Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson Book 13)

I followed Zee into the garage, where presumably he’d tell me all about what was going on. I felt like I had too much information and none of it went together. I had a box of jigsaw pieces, but I felt like I couldn’t tell if they all went to one puzzle or three different ones.

I clutched Adam’s coat around me, probably looking like an idiot. I was tired, sore, and scared—and well beyond caring what I looked like, or at least caring enough to do anything about it.

Aubrey followed me.

I’d quit talking to him, though it was probably already too late. I didn’t know if my paying attention to him affected Aubrey anyway because he wasn’t a typical ghost; I hadn’t really figured that out before I tried to help him “go into the light” or whatever. Ghosts are spirit, what’s left behind sometimes when people die. Aubrey was the whole kit and caboodle minus his body—soul bound to this earth as if he were still alive. And not really without body, either, though that was dead, all right. But when I’d tried to send him on, I’d felt that the ties that bound him to his body weren’t cut the way they should be.

Zee took a seat on one of the short mechanic’s stools, the kind on wheels, arms crossed and mouth set. The unhappiness that had begun earlier today and built into anger through the visit to the grocery store, morgue, and cemetery was still with him. Zee could hold on to rage longer than anyone I knew.

“Mercy,” he began, but I stopped him.

“Could you wait for Adam?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow.

Adam couldn’t perceive the kind of magic that Zee and I had been wading through all day. I wasn’t sure I was getting all of it. What I did get, I hoped I didn’t understand what it meant—because what I thought it meant was bad. I had the distinct feeling that Zee’s explanation wasn’t going to make me feel any better, any less afraid.

I’d had a spider-fae lay thorns or something that had turned into eggs infesting my hands and feet, and those embryonic creatures had taken control of my mind. The spider eggs were going to give me the willies for days once I allowed myself to think about them. I’d waded through the magical and physical leavings of a killer and viewed the bodies he’d left in his wake. If I was going to get more horrible news—and I was pretty sure I was—I wanted Adam to get the horrible news with me.

I raised my chin in response to Zee’s eyebrow lift to indicate that I didn’t care if Adam added to the discussion or not, I wanted to wait for him. That seemed to amuse Zee—without cooling the rage I could feel radiating off him. He shrugged to indicate that he was fine waiting for Adam even if he thought I was being stupid.

My hands and feet hurt, a dull irritating ache that didn’t keep me from pacing. Pacing meant that Aubrey had a harder time trying to invade my personal bubble. As a bonus, as I walked, the minor pain of my feet distracted me from the worst part of my day so far.

The awareness that I was somehow tied to that dark entity hadn’t faded like it had after I’d dreamt about it. Maybe if I hadn’t tried to send Aubrey to wherever souls go when their bodies die, or maybe if I hadn’t examined Aubrey’s body, if I hadn’t tracked the killer using my ties to that endless darkness—hey, maybe if I hadn’t gotten up this morning—I wouldn’t be noticing that the taste of darkness in my mouth was strong enough to choke on.

Probably, as Larry the goblin king had not-so-usefully warned me after the fact, it really hadn’t been a good idea to use my body to break the spider-fae’s web. Something about that surge of aimless magic had made me vulnerable enough for the abyss or whatever it was to connect with me.

I heard Adam open the office door and lock it behind him. That was smart; no need for a customer to come in and overhear us talking about a serial killer.

Adam walked in and I immediately felt better. His air of competence and confidence was contagious. It worked on the pack and it worked on me. With Adam in the room, I knew he would find a path forward that was, at the very least, less stupid than all the other paths forward—no matter how bad the situation was.

Adam glanced at Zee, who might have looked a little ridiculous squatting on the short stool if he hadn’t felt so dangerous. That Adam took note of Zee first told me that he considered Zee a threat. My mate is not stupid.

Adam looked at me—and I caught the moment he saw I was still wearing his coat, indoors where the temperature was fine for shirtsleeves. He met my eyes and smiled. It wasn’t amused, that smile. He liked it when I wore his clothes. I went from feeling ridiculous to feeling sexy in one smile.

