Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson Book 13)

Deciding we needed to get Warren home quickly, Adam loaded Warren, Zack, and me in his SUV and sent the rest of the wolves to ride with Honey back to the garage. Darryl took Warren’s key fob, rescued from the shreds of Warren’s jeans, and promised to deliver the Subaru.

Zack hopped back out of the SUV and went over to have a word with Darryl. I turned to Adam.

“Not now,” he suggested.

Warren, curled up on the flattened half of the back passenger seat, looked as though he were asleep. But I took Adam’s point. There were a lot of things we needed to talk about, but adding Warren and Zack into the mix just now was probably not useful.

Zack slid into the side of the backseat that hadn’t been turned into cargo space and belted himself in. “Auriele will drive the Subaru to our house,” he said, possibly to Warren. “Darryl will pick her up there.”

No one talked much on the way to the house Warren and Kyle shared with Zack. Zack must have texted, because Kyle came out as soon as we drove up.

He accepted Warren’s shredded clothing with a muttered, “Maybe he wasn’t wrong about expensive clothing and werewolves.” But his eyes were on Warren, who’d hopped out of the SUV, stretched, and then trotted up to Kyle, tail waving gently.

Kyle gave Adam an anxious look. “I couldn’t tell what happened from Zack’s text. ‘Warren got a magical whammy but he’s fine’ doesn’t really mean a lot to me.”

“Keep an eye on him,” Adam said. “The whammy was nothing to worry about, but he was bitten by a vampire. You should make sure he eats and drinks.”

“Vampire?” Kyle said, his hands closing on Warren’s fur. “It’s the middle of the day.”

“Some of them are active during the day,” I said.

“If you get worried, get Zack to take a look at him,” Adam told him. “If you get really worried, call me or”—he hesitated—“Sherwood.”

“Sherwood?” asked Zack, looking startled. “Are you sure?”

Kyle looked from one to the other and said, “Definitely not calling Sherwood. What’s wrong with Sherwood?”

“What’s not wrong with Sherwood,” I said. Weariness from the fight had started setting in. My feet and hands ached for some reason—it took me a minute to remember that Zee had dug spider bits out of them yesterday. That seemed like a long time ago. My arms hurt, my left hip hurt, and the place on my jaw where I’d caught an elbow hurt every time I moved my mouth. “But call him anyway if you think Warren isn’t right. He’s got more experience with magic than any of us.”

“I thought he didn’t remember anything?” Kyle narrowed his eyes.

I gave Kyle a look, met his gaze, and then jerked my head away. “Sometimes I wish Warren had fallen in love with one of his fluff pieces instead of a lawyer. I will answer your questions when we all have better answers. Warren needs to lie down in front of a fire and sleep. Zack can tell you about our adventures today. I need to get home and wash and change and not keep standing on your driveway answering questions I don’t know the answer to.”

There was a little silence. The air echoed and I realized I’d yelled the last few words.

“You look like you killed someone,” Kyle said. “Too late to hide it from me, I’m sad to say. But if you wash up quickly and burn those clothes, I’m sure no one will ask.” It sounded as if he were snapping back, but I knew Kyle. He was worried. But he knew better than to ask me what was wrong when I’d just asked him to stop asking questions.

“Don’t you have to report it when you think someone might be a murderer anyway?” Zack asked Kyle, his tone one of casual inquiry.

I threw my hands up—which made the cut on my back burn—and stomped back to the SUV. They talked for a little bit more, but with the door shut I could pretend not to hear them.

“I thought she just dyed your hair blue when you weren’t looking, or put stuff in your coffee that made you pee green,” Zack said. “I didn’t think she yelled at people.”

“She yells at me,” Adam told them.

“Probably because you wouldn’t care if she dyed your hair blue,” Kyle answered. “She gets mad when she’s scared. What’s scaring her?”

