Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(55)
Author: Patricia Briggs

I raised my eyebrows. "He told me he was hungry for human flesh. I guess that could be overeagerness."

He looked at me and I couldn’t read his face or his scent. "I talked to Samuel earlier. He’s sorry to have missed the excitement, but he’s at home now. If Fideal follows you home, he’ll have Samuel to contend with." He waved his hand around. "And there are plenty of us here to come to your aid."

"Are you sending me home?" Was I flirting? Damn it, I was.

He smiled, first with his eyes and then his lips, just a little, just enough to turn his face into something that made my pulse pick up. "You can stay if you’d like," he said, flirting right back. Then, a wicked light gleaming in his eyes, he went one step too far. "But I think there are too many people around for what I’d like you to stay for."

I dodged around Honey’s husband and out the door, the flip-flops making little snapping sounds that didn’t cover up Adam’s final comment. "I like your tattoo, Mercy."

I made sure that my shoulders were stiff as I stalked away. He couldn’t see the grin on my face…and it faded soon enough.

From the porch I could see the damage the fight had done to both the house and the SUV. That dent in the side of the shiny black vehicle was going to be expensive to fix. The side of the house had taken some damage, too, and I didn’t know how much it would cost to repair. When I’d had to have the siding replaced on my trailer, the vampires had picked up the tab.

I started adding up the cost of the fight. I didn’t know exactly what Fideal had done to my car, but it was going to take hours to fix, even if I could scrounge all the parts off the dead Rabbit presently annoying Adam in my back field. And somewhere I was going to have to come up with money to pay off Zee (and I really didn’t want to borrow it from Samuel) – unless Zee had been playing some elaborate game to keep me from investigating the murder.

I rubbed my face, suddenly tired. I’d kept mostly to myself since I left the Marrok’s pack when I was sixteen. The only problems I’d stuck my nose into had been my own. I stayed out of werewolf business and Zee kept me out of his. Somehow in the past year all that careful management had gone to hell.

I wasn’t sure that there was a way back to my old peaceful existence, or if I even wanted it. But my new lifestyle was starting to get expensive.

A piece of gravel slid between the flip-flop and my sore foot and I yelped. It was getting painful, too.

Samuel was waiting for me on the porch with a mug of hot chocolate and an expert glance that checked for wounds.

"I’m fine," I told him, scooting past the open screen door and snagging the cocoa on the way. It was instant, but the marshmallows were just what I needed. "Ben’s the one who got hurt, and I think I saw Darryl limping."

"Adam didn’t ask me to come over, so neither of them must have been hurt very badly," he said, shutting the door. When I sat on a chair in the living room, he sat on the couch across from me. "Why don’t you tell me about tonight. Like how you happened to get chased by the Fideal."

"The Fideal?"

"It used to live in a bog and eat straying children," he told me. "You’re a little older than its usual fare. So what did you do to tick it off?"

"Nothing. Not a darn thing."

He made one of those sounds he used to let me know he wasn’t buying my story.

I took a long drink. Maybe another viewpoint would notice something I had missed. So I told him most of it – leaving out only what had gone on between Adam and me after I’d gotten into the shower.

As I talked, I noticed that Samuel looked tired. He loved working in the emergency room, but it took a toll. Not just the odd hours, though they could be bad enough. Mostly it was the stress of keeping control when surrounded by blood and fear and death.

By the time I finished my story, he looked better. "So you went to a Bright Future meeting, hoping to find someone else who might have killed this guard, and ran into a bunch of college kids – and a fae who decided that eating you would be fun."

I nodded. "That’s about it."

"Could the fae have been the killer?"

I closed my eyes and pictured Fideal’s fight with the werewolves. Could he have ripped a man’s head off his shoulders? "Maybe. But he didn’t seem concerned about the investigation."

"You said that he was angry you were at the meeting. Could he have been worried that you were closing in on him?"

"That might have been it," I said. "I’ll call Uncle Mike and see if there’s any reason Fideal might have wanted the other fae dead. He certainly knew O’Donnell – and the more I find out about him, the odder it seems that someone hadn’t killed him years ago."

Samuel smiled a little. "But you’re not convinced the Fideal did it."

I shook my head. "He’s put himself on the top of my list, but…"

"But what?"

"He was so hungry. Not for sustenance, though that was part of it, but for the hunt." Samuel the werewolf would understand what I meant. "I think that if Fideal had killed the guard, O’Donnell’s death would have been different. He’d have been found drowned, or eaten, or never found at all." Putting it into words made it more than a suspicion. "I’ll call Uncle Mike and see what he thinks, but I don’t believe it was Fideal."

I remembered that I had something else to talk to Uncle Mike about, too. "And that walking stick showed up in my car tonight, again."

I started to get up to get the phone, but my legs had had enough and I fell back. "Darn it."

"What’s wrong?" The tired relaxation left Samuel between one heartbeat and the next – I gave him an exasperated glance.

"I told you, I’m fine. Nothing some stretches, Icy Hot, and a good night of sleep won’t cure." I thought of all the little cuts and decided to do without the Icy Hot. "Can you throw me the phone?"

He plucked it off its base on the table next to the couch and tossed it to me.

"Thanks." I’d been calling him so often the past few days that I had Uncle Mike’s number memorized. It took me a few minutes of wading through minions before Uncle Mike himself got on the phone.

"Could Fideal have killed O’Donnell?" I asked without ceremony.

"Could have, but didn’t," answered Uncle Mike. "O’Donnell’s body was still twitching when Zee and I found him. Whoever killed him did it while we were still standing on the doorstep. The Fideal’s glamour isn’t good enough to hide himself from me if he were that close. And he’d have bitten O’Donnell’s head off and eaten it, not just torn it off."

I swallowed. "So what was Fideal doing at the Bright Future meeting and why wasn’t his scent at O’Donnell’s?"