The first time I’d met Ymir, he’d struck me as hesitant and polite, once he’d quit trying to kill everyone.
“I appreciate that,” I said.
A car door shut quietly and then nothing. As minutes passed, Zee turned to give the wall between him and the front door a frowning look.
“Wait while I check this out,” he said to me.
But then we both heard the sound of booted feet on the wooden steps and the doorbell rang.
“Come as guest and as guest depart,” said Zee, staying where he was.
Ymir opened the front door. “Accepted,” he said before the sound of his feet told me he was inside. I heard the door close gently. “Threshold to threshold.”
In the house, he was soft-footed—if I hadn’t been listening for him, I wouldn’t have heard him walk from the doorway to the kitchen. That meant he had intended for us to hear him on the porch. He stopped as soon as he could see us, a slight man a few inches shorter than me—and I’m average height for a woman. He was wearing glasses, and he blinked at us as if they weren’t quite strong enough.
Then he ruined the whole look by exposing his white, slightly crooked teeth at Zee. The expression muted itself into a smile when he turned it to me.
“I am pleased to see you once more, Mercy Coyotesdaughter. Zee has explained to me that your brother is suffering from a spell cast by one of my kind.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“I will examine him and remove it if I can. If I cannot, I will tell you what I know about it. Is this acceptable?”
“Payment?” Zee asked before I could say anything.
“Payment has already been made,” Ymir said mildly.
Because I’d broken the spell on him at Uncle Mike’s, I thought, assuming that the Jötunn obeyed the same laws as the fae. It felt like the right sort of balance for what we were asking of him tonight.
Zee glanced at me, then gave a brisk nod, accepting my judgment.
“Here’s my brother,” I said, raising my hand and, because he was gripping it tightly, Gary’s.
Ymir approached us; with his hands clasped behind his back and his face thoughtful, he examined my brother. Bored, Tad had said. Ymir didn’t look bored now.
Gary figured out that there was something going on. He inhaled strongly and squeezed my hand. I squeezed it back. He held up three fingers with his free hand, gestured at himself and made it four. I squeezed his hand four times, one for each of us in the room.
Ymir dropped to a knee in front of Gary and tipped his head like one of the werewolves catching an interesting scent. My brother’s whole body stiffened and a growl rumbled in his throat. I squeezed his hand again, but he didn’t relax. I didn’t blame him. I found the Jötunn unnerving, too.
Ymir’s vivid blue eyes had brightened to near-white in a way that reminded me of the Marrok’s son Samuel, and he smelled of ozone and chill air—like an incipient ice storm. But there was something else, too, a quality of wildness my other senses observed, something that made me believe this being was able to call wolves.
Ymir stood up after a while and paced slowly around the kitchen, the picture of a man in deep thought. He raised his face as if to speak, and Adam boiled through the back door, coatless and shoeless.
Rage hot in his yellow wolf eyes, Adam stopped, weight balanced over his feet in a stance that spoke of his readiness to fight.
“Release her,” he growled. “She is not yours.”
It wasn’t me he was talking about. I looked at Ymir.
A cold smile grew over the frost giant’s face. “She is payment for what I do here. It has been agreed. Mercy is your mate, empowered to make bargains on your behalf.”
It wasn’t the time to do anything stupid like ask what the two of them were talking about. But I hadn’t spent a decade fixing cars with Zee without learning to pay attention to my words. I thought back over what had been said.
But Zee got there first.
“Mercy made no bargain,” he said. “Accepting your word that a payment has been made is not agreement. And I have no hold on the wolves that you can use my approval to take one of them. No bond to Mercy that I can make bargains in her stead. If you chose to accept some past action or inaction of mine for your aid with Mercy’s brother, that is not our fault.”
Ymir stiffened and made a gesture at the air, and I felt a fizz of unfamiliar magic. It seemed to tell him something.
“I am not a mortal child,” Zee said, menace easing into his voice, “to be fooled by the likes of you. Nor do I lie. Your bargain is with me. That you chose to believe it was with Mercy is not her fault. And if you had been honest in your bargaining, it would not have mattered who you were making the agreement with.”
Ymir looked at me, face so expressionless it sent ice down my spine. “I should have expected one of your kind to be duplicitous. Loki was always so—and I am told that he and Coyote are of a piece.”
“Winter roads are treacherous,” I said slowly. I wished that I’d gotten a chance to talk to Larry the goblin king instead of hearing his message from Uncle Mike. I might have been able to get more clarification. I’d tell Larry that he needed to give better warnings next time I saw him. “What did he do, Adam?”
“He’s got Mary Jo,” Adam said grimly.
“I found her spying upon me,” Ymir said. He looked at Zee, and his upper lip curled derisively. “Before I accepted guesting rule. Bargain or no bargain, she stays mine,” he said, his voice mocking, his attention on Adam now, “unless you can take her from me, remembering that I am a guest in your house.”
When no one said anything, Ymir looked pleased. “Mary Jo. Is that her name? Pedestrian and Christian both. I will change it.”
He snapped his fingers and I heard the crash of the big plate-glass window in the living room. A frigid blast of air swept through the kitchen, then a silvery wolf with black markings on her face that would have looked more at home on a cheetah or on the face of an ancient Egyptian queen stalked into the room. Pieces of glass and drops of blood fell onto the tile floor in an irregular pattern.
Mary Jo’s eyes were fixed on Ymir, who looked smaller next to her even though Mary Jo’s wolf form was as compact as she was as a human. The frost giant laid his hand on the top of her head and turned gloating eyes to Adam.
My brother leaned his shoulder against me and let go of my hand. I couldn’t tell if that was to free me for action—or to free himself.
“Mary Jo,” Adam said, and I felt him light the pack bonds, as he had earlier for Gary, but this time he drew on one particular bond with a little more emphasis.
I was not so good with the pack bonds that I understood what Adam asked for, but I didn’t need to be. The flavor of Sherwood Post in our pack bonds had changed over the past few months until he felt almost more like Joel, who wasn’t a werewolf at all, than he did any of the rest of the pack. Through Adam, I felt Sherwood hesitate, and then he gave Adam what he’d asked for.
Our pack’s ties strengthened and became something more, something that lived and breathed magic. When it was stable—a time both infinite and less than the tick of a clock—Adam made another ask, this time to Joel. The response he got was more immediate than Sherwood’s had been but less sure, a hot vital spark that Adam’s more subtle skill blended with the powers Adam already held. Then my mate asked me. Like Joel, I had no idea what he was asking for, less than Joel really, but I opened the barriers between us and offered him whatever he needed to gather from me.
Ymir’s eyes widened and he sniffed the air. Zee’s eyebrows rose and he allowed the hand that had been moving ever so slowly behind his back to return to his side. My usual carry was a gun in a holster in the small of my back, and even absorbed by whatever Adam was doing, I still wondered what weapon Zee carried there.