“Let me start,” Adam said, holding up a finger. “Mercy’s been tied to some kind of intelligence since she broke the spell web at Stefan’s, and it is getting stronger.”

“This is true?” Zee turned to me.

I shrugged, glad of the warmth of Adam’s coat. “Yes.”

“That is not good.”

“Agreed,” Adam said with a growl. He held up a second finger and said, “At the grocery store, Mercy could tell that that intelligence was tied to the killing of the young man—which means presumably also the witch earlier this week. She thinks this intelligence is feeding off the deaths—and using them.”

Zee nodded.

Adam held up a third finger. “The ghost of the boy from last night is following Mercy around, unable to move on because he is being held by that intelligence. I think from your reactions to the bodies in the morgue and because we visited the cemetery afterward that the magic the intelligence is working is also tied to the bodies of its victims.”

He held up another finger without waiting for a reaction from either Zee or me. “Fourth.” Adam stopped speaking and shook his head. “You have no idea how much this disturbs me. And if I weren’t living with Mercy’s walking stick, I wouldn’t be able to conceive it was possible. Fourth, the intelligence Mercy found is the artifact that you, Zee, told us about, the one that killed people forty years ago. The cemetery we stopped at dates back to well before the time when those people were killed. I presume that some of the victims were buried there and you both were checking out their graves. I’d guess you found that those bodies were still bound to souls that should have gone on decades ago. Prisoners, in fact.”

He tilted his head and examined Zee’s face. “Some damned thing controls people, picks out victims, works magic to bind them, and defends that binding. And now it’s attached itself to Mercy.” Adam’s voice roughened with anger on the last bit, but his focus stayed on Zee.

“Ja,” said Zee. “To be fair, it is a very old thing.” He shrugged, the motion making his stool squeak. “And magic applied over time is a strange and powerful force.”

“Finally,” Adam said, “you’re mad as a wet hen because someone pulled the wool over your eyes all those decades ago by slipping you a sloppy ringer when you were hunting a powerful artifact.”

“Perceptive for someone who has no feel for magic,” said Zee sourly. He considered Adam a moment, then said, “I believe that the intelligence that Mercy is sensing is an artifact known as the Seelennehmer.”

“The Soul Taker?” I asked, dusting off my rusty German. “Like in the children’s prayer?”

Zee looked blank, so Adam recited it for him. I joined him on the last line, remembering that Stefan had quoted that, too. “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

Zee stared at us. “And that is a prayer for children to recite?”

I nodded.

He grimaced. “Charming. Yes. The Soul Taker. Or possibly the Soul Stealer. Ja. I have been hunting this artifact for a long time. Four decades ago I was told that it might be here, and that possibility was the reason I came.” He gave Adam a savage smile. “That I followed orders.”

“I get you,” Adam said.

Zee nodded. “When I came to look, the killer was found dead and I was given a weapon that could have been the murder weapon. It is my shame that I did not look beyond my disappointment.” He frowned, and for a moment the whole garage smelled of his rage before he quenched it into something colder. “Someone played a game with me.”

“They had a second sickle that could have killed people the way Aubrey was killed?” I asked, because that part of the story didn’t make sense. “Something just sitting around for them to use when you appeared on the scene?”

“That is why I did not look further,” Zee said in an aggrieved tone. “Who would have such a thing? It was inferior to the Soul Taker, but still an artifact that had taken a great deal of time and effort to craft, for all that it was mortal made. A few centuries old, it was valuable in its own way. And, too, a sickle is not a usual weapon to be so crafted. It is far more useful as a farming implement.”

Adam grunted, then said, “Convenient that someone produced both a sickle that could have done the job and a dead body who could not be questioned. I presume you are sure that the body was the one who had been doing the killing?”

Zee nodded. “Yes. And I never found out who left them for Uncle Mike to find. I made assumptions, but I didn’t push it further because I wasn’t interested in how or why, just in acquiring the Soul Taker.”

