Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson, #10)

by Patricia Briggs

I DIED FIRST, SO I MADE COOKIES.

“Stop and Rob” was more of a general term for a twenty-four-hour gas station and convenience store, a sobriquet earned in the days when the night-shift clerk had been left on his or her own with a till full of thousands of dollars.

“And, Captain Larson,” I said, addressing Adam—my mate had taken the name from Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf—“you can have gold, and you can have grog. You go after another woman, and you’ll be pulling back a stub.”

“We were told you were the most dangerous person in the Tri-Cities and gave you the courtesy of treating you as such.”

“What idiot told you I was the most dangerous person in the Tri-Cities?”

“Wulfe is subtle, and he often gives correct answers that lead to the wrong conclusions. Someone should have broken him of that habit a long time ago.”

“So why does Wulfe think you are so powerful?” he asked, an edge in his voice.

Who are you, Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman, and why did Wulfe tell me that you were the power we should contact to begin negotiations in the Tri-Cities?”

The vampires from my neck of the woods hated and feared what I was. The walkers, the children of the ancient ones, hunted down a lot of vampires in the American frontier during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They ultimately failed, and the vampires exterminated most of my kind.

“Why did you put Mercy forth as the most powerful of us?” asked Adam tersely. Wulfe’s silly grin returned. “Because it was funny.” He sobered. “Because it was true.” He looked at Marsilia. “Because if I’d answered the question the way he meant it, he’d have taken Adam. And he would have killed Adam, he couldn’t have helped himself. Mercy . . . he won’t see the threat Mercy is until she has his head on a pike. He doesn’t understand that kind of strength. He cannot use his most powerful weapons on her because of what she is, and he has no experience to understand what she is.”

I knew a little bit about Prague. The first thing that came to mind was that Prague citizens had a habit of throwing powerful officials out of windows—the Second Defenestration of Prague began the Thirty Years War in 1618. There wasn’t another capital city with a First Defenestration that I knew of, let alone a second one. Prague was full of my kind of people.

I’m asleep with my face plastered against the top of a metal table. Being sophisticated like this just comes naturally to me—what can I say?

“A bus,” murmured Marsilia. “At least she never hit one of mine with a bus. I wonder if it was a mark of respect—or the opposite. It doesn’t do to underestimate Mercedes, Jacob, something that I had to learn, too. Did she give you the spiel she likes to bring out now and again about how she’s mostly no more powerful than the average human? It is a most effective speech, because I think she actually believes it.”

“Thankfully, most of the Gray Lords agree with you,” Adam said. “They had locked themselves in their fortress. But the fae are not vampires or werewolves, who can live in peace with their brethren.” His wolf laughed at that. Fae living together in peace? Werewolves maybe, if the Marrok were there to bang heads together. Vampires? Still, one must flatter one’s host, and the vampires were better, generally, at living together than the fae were.

“But now they have thoroughly schooled their hosts in exactly how scary, how powerful they really are. How could they reestablish communications after that?” He gave Adam a doubtful look, clearly indicating he didn’t think Adam was up to the task. “I don’t think you understand just what Adam is to the humans,” Marsilia said. “He was a celebrity werewolf almost from the first moment the werewolves came out. He’s good to look at, and he understands how to walk in the halls of power. He was respected by the military-industrial complex of the US before it was known that he was a werewolf. He was a person trusted by high-level military and political people. So he helped to weave relationships between the werewolves and humans.” Here Marsilia paused to smile wryly. “And then Mercy took a handful of Adam’s pack and killed a troll to save the humans. They risked their lives and were hurt in a battle they could have avoided. But they put themselves between the fae bad guys and the humans and turned themselves into heroes. They are celebrities.” “Stupid of us,” Adam said. “Because it gave the Gray Lords an idea.” “You were set up,” Bonarata said sitting forward. In a hushed, power-filled voice, he said, “They set you up. Set you up to be a hero, pretended to be afraid of you so that the humans would believe you could make the fae behave.”

“The fact is,” Adam said, addressing the issue at hand, “no one believes the fae are afraid of me. Not the fae. Not the humans. Certainly not me. What they believe, because we have done it, is that we will fight to the death to protect the humans in our territory. But, I can tell you that if a fae steps wrong in my city, I won’t have to lift a finger to destroy him, because the fae themselves will do it for me. We have a treaty signed in blood to that effect.”

Matt Smith (who is not the Doctor) and Adam

“Adam of the Columbia Basin,”

Belief is the most powerful magic of all.

I’m a mechanic; I fix things that are broken. I turn into a thirty-five-pound coyote. I have powerful friends. But when it comes right down to it, my real superpower is chaos.

Wulfe, aka the Wizard, a powerful, magically talented, and bug-nuts-crazy vampire.