Iron Kissed (11 page)

Secrets. I shivered a little, though as soon as I'd gotten home from church, I'd turned up the temperature from the sixty degrees Samuel had set it at this morning before he'd left to go to the last day of Tumbleweed. Werewolves like things a little cooler than I do. It was a balmy eighty in the house, not a reason in the world that I should feel cold.

I wondered which part of what I'd told the lawyer he objected to—the murders in the reservation, or telling Ms. Ryan that there had been another fae with him when he'd found the body.

Damn it
, I hadn't told Ms. Ryan anything someone wasn't going to have to tell the police. Come to think of it—I
had
told the police most everything I'd told Ms. Ryan.

However, I should have asked someone before I'd talked to the police or the lawyer. I knew that. It was the first rule of the pack—keep your mouth shut around the mundanes.

I could have asked Uncle Mike how much I could tell the police—and the lawyer—rather than depending upon my own judgement. I hadn't…because I knew that if the police were going to look beyond Zee for a murderer, they'd have to know more than Uncle Mike or any other fae would have told them.

It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission—unless you are dealing with the fae, who aren't much given to forgiveness. They see it as a Christian virtue—and they aren't particularly fond of Christian anything.

I didn't lie to myself that Zee would get over it. I might not know much about his history, but I did know him. He gathered his anger to him and made it as permanent as the tattoo on my belly. He'd never forgive me for betraying his trust.

I needed something to do, something to keep my hands and mind busy, to distract me from the sick feeling that I'd done something terrible. Unfortunately I'd stayed late and finished all the work I had at the shop on Friday, thinking I'd be spending most of Saturday at the music festival. I didn't even have a project car to work on. The current project, an old Karmann Ghia, was out getting the upholstery redone.

After pacing restlessly around the house and making a batch of peanut butter cookies, I went to the small third bedroom that served as my study, turned on the computer, and connected to the Internet before I started on brownies.

I answered e-mail from my sister and my mother and then browsed a bit. The brownie I brought into the room with me sat undisturbed on its plate. Just because I make food when I'm upset doesn't mean I can eat it.

I needed something to do. I ran through the conversation with Uncle Mike and decided that he probably really didn't know who had killed O'Donnell—though he was pretty sure it wasn't the ogres, or he wouldn't have mentioned them at all. I knew it wasn't Zee. Uncle Mike didn't think it was the Gray Lords—and I agreed with him. From the fae point of view, O'Donnell's murder was a screwup—a screwup that the Gray Lords could have easily avoided.

The old staff I'd found in the corner of O'Donnell's living room had something to do with the murder, though. It was important enough that the raven…no, what had Uncle Mike called it—the Carrion Crow—had come and taken it, and Uncle Mike hadn't wanted to talk about it.

I looked at the search engine screen that I used as my default page when I surfed the 'Net. Impulsively, I typed
staff
and
fairy
then hit the search button.

I got the results I should have expected had I thought about it. So I substituted
folklore
for
fairy
, but it wasn't until I tried
walking stick
(after
magic staff
and
magic stick
) that I found myself on a website with a small library of old fairy and folklore books scanned online.

I found my walking stick, or at least
a
walking stick.

It was given to a farmer who had the habit of leaving bread and milk on his back porch to feed the fairies. While he held that staff, each of his ewes gave birth to two healthy lambs every year and gave the farmer modest, if growing, prosperity. But (and there is always a “but” in fairy tales) one evening while walking over a bridge, the farmer lost his grip on the staff and it fell into the river and was swept away. When he got home, he found that his fields had flooded and killed most of his sheep—thus all the gain he'd gotten from the staff had left with it. He never found the staff again.

It wasn't likely that a staff that ensured all its owner's ewes had two healthy lambs each year was worth murdering people over—especially as O'Donnell's killer hadn't taken it. Either the walking stick I'd found wasn't the same one, it wasn't as important as I had thought it might be, or O'Donnell's killer hadn't been after it. The only thing I was certain of was that O'Donnell had taken it from the murdered forest man.

The victims, even though they were mostly names, had been gradually becoming more real to me: Connora, the forest man, the selkie…It is a habit of humans to put labels on things, Zee always told me. Usually when I was trying to get him to tell me just who or what he was.

Impulsively, I typed in
dark smith
and
Drontheim
and found the story Samuel had told me about. I read it twice and sat back in my chair.