Adam got into the SUV eventually without answering that question because he didn’t know the answer to it yet. He gave me an opportunity to say something, but when I didn’t, he started the engine and we headed home.

“Bran taught me how to use the pack bonds to break the ties that vampires use on their prey,” he said into the silence. “That’s how I knew what to do for Warren. I asked about you and Stefan, but Bran said a consensual bond was a different matter.”

I nodded. My newfound and unwelcome understanding of the way the bonds worked with souls allowed me to visualize the problem. Consensual bonds were like two-ply rope instead of string. Just like I understood how blood made those ties possible and stronger.

I knew all of that because the connection between the Soul Taker and me was stronger now that it had tasted my blood. The cut along my shoulder blades burned. I was pretty sure it was just a normal cut, but the significance of feeding my blood to the Soul Taker made it feel as if it was the worst damage I’d taken in that fight. Maybe it was.

I wanted to run, but I was trapped in the SUV, bouncing the heel of one foot. The problem was that right now there was nowhere to run from or run to, but my adrenaline-infused body didn’t know that.

“Bran says if it becomes a problem, killing Stefan is the easiest way to break it,” Adam said. “I could do that.”

I wasn’t as sure of that as Adam sounded, but I nodded again. I knew Adam wouldn’t kill Stefan without a good reason—I wasn’t going to get upset with Adam for suggesting it, because I was pretty sure he wanted me to react. It was kind of him to try to distract me, but manipulation was a bit much. Maybe I should dye his hair blue. I rubbed my eyes because I didn’t want to cry. That would send the wrong message.

“Mercy?” Adam asked, his voice low.

“I’m thinking,” I told him. “Let me get it straight in my head first.”

He nodded, “Can do, darlin’.”

After a while I asked, “Did you take Warren home and send the rest with Honey to keep me away from Zee?”

“Yes,” he said. “If I had taken you straight to the garage and he asked you about the Soul Taker, what would you have done?”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure of the answer. “What could I have told him that he doesn’t already know?”

“That you’d call him in when you found out where it is,” Adam said. “I thought you should have some time before you deliver a powerful, ancient, and cursed artifact into a powerful, ancient, iron-kissed fae’s hands. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do just that—but we should only do it after due consideration.”

I didn’t say anything to that, either. He wasn’t wrong.

“Did you blow up at Kyle because you are scared of the Soul Taker?” Adam asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And Wulfe.”

Adam didn’t respond because he knew I wasn’t telling him all of it.

“I’m scared of what will happen if Zee has the Soul Taker,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I’d been all that worried until Adam had made sure I didn’t see him until I had time to think it over.

I’d known Zee for ten years. I loved him as if he were my family. He’d saved my life more than once. But I agreed with Tad when he worried about Zee’s interactions with Izzy. Adam was not wrong that we should be wary of Zee’s interest in the Soul Taker. I thought about that bead of sweat on my old friend’s face as he spoke of the artifact. I couldn’t think of anything I lusted after enough to make me sweat—except for Adam. I understood the way the Soul Taker worked on the people around it—not just its wielder. Zee and the Soul Taker sounded, now that I really thought about it, like a very bad idea. I just wasn’t sure we were going to have a choice in the matter.

“And?” Adam asked. “You’re scared of something else, because none of that is anything that would make you yell at Kyle.”

Me. I thought. I’m scared of me.

“Vampires have souls,” I said abruptly. It was not the change of subject that Adam probably thought it was.

I could feel him looking at me, but I kept my face turned away. “Old souls are—not bigger, exactly, than newer, younger souls. They just have more twists and turns.”

“Did you have a philosophical discussion with the Soul Taker while you were fighting?” Adam asked dryly.

“Wulfe was always screwed up,” I said, picking at the fabric of my jeans. “Some sort of experiment, maybe.” I had a fleeting impression of vague faces that told me not much. Had they been his parents? They didn’t feel parental. “He was a pet, maybe,” I heard myself say. This wasn’t the important part. I sorted through what was important and got back on track.

