Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson #5)(72)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"There," said the fairy queen. "Now you are mine."

I blinked at her and tried to mold my features into the stupid expression I’d seen on the other thralls as she cut the ropes that held me to the chair.

"Go to the kitchens and get something to wipe the blood off the floor," she told me.

I stood up and started walking. She quit paying attention to me, because I wasn’t interesting anymore. I started walking a little faster because I saw my gun on the floor by one of the benches, where someone must have kicked it. I suppose that made sense. There weren’t many fae who could have picked it up without hurting themselves. None of the thralls would dream of using it – but I could see that the fae might hesitate to have a thrall dispose of it.

I picked it up and turned around. Slowly, so as not to attract the attention of the fae in the room – who were all looking at the fairy queen and not at her new thrall. The queen was leaning over the arm of her throne, talking to her witch. I shot the queen three times in the heart. The witch was watching me and smiled as I pulled the trigger.

"Huh," said a voice right next to me. I turned my head and had to look down at a human-seeming child who appeared to be no more than eight or nine years old.

She smiled at me. "And they were afraid something would happen to you if we waited until everyone could come to the party. Just like a coyote to spoil the fun for everyone."

The last time I’d seen this fae, she’d been playing with a yo-yo in the front yard of a murder scene she was guarding. I didn’t know her name, just that she was plenty powerful, people were scared of her, and she was a lot older than she looked.

For an instant I almost saw something completely different standing beside me, then she smiled at me, and said, "Not my glamour you don’t, Mercedes."

The other fae in the room didn’t move, frozen in the moment of the fairy queen’s death.

Yo-yo Girl walked forward to the dead queen, and I followed her. The witch had grabbed the body and was taking handfuls of the queen’s blood and painting it over the silver thrall necklace around her neck.

"I don’t think so," said Yo-yo Girl. She bent and touched the remains, and said something that might have been a word. The queen’s body turned to dust.

Yo-yo Girl started to back away – and then saw the forest lord in his chains beyond the throne. Somehow I don’t think that she’d seen him before reducing the queen to so many ashes.

The silver ring popped off the witch’s neck – only to be replaced by small fingers. I heard only the echo of a whisper, then the witch was dust, too. Yo-yo Girl took a handful of the resultant gray mass, lifted it to her mouth, and licked it like an ice-cream cone.

"Yum," she said to me. Her hands, her clothes, and her mouth were covered with ashes. "I love witches."

"I’ll take chocolate, if it is all the same to you," I told her.

"Mercy!" roared Adam from somewhere beyond the hall.

"Uh-oh," said Yo-yo Girl. "Someone missed out on all the killing."

"Here!" I called. "We’re okay."

And then it was true. Because Adam was there and he had his arms around me and that made everything all right.
* * *

I KICKED THE SNOW AND STUBBED MY TOE ON THE kitchen sink. It was the night of the big rescue, and everyone was partying over at Adam’s house. I’d been hugged and fussed over until I decided that it was a good time to go check out the remains of my home.

The snow hid a lot, and the pack had cleaned it up. They’d had the whole month that I’d been missing to do it. I suppose I was lucky it hadn’t been a year or a century.

They hadn’t been able to find the Elphame after Zee had been forced to let his door close. Apparently, as Zee explained it to me, the Elphame moved in relation to the reservation, and Ariana hadn’t been able to find me.

It was only when the bond between Adam and me reconnected that they were able to locate the Elphame. While Zee worked to make another entrance, they’d sent Yo-yo Girl ahead to make sure I was safe. She apparently didn’t need anything as crude as an entrance to find her way to the Elphame. She probably had a name besides Yo-yo Girl, but the fae are funny about names, and no one wanted to give her a real one.

The fae who had belonged to the fairy queen were being housed in the reservation temporarily. Some of them had no memory of how they’d come to follow the fairy queen. Some of them were angry that I’d killed her, but not so angry they’d made any move against me. Zee said that the Gray Lords were torn between anger at the way the fairy queen had used a forest lord and a black witch, and triumph at the proof that Underhill was returning some power to all of the fae.

There wasn’t much left of my trailer except for a small pile of things that might be reused. I hadn’t lost the pole barn with my Vanagon inside. I hadn’t lost Medea or Samuel.

The first time I’d seen the place, there had been a coyote hiding under the porch, and I’d taken it as an omen. When I’d finally bought it, I’d felt like I had a home for the first time in my life. A home no one could take away from me.

"Saying good-bye?"

I hadn’t heard the Marrok, but Bran was like that.

"Yeah." I smiled at him so he’d know I didn’t mind his presence.

"I meant to thank you for Samuel," Bran said.

I shook my head. "It wasn’t me. It was Ariana – have you seen them together? Aren’t they cute?" Ariana wasn’t at Adam’s house, though Samuel was. She wasn’t quite up to bearing a pack of werewolves celebrating madly. Samuel had talked about her for twenty minutes, though.

Ariana hadn’t managed to touch Samuel when he was a wolf – yet, Samuel had told me. But she didn’t have any trouble with Samuel the man, and she didn’t have panic attacks around any of the werewolves – as long as they were calm and approached her one at a time in human form. She’d just needed a reason to work on her phobias, he’d explained with great pride. Bran had smiled when Samuel said that, the smile that said the Marrok had been up to something. So he might have had something to do with her finding her way among the wolves. Or maybe he just wanted me to think that. I’ve found that I do better when I don’t worry too hard about what Bran can and can’t do.

"Ariana is a gift," said Bran. "But if it hadn’t been for what you did, Samuel wouldn’t have been around to receive it."

"That’s what friends are for," I told him. "Lift you when you’re down – and kick you in the rump when you need it. Adam helped. Speaking of friends, thank you for the Pack Magic 101 that kept me from being Zombie Mercy."

He smiled, an expression that made him look about sixteen. If you didn’t know him, it would be hard to believe that this young man with the diffident expression was the Marrok.