Iron Kissed (21 page)

Like the water in my phone, he smelled of rotting vegetation and salt. Not being able to see him bothered me; I needed to get away from the headlights.

I could have run, but running from something that might be faster is more of a last resort than a first action. Maybe all he wanted was that stupid walking stick. So I got onto the road and walked a big semicircle around the car until I was facing the side of his car rather than the lights in front.

As my shoes hit the blacktop, I felt a well of magic that seemed to be spreading out through the asphalt. Strong magic usually is almost painful, like touching my tongue to both sides of a nine-volt battery. Tonight there was something more, something…predatory about it.

Fideal was not as weak as he'd appeared at Tim's party.

I hissed between my teeth as sharp pains shot up my legs. I stopped on the far side of the road. My eyes were still burning, but at least I could see him standing by the driver's side door. He looked a little different than he had at Tim's. I couldn't see him well enough for fine details, but it seemed to me that he was taller and broader than he'd been.

Courteously he'd waited until I stopped moving before speaking. It is generally a bad thing when someone hunting you is polite. It means they are sure they can take you anytime they want to.

“So you are the little dog with the curious nose,” he said. “You should have kept your nose to your own kind.”

“Zee is my friend,” I told him. For some reason the “dog” part of that offended me. It would sound stupid to say, “I'm not a dog,” though. “You fae were going to let him die for someone else's crime. I was the only one willing to look elsewhere for a murderer.” I thought of a reason he might be upset with me. “Am I looking at a murderer now?”

He threw his head back and laughed, a full-throated barrel-chested laugh. When he spoke again, his voice acquired a Scot's brogue and had dropped half an octave. “I didn't kill O'Donnell,” he said, which wasn't quite an answer.

“I have protection,” I told him quietly, careful not to put a challenge in my voice. “Killing me will start a war with the werewolves,” I told him. “Nemane knows all about it.”

He shook his head from side to side, like an athlete stretching out the muscles of his neck. His hair was longer, I thought, and rustled wetly when he moved.

“Nemane is not what she once was,” he said. “She is weak and blind and troubles herself overmuch with humans.” He inhaled and he grew. When he finished breathing in, the outline of his form was larger than any human male I'd ever seen by about a foot, and he was almost as wide as he was tall. My eyes were adjusting and I could see that size wasn't the only change.

“The call for your death has been set,” he said. “It is too bad that no one told me until too late that the orders had been recalled.”

He laughed again and it shook the froth of dark strands that covered him like a tattered overcoat. His lips were larger than they had been and there were long, pale shapes in the dark cavern of his mouth. “It has been so long.” His voice was wet and sloppy. “Human flesh is sweet to my tongue and I have not partaken for so long that my very bowels cry out for sustenance.” He roared like a winter wind as he leaped across the road in a single jump.

I was in coyote form and hightailing it at top speed down the road before he landed. Bits of clothing scattered behind me as I ran. I tripped once when my foot caught in my bra, but I rolled with it and shed the bra in my fall.

He could have had me then, but I think he was enjoying the chase. It must have been the reason he didn't just go back and get the Porsche. It might take him a minute to shrink down so he could get into it, but the car was a lot faster than I was, and it could run forever.

I had to stay on the road until it crossed the canal. Otherwise it was too far for me to jump across and I wasn't swimming anything with a water fae of some kind after me.

As soon as I was past it, I dodged down the road that paralleled the canal, running toward the river. I jumped through the fence behind the first house and tore through the field. By the time their dog noticed me and began barking an alarm, I was in the next field over and running through grass taller than I was. After a half mile of running, I slowed to a trot.

The ground was soft and there were horses and cows in the fields. A donkey chased me through its paddock with murderous intent, but I just picked up the pace until I could jump out of its paddock. Horses mostly don't care about coyotes, nor do cows. Chickens run, but donkeys hate us every one.

When I heard hoofbeats behind me, I thought maybe the donkey had jumped its fence—until the horse I'd just passed let out a terrified squeal.

