I turned on the radio to listen for the news. It was pretty late—or rather, early in the morning—to get real news, but Mary Jo had been taken while on duty as a firefighter. If the enemy had done something to the people she worked with, doubtless we’d hear about it. It would be stupid of them, but people who attack a full pack of werewolves are either very stupid or very strong. I was betting that if someone had kidnapped a firefighter—or killed a bunch of them—there would be some sort of special report on the radio even at this hour.
While I was driving, I used Rosa’s bling-covered phone and tried Elizaveta the witch’s number to no avail. Then I tried Stefan’s.
It said something about how ambivalent I was feeling about Stefan that I’d tried the witch, who didn’t like me, first. If Stefan had still been part of the local seethe, I’d have had a good excuse to hesitate. But Marsilia had screwed him over to save her position as Mistress of the seethe. Vampire politics make the very complicated dance of manners that is werewolf protocol look like the Hokey Pokey.
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.