Somehow it fit. I could see Zee being perverse enough to create a sword that, once swung, would cut through whatever was in its path—including the person who was using it.

Still, there wasn't a Siebold or an Adelbert in the story. Zee's last name was Adelbertsmiter—smiter of Adelbert. I'd once heard a fae introduce him to another in a hushed voice as “
the
Adelbertsmiter.”

On a whim I looked up
Adelbert
and laughed involuntarily. The first hit I had was on Saint Adelbert, a Northumbrian missionary who sought to Christianize Norway in the eighth century. All I could find out about him was that he'd died a martyr's death.

Could he be Zee's Adelbert?

The phone rang, interrupting my speculations.

Before I had a chance to say anything, a very British voice said, “Mercy, you'd better get your butt over here.”

There was a noise in the background—a roar. It sounded odd and I pulled my ear away from the phone long enough to confirm that I was hearing it from Adam's house as well as through the phone.

“Is that Adam?” I asked.

Ben didn't answer me, just yelped a swearword and hung up the phone.

It was enough to have me sprinting through my house and out my door, the phone still in my hand. I dropped it on the porch.

I was vaulting over the barbed wire fence that separated my three acres from Adam's larger field before it occurred to me to wonder why Ben had called
me
—and not asked for, say Samuel, who had the advantage of being a werewolf, one of the few more dominant than Adam.

I didn't bother going around to the front of Adam's house, just opened the kitchen door and ran in. There was no one in the room.

Adam's kitchen had been built to
cordon bleu
specifications—Adam's daughter, Jesse, had once told me that her father could
really
cook, but mostly they didn't bother.

As in the rest of his house, Adam's ex-wife had chosen the decor. It had always struck me as odd that, except for the formal living room, which was done in shades of white, the colors in the house were much more welcoming and restful than she had ever been. My own house was decorated in parents' castoffs meet rummage sale with just enough nice stuff (courtesy of Samuel) to make everything else look horrible.

Adam's house smelled of lemon cleaner, Windex, and werewolves. But I didn't need my nose or ears to know that Adam was home—and he wasn't happy. The energy of his anger had washed over me even outside the house.

I heard Jesse whisper, “No, Daddy,” from the living room.

It was not reassuring that the next sound I heard was a low growl, but then Ben wouldn't have called me if things had been good. I was pretty surprised he'd called me at all; he and I weren't exactly great friends.

I followed Jesse's voice into the living room. The werewolves were scattered all over the big room, but for a moment the Alpha's magic worked on me and all I could pay much attention to was Adam, even though he was facing away from me. The view was nice enough that it took me a moment to remember that this must be a crisis situation.

The only two humans in the room huddled together under Adam's intense regard on Adam's new antique fainting couch that had replaced the broken remains of his old antique fainting couch. If I had been Adam, I wouldn't have wasted money on antiques. Fragile things just don't fare well in the house of an Alpha werewolf.

One of the humans was Adam's daughter, Jesse. The other was Gabriel, the high school boy who worked for me. He had an arm around Jesse's shoulders, and her diminutive stature made him look bigger than he actually was. Sometime since I'd last seen her, Jesse had dyed her hair a cotton candy blue, which was cheerful, if a little odd. Her usual heavy makeup had slid down her face, striping it with metallic silver eye shadow, black mascara, and tearstains.

For a moment I thought the obvious. I'd warned Gabriel to be careful with Jesse and explained the downside of dating the Alpha's daughter. He'd heard me out and solemnly promised me that he'd behave himself.

Then I realized that under the streaks of makeup were the faint marks of new bruises. And part of what I'd thought was more mascara was actually a trickle of dried blood that ran from one nostril to her upper lip. One bare shoulder had a patch of road rash that still had gravel in it. No way that Gabriel had done that—and if he had, he wouldn't be living now.

Damn, I thought, growing cold. Someone was going to die today.

Gabriel's submissive posture must have been a reaction to something Adam had done, because as I watched him, he straightened his shoulders and lifted his gaze to Jesse's father's face. Not a really smart move with an enraged Alpha, but brave.

“Did
you
know them, Gabriel?” I couldn't see Adam's face, but his voice told me that his eyes would be bright gold.

I took another step into the room and a wave of his power almost sent me to my knees—as it did all of Adam's wolves, who fell to the floor almost as one. The motion made me actually look at them and realize that there weren't as many as I'd originally thought. Werewolves have a tendency to fill up the spaces in a room.

