“Gina Stephanie Albright,” I told her. “It’s time for you to stop.” She was spirit without soul, so there would be no moving on for her—and I never lied to something that might know I was lying.
She made no motion, but a pottery vase flung itself at my head. I knocked it away with the pry bar, took a deep breath, and pulled on my mate-tie to Adam, borrowing the absolute authority that he bore innately. And also that part of me that was Coyote, the part that allowed me to see ghosts when no one else could.
“Gina Stephanie Albright,” I told her, filling my words with truth and command. “You have no power. You have no place. You will not hurt anyone ever again. You do not belong here. Go away.”
Her face twisted in rage, and I could feel her push at the commands I had given her. But I could also feel the fade in the energy of whatever force it was that allowed her ghost to remain.
“Whore,” she screamed at me. “Whore!”
“Go,” I told her.
And she was gone.
“So,” I told Adam as we drove home together—Zack had volunteered to take my van home. “I think that there’s no point in rebuilding the garage.”
I’d told Rick and Lisa that I was pretty sure that the one ghost was gone and that the other would fade with a little time. I also told them that if they (or the neighbors) had any further trouble, they were welcome to call me. I had the distinct impression that “they” was the right pronoun, and Lisa wasn’t going to be going to her home anytime in the near future.
“You don’t want to rebuild the garage.” Adam’s voice was very neutral, a statement, not a question.
“I mean,” I said, trying to sound casual about it. Businesslike. “It’s not exactly a high-profit career—fixing cheap cars so they’ll run another year. It will cost a lot to rebuild—more than the business could earn in years. I’ve already sent in the call to have it leveled to the ground.”
I didn’t need to be independent. I trusted Adam—and I could find other ways to be useful. If I decided I needed to earn my own money, I could find a job at Jiffy Lube and make more than I did at my garage.
“Call came to the house phone while we were gone,” he said. “Jesse left a voice message on my phone a few hours ago. The new body-and-paint guy, Lee, says that he told you the Karmann Ghia you put the Porsche engine into was going to be a hit. He was quite clear that he thought you should have trusted him.” Lee had taken the Karmann to a concours in Southern California. “It apparently brought in twice the estimate at the auction—about $19,000.” Adam glanced at me, then away, the corner of his lip turning up. “Jesse told me to tell you that she is sure about the $19,000 and, yes, she asked him twice. Apparently the guy who lost the auction is sending you a good body to fix for him if you can do all the work for $12,000—which Lee has already assured him you and he could do. He’s bringing back two other commissions as well, so you should—I quote Jesse, who quoted him—‘get your ass in gear and find somewhere to work.’ Unquote.”
Nineteen thousand dollars meant about $10,000 profit split between me, Kim the upholstery guy, and Lee—the new body-and-paint man. For work that had taken me about forty hours altogether. Not doctor’s wages, but not bad, either. I said a quiet prayer of thanks, not for the first time, that the Karmann had been getting painted and hadn’t been stuck in my garage when the disaster struck.
“So,” Adam continued. “I took the liberty of telling our contractor to be ready to rebuild, and in the meantime you can work out of the pole barn. I’ll loan you the amount the insurance doesn’t cover.”
“With interest,” I demanded.
He pursed his lips, and said, “Of course. That makes sense. Charging my wife interest. What a smart idea.”
“Hmm,” I said, and he grinned at me.
He turned his head back to the road but pulled my hand to his lips and bit one of my knuckles with playful promise. “Besides. As long as forgotten deities, vampires, and kids with grudges stay away, mechanicking is a much safer occupation than ghost hunting. I’m all about keeping you safe.”
Outtake from SILVER BORNE
This is an outtake, a scene that I knew happened between the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of Silver Borne, while all the people who care about Mercy are out looking for her. I had no good way to fit this into the book—given that Silver Borne is told strictly from Mercy’s viewpoint.
I didn’t intend to ever write it down—it is not a story, really, just a scene. But my husband, after reading “Silver,” told me that I needed to remind readers that there was a happy ending to Samuel and Ariana’s story, even if it was a long time later.
So for those of you who have not read Silver Borne, there are some spoilers in here.
Ariana
Somewhere between Walla Walla and the Tri-Cities in Washington State
The snow had fallen overnight. Ariana pulled into a meadow that had turned into a parking lot. Two of the cars, like hers, were bare, but a big black SUV and a cherry red Mercedes were dusted with snow: Adam and Samuel had been here all night.
Samuel was beside himself—and Adam . . . She couldn’t think about Adam for very long without pulling her beast from its rest. Adam was very, very scary. Zee said he wasn’t usually like this, that Adam was usually cool and controlled. But he’d been wounded and asleep when his mate went into a fairy queen’s Elphame to rescue a human boy. The boy and the rest of the rescue party had gotten out, but Mercy had stayed behind.
Shortly thereafter, someone had broken the mate bond that held Adam to his mate—and though she had tried, Ariana hadn’t been able to use Adam or anything else of Mercy’s to find the Elphame. Mercy’s ties to the pack, to her real life, had been sundered.
Ariana locked her car, pulled on her gloves, and began to walk a different direction than she had yesterday and the day before. She let her earth magic seep into the soil, reaching out to look for something that didn’t belong. Zee had been here before her; she could feel the touch of the iron-kissed fae on the land. If he hadn’t found the fairy queen’s lair, then the chances of her doing so were slim. But still she had to look.
It was Ariana’s fault, after all. If she’d been stronger, braver, more something, then Mercy would have been freed with the rest of them. They had been looking for her now, to no avail, for two weeks.
If she had thought about it very long, Ariana would have given the Silver Borne to the fairy queen right from the start. It was an artifact of power—but owning it was more curse than blessing because it drained the powers of any fae who happened to get too close. They always thought there was some secret magic, some spell she’d put on it to allow her to siphon off the magic.
There wasn’t. But fae don’t give up advantage easily—so it made them unwilling to believe any other fae would do so, either.
She was paying too much attention to her dowsing and not enough attention to where she was going. She stepped around a half-downed fence and found herself face-to-face with a pair of werewolves. She’d known they were out here somewhere—hadn’t she just noticed their cars? But she knew that they had been told about her, told to avoid her, and she hadn’t seen any sign of them except for their cars since she’d started searching.
She froze, unable to move, unable to do anything about the black entity that crawled up her spine and took over her body. Magic coiled in her hands, and the beast who rode her waited for them to attack.