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I could hear Adam talking on the phone; I was pretty sure it was someone from work. Nothing important or he would have shut his office door. But if he was on his phone, then he wasn’t changing to his wolf. That gave me time to go talk to Aiden about the door to Underhill.
Aiden’s room was in the basement, so I just continued down the next set of stairs. He lived in what had previously been the pack’s safe room because Adam and his happy contractor (who said that fixing the damage routinely experienced by our house from a pack of werewolves had already paid for his kids’ college and was working on his grandchildren’s) had decided that it would be the easiest room in the house to fireproof. Aiden tended to have nightmares, and when he did, sometimes he started fires. There was a fire extinguisher in every room of the house and two in the main basement—one of them near the stairs, and the other on the wall next to Aiden’s bedroom.
Construction had begun on another safe room in the far end of the basement. Werewolf safe rooms kept everyone else safe from the occupant (presumably an out-of-control werewolf) instead of the other way around like safe rooms in human houses were intended to do.
A safe room started out as a cage constructed from silver-coated steel bars. Then it would be covered with drywall and turned into a fairly normal-looking room because cages don’t help anyone calm down. Our new safe room was still in the cage stage.
Aiden’s door showed its origins in that it was solid metal, but it no longer locked from the outside. I knocked on it twice.
Aiden opened the door. His hair stuck out in medium-brown swirls as it tended to when he got upset, because he ran his fingers through it and occasionally would grab and twist. Sometime since I’d left the house, he’d changed his clothes and cleaned up.
As soon as he had the door open, Aiden started apologizing.
“I am so sorry, Mercy. I had no idea Tilly was planning on this.”
“Not your fault,” I told him. “When an ancient powerful force of magic decides to do something, people like you and me don’t get much of a say in it.”
He didn’t look as though I’d relieved him of guilt. “If you hadn’t let me stay—”
“We like you,” I told him. “We’ll take you how you come.”
I’d told him that before. He was, I thought, starting to believe it.
He took a breath, then frowned at me doubtfully. “Ancient powerful forces of magic and all?”
“Yup. You’re in good company in this family.” I gave him a rueful smile. “Joel is possessed by a volcano spirit. I have Coyote, who likes to show up and make trouble whenever he chooses. Even Adam comes with Christy baggage that just keeps on giving.”
“Okay,” he said. “You are all cursed, and I fit right in.”
I laughed. Aiden learned fast. Anyone listening in would never think that he’d been trapped for who knows how long in that magical land and had only popped out just a few months ago. Jesse credited it to her tutoring with the aid of Netflix.
“I did come down to ask about Underhill’s door,” I said.
He nodded. “I already talked to Adam a little about it. She told me she put it there …”
He frowned trying, I knew, to recall Underhill’s exact words. Exact words were important to the fae—and Underhill, as far as I’d been able to tell, followed the rules that governed the fae. “She said, ‘I need a door to Mercy’s backyard. I miss you. The fae aren’t playing nice and I don’t want to owe any of them anything.’”
“Why would she owe the fae anything?” I asked.
Aiden shrugged. “I don’t know. But it wasn’t specific, so maybe it was something she said to distract me from the fact that she put a doorway in our backyard.”
“Can anyone else use the doorway?” I asked.
He nodded. “Me and Underhill. I made her spell it that way as soon as I saw it. She guards her doorways pretty zealously anyway, but there are monsters in Underhill and sometimes we get out.”
“Yep, well, there are monsters on this side of Underhill’s doors, too,” I told him briskly. “Don’t get feeling too special.”
He started to smile at me—and then his gaze grew suddenly intent. “Mercy, what happened?”
“My eyes aren’t swollen anymore,” I said, a little indignant. “I spent time with a cold washcloth.”
He reached up and put a hand briefly on my face—his hand was warm. “Your eyes are sad, Mercy. Washcloths can’t help that.”
I told him about my neighbors. I included the jackrabbit and the ghost. I left out my interlude with Adam.
“Their deaths hurt you,” Aiden said when I finished. “I am sorry for your loss.” Frowning, he leaned against the door. “There are a few things that can use a bite—use that blood contact to make people do their will. Vampires, for instance.”
“Marsilia would never permit it.”
Aiden shook his head. “Not Marsilia’s seethe. The ones in Underhill wouldn’t owe her any fealty.”
Like the rest of us, his thoughts had immediately gone to the door in our backyard when looking for a culprit.
“There are vampires in Underhill?”
Aiden said, “Everything you’ve told me about your neighbors’ deaths could have been done by the fae. Other than a few of the less powerful fae—and creatures like the goblins, whose control of glamour is different—they could all take on the form of a jackrabbit. And while the fae don’t use blood as often as, say, the witches do, there is a lot of magic in blood. But you told me that it didn’t smell like fae magic to you. That still leaves other options. When the fae were driven out, there were still servants, curiosities like me, and prisoners left behind in Underhill. Tilly opened the prisons when she exiled the fae who were their caretakers. Most of the prisoners were—or had been—fae, but not all of them were. There are some weird things roaming around. Weirder even than I am.” He shivered.
I was still stuck on vampires. “Vampires? Really? In Underhill? That’s like finding coyotes in ancient Egypt.”
“There weren’t coyotes in Egypt, right?” he asked.
“Not unless Coyote—” I held up a hand. “Sorry. Let’s get back to the idea that something escaped from Underhill through the door in our backyard and killed my friends.” I had a thought powered by his tales of creatures set free by Underhill. “How many escapees could there have been?”
“If something escaped, it would have had to be before I found the door,” he said. “I could believe that one creature escaped—but she doesn’t like to lose her captives.”
“It wasn’t there when I got home,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “That makes multiple escapees even less likely.”
“Would she know if something escaped?” I asked. “And more importantly, would she know which something escaped?” And hopefully give us more information on what it was and how to kill it.
He nodded. “I think so. But she will know that I’ll be mad at her over it—so getting her to tell us if something escaped will be hard. I’ll call her and see what she will tell me. It might take a while for her to answer.”