“Witch and wizard and mage and vampire and something fae that’s mostly gone now.” It had been a wisp I could sense but not put my finger on. “Riding all of those magics was a balancing act, but he managed, mostly.” He’d killed his progenitors and wandered the world haphazardly for longer than I’d realized. He might be as old as or older than Bran. “He found Marsilia first, then Stefan, and finally Bonarata. They took care of him. He knew so much, understood so much, and was so lost. Bonarata persuaded Wulfe to turn him. Wulfe was old even then, but Bonarata was his first—the first vampire he made.”

“Who have you been talking to?” Adam asked.

I shook my head. “Bonarata didn’t understand what Wulfe was. Didn’t understand what maker meant—that Bonarata would have to obey Wulfe. He dealt with it until one day Wulfe scared him. Bonarata doesn’t deal well with fear, so he set out to destroy Wulfe.” I paused. “And I think he was jealous, too—of Marsilia’s feelings for Wulfe. That’s why Wulfe let Bonarata be the one to turn Marsilia. But Wulfe doesn’t understand jealousy very well.”

“Mercy?” asked Adam, sounding wary. “Do I need to take you to Sherwood? Or Bran?”

I reached out and he caught my hand. His was very warm or mine was very cold.

“I think we just need to get rid of that damned artifact,” I said in a normal voice that made me realize how singsongy and dreamy I’d been. I cleared my throat. “Coyote is affiliated with the soul and with death—and I think that is playing with the effect the Soul Taker is having on me.”

“Okay,” Adam said, his hand still holding mine.

“Let me tell you about Wulfe, because it’s important and I don’t know if I’ll remember the important bits later.” Or I might be dead and you need to know about Wulfe. If you, my love, are the one left to face him and that artifact.

“Okay,” he said.

“And I don’t know things until I say them out loud,” I said. “So some of the out-loud parts aren’t going to be important.” I had looked into Wulfe’s eyes for a very short period of time, and that had been in a dream. And I had seen everything. My head ached worse than the cut along my shoulder blade where it pressed against the SUV seat.

“Okay.” Adam’s voice was very soft.

“Bonarata set out to break him, but he didn’t really understand what he was dealing with—because Wulfe never told him. Bonarata knew Wulfe could wield magic and that he was a little wrong, but he didn’t connect the two. I don’t know why Bonarata doesn’t kill Wulfe. Or rather, Wulfe doesn’t know why. I think it’s because Bonarata is scared of Wulfe, and killing him would be an admission of that.”

Adam nodded. “That’s how Marsilia reads it, too,” he said. “She thinks that if Wulfe dies before Bonarata conquers that fear—then Bonarata will be afraid of Wulfe forever.”

“I don’t know why Wulfe hasn’t killed Bonarata,” I said.

There was something, some reason, but I could not find it in my mental image of what I’d seen when I looked at Wulfe.

I just knew there was a reason, something Wulfe had kept hidden from me as soon as he knew that I was seeing into him.

“Is it important?” Adam asked.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “But other things are. Bonarata tried to break Wulfe—but Wulfe was already broken. Wulfe isn’t stubborn, he is like . . .” A kite in the wind, and Bonarata was the wind. But what I said was “Like the lizard with the two dark spots on its rump that look like eyes, to fool predators. Wherever your enemy thinks you are, be somewhere else.” That was all I could tell him. There were other things he should know, but I couldn’t put them into words.

“You think that the Soul Taker doesn’t have as strong a hold on Wulfe as it assumes,” Adam said, because he was good at reading between the lines.

That was it. I nodded, then shook my head. “None of them do. Not the Soul Taker, not Bonarata, and not Marsilia.”

The SUV was very quiet; I realized we’d stopped at a red light. We were near the turn that led to my garage.

“Now why don’t you tell me why you aren’t looking at me?” Adam asked. “I thought maybe you had a headache, but you’re deliberately not looking at me.”