“You came here to find it,” I said. “You thought that the sickle was the wrong one and destroyed it. And you stayed here. Why?”

He paused and his chair squeaked again as he rocked back. “I had been looking for the Soul Taker for a very long time, and creatures as old as I am eventually run out of things that make life interesting. I decided to settle here and wait.”

“You’ve been waiting for forty years to see if an artifact turned up?” I asked.

“It started that way,” he said. “Forty years is not a long time, Liebchen. I am patient.”

Adam pulled over one of our shop stools and bumped my leg with it. “Sit,” he said. “You make my feet hurt.”

I sat down with a thump.

Adam stepped behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “We have some unknowns to address,” he told us. “It is possible that forty-odd years ago an artifact was found by chance and some clueless kid—” He paused, and Zee nodded.

“He was no one special. An average human teenager before he was taken,” Zee said.

“But someone killed him and slipped you a ringer,” Adam continued.

I hadn’t realized that Zee had calmed down during our discussion until he got angry again.

“Yes,” Zee said.

“We don’t know who that is,” Adam said. “But I am going to assume, based on the evidence that the Soul Taker is active again, that the person who killed that teenager and gave you a replacement sickle is the one who saw to it that the Soul Taker is out killing people again.”

Zee nodded. “I agree. And possibly that person is responsible for the last time, too. Before that incident, the Soul Taker was last active three centuries ago in Eastern Europe. Someone brought it from there to here.”

“Second unknown person is our current killer,” Adam said. “This killer, we think, is not a mundane person.” He glanced at me.

“Teleported,” I told Zee, making a bouncing gesture with my hand and making pop-pop sounds. “I think it might be Stefan, but something is interfering with my ability to pick up a real scent.” I got that out as if it didn’t matter to me, but Zee gave me a sharp look and Adam’s hands tightened on my shoulders.

“It could be Marsilia,” Zee said. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew she could teleport, but I was. “Or any of their bloodline who got that gift.”

“That’s what I said,” Adam agreed. “But I just can’t see either of them giving their minds over to an artifact, no matter how powerful. Vampires have mind magic naturally, and Marsilia and Stefan are old and powerful.”

“Agreed,” Zee said thoughtfully. “There is the possibility that the Soul Taker is being used without taking over its wielder—but then it is even less likely, because the vampires, more than any of us, do not want bad publicity. They do not want any publicity.”

I thought about my dreams. “What about torture?” I asked.

Adam caught what I meant immediately. “You mean the way Stefan showed up with gouged-out eyes.”

“Torture weakens the will,” said Zee, with more confidence than I wanted to see in someone I considered a friend. He nodded slowly. “That might do it, but it would take weeks, if not longer, to break the shields that master vampires can call to protect their minds.”

“Could the artifact give someone the ability to teleport?” I asked. “I mean could we be looking at a normal human given magical powers by the artifact?”

Zee shrugged. “If I had ever held the Soul Taker in my own hands, I could tell you. My own weapons can make an unskilled warrior more skilled. Give them strength, endurance, and other things.” He frowned. “Other fae artificers have done more, cloaks that make one invisible, or change the wearer into a stag or a horse.” He held up a finger, asking us to wait while he thought. Eventually he shook his head. “Giving its wielder more power is not something the stories credit the Soul Taker with. It is possible, but unlikely.” Seeing my face, he said, “It is an uncommon gift, but there are fae who can teleport, as well as a few other beings. Uncle Mike will know.”

“Okay. Please let me know if he comes up with some possibilities,” I said. Then I altered the subject. “Whether it has anything to do with the Soul Taker or not, something is going on with the seethe. Stefan is missing. We are looking for Wulfe, too. And Larry says that all of the vampires in the seethe got into fancy cars and drove away, leaving the seethe empty.”

“Larry thinks that Wulfe is shaking things up,” Adam said. “I don’t disagree with him. If Bonarata weren’t in Italy, I’d look to him—though he has used Wulfe to work his mischief before.” He shook his head. “But I’m not sure that it is connected with the Soul Taker.”

