Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson #5)(34)
Author: Patricia Briggs

I waited in the bookstore until I realized I was waiting for Samuel to say something. But Samuel wasn’t here: it was just Sam and me.

"Okay, that’s enough make-believe for me." I dusted off my jeans. I’d have been hoping that I was wrong, but the way my life had been going the past year – this almost sounded tame. No vampires or ghosts, right? No Gray Lords who terrified even other fae. If I was wrong, I was afraid that it was only because the reality was even worse. "Let’s keep looking. I’d feel really dumb if Phin turns out to be hidden in the basement."

Sam found a door behind about three bookcases. Happily, it opened away from us, so we just had to scramble over the top to drop to a landing. Straight ahead was a brick wall; to the right of the door we’d entered through was a set of narrow and steep stairs that led down into a pit of inky blackness: the bookstore had a basement.

I didn’t think that anyone would notice if I turned on the lights here because I was pretty sure that there weren’t any windows in the basement. I’d have noticed.

It took me a minute to find the light switch. Sam, apparently unfazed by the darkness, had already continued down on his own when my hand found the right place.

With light to guide my way, I could see that the basement was mostly a storage facility with cardboard boxes set in piles. It reminded me of the hospital’s X-ray storage room in that there was obvious order to the stacks. The ceiling height was deeper than usual for basements this near the river, but I could detect no trace of dampness.

Just to the right of the stairway, a section had been used as an office. A Persian rug delineated the space and stretched out beneath an old-fashioned oak desk complete with clamp-on desk lamp. There was a large framed oil painting of an English-type garden placed just in front of the desk, where someone sitting might use it as a mock window.

At one time the desk had held a computer monitor. I could tell because the monitor was lying in pieces on the cement floor next to the rug. There were more broken things on the ground – what looked to be the remains of a scentless jar candle, a mug that might have held the pens and pencils that had scattered when they hit the cement, and an office chair minus a wheel and the backrest.

"Be careful," I told Sam. "You’ll end up with glass in your paws."

The stack of boxes nearest the desk was the only one that had been disturbed. Five or six boxes had been knocked around, spilling their contents on the floor.

"No blood here," I told him, and tried not to be relieved. I did not want to discover Phin’s body. Not while I was alone with Sam, the wolf. "They were just looking – and not very seriously at that. Maybe they were interrupted, or this is how far they got when Phin finally broke down and started to talk."

"Fee fie foe feral," said a man’s voice, hitting my ears like the blast of a barge’s horn. "I smell the blood of a little girl." He rhymed "girl" with "feral," something only possible because of his cockney-accented English. "Be she hot, be she cold, I’ll wager this, me lads – she won’t get more old."

All I could see was two feet on the stairs. I’d had no warning that the man was in the building at all – and from Sam’s sudden movement, he hadn’t heard or smelled anything either. I had no idea that fae could hide themselves like that. No telling whether he’d been there all the time, or if he’d followed us in.

The fae was wearing big, black boots, the kind that should go clomp-clomp-clomp. And he was in no hurry to come down and kill us – which told me that he was one of the kind that enjoyed the hunt.

He wasn’t a giant, despite my facetious naming of the two forest fae, because the giants were beast-minded, more instinct than intelligent. The beast-minded fae who had survived the rise of metal-wielding humans had died at the hands of the Gray Lords. Instinctive behaviors weren’t good enough to make sure you’d hide your nature from the humans, and for centuries the fae had tried to pretend that they had never existed outside of folklore and fairy tales. But from the size of those feet, he was big enough.

Sam caught my attention by bumping his head against my hip – then ducked under the desk. He planned on taking the fae by surprise. Good to know Sam was still with me.

"That’s possibly the worst doggerel verse I’ve heard since I was thirteen and wrote a poem for an English assignment," I told the waiting fae as I walked around so I could look up the stairs.

The one who stood at the top of the stairs was maybe six feet or a little under, though his feet were five inches longer than I’ve ever seen on any normal human. He had curly red hair and a pleasantly cheerful face – if you didn’t look too hard at his eyes. He was wearing slacks and a red shirt with a blue tie that matched the red canvas apron that covered his clothes. Embroidered across the top of the apron was the name of a grocery store.

In his right hand he held a butcher knife.

He smelled of the iron and sweetness that was blood, with an undertone that made him the second of the Jolly Green Giants who’d trashed the place. The damned strong one who’d hefted a filled bookcase.

"Ah," he said, "a hintruder. How droll." He loosened his neck by pulling his head to one side, then the other. His accent was so heavy it was hard to decipher. Intruder, I thought, not hintruder.

"Droll?" I tried it, then shook my head. "Fateful, rather. At least for you." When in doubt, sound confident – it confuses the guys who are about to wipe the floor with you. It helped that I had a secret weapon. "What have you done with Phin?"

"Phin?" He came down three steps and paused with a smile. I think he was waiting for me to run – or, like a bored cat, drawing out the pleasure of the kill. A lot of fae are predators by nature, and among the things they like to eat are people.

"Phin is the owner of this bookstore." My voice was steady. I don’t think I was getting braver, but after all the things that had happened lately, being frightened had lost its novelty.

"Maybe oye et ‘im." He smiled. His teeth were sharper than a human’s – and there were more of them.

"Maybe you’re a fae and can’t lie," I told him. "So you should stick to the facts instead of trying my patience with ‘maybes.’ Like where is Phin?"

He raised his left hand and gestured at me. Faint green sparkles stretched out between us and hung in the air for a moment until one touched me. It fell and took the others with it. They glittered on the floor, then winked out.

"What are you?" he asked, tilting his head like a puzzled wolf. "You ain’t witch. Oi can feels witches in moy ‘ead."

"Stop right there," I said, pulling the SIG from its holster.