“Remember how I told you that I was tied to the Soul Taker somehow?” My voice was tight.

“Yes,” he said.

“Today, while we fought, it cut me. Tasted my blood. And now when I look into someone’s eyes, I see them. I saw Mary Jo when she was cleaning me up at Marsilia’s. I saw Kyle.”

“You saw them,” Adam said cautiously, turning onto Chemical Drive. “You don’t mean with your eyes?”

“Yes, with my eyes,” I snapped at him. “Sorry, sorry. It’s with my eyes the same way I smell magic. Only I can smell magic without my nose. With this I have to meet their eyes.”

That wasn’t quite true. I’d seen Wulfe and he didn’t have physical eyes to look into. He’d had to use a dream for that.

“Mercy?”

“Wait, I’m having a revelation.” Had Wulfe meant me to see him? Was that why he’d bitten me—blood magic—and pulled me into a dreamscape?

Even after looking into him, I wasn’t sure. I pulled my mind back to the explanation I owed Adam.

“I see”—I clutched his hand with my suddenly clammy one—“into their souls. When I remember it—it comes like a visual. But I can tell you things about them that the visual shouldn’t tell me. It feels like my senses are confused. Like I can taste music or hear colors. I looked at Wulfe and I know things about his past that looking at him shouldn’t be able to tell me.”

“As a person who tried LSD a few times,” Adam said, “I probably understand better than you might think.”

“You?” I asked, genuinely shocked. Not that people did LSD, but that Adam had.

“Vietnam,” he said shortly, as if that was an answer—and maybe it was. “But I understand how perception can get miscategorized.”

“It’s like what happened with Aubrey,” I said. “Except they aren’t dead. Mary Jo—” I hesitated. What I saw when I looked at her, at Kyle, was something I had no right to know, let alone repeat.

“Do you think it’s permanent?” Adam asked.

I slumped in the seat. “No idea.”

We drove in silence for a while, past the fairgrounds.

“Can we stop by my shop?” I asked.

We’d have to backtrack to do it now.

“Do you want to see Zee?” There was no emphasis on the “see,” but we both knew what he meant.

“No,” I told him honestly. “If I use this to look at him, I don’t think he’d ever forgive me. But I think I have to. Because if we get the Soul Taker, the only thing I can think of to do with it is give it to Zee. And I just don’t know if that’s a good idea or not.”

Adam didn’t say anything.

“The Soul Taker is really bad news,” I said in a small voice. “It scared Coyote.”

“When did—” Adam began, but broke off. “Never mind. That doesn’t matter right now. Zee is the only person you think can deal with this artifact.” He grunted. “All things considered, he’s still the only person I’d ask to deal with it, too.”

“Larry left the Soul Taker with Bonarata rather than tell Zee where it was,” I said. “And Bonarata was so ignorant that he gave Wulfe to it. I have to tell you right now that the Soul Taker riding Wulfe scares the pants off me.”

Adam still hadn’t turned around, and we were now closer to home than to the garage.

“Did you change your mind about Wulfe after you saw him?” asked Adam.

“No,” I said.

“How about Mary Jo or Kyle?”

I saw where he was going. “No.”

“You know enough about Zee to decide what to do,” Adam said, and I could breathe again because he was right.

He didn’t take me to the garage. We drove home instead. There were no other cars parked at the house, so Jesse was still out.

Adam got out first because he wasn’t stiff from sitting after a fight. I heard him laugh as I slid gingerly out of the vehicle—but I didn’t see why he was laughing until I shut the SUV’s door.

Some joker had left a pumpkin pie on the porch step. It was store-bought, one of those in a clear plastic keeper. In orange Sharpie they’d scrawled For Mercy, with apologies, from Her Little Pumpkin.