“Except,” Zee said softly, looking at me, “that Mercy tells us that the Soul Taker noticed her and attached itself when she broke through the spell woven by the spider-fae at Stefan’s house.”

I nodded, flexing my hands reflexively.

“There is something about spiders and the Soul Taker,” Zee said. He tapped his forehead. “It is in here somewhere, but I am very old and I think it is an old story. I will think on it some more. There are people who might remember.”

“It sounds like we have one problem and not two,” said Adam. “I don’t think that makes our situation better.”

“No,” I agreed.

“I am not going to be able to come in here tomorrow, Liebchen,” Zee said in a total non sequitur. “Either you’ll have to work the shop or close it for a day—which is bad for business.”

It became obvious that he wasn’t going to elaborate until I responded.

I rubbed my face and glanced at Adam.

“We’re going to break into the seethe tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve arranged to bring some of our pack with us. ‘With us’ can be ‘with me’ if you need to open the shop. If we run into something where we need you, we can always call.”

I should go with him. But I was exhausted mentally and physically. The idea of coming to work and doing something I knew how to do was very appealing. At the very least, I was unlikely to have spider-fae lay eggs in my feet if I was taking apart carburetors.

“Mary Jo was going to come with us to the seethe,” Adam said. “If you stay here, I’d ask that you keep her with you here for the day.”

He met my eyes and waited. This was not an “I want to keep you safe, little woman” request. This was the Alpha of our pack not wanting to let one of his pack members who may or may not have put herself in the sights of a supernatural serial killer work alone in a place where she would predictably be found.

“She can do paperwork.” Adam offered up Mary Jo to my least favorite job without evidence of a qualm.

After a few terrible incidents, Mary Jo and I were coming to an odd sort of acceptance of each other. It wasn’t quite friendship, though the possibility was there—more a matter of mutual respect.

“You mean I get to torture her?” I asked.

Adam threw back his head and laughed.

“Of course I’m coming with you,” I told him. “I’ll close the shop for the day.” I glanced at Zee. “If we don’t take a random day off every once in a while, our customers will think they are in charge.”

“Passt,” said Zee, the satisfaction in his tone conveying the meaning of the German word, which meant I probably wouldn’t bother looking it up in the Langenscheidt’s German-English, English-German Dictionary I kept tucked in a drawer in the office.

“Zee,” I said. “We need to talk about the Soul Taker. What it is. What it’s doing. And how to render it harmless.”

He stared down at his boots. Then he laced his fingers together and stretched them, as if preparing for an arduous task.

“Most artifacts are made with intent,” he said. “On purpose rather than by accident. And if so made, most are crafted by the fae.”

He reached out a hand and pulled the walking stick, my walking stick, from the air. I had been looking at his hands and couldn’t quite pinpoint the moment in which the walking stick had appeared. It felt as if, somehow, the artifact had always been there, in Zee’s hands. He turned it as if examining it, letting the artificial lights overhead illuminate the old wood and silver.

He eventually continued, “Humans can also create magical items, but being mortal, most are not concerned with making something that outlives them. The more conscientious mortals are very concerned, in fact, that nothing they make outlasts them so that they do no unintentional harm.” His face composed itself into something subtly more gentle, as if thinking about someone specific. “A witch’s magic dies when they die, usually. And if not, it fades over time. Humans are rarely able to make true artifacts. There are, outside of the fae and human magic users, few other beings whose magical crafting lends itself into making artifacts.”

Everyone in the garage bay knew all of this. My feet hurt. I was very tired. And, I realized, hungry. I should have let Adam get food earlier. Zee was seldom long-winded, I reminded myself. If he was taking time with this, it was because he thought it was important.

“Among the fae, there have never been many who could make even such a minor artifact as this once was.”

He tapped the walking stick lightly, then spun it. I would never have suspected that the old fae had the skills of a drum major, but he twirled it so fast it blurred.

