Fire Touched

  Two of the riders led the horses away, but the other one waited to escort us into the building. Adam went first, Zee and Tad took the rear guard, and the rest of us spread out between them.

  The building wasn’t much to look at. Built to the military specs of the eighties, cement steps took them to a plain painted door set into uninspired vinyl siding. But inside . . .

  Jesse sucked in her breath, and said, “It’s a TARDIS.”

  “A what?” asked Aiden.

  “Bigger on the inside than it is on the outside,” Jesse said.

  She was right, because we’d entered not a small antechamber that probably had originally been the first thing visitors saw, but a spacious room with marble floors and pillars. The marble was pink, flecked with patches of black and gray. The room was empty, and our escort didn’t slow down as he crossed the room and out through one of many doorways. This one led to a large office, easily large enough it didn’t feel crowded despite floor-to-ceiling bookcases and the seven of us. In contrast to the size of the room, Beauclaire’s desk was of normal size. The fae lord himself sat behind it.

  “Sir,” said our escort, “I bring you the guests you were expecting.” He didn’t wait for acknowledgment, just turned and left the room.

  Beauclaire cleared away the papers he was working on and set them in a folder without hurrying. His desk was as hyperorganized as Adam’s. Adam had learned to organize in the army; I wondered where Beauclaire had picked up the habit. Only when the papers had been properly stowed did he turn his attention to us.

  “Gentlemen,” said Beauclaire, his gaze drifting past Adam’s face and lighting on mine briefly before stopping to dwell on Jesse’s. “Ladies.”

  “My daughter,” said Adam, answering the question the fae wouldn’t ask. “She needed to see us off on our journey.”

  Beauclaire knew about daughters. His face lit with appreciation of our predicament.

  “I told him no harm would come to her here,” said Zee.

  Beauclaire met Zee’s eyes in a way he hadn’t Adam’s. “I am pleased to help you keep that vow.”

  Zee inclined his head regally.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know why Órlaith and several other fae of her cadre are missing, would you?” Beauclaire asked Zee.

  Zee smiled and said nothing.

  Beauclaire smiled back. Evidently, none of the missing would be missed by him.

  Beauclaire reached into a desk drawer and brought out a roll of vellum. He stretched it out across his desk, so the lettering faced us, putting a paperweight at the top and the bottom to keep it rolled out. “The others have signed,” he told Adam. “When you have read it and signed, I’ll make my mark, and the bargain will be made.”

  Adam nodded, pulled up a seat, and began to read. I read over his shoulder.

  We, the Gray Lords of Faery, representing themselves and all of Faery, do make this bargain with Adam Alexander Hauptman and his mate Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman, who represent themselves and the Columbia Basin Pack . . .

  When Adam was finished, he stood up and looked at Zee. “Would you mind going through it as well?”

  Zee nodded. It didn’t take him as long as it had us. “It says what we think it does,” he said, his smile brief but real. “It helps that the fae want this more than you do.”

  After Tad nodded, too, I wrote my name in the space left for me, then handed Adam the quill pen to sign. Beauclaire rounded the desk to sign rather than turn the sheet around.

  When he was finished, he set the pen aside and put his hand on the vellum. He took three deep breaths, and magic swelled. I sneezed twice and still couldn’t get the tickle out of my nose.

  Beauclaire bent his head then, and spoke a word. Adam put his hand on my shoulder, but Beauclaire didn’t use the kind of power he’d called when destroying the bridge. When he took his hand off the document, there were two copies.

  He rolled them both and wrapped some kind of keeper around the rolls. One of those he left on his desk, and the other he gave to Zee.

  “I’ll take you to a door,” he said, and started out of his office, only to pause in the doorway. “You should take off any iron or steel you have on your persons.”

  But Adam had spent the night going through the go-bags he kept ready and waiting in our closet. He’d substituted plastic and nylon for most of the metal.

  I had a thought. “Adam. Your dog tags. What are they made from?”