I picked it up and took it inside. There were three small pumpkins sitting on the stairway. One of them had a three-by-five index card with Score is 1–0. Want to try again? A second had a big spider drawn on it with marker. The third was covered with itty-bitty spiders.

I could have sniffed them to figure out who it was—even if they’d used gloves, they had transported the loot in a car. But that would have been cheating.

I walked past the stairway and into the kitchen. I set the pie on the table next to Medea, who was not supposed to be on the table. She rolled over on her back without any sign of guilt, and I rubbed her belly.

“You are a weird cat,” I told her, as her stump tail swatted back and forth with pleasure as if she were a dog.

Adam came up behind me and put the stairway pumpkins on the table next to the cat and the pie. He wrapped his arms around me and said, “What can I do to help?”

I turned around and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, finding his lips by feel because I kept my eyes closed. As his mouth caressed mine—and then changed into something fiercer—I felt the tension that had invaded my body ever since I saw the encyclopedias in the bathroom ease into a different kind of tension.

Passion didn’t make my stomach hurt, didn’t make me want to curl up under the blankets like a child afraid of the dark. Passion—at least passion with Adam—made me feel brave.

“That,” I said. “Yes. That’s good. Nudge.”

“Upstairs.” His voice was gravelly and sent a zing up my spine because my body knew what happened to it when Adam sounded like that.

I nodded and he picked me up—I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t wince at the feel of his arm across the cut on my back and the flexing of stiff muscles. I was pretty sure that I’d pulled something in my lower back, because it spasmed when I twisted.

Adam was observant by nature and training, so it didn’t surprise me when he took me to our bathroom instead of our bed. He undressed me carefully. When my shirt tried to stick to the cut, he held a wet washcloth over it until it pulled free.

“Mary Jo looked at it,” I told him. “She said it was my choice for stitches, but her opinion was the stitches would bother me more than the wound.”

“She’s a werewolf,” Adam said, looking closely at my back. “Stitches are always unnecessary for her, and she’d already be healed from something like this. She cleaned it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Did she bring her little first-aid kit just for me?” I don’t know why that hadn’t occurred to me. But anything the werewolves couldn’t heal from in minutes would be too much for that little kit.

“Yes,” Adam said, and I snorted at his “of course” tone.

He stripped me down to my skin. He paused here and there to check other cuts and bruises. But I knew there wasn’t much. His fingertips touched the muscle in my side that had given me fits when he picked me up in the kitchen.

“Bruised,” he said.

“The wall.” The impact had been on my back. Good. Bruises healed faster than pulled muscles—or at least they quit bothering me sooner.

He wet another clean washcloth and delicately cleaned my face, my hands and arms, making me remember that I was splattered with blood.

“Most of the blood is Wulfe’s,” I said. And told him about how I’d tried to free Wulfe from the hold of the Soul Taker—and how he had used that freedom—in more detail than I’d given the pack.

“He cut himself open to save me,” I said. Possibly that wasn’t the only reason, but I didn’t want Adam to know quite how much the Soul Taker wanted me or what it thought that would mean. Not because I wanted to keep anything from Adam but because I needed to make love with him. And if I got started on the whole woo-woo mess of my visit to the seethe, I wasn’t going to want to make love for a while.

“He could have killed me anytime he chose,” I told Adam’s shoulder—because he was holding me again by that time and because if my face was buried in his shoulder, there was no possibility of my catching his eyes.

“There are people I would less like to make an unwilling slave of than Wulfe,” Adam commented. “But they are fewer in number than the fingers of my right hand.”

“How come you have all your clothes on and I’m naked?” I complained, because I was done talking about Wulfe and the Soul Taker right now.

He laughed, a small private sound. “Because you plastered yourself against me before I could get them off.”

I backed up and sat on the cold marble of the vanity countertop because my feet hurt and because it put some distance between us. I could watch him strip without being tempted to touch—which might slow us up.

Watching Adam undress was one of my favorite things.

“What?” he asked, stepping out of his jeans.