Still spinning it, he said, “Ariana”—Samuel’s mate—“was one of the best of the makers before she deliberately crippled herself.”

He tossed the walking stick up and caught it.

“Lugh.”

As he spoke that name, a spark of light twinkled in the worked silver that bound the gray wood of the artifact Lugh had crafted who knew how long ago. Possibly Zee had an idea, but I doubted it. The few very old beings I knew tended not to dwell on the past or count the years.

“An artifact is made—and then finished, sealed in its wholeness so it neither gains nor loses magic. Nor can its purpose be changed. Lugh was careless in his later years, though mostly that just meant that his artifacts lost power, became less, and then broke.”

He tossed the walking stick at me without warning. I caught it. Or possibly it came to my hand.

“It is not the case that your walking stick was improperly made,” Zee said. “Extraordinary things happened to it while it was in your hands to change it. To allow it to change.” He looked at me.

“I didn’t mean to,” I said.

I had done something to the walking stick, a lot of somethings that had resulted in the object I held in my hands. I’d used it to kill an immortal monster. I considered that and amended it to multiple immortal monsters—at least one of which might have been considered a god. I’d gifted it to Coyote—which, in retrospect, might not have been the smartest thing I could have done. The walking stick had gained in power, in versatility, and . . . sentience. I didn’t know what it could do, or would do, and neither did anyone else.

“Because there is another way for an artifact to be made.” Zee’s voice was soft. “Worship. Blood. Desperate need—the way that you remade Lugh’s walking stick. Other catalysts include time and belief.”

He reached into one of the pockets in his overalls and pulled out a small metal object. He threw it at Adam, who caught it easily.

Adam opened his palm and I saw a dull gray metal ring. “Heavier than it should be unless it’s made out of lead.”

“Iron,” Zee told him.

I touched it and pulled my finger back with a hiss. It hadn’t hurt exactly, but it left me with a feeling of wrongness and seeking.

I told Adam, “Give that back to him.”

He tossed it back to Zee.

I took Adam’s hands in mine and examined them, turning them. I had no idea what I was looking for and didn’t find anything, but the palms of my own hands itched. Possibly that was still because I’d had spider eggs dug out of them.

“Go wash,” I said. Running water was effective at dispelling magic. It should wash away any taint that foul thing had left behind. “You don’t want any of that sticking to you.”

He didn’t argue or ask what “that” was. As soon as I heard the sound of the faucet in the bathroom being turned on, some of my urgency dissipated—leaving room for anger.

“What were you thinking?” I growled. “That isn’t something you just toss around as if you’d picked it up at Walmart. And you don’t, by God and all his angels, you don’t ever throw something like that at my mate.”

Behind me Adam laughed. I turned to give him an indignant look to see him drying his hands off with a shop rag. But he was looking at Zee.

“Bran looks like that when she lays into him,” he told Zee. “Affronted, but also sort of incredulous and delighted. When was the last time someone yelled at you for a”—and his voice lost its amusement—“dumb stunt?” He let the words ring a moment and said, “Are you going to tell me what that was?”

“Haunted,” I said.

“An artifact,” Zee answered at the same time.

Zee shrugged. “Haunted might be right. Your mate was in no danger. It takes time to feel its effects, and once it is no longer in skin contact, its magic dissipates.”

“I stand by my objection,” I said. “I don’t care how harmless you think it is. Don’t throw cursed objects at my husband.”

Zee threw up his hands. “Fine. Fine.”

Adam got us back on track. “What would it do if I wore it for longer than five minutes?”

Zee looked at me. “People who wear that ring on a regular basis kill themselves. Eventually.”

“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.”

“Football metaphors aren’t like you,” I tried.

“You would not believe how competitive a bunch of doctors can get,” Samuel said, sounding more like himself. “I’ve played a lot of football—proper football and not American—this past year.”

“Where are you now?” Adam asked.

Africa was a whole giant continent. I never had been able to pin down exactly where Samuel and Ariana were on it. Sometimes he talked about where they’d been last week or last month, but not where they were.