  “Stainless steel,” Adam told me, and started to take his off.

  I had one of his tags on the necklace I always wore. I undid the clasp and looked at it. It was an untidy mess—a gold lamb charm, my wedding ring, and the tag. I put out my hand and took Adam’s steel necklace with his remaining tag—and then I put both necklaces around Jesse’s neck.

  “These are our promise to you,” I told Jesse, “that we’ll do our best to get back to you if we can. That we will do our best and expect the same from you.”

  “That’s my Mercy,” Adam said. “Not too good with words until it counts. And then she’ll pull the rug right out from under you.”

  Jesse blinked hard and gave Adam a “help me” look out of her watery eyes.

  He grinned at her. “Just remember whose daughter you are,” he said. “And whose daughter she is.” He tipped his chin at me.

  I felt my jaw set hard. But I didn’t protest. “Joe Old Coyote,” said Jesse.

  Who had been Coyote wearing a human suit. Joe Old Coyote had died, not abandoned my mother. Coyote had abandoned my mother—and me.

  “Joe Old Coyote was tough,” Adam told Jesse, putting an arm around my shoulders. “He hunted vampires, and he took on Mercy’s mom. Of the two, I know what I’m more scared of.”

  That made me laugh. “My mom isn’t that bad.”

  Adam gave me a look.

  I bit my lip, then gave up and laughed again. “Okay, okay. She is. Worse. I’d rather face vampires any day than my mother.”

  “I found her charming,” said Zee.

  Laughter, I thought with satisfaction, is a terrific way to start an adventure.

  13

  I stepped in front of Adam when he started to pull his clothes off. Not that Jesse hadn’t seen him naked before. Like me, werewolves have to strip to change. Modesty is for humans. But it wasn’t only modesty that had made me step between Adam and the rest of the room. Werewolves in the middle of shifting could and did protect themselves, but they couldn’t do it well until they were fully in either form. I wasn’t worried, really, that anyone would attack him—we had Baba Yaga’s word on it. It was more the way Adam always walked on the traffic side of me when we walked around town. He didn’t expect anything to happen, but he wanted to be there if it did.

  I could feel Adam pulling on the pack bonds for speed. If it hadn’t been for the necessity of signing the bargain, he could have changed at home, could have taken his time. But he couldn’t afford to be weakened in any way for very long on the reservation, so he pulled on the bonds and asked for help.

  Beauclaire said, “I’ve never seen a werewolf change.”

  “New experiences are hard to come by,” Zee agreed. “Unless you work with Mercy. I’ve been having all sorts of new experiences since I met her.”

  Beauclaire smiled appreciatively.

  I said, “We decided it would work best to go in with Adam as wolf. Guns don’t work in Underhill.” And wasn’t that too bad. “And we can’t take steel or iron. So our best weapon is going to come in ready to defend us.”

  “You will stay human?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “At least I can talk to Aiden this way.” The only other time I’d been in Underhill, I’d been in coyote form. The very scary fae I’d met there—a fae that Zee had treated with more caution than he did any of the Gray Lords—had known exactly what I was anyway.

  If my coyote skin wo
uldn’t serve as camouflage, there was no reason not to stay human. I could carry more that way. I wasn’t entirely sure that I could change shape in Underhill. I hadn’t tried before, and Zee worried that only fae magic would work there. But Aiden needed a cheering section and, if the walking stick cooperated, I probably needed to be in human shape to use it.

  I also probably should have grabbed the walking stick off the chest of drawers when we left. But it had seemed wrong. When the walking stick chose to come to my aid—it just came. Taking it with me . . . I worried that it wouldn’t work.

  Adam’s change took a little less than five minutes. Not as fast as Charles’s—the Marrok’s son, who had been born a werewolf, could sometimes change as fast as I could, between one blink and the next. But it was faster than most werewolves. He shook himself and stretched like a cat, his claws making clicking sounds on the marble floors. Then he walked up to me as Tad gathered his fallen clothing.

