Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(25)
Author: Patricia Briggs

Numbly I nodded before realizing that she couldn’t see me. "I bought my shop from him. I still owe him money on it." I’d been paying him on a monthly basis, just as I did the bank. It wasn’t the money, which I didn’t have, that left my throat dry and pressure building behind my eyes.

He thought I’d betrayed him.

Zee was fae; he could not lie.

"Well," she said. "He made it clear that he had no desire to talk to you before he went mute again. Do you still wish to retain my services?" She sounded almost hopeful.

"Yes," I said. It wasn’t my money that was paying her – even at her rates there was more than enough in Uncle Mike’s briefcase to cover Zee’s expenses.

"I’ll be honest, Ms. Thompson, if he doesn’t talk to me, I can’t do him any good at all."

"Do what you can," I told her numbly. "I’m working on a few things myself."

Secrets. I shivered a little, though as soon as I’d gotten home from church, I’d turned up the temperature from the sixty degrees Samuel had set it at this morning before he’d left to go to the last day of Tumbleweed. Werewolves like things a little cooler than I do. It was a balmy eighty in the house, not a reason in the world that I should feel cold.

I wondered which part of what I’d told the lawyer he objected to – the murders in the reservation, or telling Ms. Ryan that there had been another fae with him when he’d found the body.

Damn it, I hadn’t told Ms. Ryan anything someone wasn’t going to have to tell the police. Come to think of it – I had told the police most everything I’d told Ms. Ryan.

However, I should have asked someone before I’d talked to the police or the lawyer. I knew that. It was the first rule of the pack – keep your mouth shut around the mundanes.

I could have asked Uncle Mike how much I could tell the police – and the lawyer – rather than depending upon my own judgement. I hadn’t…because I knew that if the police were going to look beyond Zee for a murderer, they’d have to know more than Uncle Mike or any other fae would have told them.

It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission – unless you are dealing with the fae, who aren’t much given to forgiveness. They see it as a Christian virtue – and they aren’t particularly fond of Christian anything.

I didn’t lie to myself that Zee would get over it. I might not know much about his history, but I did know him. He gathered his anger to him and made it as permanent as the tattoo on my belly. He’d never forgive me for betraying his trust.

I needed something to do, something to keep my hands and mind busy, to distract me from the sick feeling that I’d done something terrible. Unfortunately I’d stayed late and finished all the work I had at the shop on Friday, thinking I’d be spending most of Saturday at the music festival. I didn’t even have a project car to work on. The current project, an old Karmann Ghia, was out getting the upholstery redone.

After pacing restlessly around the house and making a batch of peanut butter cookies, I went to the small third bedroom that served as my study, turned on the computer, and connected to the Internet before I started on brownies.

I answered e-mail from my sister and my mother and then browsed a bit. The brownie I brought into the room with me sat undisturbed on its plate. Just because I make food when I’m upset doesn’t mean I can eat it.

I needed something to do. I ran through the conversation with Uncle Mike and decided that he probably really didn’t know who had killed O’Donnell – though he was pretty sure it wasn’t the ogres, or he wouldn’t have mentioned them at all. I knew it wasn’t Zee. Uncle Mike didn’t think it was the Gray Lords – and I agreed with him. From the fae point of view, O’Donnell’s murder was a screwup – a screwup that the Gray Lords could have easily avoided.

The old staff I’d found in the corner of O’Donnell’s living room had something to do with the murder, though. It was important enough that the raven…no, what had Uncle Mike called it – the Carrion Crow – had come and taken it, and Uncle Mike hadn’t wanted to talk about it.

I looked at the search engine screen that I used as my default page when I surfed the ‘Net. Impulsively, I typed staff and fairy then hit the search button.

I got the results I should have expected had I thought about it. So I substituted folklore for fairy, but it wasn’t until I tried walking stick (after magic staff and magic stick) that I found myself on a website with a small library of old fairy and folklore books scanned online.

I found my walking stick, or at least a walking stick.

It was given to a farmer who had the habit of leaving bread and milk on his back porch to feed the fairies. While he held that staff, each of his ewes gave birth to two healthy lambs every year and gave the farmer modest, if growing, prosperity. But (and there is always a "but" in fairy tales) one evening while walking over a bridge, the farmer lost his grip on the staff and it fell into the river and was swept away. When he got home, he found that his fields had flooded and killed most of his sheep – thus all the gain he’d gotten from the staff had left with it. He never found the staff again.

It wasn’t likely that a staff that ensured all its owner’s ewes had two healthy lambs each year was worth murdering people over – especially as O’Donnell’s killer hadn’t taken it. Either the walking stick I’d found wasn’t the same one, it wasn’t as important as I had thought it might be, or O’Donnell’s killer hadn’t been after it. The only thing I was certain of was that O’Donnell had taken it from the murdered forest man.

The victims, even though they were mostly names, had been gradually becoming more real to me: Connora, the forest man, the selkie…It is a habit of humans to put labels on things, Zee always told me. Usually when I was trying to get him to tell me just who or what he was.

Impulsively, I typed in dark smith and Drontheim and found the story Samuel had told me about. I read it twice and sat back in my chair.

Somehow it fit. I could see Zee being perverse enough to create a sword that, once swung, would cut through whatever was in its path – including the person who was using it.

Still, there wasn’t a Siebold or an Adelbert in the story. Zee’s last name was Adelbertsmiter – smiter of Adelbert. I’d once heard a fae introduce him to another in a hushed voice as "the Adelbertsmiter."

On a whim I looked up Adelbert and laughed involuntarily. The first hit I had was on Saint Adelbert, a Northumbrian missionary who sought to Christianize Norway in the eighth century. All I could find out about him was that he’d died a martyr’s death.

Could he be Zee’s Adelbert?

The phone rang, interrupting my speculations.

Before I had a chance to say anything, a very British voice said, "Mercy, you’d better get your butt over here."