“Middle of a snowstorm,” Samuel said. “In more ways than one. I have about three minutes of battery left on my phone, Mercy. What did you need?”

“Snowstorm in Africa?” I asked. Granted it was a whole continent, but when I thought of Africa, I thought of jungles and deserts.

“What did you call me for?” Samuel said.

From the sound of his voice, he was done talking about himself.

“Sherwood’s memory came back,” I said.

“Hah!” Samuel said, and I could hear his smile. “I told Da he wasn’t faking it.”

“Did Bran think he was?” I asked.

“You know? I’m not sure. It seemed to irk Da a whole lot, though.”

He was sounding more like himself, but there was still an undercurrent of something, a little edge that told me he was in the middle of something desperate. If talking about our mysterious Sherwood gave him some amusement, some respite, then we could talk about Sherwood—for the next three minutes, anyway.

“Just who is he?” I asked.

“I’m not sure I am at liberty to tell you,” Samuel said.

“I can tell he’s one of you—a Cornick. And he’s old.”

“Did you ask him?”

“Who was it who told me never to ask old wolves about their pasts?” I asked in return. If Sherwood had intended to tell us who he was, he would have done it.

“Did I do that?” He laughed. The honest amusement made him sound tired.

I exchanged a look with Adam, who was frowning.

“Yes,” I said. “If your phone gives up before you tell me, I’m going to sell your Christmas present on eBay and donate the proceeds to—” I tried to think of somewhere he’d hate. “The John Lauren Society.” The John Lauren Society was an anti-fae, anti-werewolf, anti-supernatural hate group for the Upper Ten Thousand.

Samuel laughed. “What the hell. He’s Da’s oldest brother.”

I’d finally gotten Samuel to tell me how he and Ariana met. That had taken in a lot of history I hadn’t expected to hear about.

“All of Bran’s brothers died saving Ariana from her father,” I said. “You told me that story.”

“He left Grandmother’s pack long before that,” Samuel said. “His escape was one of the reasons Grandmother came hunting Da. She couldn’t find”—he started to say another name and changed his mind—“Sherwood.”

I exchanged a look with Adam. What had Bran been thinking to stow his brother with us? Had he been protecting us? Protecting Sherwood?

“Look,” Samuel said. “Be careful with him. Of him. You know what Charles does for Da?”

“Goes out and kills rogue wolves?” I said.

“And scares the rest into behaving,” agreed Samuel. “It’s a horrible job, but necessary. Sherwood was my da’s bogeyman before Charles was. It’s not a job that leaves someone stable and well-adjusted.”

“Bran wasn’t the Marrok before Charles was his bogeyman,” I said.

“Wasn’t he?” Samuel sounded amused.

“Sherwood is dangerous,” said Adam.

“We are all dangerous,” Samuel told him. “He’s worse than that.” I heard a faint beep. “Love you,” said Samuel. “Got to go. Bye.”

He hung up before I could say anything more.

“I don’t like that,” I said.

“If you didn’t know Sherwood was dangerous, you haven’t been paying attention,” Adam said.

“Not that.” I waved the issue of Sherwood away for later consideration. “I meant Samuel.”

“I know,” said Adam gently. “But he’s an old wolf, and not stupid. He has backup if he needs it. Sounds like he has Bran involved already.”

My phone rang again.

“Samuel?”

The person on the other end of the line didn’t say anything. I couldn’t hear breathing, but I could hear the faint sound of the wind in some trees. I disconnected.

“Wrong number or something,” I told Adam. I had more interesting things to think about than a crank caller. “First-string wouldn’t be Bran. Bran’s not part of the team. Bran would be . . . I don’t know. Coach, maybe. Or the franchise owner. First-string—that’s Charles all the way.”

“Agreed,” Adam said.

I nodded. “Okay, that’s good. He’ll be okay if Charles has his back.”

“And he knows he can come to us,” he said.