  I grabbed Aiden’s pack and helped him to settle it comfortably. My pack was a lot heavier. Adam, we decided, needed to be free to move, so I carried most of our supplies. Food for a week, water for a day, and a very light boatload of technology-lightened-and-miniaturized backpacking supplies. Also six hard-boiled eggs from the dozen I’d made at breakfast. Baba Yaga might not have meant anything when she’d told me that hard-boiled was best, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Aiden had a pack, too, but however old he really was, his body was that of a ten-year-old. His pack was mostly his bedroll and freeze-dried food.

  We hadn’t brought a tent. Even if it rained, we couldn’t afford to blind ourselves like that when we slept.

  “We’re ready now,” I told Beauclaire.

  He took us back out to the main room, through two more doors, and into a room that was so utilitarian, it must have belonged to the original building. There was a closet door on one wall, and it was to this he led us.

  Zee took a deep breath. “This one wasn’t here last month. There are too many doors to Underhill in too small a space.”

  “We know,” said Beauclaire.

  “It’s not safe,” said Zee.

  “We know that, too.”

  Zee snorted. “Well, somebody doesn’t, because she can’t make doorways where she isn’t invited.”

  “Is this doorway acceptable?” Beauclaire asked me, ignoring Zee’s taunt.

  I looked at Aiden, who shrugged. We both looked at Zee.

  “It doesn’t matter where you go in,” he said. “These doorways are all too new to have found an anchor in Underhill. That means they’ll drop you someplace random. Just make sure you are holding on to each other when you go—or you’ll all end up in different parts of Underhill.” Beauclaire opened the door and stepped back. Jesse hugged her father, hugged me, then hugged Aiden.

  “Don’t get them killed,” she told Aiden.

  “I’ll try not to,” he said earnestly.

  “Don’t get stuck,” she said.

  “I’ll try not to,” he told her.

  “Good enough,” she said. “If you try, Dad will do the rest.”

  “Safe journey,” said Zee.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” said Tad.

  “I love you, too,” I said, and, holding on to Adam with one hand and Aiden with the other, crossed over into Underhill.

  —

  We had to go down three cement steps to get to the ground. When Aiden went back and shut the door behind us, I turned to see that the door was set in the back of a building that looked like the back of the building we’d gone into.

  But my bones hummed with the magic—it was like standing on a washing machine permanently caught in the spin cycle.

  “It’s a good idea to shut doors behind you in Underhill,” Aiden told me. “People who are chasing you usually go somewhere else.”

  He looked around, his breathing a little fast, and his weight shifted from foot to foot like a deer waiting to see where the danger emerged, so he could flee in the opposite direction as fast as he could.

  We had emerged into an anticlimactic, bland landscape that looked very much like the area around the reservation. We were on the top of a small hill at the base of larger hills. Below us was a grassy valley with a river running through it. If it hadn’t been for the lack of civilization—roads, wires, squashed beer cans—it could have been anywhere near Walla Walla.

  Okay, it could have been anywhere near Walla Walla if there had been beer cans on the ground and a sun in the bright blue sky. There was no sun in the sky. There were shadows, and, from how the shadows lay, we were approximately the same time as it was back on the reservation. I just couldn’t see any reason for the shadows.

  From what Zee told me, time in Underhill could be capricious—but not as badly as in the Elphame of the fairy queen I’d encountered. We might lose or gain a few days or possibly a week. But we were unlikely to lose years or decades.

  I turned slowly. We had a clear field of vision, but I couldn’t see anything that looked out of place. At the thought, I turned to look for the small building we’d exited from—but there was no sign of any building anywhere.

  “Do you know which way to go?” I asked. “Have you been here before?”

  “I don’t think that I’ve been here, precisely,” he said. “But I know which way to go. Mostly I find my way around by the way it feels here.” He thumped himself on the chest.

  I tried, but I couldn’t feel any kind of pull or push in the magic.

