that you have one of my father’s artifacts. I have come for the walking stick.”
2
“I don’t have the walking stick,” I told Beauclaire.
He should know that. I’d told Zee, and, according to his son, he had told some of the other fae to protect me from exactly this scenario.
If he didn’t know, was it only because he was not from the nearby Walla Walla fae reservation? Or did that mean that Zee didn’t trust him?
“Where is it?” His voice slid silk sweet and dangerous into the room.
If he didn’t know, I didn’t want to tell him. He wasn’t going to like it, and I didn’t want to enrage a Gray Lord while he sat at my kitchen table.
“I tried to give it back to the fae,” I told him, stalling for time. “I gave it to Uncle Mike and it just came back.”
“It is very old,” Beauclaire said, and his voice was halfway apologetic. “The fae don’t have it, at least none of the fae in the local reservation. Do you know where it is, now?”
He was assuming that I’d given it to the fae again. If it hadn’t been for the apology in his voice, I think I might have been happy to … not lie, not precisely. Because I didn’t know where the walking stick was, I only knew who it was with.
“Not exactly,” I told him, then stalled out. Zee had been very clear that the fae would not be amused at where that walking stick had ended up.
“Then what ‘exactly’ do you know? Whom did you give it to?”
There was a thump from the stairs, and both of us jumped. Beauclaire focused his attention, and I felt his magic send shivers of ice along my arms.
“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll check.” Before the first word had left my mouth, I hopped out of my chair and headed for the stairway. Whoever had made the noise was likely to be someone I cared about, and I didn’t want them to get blasted by a Gray Lord.
I turned the corner, and Medea stared up at me from the fourth step from the bottom. “It’s okay,” I told Beauclaire. I picked her up, and, true to form, the cat went limp and started purring.
“What was it?” he said.
“I know it’s a horror-film cliché,” I said as I walked back into the kitchen. “But, really, it’s just the cat. I thought you put her to sleep like everyone else?”
Beauclaire frowned at my cat, the magic in the air dissipating gradually. I sat down, and the cat consented to continue to be petted.
“Cats are tricky,” he told me. “Rather like you, they tend to shed enchantments. I didn’t expect to find one in a house full of werewolves, and magic on the fly, delicate magic, is not my specialty.” He looked at me, and there was a threat in his voice when he said, “Hurricanes, tidal waves, drowned cities—those are easier.”
“Don’t feel too bad about it,” I told him, my voice conciliatory. His brows lowered, and I continued in a bland tone, “No one else has heard of a cat who likes werewolves, either.”
Medea—maybe because dangerous men with threatening voices, in her experience, were the people most apt to drop whatever they were doing and cuddle her—decided that Beauclaire was fair game. She oozed from my lap to the tabletop and began a very-slow-motion creep across the table toward him.
“We were talking about the walking stick?” he said, raising an eyebrow. I couldn’t tell if the eyebrow was at me or at my cat—watching Medea do her slo-mo cat stalk can be disconcerting.
“An oakman used the walking stick to kill a vampire,” I told him. It was either the beginning of the story or a diversion, I wasn’t certain myself.
I reached up and wrapped a hand around one of Adam’s dog tags, which hung from my necklace along with my wedding ring and a lamb. If I was going to keep Beauclaire from destroying me and my all-too-vulnerable family in a fit of pique, he’d have to understand—as much as I did—what had happened to the walking stick.
Medea made it all the way across the table and hunkered down in front of Beauclaire. She focused on him and moaned. I’d never heard another cat do it.
“The oakman told me afterward”—I raised my voice a little so it would carry over Medea—“that Lugh never made anything that couldn’t be used as a weapon.” I frowned. “No, that wasn’t quite what he said. It was something along the lines of ‘never made anything that couldn’t become a spear when needed.’”
Medea upped the volume on her yowl, then turned into Halloween kitty; every hair on her body stood at attention, and if she’d had a tail, I was sure it would have been pointed straight in the air.
Medea, who dealt with werewolves on a daily basis, was pretty much immune to fear. She even liked vampires. And she had no trouble with Zee or Tad.
Beauclaire ducked his head until he was face-to-face with Medea. He dropped his glamour just a bit, and I caught a glimpse of something beautiful and deadly, something with green eyes and a long tongue as he hissed at the cat. She all but levitated off the table and disappeared around the corner of the kitchen and up the stairs.
I felt my lip curl in an involuntary snarl. “Overkill,” I told him.
He relaxed in his seat. “So the walking stick is with an oakman now?”
I shook my head. “No. It came back after that. But last summer … the otterkin…”
“I’ve heard about you and the death of the last of the otterkin.” He shrugged. “They always were bloodthirsty and stupid. They are no loss—” He paused, looked thoughtfully at me, and said, “You killed them with the walking stick?”
“It was what I had.” I tried not to sound defensive. “And I only killed one with it.” Adam had taken care of the rest, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “There was something wrong with the walking stick when the otterkin died.” Something hungry.
“Something wrong,” he repeated, thoughtfully. Then he shook his head. “No. It is only the great weapons that are quenched when they are first made, usually in the blood of someone worthy, someone whose traits will make the sword more dangerous. The walking stick was finished long ago.”
I wondered if I should mention that Uncle Mike had thought that I’d “quenched” the walking stick. Maybe I should tell him that the otterkin wasn’t the only thing the walking stick had killed that day. Maybe I should tell him that I was pretty sure the walking stick had killed that otterkin mostly on its own.
But before I had a chance to speak, Beauclaire continued, “The blade you know as Excalibur was born when her blade was drowned in the death of my father.” He paused, showed his teeth in a not-smile. “I understand that you might be acquainted with the maker of that blade.”
I quit worrying about the walking stick for a moment.
Jumping Jehoshaphat. O Holy Night.
Siebold Adelbertsmiter had made blades once upon a time. He’d been the owner of a VW repair shop when I met him. He’d hired me, then sold me the shop when the Gray Lords decided that it was time that he admit he was fae—decades after the fae had come out to the public. I knew him as a grumpy old curmudgeon with a secret marshmallow heart, but once he’d been something quite different: the Dark Smith of Drontheim. He wasn’t one of the good guys in the fairy tales that mentioned him.
Part of me, still properly afraid of Beauclaire, worried that his grudge against Zee might be turned toward me. Part of me was horrified that my friend Zee had killed Lugh, the hero of hundreds, if not thousands, of stories. But the biggest part of me was still stuck on marveling that Zee, my grumpy mentor Zee, had forged Excalibur.
After a moment, I started processing the information in more practical paths. That story was the answer to why Beauclaire didn’t know what I’d done with the walking stick.
If Zee had killed Lugh, Lugh’s son wouldn’t be exchanging kind words with him or anyone who associated with him. No one holds grudges like the fae.
“But we are not speaking of one of the great weapons,” Beauclaire said, temper cooling as he pulled away from an old source of anger. “So tales of the walking stick’s being used to kill a vampire or otterkin are not germane. The walking stick is a very minor artifact, for all that Lugh made it, nor is it useful for important things.”
“Unless I decided to raise sheep,” I said, because his disparagement of the walking stick, to my surprise, stung a bit. It had been old and beautiful—and loyal to me as any sheepdog to its shepherd. If it had become tainted, that was my fault because it had been my decision to use it to kill monsters. “Then all my sheep would have twins. Might not be important to you or the fae, but it would certainly have made an impact on a shepherd’s bottom line.”