“And I can check with Charles to make sure that there really isn’t anything we can do.”

“Yes.”

It started to rain. Out of habit I checked the temperature, but we were a few degrees too warm to have to worry about freezing rain. This rain would only get us wet.

“What do you think is so bad that it has Samuel on the run?” I asked, my voice sounding small in my own ears.

“I have no idea,” said Adam.

He put his hand on my knee and gave it a squeeze. For absolutely no rational reason at all, that helped.

—

Jesse and Tad were doing homework on the kitchen table when we got home.

“Glad you’re alive,” Jesse said. “There’s pizza in the fridge—we saved you some. Kind of nice just having the three of us plus one in the house. When you put something in the fridge, it doesn’t magically disappear.”

“Glad you’re alive, too,” I said with maybe a bit too much emphasis.

Both Tad and Jesse looked up.

“I thought that your death had been indefinitely postponed, Dad.” Jesse sounded worried.

“It was,” Adam said. “But since we never want boredom to be a thing in this household, today it’s Mercy’s turn to have a killer on her tail.”

Tad and Jesse both looked at me.

“The Harvester is out to get me,” I said with perfect truthfulness. Almost perfect truthfulness. “We think.”

There was no way to be sure that the Soul Taker was after me just because I was connected to it. But Zee and Adam had both decided that probably I was in its sights, metaphorically speaking.

Jesse rolled her eyes, but Tad, who could hear the truth in my answer—or at least knew a little bit more about the story of the Harvester than he had last night—stiffened. He looked at Adam, who nodded once.

Jesse missed that exchange. She had other things on her mind.

“Dad, you’ve been to Southeast Asia. Have you been to South Korea?”

“Yes?” he said cautiously.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “How long ago?”

“Ten years?”

She pointed at the seat next to her. “Sit down, right here. I need you. You will be my primary source.”

She looked at me and waved her hands. “You. Stepmother. Eat your pizza somewhere else while I quiz your man about the way women were treated ten years ago in South Korea.”

With a grin, I loaded a plate with a couple of pieces of kitchen-sink pizza, a third piece with pineapple and what looked like poblano peppers, and started for the back door.

Tad hopped up and opened the door for me. “If you have a killer out hunting you, maybe I should come out with you.”

“Don’t you have a paper to write?” I asked.

But he was right, I needed to be more careful. When he followed me out the door, I didn’t object.

Normally I’d have said our house was the safest place for me to be. But normally there were three or four werewolves here as well as a demon dog. We’d sent them all away.

It was chilly outside, but I’d recovered from my earlier shivers. I’d given Adam back his coat, but I’d kept my own on. Tad only had a sweater on, but he didn’t look cold.

Tad and I had worked together for years. I felt no need to make conversation as I walked out to one of the picnic tables and put my plate on top of it.

Rather than use the bench, I climbed onto the table and sat cross-legged, facing the house. Tad sat on the other half of the table, facing the opposite direction—toward the gate to Underhill and also toward my old house, the one he was moving into in a couple of days.

Before I started eating, I took out my phone and looked up “snow in Africa.” Apparently the Atlas Mountains in Morocco regularly got dusted in snow. I switched to my weather app. It wouldn’t have Aspen Creek on it—or at least it hadn’t last time I checked. But Troy, Montana, was close. They had a winter storm warning until Saturday noon. The area expected high winds and snow accumulation up to eighteen inches in the next twenty-four hours, as much as three feet of snow in the mountains.

“You okay?” Tad asked.

“No,” I said. “Worried about a friend.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Nope,” I told him. “Me, neither.”

“That sucks,” he said.

“For sure.”

The pepper on the pizza wasn’t poblano but something a lot hotter, though it went with the acid-sweetness of the pineapple in a way I wouldn’t have predicted.

I looked up at the moon, which made a C shape, and smiled. A long time ago I’d sat on top of a picnic table while Samuel told me about the science of the moon’s phases. I’d told him that the way I could tell a waning moon was that it looked like a cookie monster had bitten into it and left a “C” in its place. I’d sung him the “C Is for Cookie” song. It was the first time he kissed me.