I remembered to shut my eyes before I accidentally looked into his. “What do you mean, what?” I asked.

“You were grinning.”

I felt it happen again. “I am just surprised that some enterprising women haven’t put a hit out on me in sheer envy,” I told him. “And they don’t even know that the outside package isn’t a tithe on the man underneath.”

There was a pause, and I felt my smile soften, but it wouldn’t go away. I hurt all over. I was an exhausted mess. As soon as I let myself think again, I was going to be a scared, exhausted mess. And it didn’t matter. Adam made me happy.

“You can look at me, you know,” he said, nearer than I’d expected. “You don’t need the Soul Taker to show you my soul—you’ve already been there, done that.”

My mate had a generous and open heart. Beside him I was a hopeless coward. It would not matter to me if he’d seen my soul bared once, I still would not want him to do it again. I would be too afraid of what he’d see.

I swallowed. “I have my heart set on jumping your bones,” I told him. “That other is distracting.”

He gave an Adam grunt, and I heard the soft footfalls that told me he had gone into the bedroom. I opened my eyes and gingerly got off the vanity. My skin wanted to stick so I had to peel myself off. Standing on my feet had been getting more uncomfortable, but sitting on the vanity had been the wrong choice. Hopping down wasn’t pleasant.

Adam missed all of this—as I intended him to. When he came into the bathroom, I was standing on the tile and he was holding one of his silk ties—deep blue with chocolate highlights that were the same color as his eyes.

“Not that one,” I said. “It’s my favorite.”

He lifted it and wrapped it around my eyes anyway. “Mine, too,” he said. Then he put his lips against my ear and whispered, “I like it when you wear my clothes.”

I didn’t object again. There were always dry cleaners.

He picked me up again—this time avoiding both the cut on my back and the sore muscle. He took his time getting from the bathroom to the bed. By the time he set me down on the cool sheets, I had forgotten all about my aches and pains.

It took him a while, but eventually I forgot my own name. I remembered his, though.

Sweaty, panting, and happy, I lay contentedly facedown on the bed while Adam cleaned the mess we’d made. He put ointment on my back and only then untied the tie covering my eyes.

“I think it will survive,” he said, sounding a little surprised.

“Quality pays off,” I murmured.

“You should eat something,” he said.

If I moved, it was going to hurt. Right now nothing hurt at all.

“Go away or come to bed,” I told him.

“I thought it’s supposed to be men who have to sleep after sex,” he complained, but there was a thread of laughter in his voice. I made Adam happy, too.

“I fought a possessed vampire. I get to sleep.”

“Fair enough,” he said, patting my butt. He pulled the sheet and then the blankets over me.

I probably should have worried about the ointment on my back getting on the sheets. But I couldn’t work up the energy.

Adam pulled down the shades to darken the room, then took a shower. I was asleep before he came out of the bathroom. Someone tried to wake me up for dinner but left me alone after I yelled at them. If I dreamed, I didn’t notice.

—

I woke up to a dark room and Adam sleeping beside me. I’d stolen all of the covers and he lay naked, facedown on the bed. I couldn’t help but smile—and it had nothing to do with his hard-muscled body. He could have unrolled me from the covers, but that would have woken me up.

“Frost—”

The memory of Wulfe’s voice made me frown. Why had he wanted to talk about Frost? Frost was dust, Adam and I had killed him between us, but when Frost was walking the earth, he’d had a talent for souls. He’d fed off them.

Adam stirred. I rolled out of the blankets and covered him.

“I’m up,” I whispered. “Go back to sleep. I’m going down to grab some food.”

He grunted and reached out. I touched his hand and leaned over to kiss him. Then I grabbed a set of sweats I kept in the top drawer of my dresser and put them on before leaving the bedroom.

