Chapter 13

SAMUEL STARTED TO SAY SOMETHING TO ZEE WHEN the woman he held opened her eyes, which were green again. She gave us all a bewildered look, as if she could not imagine how she’d gotten where she was.

I knew exactly how she felt.

As soon as he saw that she was awake, Samuel set her down with careful haste. “I’m sorry, Ari. You were falling . . . I wouldn’t have touched—”

I had never in my life seen anything like it. Samuel, the son of a Welsh bard, who shared his father’s gift for words, stammering like an infatuated teenager.

She grabbed Samuel’s sweatshirt and looked up at him in utter astonishment. “Samuel?”

He stepped away from her, but stopped short of pulling the shirt from her grasp. “I can’t give you space unless you let me go,” he told her.

“Samuel?” she said, and, though it hadn’t caught my notice before, I realized that her voice had changed sometime in the middle of her panic attack, and sounded way too young for the late-middle-age face she wore. It was also lightly accented, some combination of British and Welsh or a related language. “I thought . . . I looked but I never could find you. You just disappeared and left me nothing. Not a shirt or a name.”

He pulled away again, and this time she let him go. Free, he retreated to the damaged door that separated my office from the garage. “I’m a werewolf.”

Ariana nodded and took two steps forward. “I did notice that when you killed the hounds who had come for me.” There was a hint of humor in her voice. Good, I thought. Any woman I’d allow to have Samuel would have to have a sense of humor. “The fangs gave it away—or maybe the tail. You saved me again—and then you left, and all I knew was your first name.”

“I scared you,” he said starkly.

She gave him a half smile, but clenched her hands. “Well, yes. But it seems I scared you worse because you ran away for . . . a very, very long time, Samuel.”

He looked away from her gaze—the most dominant werewolf in the Tri-Cities, and he couldn’t meet her gaze. Didn’t he see that even if he scared her, she still wanted him?

She tried to take another step toward him and stopped. I could smell her terror, sharp and sour. She backed away from him with a little sigh.

“It is very good to see you again, Samuel,” she said. “Because of you I am whole and here all these centuries after my father would have destroyed me. Instead, his body long ago fed his beasts and the trees of his forests.”

Samuel bowed his head and, to the floor, he said, “I’m glad you are well—and apologize for causing your panic attack today. I should have stayed out . . .”

“Yes. Panic attacks. They can be pretty . . .” She looked at Zee, who was back in his chair looking as relaxed as if he’d spent the last ten minutes watching a very boring soap opera. “Did I hurt anyone, Siebold?”

“No,” he said, folding his arms. “Just true-named our wolf, and told Mercedes and Jesse the story of the Silver Borne.”

She looked at me, then at Jesse, maybe to see how frightened we were. Whatever she saw reassured her because she gave a shy smile.

“Oh, that’s good. Good.” Her shoulders relaxed, and she turned her attention back to Samuel. “I don’t have them often anymore. Not at all with mortal canines. It’s just the fae dogs, the magic ones—black dogs and hounds—that set me off. Only when I am overcome with—” She bit her lip.

“Fear?” Samuel suggested, and she didn’t answer. She also had left off werewolves, I noticed.

“I am glad to see that your magic has returned,” he said. “You thought it was gone.”

She took a deep breath. “Yes. And for a while I was glad of it.” She looked at me. “And that has bearing on the present situation. You are Samuel’s friend, Mercedes?”

“And mate of the local Alpha werewolf—Jesse’s father,” I told her. I could hardly tell her that Samuel was single—that was a little too obvious. I saw that it mattered to her that Samuel didn’t belong to me.

“You were going to—” I was so caught up in matchmaking that I almost flubbed it then and there. I shut my mouth and grabbed Jesse’s hand.

“—help us find Gabriel.” Jesse completed my sentence for me.

Ariana didn’t move like a human at all when she came back to where we sat, with her chair in hand; she moved like a . . . wolf, bold and graceful and strong. Without a glance at Samuel, she sat down.

“Ask her about the thing the fairy queen wants,” I told Jesse.

“Zee said she wants the Silver Borne,” Ariana said. “That is the object of power I built for my father—although it never quite worked as the one who commissioned it would have liked. For many years I thought I had destroyed all my magic by making it.” She closed her eyes and smiled. “I lived as a human, except for my long life span. I married, had children . . .” She glanced at Samuel, who was looking over our heads and out the window. His face was composed, but I could see the pulse beating fast in his throat.

Ariana continued her story quickly. “It took me nearly a century to make the connection between my lack of magic and the Silver Borne.”

She gave me a wry smile. “I know. I had no magic anymore, and the last thing I made was something that was supposed to eat magic. You’d think I’d have made the connection. But all I knew was that it wasn’t finished . . . and I couldn’t remember how far I’d gotten when my father called the wolves. After a while it was not as important to me—it was only a broken thing that did nothing. Someone stole it, and I thought, good riddance. I left it to them, and after a few months my magic returned. It was then that I first understood I’d succeeded, in part. It does consume fae magic—but mostly just the magic of the person who currently possesses it.”

“Why would a fairy queen want it, then?” I asked, then added a belated, “Jesse?”

“It eats fae magic, Mercy,” said Zee. “How easy to change a formidable opponent to someone more vulnerable than a human—at least a human knows he has no power. Dueling is still allowed among the fae.”

“Or maybe she doesn’t really understand what it does,” suggested Ariana. “She could believe it does as it was built to do: take power from one fae and give it to another. I’ve heard the stories—and I do not bother to correct them. Now I have answered a question, I have one for you. Mercy, did Phin give that book to you?”

I took in a breath to answer, and Jesse clamped her hand over my mouth and jumped in. “It would work better if you ask me,” she said. “Then it would be less likely that Mercy breaks her word.” She dropped her hand. “Did Phin give you the book?”

“But what does the book have to do with it?”

“Glamour,” said Samuel suddenly. “By all that’s holy, Ari, how did you manage to do that? You disguised that thing as a book, and you gave it to your grandson?”

“He is mostly human,” she answered him without looking his way. “And I told him to keep it locked away so it wouldn’t eat the magic he has.”

“What if he’d sold it?” I asked. “Jesse?”

“It is my blood that it was born in,” Ariana said. “It finds its way back to me eventually. Jesse, please ask her. Did Phin give you the book?”

“No. I might have bought it if I could have afforded—” I stopped talking because she slumped down and put both hands over her face.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Ariana said, hiccuping and wiping her face with her hands. Samuel surged toward her, then stopped where he was. She’d flinched, just a little.

“It’s just been such a . . . I was so sure Phin was dead—that they’d killed him trying to get it, and it would be my fault.” She wiped her eyes again. “I’m not usually like this, but Phin is . . . I adore Phin. He is so much like my son who I lost a long time ago . . . And I thought he was dead.”

“Now you know he lives?” Samuel asked.

“In fire or in death,” Jesse said, understanding it before any of the rest of us did. “That’s what the fairy queen said. That if she killed Mercy, or if they burned it, it would reveal itself. But if it still belongs to Phin . . .”