That had been a long time ago. And it had probably been for the best that Bran had put an end to our romance, though I hadn’t been grateful at the time. When you’re sixteen, sometimes you need the adults in the room to step in.

“You and Izzy okay?” I asked. Tad wasn’t sixteen. But he was still pretty young.

“Can’t help your other friend so maybe you can help me?” suggested Tad gently.

“Keep my nose out of it?” I asked.

He sighed. “For now. I warned her about Dad, about me, too. But I guess she hadn’t listened.”

I took another bite of pizza and crunched through a pepper that had been lurking beneath the cheese, spicier than the first. I looked around and realized I hadn’t brought out anything to drink.

“I’ll get you a water,” Tad said, jumping off the table and escaping from our discussion of his love life.

I looked back up at the moon as the door closed behind him. Then I oh-so-casually let my gaze drift back down to the house again. There was something wrong with the roofline.

As if he had only been waiting for me to notice him, a shape pulled away from the shadows to stand silhouetted against the sky. He walked a few deliberate steps until the faint light of the moon fell on him, so I could see him clearly.

He was dressed in ragged clothing—like a scarecrow, like the Harvester from the movie. There was no question that the resemblance was on purpose. A small part of my brain noted that it might be a good idea if Adam and I actually watched the blasted movie. The rest of me sat with a piece of half-eaten pizza in one hand and didn’t move.

Though he was backlit by the moon, I had good night vision. I should have been able to see his face. But, as in the movie poster, all I could see was blackness. It didn’t matter. I didn’t need to see his face to know who it was.

“Oh no,” I said, my throat dry. “No.”

He held the Soul Taker in one hand. In my head, I’d seen a shining blade, something worthy of the power it carried. But it wasn’t like that at all. The blade was pitted and rough-finished. The handle was wrapped in something that could have been leather—or electrical tape, something dark.

I stood up, as if the extra height would help me pick out details more clearly. I peered into the blankness that was his face and tried to decide if it was a mask. He angled his head, following my motion, obviously returning my attention in a way that felt almost mocking.

He walked toward me, the steep angle of the roof not affecting the grace of his movements.

Tad opened the back door, a glass of water in his hand. His body stiffened and his eyes looked behind me. He was facing the wrong way to see the Harvester drop down and disappear into the shadows on his way to the ground. I stared at where he’d been for a second, trying to process exactly how he’d disappeared.

“What is that?” said Tilly breathlessly. “Oh, what is that?”

I jumped off the picnic table and turned to face Underhill. Red curling hair hung in a tangled mess nearly to her feet, which were filthy. Usually she appeared in the guise of a child, but tonight she chose to be a teenager, and she was bundled up in a jacket that looked very much like Adam’s—exactly like Adam’s.

She smiled brilliantly at me, her face alight with greed—an expression I’d seen on Zee’s face earlier today. Because of that, when she said, “Usually they are disappointing, don’t you think? But that was even better than in the stories. It was so dark and vast. Empty and full at the same time, an abyss that stretches across the universe. Can you get that for me, Coyote’s daughter? If you get that for me, I will—” Tad stepped between us, and she broke off, pouting.

“Iron-kissed son,” she spat like an annoyed cat. “Have a care.”

“Mercy,” said Tad, “I think it might be a good idea to finish eating inside.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Get it for me,” Tilly said, “and I’ll keep your people safe.”

I gathered my food and thought hard. I had to say something, because rudeness was likely to be more dangerous than silence.

“I fear, Tilly, that acquiring such a thing is beyond my abilities,” I managed.

Watching her with narrow eyes, Tad walked backward as he escorted me to the house. When I took a quick glance over my shoulder before I went through the door, she was staring up at the roof, her face moonlit and rapt.

Adam was on his feet by the time I got inside.

“Marsilia was right,” I told him. “We need to find Wulfe. He’s the one who has the Soul Taker.”