  “It took me a while,” he said. “This way.”

  And he set off, straight up the hill. We walked for hours. Aiden’s terror subsided, though it never quite left him. Adam ranged a little, his nose to the ground and his ears alert, but he never traveled out of sight. He didn’t chase the white bunny that first appeared in glimpses, then ran across our path. Twice.

  “He’s not a dog,” I commented loudly, spinning in a slow circle to look for something, I don’t know what it was. “He’s not going to chase a rabbit and leave us behind.”

  I could feel the urge to chase that rabbit, and I seldom felt the need to hunt when I was on two feet. Adam didn’t even lunge at the rabbit when it emerged from a hollow just beyond his nose.

  He did growl, though.

  “It’s not a real rabbit,” said Aiden unnecesssarily. “After a while, even before I had magic, I learned to tell the difference. I survived a long time without magic—but I had friends then.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He laughed without humor, but his voice was relaxed. “No need to sound so careful,” he told me, his gaze on the strange sky. “It was a very long time ago, even by my reckoning. There were five or six of us humans left behind when the fae were banished. At first, we were overjoyed. We played all day long and ate the food in the larder—and there was always food in the larder. Last time I went back there, a very long time later, there was still food there—but there are other things living in the Emerald Court now, things that feed on those weaker than they. Like me and like you.

  “Evander died first,” Aiden said. He was walking faster as he talked, and he kept looking behind us. “He was the youngest of us—you learned caution very quickly in that court, or you died. I don’t think Evander would have survived long even if we hadn’t been abandoned in Underhill. Evander first, then Lily and Rose—I don’t remember what their human names had been. Lily just disappeared from her bed one day, and Rose quit eating. Then it was just Willy and me. For a long time, it was Willy and me. Then we found this pretty little girl crying next to a stream. We took care of her and told her stories.”

  There was nothing behind us that I could see or smell. I touched Adam lightly on his head and looked at Aiden. Adam watched him a moment, then broke free to run down the hill half a dozen yards before circling back.

  There was nothing following us. Aiden didn’t seem to take note of Ad
am’s useless search. He looked up at the sky again, and as he did so, I realized that warm feeling on the back of my shoulders was gone. Above us, dark gray clouds roiled, and as soon as I saw them, a chill wind picked up.

  “Willy figured it out first,” Aiden said, picking up the pace again. We weren’t running, but it was a swinging walk that would take us places fast. “He said it was because she always knew where to find berries and which path we should take. But Willy always had a bit of the gift—he could see things that others didn’t.”

  He paused, this time looking down at the path we were on. He turned a little to the left, a steeper climb. “Never follow a path while you’re in Underhill,” he told me. “The only things here that make a path are things you don’t want to meet.”

  The hill was steeper than it had been, steeper than it looked.

  “He talked to me about it first,” Aiden said. “But I didn’t believe him. Underhill was just where we were—like Caledonia or Ulster, right? Willy could make up things, too—he was the best storyteller. I thought he was making up a story right up until he died and proved himself right.”

  For all that he’d said it was a long time ago, Aiden’s breath was shaky. “Underhill can’t kill, not directly. But if she wants you dead, you die. Sometimes quickly but usually slower. She can’t feel pain, so it fascinates her.”

  A cold wind blew down my neck just then. “Aiden,” I said, “we’re on a path again.”

  We walked—and now Aiden wasn’t the only one who could feel something following us. I felt as though if I turned around, I would see someone. When I did, there was no one there—except the ghosts.

  Underhill was a haunted land. Most ghosts I’ve been around—and I’ve been around a lot of them—haunt places where people might be found. Churches, homes, stores—places like that. The ghosts that I’d been seeing were tucked into hollows under trees and hiding under branches. All of them were children. One of them had been following us since Aiden had started talking about the children he used to run around with. I wish I could believe that it was the ghost who was watching us—but his regard felt desperate, as if he thought we might be able to save him.