There were only four. Honey, one of the few women in Adam's pack, and her mate had their heads bowed and were holding each other's hands in a white-knuckled grip.

Darryl kept his face up and expressionless, but there were a few drops of perspiration on the mahogany skin of his forehead. Chinese and African blood ran in his veins and combined in a rather awesome mixture of color and feature. By day he was a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; the rest of the time he was Adam's second.

Next to Darryl, Ben looked as pale as his hair and almost fragile—though that was deceptive because he was tough as nails. Like Honey, he'd been gazing at the floor, but just after he'd dropped to the floor, he looked up and gave me a rather frantic look that I had no idea how to interpret.

Ben had fled England to Adam's pack to avoid questioning in a brutal multiple rape case. I was pretty sure he was innocent…but it says something about Ben that he'd have been my first suspect also.

“Daddy, leave Gabriel alone,” said Jesse with a shadow of her usual spirit.

But neither Adam nor Gabriel paid attention to her protest.

“If I knew who they were and where to find them, sir, I wouldn't be here now,” Gabriel said in a grim voice that made him sound thirty. “I'd have dropped Jesse off with you and gone after them.”

Gabriel had grown up the oldest male in a house that had more than a passing acquaintance with abject poverty. It had made him driven, hardworking, and mature for his age. If I thought him reckless for going out with Jesse, I thought Jesse very wise for choosing him.

“Are you all right, Jesse?” I asked, my own voice more of a growl than I'd planned.

She looked up with a gasp. Then jumped up from her seat, where she'd been trying not to lean too close to Gabriel and give her father a target for his anger. She ran to me, burying her face in my shoulder.

Adam turned to look at us. Being a little better versed in prudence than Gabriel (even if I used it only when it suited me), I dropped my gaze to Jesse's hair almost immediately, but I'd seen enough. His eyes blazed just this side of change, icy yellow, pale like the winter morning sun. White and red lines alternated on his wide cheekbones from the force he was using to clench his jaws.

If a news camera ever captured a shot of him looking like this, it would ruin all the spin-doctoring the werewolves had been doing over the last year. No one would ever mistake Adam in such a fury for anything except a very, very dangerous monster.

He wasn't just angry. I'm not sure there is an English word for just how much rage was in his face.

“You have to stop him,” Jesse murmured as quietly as she could in my ear. “He'll kill them.”

I could have told her that she couldn't whisper quietly enough that her father wouldn't hear, not when he was in the same room with us.

“You protect them!” he roared in outrage and I saw what little humanity he was clinging to disappear into the anger of the beast. If he hadn't been as dominant, if he hadn't been Alpha, I'm not sure he wouldn't have already changed. As it was, I could see the lines of his face begin to lose their solidity.

That's all we needed.

“No, no, no,” Jesse chanted into my shoulder, her whole frame shaking. “They'll kill him if he hurts someone. He can't…he can't…”

I don't know what my mother intended when she sent me to be fostered with the werewolves on the advice of a cherished great-uncle who was a werewolf. I don't know that I could have given away my child to strangers. But I'm not a teenage single parent working a minimum wage job who'd discovered her baby could change into a coyote pup. It had worked out for me—at least as well as most people's childhoods. And it had left me with a certain skill for managing enraged werewolves, which was a good thing, my foster father had told me often enough, since I sure had a talent for enraging them.

Still, it was easier to deal with them when I wasn't what had set them off. The first step was to get their attention.

“That's enough,” I said in firm, quiet tones that carried right over the top of Jesse's voice. I didn't need her warning to know that she was right. Adam would hunt down and kill whoever did this to his daughter, and damned be the consequences. And the damned consequences would be fatal to him, and maybe to every werewolf anywhere.

I raised my eyes to meet Adam's fierce gaze and continued more sharply. “Don't you think you've done enough to her? What are you thinking? How long has she been here and no one has cleaned her wounds? Shame on you.”

Guilt is a wonderful and powerful thing.

Then I turned, hauling Jesse, who stumbled in surprise, over to the stairs. If Darryl hadn't been in the room, I couldn't have left Gabriel. But Darryl was smart, Adam's second, and I knew he'd keep the boy out of the line of fire.

Besides, I didn't think Adam would stay in the living room for very long.

We made it only about three steps before I felt Adam's hot breath on the back of my neck. He didn't say anything, just stalked us all the way up to the upstairs bathroom. There seemed to be about a hundred steps more than the last time I'd come up here. Anything feels longer when you have a werewolf behind you.