Kelpies could take on the form of a horse, I thought as I moved back into top gear.

I learned that whatever Fideal was, he didn't like railroad tracks. Though he could cross them, they slowed him down and made him shriek with evident pain. Finley has lots of railroad tracks and, after that, I crossed them wherever I could without slowing down my headlong run for Adam's house.

On the flats Fideal was faster than I was, but he couldn't get through or over obstacles as quickly as I could. I scrambled over a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounded one of the big industrial compounds and wished it were iron. The barbed wire at the top made it a little interesting, but I managed.

The fence bent down under his weight and I heard the metal groan as the fence collapsed. It slowed him down. So I avoided the open gate and scrambled over the fence on the other side of the compound, too.

Though I hadn't turned, the river had, and I had to run about a half mile along the shore past several old barges that had been tied up along the shoreline. He gained on me until I found the big hedge of blackberries.

This was part of one of my usual trails and over the years I'd built a path under the bushes and so I could run almost unhindered. Fideal, being a lot bigger, didn't have that luxury.

When I cleared Adam's fence, I couldn't hear Fideal behind me so I changed as I ran. I mistimed it a bit and stumbled painfully to my knees in Adam's gravel driveway. Darryl's car was there, and Honey's Toyota. The little red Chevy truck belonged to Ben.

“Adam!” I yelled. “Trouble on the way!” My legs didn't want to work right as a single pair instead of two pairs, and I stumbled as I tried to regain my feet and run at the same time.

By the time I was on the porch, Darryl had the front door open. I fell again and this time I just rolled until I hit the outside of the house, just under the big picture window.

“Some kind of water fae,” I told him, panting hard and coughing with the force of my breathing. “Might look sort of like a horse or some hooved animal. Or it could be a swamp thingy as big as Adam's SUV. A monster with fangs.”

I must have sounded like a ninny, but it didn't faze Darryl.

“You keep bothering the monsters, Mercy, and someday something's going to eat you.” He sounded calm and cool as he kept his eyes on the fence I'd jumped over. He had a big automatic in one hand—he must carry concealed because I hadn't noticed him holding one when he opened the door.

“Oh, I hope not,” I said in between gasps. “I don't want to be eaten. I've been counting on the vampires to kill me first.”

He laughed, though it wasn't that funny. “Everyone else is changing,” he told me, and he didn't mean clothes. But I could feel them, so he didn't need to tell me. “How far behind you is this thing?”

I shook my head. “Not far. I led it into the blackberries, but—
There! There!
From the river.”

Darryl shifted his aim and began firing at the thing that emerged from the black water and trailed over Adam's groomed gravel beach.

I hastily plugged my ears in an attempt to save my hearing. Even with Adam's porch light and my own night vision, I couldn't really focus on the thing that Fideal had become. It was as though his body swallowed the light and left me with an impression of marsh grasses and water.

The bullets slowed him a little, but I didn't think they were doing enough damage to stop him. I'd caught my breath, even if my legs felt like they were made of rubber, and I had no intention of sitting here like bait.

I started to get up and Darryl grabbed my arm and jerked me down as the big plate glass window over me shattered and a werewolf leaped over my head and landed on the porch railing ten feet away. He paused there, examining Fideal.

“Careful, Ben,” I said. “It's as fast as I am and it has great big teeth.”

The lanky red werewolf glanced back and the porch gave a warning creak. Ben sneered at me, an expression infinitely more impressive with gleaming white fangs than it was when he did it as a human. He jumped off the porch and barreled silently into Fideal.

A black wolf, tipped with silver like a reverse Siamese cat, jumped out behind him. He turned Adam's eyes to me, where I sat covered in glass shards, and then looked at Darryl.

“Right,” said Darryl, though I know Adam couldn't talk to his pack while he was in wolf shape the way the Marrok could.

Darryl dropped the gun he'd been firing continuously and picked me up gingerly. “Let's get you off the glass. If you bleed to death, Adam's going to make mincemeat out of Ben.”