The house was quiet. I could hear even breathing from Jesse’s room. Medea joined me at the top of the stairs, twining around my ankles all the way down to the kitchen. There was a Tupperware container of food obviously portioned for my dinner—spaghetti and salad. The pumpkin pie was on the same shelf with two pieces missing. I gave Medea a meatball in her food dish, then sat down and ate like I hadn’t had food in a week. When I’d finished the dinner I’d been left and a big piece of pie, I went back to the fridge and gathered sandwich makings.

And on my second bite of sandwich, I realized what Wulfe had meant. It was a lot of meaning to get from one word, but I was pretty sure I was right.

My absent gaze fell on the window, and I realized that Tilly, in her favorite guise of a ten-year-old girl complete with long, tangled hair and a dirty shift, was sitting on the picnic table I’d been sitting on when the Harvester had come calling.

Blood chilled, I wondered how long she’d been there.

I was going to start using the curtains in this room at night, I decided. After a second, I changed my mind. Curtains would mean that I couldn’t see what was on the other side of the window.

She beckoned me outside.

I looked at the cat. “I don’t think this is going to be good,” I said, but I went out, sandwich in hand. If the Harvester came back, he would be occupied with Tilly and not me.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” I asked as I closed the kitchen door behind me.

She had a lumpy mass of rough fabric sewn with thick thread that might have been gut sitting on the table beside her. Something roundish about the size of a small cantaloupe was inside the makeshift bag.

“You are going to get the Soul Taker,” she said with more confidence than I felt. “And I have a gift for you to give the old Smith, with my compliments. I’d give him the other, but I can’t remember where it was left.” She held a finger up to her cheek and dimpled at me. Someone had been watching too many Shirley Temple movies.

I finished my sandwich, taking my time, then wiped my hands on my pants. When I started toward her, she pushed the bag in my direction.

“You bring the Soul Taker to me,” she said, her voice no longer sounding like a child’s voice, “and I will see that it troubles you no more. You bring me the Soul Taker, and I will see that no harm comes to you and yours for a mortal generation. You bring me the Soul Taker, and I will owe you a favor commensurate with the gift of the sickle.”

She opened the bag, pulling the fabric back so that it worked as a presentation cloth for the object it had held. Then she lit a lantern—or created one, because I hadn’t noticed a lantern before this. Maybe she thought that I hadn’t figured out what it was and I needed the light.

I looked her in the eyes—then flinched away when I remembered I shouldn’t do it. But it had been only Tilly’s dirty face I saw. She smiled slyly at me when I met her eyes a second time. “Is it that I don’t have a soul, do you think?”

“I think that it would take more than the magic of an old artifact to let me see into you,” I said.

She laughed delightedly. “I do like you,” she said.

I stared at the thing on the table. “If I take it to him, you will extend the agreement—the one that allows you to have a door in our backyard and pledges that you harm no one who lives in our home—to my house over there.” I waved at the single-wide. “So I can rent it to someone without worrying about the tenant.”

If one of the fae asked me to do something, it was expected that I ask something in return. I didn’t let on that it was important to me—just a balance for the delivery service.

“Agreed,” she said easily, unwittingly making Tad’s life safer and easier. She probably wasn’t going to be happy about it, but it was a valid bargain. “And the other?” she didn’t bother to hide her eagerness.

I picked up the cup—it was neither as large nor as heavy as it looked, though it appeared to be molded out of pure silver. There was no question it was a work of art—exquisitely beautiful, even if it was in the shape of a skull. I’d instinctively lifted it with my hand cupped beneath the round part, and it felt comfortable there.

I’d pictured it with lower jaw attached, but it was only the single complete piece of skull, though the socket where the bottom jaw fit was clearly visible. The teeth from the upper jaw were a little irregular and one eyetooth was missing. I couldn’t tell what color the gems set in the eye sockets were at first. But when I tipped the cup, the lantern made the gems flash blue.

“You think of him as a mentor. As one who fixes machines. You think he is your friend,” Tilly said. Interesting that she didn’t name him. She wasn’t usually worried about drawing his attention.