I sat Jesse down on the closed lid of the toilet and glanced back at Adam. “Go get me a washcloth.”

He stood in the doorway for a moment, then turned and punched the door frame, which buckled. Maybe I should have said “please.” I gave a worried glance upward, but other than a little plaster dust, the ceiling seemed unaffected.

Adam stared intently at the splinters that were splattered with blood from his split knuckles, though I don't think he really saw the damage he'd done.

I had to bite my lip to keep from saying something sarcastic like “Now that was helpful” or “Trying to keep the local carpenters in work?” When I get scared, my tongue gets sharp—which is not an asset around werewolves. Especially werewolves who are mad enough to take out doorways.

Jesse and I both waited, frozen, then he screamed, a sound more howl than human, and he hit the door frame again, and this time he took out the whole wall, his fist pushing through the remnants of the frame, the next two wall studs, and all the drywall between.

I risked a glance behind me. Jesse was so scared I could see the whites all the way around her eyes. I suspect she could have seen mine if she were looking at me instead of her father.

“Talk about overprotective fathers,” I said in a suitably amused tone. The lack of fear in my voice surprised me as much as anyone. Who'd have thought I was such a good actor?

Adam straightened and stared at me. I knew he wasn't as large as he looked—he wasn't that much taller than me—but in that hallway he was plenty big.

I met his gaze. “Could you get me a washcloth, please?” I asked as pleasantly as I could manage.

He turned on his heel and stalked silently toward his bedroom. Once he was out of sight, I realized that Darryl had followed us up the stairs. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, letting out two long breaths. I tucked my cold hands in my jeans.

“That was too damn close,” he said, maybe to me, maybe to himself. But he didn't look at me as he pushed himself upright with a shrug of his shoulders and headed back down the stairs, taking them two at a time in a manner more common among high school boys than doctors of physics.

When I turned back to Jesse, she held a gray washcloth to me with a shaking hand.

“Hide that,” I said. “Or he'll think I sent him away just to get rid of him.”

She laughed, as I'd meant her to. It was wobbly, and stopped abruptly when a cut broke open on her lip. But it was a laugh. She'd be all right.

Because I didn't really care if he knew I'd sent him on a useless errand, I took the washcloth and used it to thoroughly clean the scrape on her shoulder. There was another road rash on her back just above the waistline of her jeans.

“You want to tell me what happened?” I asked, rinsing the washcloth to get rid of the gravel on it.

“It was dumb.”

I raised an eyebrow. “What? You thought you'd add some more color to your complexion so you punched yourself a couple of times and then skidded on the pavement?”

She rolled her eyes, so I guess I wasn't as funny as all that. “No. I was at Tumbleweed with some friends. Dad brought me over and dropped me off. I was supposed to get a ride back, but there were too many kids to fit in Kayla's car when we got to the parking lot. I'd forgotten my cell phone at home, so I started walking back to find a place to call.”

She stopped talking. I handed her the washcloth so she could do her own face. “I've been running cold water over it; it should feel okay on your bruises. I think your dad will feel better if you get cleaned up a bit. You'll look pretty bad tomorrow, but most of the bruising won't show for a couple hours yet.”

She looked in the mirror and gave a gasp of dismay that reassured me that most of the damage was surface. She hopped off the toilet and opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out makeup remover.

“I can't believe Gabriel saw me looking like this,” she muttered, dismayed, as she scrubbed at the mascara on her cheeks. “I look like a freak.”

“Yep,” I agreed.

She looked at me, started to laugh, and then her face crumpled again. “Tuesday, I have to go to school with them,” she said.

“They were Finley kids?” I asked.

She nodded and went back to cleaning her face. “They said that they didn't want a freak in their school. I've known—”

I cleared my throat rather loudly, interrupting her—and she gave me a little smile. Her father could hear us, so it was better not to give him too many hints about her attackers. If they'd done more to her, I wouldn't be so concerned for them. But the incident wasn't worth people dying over it. What was needed was an education, not a murder. However, those boys needed to understand just how dumb attacking the Alpha's daughter was.

“I didn't expect it at all. Not from them,” she said. “I don't know what they'd have done if Gabriel hadn't seen what was happening.” She gave me a smile then, a real smile that didn't stop when she pressed the cold cloth against her lip, which was beginning to swell up pretty well. “You should have seen him. We were in that little parking lot behind the art gallery, you know, the one with the giant paintbrushes out front?”