“Is that like most of the people who have worked with you?” I snapped, and Adam stifled a laugh.
Zee contemplated me sourly.
“If you don’t throw dangerous objects at people I love, I won’t snap at you again tonight,” I offered after a moment.
“Done and done,” he said, satisfied. “The ring is a minor artifact.”
“Minor or not, that thing is foul.” I rubbed my fingers together to rid myself of the feel of corruption. “You just carry something like that around in your pocket?”
Zee raised an eyebrow. “I carry a lot of things around in my pockets,” he said in a superior tone. “It is what pockets are for.”
Adam’s grin flashed, and I said, “Don’t encourage him.” I turned to Zee. “No one made that ring magic?”
“Correct,” Zee said. “It’s old—maybe fifteen hundred years. A lot of bad things can happen to people in fifteen hundred years, and enough of those bad things happened to people around that ring that eventually it started carrying those things with it. You called it haunted, Mercy. Maybe that is true. But the ring has a predictable magical effect on anyone wearing it, and after not being on a human hand for nearly two centuries, it has not lost any of its power. Those two things make it an artifact. A naturally occurring artifact, one might say. And because it was made without intent, it has changed a lot over the years. The last four people who died wearing it all starved themselves to death. A thousand years from now it might not have any magic at all—or its mere presence might cause everyone in the city to quit eating.”
“The sickle that killed Aubrey is something like that ring,” I said.
Zee nodded. “It is.”
He paused and pursed his lips, pushing his stool back and then forward like a teenager might. I was waiting for him to spin it in circles when he stopped.
“For a very, very long time, whispers of the Soul Taker came to my ears,” he said. “The first story I remember hearing was of a blade that turned a child of eight into a warrior who killed the bandits who attacked him. The boy died, and the sickle disappeared for a few hundred years.”
I looked at the walking stick in my lap, remembering a battle with a group of fae warriors when the walking stick had used me to fight them. A blue spark danced down the length of the wood, brushing over my fingers with a faint bite on its way to the end that sometimes turned into a blade. It was the same color of spark that Zee had called out of it with Lugh’s name.
“You chased after it?” Adam asked.
“It is my habit to find wild-made artifacts, particularly weapons. It is not wise to leave such a thing in ignorant hands because—as you see with the ring—artifacts that have not been properly finished can grow more powerful with age. Being prudent, I find them before they fall into the hands of my enemies.”
He smiled, and it was a fierce, chill smile that didn’t belong on my friend’s face. “But the Soul Taker is different.” He closed his hands as if he could feel it in his grasp.
“I think it might be the single most powerful naturally occurring artifact that has ever existed,” he said, and the creature in the room with us was the Dark Smith of Drontheim. He was the Smith who turned the skulls of his enemies into drinking cups and turned their eyes to gems.
“You have felt it yourself, haven’t you?” He was not addressing Adam, and his voice sent shivers through my bones. “It has a purpose. You can feel the ties that bind the bodies and souls together.”
“Yes,” I said. Then, unable to help myself, I reached out and grabbed Adam’s hand in a hard grip. “And me, too,” I told them. “It’s got me.”
Zee’s head gave a funny jerk, he blinked twice, and it was my old friend who sat across from me once more with an expression of grave concern on his face. “Ja.”
I took a breath. “I was kind of hoping that you could help me with that one.”
Zee shook his head. “My magic is cold and rooted in stone and metal. I do not do bonding of mind and body. I could only just barely sense the connections between the Soul Taker and the dead.” He paused, considering. “I don’t know any of the fae who might be able to help that I would trust with this. Not as power starved as my people have been.”
Adam looked from Zee to me. “What aren’t you saying?”
“I am pretty sure,” I said apologetically, “that the Soul Taker is preparing a sacrifice.”
“I have come to believe that the Soul Taker was forged as an instrument to bring death to honor a god,” Zee said. “In the old religions, sacrifice was more usual than not. The sickle, a symbol of harvest, was a common instrument to use.”
“You were supposed to disagree with me,” I told Zee.
“What god?” Adam asked. He’d moved to stand behind me and put his hands on my shoulders.
Zee shrugged. “Keine Ahnung. Perhaps, given that the sickle is a tool of the harvest and the harvest gods were commonly blood-soaked, it was one of those—though I still think there was a connection to spiders.” He frowned but shook his head. Evidently the memory was still not coming. “I can say that its magic does not have the feel of any god I have encountered—though I could tell you more if I held it in my hands. When I say that the sickle is very old, I mean just that. It was old on the day I first heard of it. The name of its god is long lost.”
“But not the god itself,” said Adam.
“Sadly, gods seldom die unless someone kills them,” said Zee, who had done so at least once that I knew of.
My phone rang on the way home.
“Are you going to answer that?” Adam asked.
I looked at the caller ID.
“Unavailable,” I told him. “I don’t need a warranty to take care of repairs on the van. And no warranty is going to help your SUVs.”
He grinned appreciatively. “True. But you might have a twenty-year-old tax bill that you can take care of now—or else the feds will come calling.”
“You get more interesting spam calls than I do,” I told him.
More seriously he said, “My people couldn’t trace the last crank call you got. If it’s the same people calling now, I’d like to give them another shot. Why don’t you pick it up and see how long you can keep them on the line? If you make it three minutes—”
While he considered rewards, I said, “I get to pick the color of your next SUV.”
He snorted. “Do I look stupid? Pick up the call, please.”
“Fine,” I said and accepted the call.
“Mercy?”
Samuel’s voice took me by surprise. I’d almost forgotten I’d asked him to call. Sherwood wasn’t precisely the least of our problems, but he was no longer the most immediate one. The SUV slowed momentarily and then resumed its former speed. It was getting dark out, so Adam turned on the lights.
“Hey,” I said. “How’s Africa?”
“Still a continent,” Samuel answered, but his voice was wrong.
I stiffened, moving to the edge of the seat as if I could leap up and help him from half a world away. “Is there something wrong?”
There was a pause.
“Samuel,” I said insistently.
“Can’t fool you,” he said, sounding almost relieved.
“Ariana?”
“She’s fine. I’m fine.” Those words hung in the air for a moment.
“Liar.” I called him out on it. “Do you need something? Is there anything I can do?”
“Or I?” Adam asked. My phone wasn’t hooked up through the SUV’s sound system, but that didn’t matter. “Or the pack? Whatever you need, you know that.”
“Thank you, my friends,” Samuel said, sounding weary, but also better somehow. “I think we have it covered for now. You were my second-string but my first-string has the ball.”