“I do,” I agreed.

“He searches for artifacts to bring back the magic that was once his,” she told me.

That was also true, though a little misleading. I expected deceptive truths with Tilly. Collecting his own weaponry had been a casual hobby of his for as long as I’d known him. I had the impression that it was more in the nature of gathering his children around him. I hadn’t been aware that he was collecting wild artifacts as well until he’d told me. He wasn’t mining them for lost power.

I was pretty sure.

“You don’t know him.” Tilly watched my face closely. “A decade to one of his kind is a mere breath to one of yours. You look at this.” She bobbed her forefinger toward the cup I held. “You look at this, Mercedes Thompson Hauptman, and you remember what he is—the Dark Smith of Drontheim, who killed his own daughter.”

She paused, but I didn’t react. That story I knew.

She frowned at me in obvious disappointment before continuing. “Wayland Smith, who forced a king to drink from the skull of his child. You remember what he is, the truth I have given you. Then you bring the Soul Taker to me. It is not the only powerful artifact I have kept safe—and kept others safe from.”

She scooted off the table and grabbed the empty bag, taking it with her as she skipped back to the door in the wall. Only then did it occur to me that she hadn’t touched the cup herself. It didn’t feel dangerous in my hand.

Even though I’d heard the kitchen door open, I didn’t turn my back to Tilly until she was gone, her door shut behind her.

Adam didn’t speak as I brought the skull cup into the kitchen and set it among the pumpkins with a clink. He put an arm across the top of my shoulders as we contemplated the delicate detail that made the gruesome object beautiful. The gems were deep blue, cabochon, and the size of a robin’s egg—sapphires, I assumed. But I wasn’t an expert; they could have been something else—gemified eyeballs, at any rate. They were a little smaller than the eyes that originally fit in the sockets. I supposed they had shrunk when Zee had changed them.

“I know where Bonarata has our vampires,” I told Adam. Wulfe had given me the clue when he’d asked me if I remembered Frost. “We need to go there tonight. Just you and me, I think. I don’t want to give Bonarata reason to declare a war—and I don’t want any of our wolves to accidentally pick up the Soul Taker.”

He pulled out a chair and I did the same. We spent the next ten minutes making plans. I was glad I hadn’t explained how anxious the Soul Taker was to kill me and gather every person tied to me. If I had, he might not have agreed to go alone with me tonight, and I had a strong feeling—a Coyote-urging-me kind of feeling—that we needed to do this now.

Adam had dressed before coming downstairs, so I left him penning a note to Jesse while I went up to put more appropriate clothes on. I didn’t know where the katana had ended up. Presumably one of the others had grabbed it—or it was still in Marsilia’s unused master bedroom.

I called Tad while I opened the safe.

“On my way,” Tad said. “Adam texted that you needed me.” He yawned.

I talked to him while I took down my chosen weapon. I considered bringing other weapons, too. In the end, I only added my usual concealed carry gun. If I needed more firepower, the walking stick would serve me as well as anything.

“I see,” Tad said. “I’ll be there in ten.”

Adam had come up while I’d been on the phone. He reached over my shoulder and took a rokushakubō from the safe. There are many varieties of bō, and Adam had two or three favorites—all of which he kept in the safe. This one was a little longer than he was tall (as the name suggested) and made of unvarnished hickory. About a foot from each end were three one-inch bands of steel.

He glanced at my weapon.

“It’s not polite to return a gift,” he said.

I looked down at the silk belt I held in my hands. “I don’t think it was a gift,” I told him. “I think he brought it here for safekeeping. Bonarata took it from him once, and he didn’t want to give him the opportunity to take it again.”

Any museum curator would have cringed at the way I wrapped it around my waist and tied it. But I didn’t think Wulfe would mind. It was a belt, after all.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” he asked.

“Benton City,” I said. “The vineyard where we killed Frost.”