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She looked at Aiden. “If he’d known about Fire, he’d have bargained for that.” She paused. “I wouldn’t have given it to him. He didn’t need that much power. I just gave him a useful twist on his own.”
She had wanted to let him shapeshift more easily. To accomplish that she devised a method that involved taking over someone’s mind. Killing them—but not before they killed as many people as they could in order to power the magic—because the complex ability she gave the smoke weaver required more magic than he had. I thought of Ben and Stefan, Anna and Dennis, and even the poor hitchhiker who I had met only after she’d died, and I kept my mouth shut. No words that would come out of my mouth at that moment would be helpful.
“Very clever,” said Aiden, coming to my rescue.
Tilly beamed and curtsied. “I am clever,” she agreed.
“If the bargain is still in effect,” Aiden said after I remained silent, “does that mean you could recapture him?”
“Yes,” she said. “Oh, that would be lovely. I miss him.” She gave Aiden a scowl. “All of my friends leave me.”
He wisely ignored that.
“How can we help you invoke the bargain?” he asked. “What are the terms?”
“We were drinking very good mead,” she told him apologetically. “So it isn’t very complicated. He has a secret—and you have to tell him what that secret is.”
“I will do my best to see that your friend is returned,” I told her.
She looked at me, then sighed. “Your best. And you raised my hopes, too. That was silly of me. Okay, go on. Do your best.” She looked at Aiden. “The food and drink were very good. When she is dead”—she pointed her finger at me—“I hope you remember who your friends are. I shall be very lonely without you or the smoke weaver to talk to.”
She looked at me. “I’m sorry,” she told me. “I forgot who I was dealing with. I hope you die soon. Then, at least, I’ll get Aiden back.”
“No,” Aiden said. “I will always be your friend, Tilly. But I am not living in Underhill ever again.”
“Not ever,” she said, “means never. But never is a long time. I do not think it will be never.”
He bowed to her but didn’t say anything.
She pouted. “You aren’t being nice. I think I will go kill some things.”
She left, closing the door behind her with a thud.
“That could have been more useful,” Aiden told me. “I’m sorry.”
I shook my head. “It was useful, I think.”
I WAS GLAD TO BE WORKING ALONE AT THE SHOP; IT gave me plenty of time to think. I thought about Adam, mostly. But also I picked apart everything that Tilly had said, everything Beauclaire had said, and everything I had ever read about bargains. I was looking for a path through that did not involve me getting into a bargain in which I gave away my firstborn child.
Warren stayed in the office reading. He was a voracious reader—he’d told me once that he’d learned to love books when he’d been out for months on cattle drives. Warren had been a cowboy in the nineteenth century and it had become as much a part of him as the wolf was.
He’d brought three books with him and I was pretty sure there were a couple in the truck in case he wanted something different to read. He usually had six or eight books midread at any given time.
He was on his third year of working his way through War and Peace. He’d told me privately once, in a bout of frustration, “I think you have to be Russian in order to read this book. Especially if you are going to try to remember who is who.”
To combat his frustration with Tolstoy, he’d brought his old copy of The Princess and the Goblin. It had been read to tatters, and sometimes he’d quote from it. “Seeing is not believing—it is only seeing.” Or “That is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of.”
The third book he’d brought, the one he was really reading today, was Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. It struck me that this book was something very interesting for a werewolf to be reading. What was a pack, really, but a military unit that sought to keep its members alive and make the world a better, safer place?
He’d offered to help—and he wasn’t a bad mechanic—but I needed to be alone in the bays so I could fix things and ponder.
We ate lunch at the soup-and-sandwich shop not too far from the garage. He read War and Peace (because he welcomed interruptions while he was reading it), and I did Internet searches on my phone to find more fairy bargain stories. “The Pied Piper” was promising in that all of the children and the piper disappeared at the end. But it didn’t fit anything else.
I was pretty sure that I knew which story our smoke weaver had come from—and that story told me his secret. Beauclaire had given me most of it. But I was also pretty sure that defeating the smoke weaver could not be as simple as shouting his secret to him—especially if I wanted to also save Stefan and Ben.
When we got back, I sat down at the office computer. I had been calling Ariana off and on since our first encounter with the smoke weaver. Now I composed an e-mail with everything I knew about the creature, and all the conclusions I’d come to. And I asked her about fae bargains—not the bargains made by Gray Lords or the most powerful of the fae, but the bargains the lesser fae made. And I sent that e-mail to Ariana and to her mate, Samuel, who was Bran’s firstborn son, and hoped that somewhere in Africa or wherever they were they could get e-mail.
As I was getting up to go back to work, I noticed a piece of paper on the floor in front of the printer. I picked it up and found myself looking at the bill for a generator.
I hesitated, then called the phone number Mr. John Leeman had left for us.
“Hello?” said a cautious voice—one I recognized.
“James Palsic,” I said. “This is Mercy Hauptman. Is Fiona there?”
“No,” he said. “What do you want, Ms. Hauptman?”
“I have information you should know—” And I told him what Bran had told me. Told him what he’d said about Chen, the Palsics, Schwabe, and Harolford. And I told him what Bran had said about Fiona.
“She’s not rogue for hire,” he said with conviction. “She’s killed a lot of people—in Bran’s service, I might add. But she is not for sale to the highest bidder.”
“Bran doesn’t lie,” I told him. “And his truths are generally not the kind of shaded truths the fae use, either. Look. You are going to do what you are going to do. I understand that. But I think that you should call Bran”—I gave him Bran’s number, and I heard the sound of a pen moving across paper as he wrote it down—“and you should talk to him. Ask him your questions and why Fiona told you that you could not go to Bran for help.”
“Is that all?” he asked.
“Yes,” I told him, and I hit the button on my phone that disconnected us.
Warren was watching me. “That might be putting the fox in the henhouse.”
“If he calls Bran,” I said. “If not—jeez. I should have called him on the shop phone because I just gave him my cell number to trace. I probably should have discussed that with Adam first.”