I looked down and realized that I was bleeding from small cuts all over my bare skin. I let Darryl carry me out of the glass and into the house before wriggling free.

He let me go and started tearing off his own clothes.

Another werewolf, this one tawny and beautiful, streaked by me, knocking me a step sideways. Honey. She was followed by another pair of wolves; one was brindled and the other gray. More of Adam's pack, though I couldn't have named either of them.

“Mercy, what is that thing?” Honey's husband, Peter, was still in human form. He saw my look and said, “Adam told me to stay human. I'm to get Jesse away if things go badly.”

I quit paying attention to him when I heard a yelp from outside. It would have taken a lot of pain to wring a sound out of a wolf this close to the pack's den. They were trained to fight silently so as not to attract undue attention. That yelp meant someone was badly hurt.

I'd brought it here. I had to help fight.

“Cold iron.” My voice jittered with adrenaline. “Salt won't work on that one, I don't think—and I'm a little short of underwear to turn inside out. No shoes. I need something steel.”

“Steel?” asked Peter.

I ignored him and ran into the kitchen and grabbed a French chef's knife and a butcher knife out of the set of Henckels that Adam had paid a large fortune for. They weren't stainless steel because regular, high-carbon steel holds a better edge. It also works better on fae.

As I charged out of the kitchen, Honey's husband landed at the base of the stairs, right in front of me. I think he'd just jumped down the whole thing—werewolves can do things like that. He held a sword in his hand.

“Mercy,” he said. His voice sounded different than I'd ever heard it. His pleasant Midwest accent disappeared and he sounded vaguely German, not like Zee exactly, but close. “Adam bound me to watch over Jesse and not help.”

Something hit the side of the house hard.

A sword was better than two little knives. “Can you use that thing?”

“Ja.”

As Adam's declared mate, I could change his orders—though I'd have to answer for it if he got ticked off.

“Go help. I'll stay out of it and get Jesse out of here if it looks like it's going badly.”

He was gone before the last words left my mouth.

I tried to look out the living room window, but the wraparound porch hid too much. Jesse's room would have a better view—and she might have clothes that would fit me.

I started up the stairs at a run, but by the time I hit the top, I was lucky to be walking. In coyote form, I can trot for hours, but sprinting is different. I just didn't have any more running in me.

Jesse must have heard me because she stuck her head out of her bedroom and then rushed over. “Can I help?”

I looked down to see what caused the consternation in her face. It wasn't my nakedness. She'd grown up with werewolves, and shapeshifters can't afford too much modesty. For the wolves, the change is a slow process and it hurts; if they are tearing up clothing as they change, it just hurts that much worse. Makes them even grumpier than usual—so mostly they take their clothes off first.

No, it wasn't my nakedness; it was the blood. I was covered with it.

Appalled, I looked behind me at the carpet that was stained with my blood all the way up the stairs. “Darn it,” I said. “That's going to be expensive to clean.”

I heard a roar that shook the house and quit worrying about the carpet. I let go of the railing that I'd been using to hold me up and stumbled over to Jesse's window, which was opened wide. She'd pulled the screen off the window already. With the knives still in each hand, I crawled out and down onto the roof of the porch, where I could see what was going on.

The werewolves were badly battered. Ben was crumpled against Adam's SUV and there was a huge dent in the quarter panel just above him.

Darryl circled the fae, his brindled coat fading into the shadows. If he hadn't been moving, I don't know that I'd have seen him at all. Adam perched on the fae's back, his front paws raking through the fronds like a giant cat's, but I couldn't tell how much damage he was doing. Honey and her husband were working as a team. She'd harry the fae with quick leaping nips until he turned to her and her husband would take advantage of its inattention to dive in and rake it with his sword.

From my vantage point, I could hear Peter mutter, “Can't find flesh in all this seaweed.”

“I can't tell if they're winning or losing,” Jesse said as she climbed through the window. She threw her comforter over me and knelt near the edge of the roof.