Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson #5)(32)
Author: Patricia Briggs

I parked in the corner of the Uptown parking lot where an all-night restaurant was located. There weren’t a lot of cars there but enough that the Rabbit didn’t stand out.

I opened Sam’s door and he sniffed the air carefully.

"Are you scenting for the fae woman who was here today?" I asked.

He didn’t give me any kind of answer, just shook himself and looked at me expectantly – as if he really were the dog we were pretending he was. Was he slower? Did his tail droop more than usual? Or was I letting Charles’s words make me paranoid?

I glanced at him and was pretty sure it was both. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you aren’t right. He wasn’t quite as responsive, either, as if it took him a moment to translate words into meanings.

I didn’t notice anyone who seemed to be watching us as we crossed the parking lot – but we were out where people could see us. All I could do was act as if I weren’t breaking into the shop. It took me two full minutes to crack the lock on the door of the bookstore, which was about one and a half minutes longer than I was comfortable standing there with my back to the parking lot and the busy street beyond. I was hopeful that someone from the street couldn’t tell that I was playing with my lockpicks instead of fumbling with a stiff lock. There was a bar that was still open about three stores over, but no one had come or gone while I struggled. Sheer good luck, something I couldn’t always count on. I was going to have to get some practice in if I kept having to break into buildings.

The door handle turned, and I started to move on to the dead bolt, when I realized that the door had popped open when I’d unlocked the handle. Someone hadn’t engaged the dead bolt.

I held the door for Sam, then slipped inside myself. He couldn’t shut the door – and if there was something unfriendly in the store, he was better able to deal with it.

I turned the dead bolt and looked around. My eyesight is good in the dark, so we didn’t need to attract even more attention by turning on the light. It was darker in the store than it was outside and the windows were already tinted, so it would be hard for anyone looking to see anything but the reflection of the outside lights.

At first I observed a neat and tidy store that smelled of incense and old books. Paper holds the memory of any strong scent, so in a used bookstore, it wasn’t uncommon to get little trickles of food, tobacco, and perfume. I took a deep breath to see if I could find anything that stood out.

Blood and fear and rage are a little out of the ordinary.

I stopped where I was and sucked in several deep breaths. Each time the smell grew stronger and stronger.

Fae glamour – a type of illusion – is strongly effective on sight, sound, taste, and touch. I’m told it is sufficient for a human sense of smell, but mine is better than that. By the third breath I smelled the sharp smell of broken wood, and the ammonia-like scent that fae magic sometimes leaves behind.

I closed my eyes, bowed my head, and let my nose be right. My ears cleared with a pop, and when I looked up, the tidy bookcases filled with tidy books had disappeared, leaving destruction in their place.

"Sam." I kept my voice down, though I don’t think anyone outside would have heard me if I’d shouted. It was a reflex thing – we were sneaking around, so I needed to be quiet. "Do you smell it? The blood? There’s a glamour here. Can you break it, too? Do you see the mess the fae left behind when they searched the place?"

He cocked an ear at me, then looked around. With a movement swifter than thought, he turned and sank his teeth into my arm.

Maybe if I’d thought there was a chance of him attacking me, I could have gotten out of the way or defended myself somehow. Instead, I stared at him dumbly as his fangs slid through skin and into flesh. He released me almost immediately, leaving behind two clean marks that could have been a vampire bite except that they were too far apart and too big. Vampires have smaller fangs.

Blood trickled out of one mark, then the other, dribbling down my forearm. Sam licked it clean, mostly, ignoring my surprised squeak and the way I backed away from him.

He looked around the shop again. I clamped my arm to my mouth – I didn’t want to be bleeding anywhere in enemy territory. Witches can use blood and hair and other body parts to do nasty things. I didn’t think the fae worked quite the same way, but I didn’t want to chance it.

I checked under the counter for tissues and found something better – a first-aid kit. It wasn’t as good as the one I had, but it was good enough to have gauze and an Ace bandage.

Wrapped and no longer in danger of dripping bits of myself all over, I walked back to Sam. He was still where I’d left him, staring as hard as he could at something I could no longer see.

It hadn’t been a hard bite, and I wouldn’t let myself be afraid of Sam. My foster father’s SIG was in its holster across my shoulder, full of regular ammunition that generally worked just fine on fae – and did nothing to werewolves but make them mad. I tuned out Charles’s warning voice and put the hand of my uninjured arm on Sam’s neck. I refused to believe he was regressing into a vicious killer. A bite did not a killer make.

"Damn it all, Sam, why’d you bite me?" If I yelled at him, I couldn’t be afraid of him. So I yelled at him.

Sam glanced at me, then knocked one of the fallen books aside with one paw. It was a cloth-bound copy of Felix Salten’s Bambi’s Children. In the glamour version of the shop, there had been no books on the floor. He’d bitten me on purpose – hadn’t I asked him if he could break the glamour, too? Evidently, the bite was his answer. My blood must have allowed him to see what I did, some sort of sympathetic magic or something.

"Cool," I said. "That’s cool." Pushing out of my head the knowledge that neither Samuel nor Sam, my friend, would have bitten me so casually, I turned my attention to the bookstore.

I have a pretty good memory for scents, and I picked up Phin’s without any trouble. If I’d been looking for purely human assailants, I’d have been in trouble. This was a bookstore and had had a lot of people running through it. There weren’t many fae aside from Phin, who barely qualified to my nose. However, several of the fae had been here recently, without many people in to cover up their trail.

"I’ve got Phin, the old woman from this afternoon, and three other fae," I told Sam.

Sam raised himself on the edge of one of the dominoed bookcases and put his nose against the back, moving and sniffing until he’d found what he wanted. He stepped back in obvious invitation.

Without touching it, I bent until my nose was nearly touching the wood. I smelled it, too, right where someone had put their magic-laden hand on the wood and pushed the bookcase over.

"That’s one of them," I told Sam. "Some kind of woodland fae, I think – air and growing things."