Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson, #5)

by Patricia Briggs

Adam laughed and shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said, knowing the other wolf would hear him through the door. “Mercy takes care of herself; I just get to clean up the mess afterward.” If I hadn’t been watching his face, I wouldn’t have seen the twist on his lips as he spoke. As if he didn’t like what he was saying very much.

Oddly, because Adam had been a wolf for longer than I was alive, I accepted him as a werewolf more easily than he did himself. Knowing that I was freaked-out by the greatest gift any wolf could give another wouldn’t surprise him (as it did me), but it would hurt him needlessly. I would adjust in time—I didn’t have any choice if I wanted to keep him.

The trick to going wherever you want unchallenged in a hospital is to walk briskly, nod to the people you know, and ignore the ones you don’t. The nod reassures everyone that you are known, the brisk pace that you have a mission and don’t want to talk. It helped that most of the people in triage knew me.

He slept on the foot of my bed. When I suggested he might be more comfortable in his room, he regarded me steadily with ice-colored eyes. Where does a werewolf sleep? Anywhere he wants to.

“Why is it that all cars are women?” he asked. “Because they’re fussy and demanding,” answered Zee. “Because if they were men, they’d sit around and complain instead of getting the job done,” I told him.

“Might not be able to save you, old son,” Adam said, lying back again and closing his eyes. “But I can buy us a little time to kick you in the butt hard enough you stop thinking about ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’ and start thinking about how much your butt hurts.”

I remembered that I was supposed to be running this. It reminded me in an odd way of the time I’d had to take over my sister’s Girl Scout troop when my mother had been sick. Fourteen preteen girls, a tableful of werewolves—there were certain monstrous similarities.

I didn’t recognize either the number or the area code. Usually, I recognize the number of people who call me in the middle of the night.

“You are overburdened with self-importance,” I told her. “But that is a common condition with the fae.” I was tired, and it was hard to keep to the fine line that kept her from taking the upper hand without enraging her.

I hadn’t been listening for Gabriel—because I thought he was safe. I closed my eyes in momentary despair. Stefan was a vampire; Zee was a fae other fae gave a good deal of respectful space to. Gabriel was a seventeen-year-old with no supernatural powers. He didn’t stand a chance against one of the fae.

She laughed again. “You do that. You just do that, Mercedes Thompson. And if they figure out what you have—and have any inkling that you might know what it is—they will kill you, werewolves or no. They’d kill you to get it, too—and trust me, it is easier to kill you, human, than it is to bother looking for it wherever you have it stashed.” I didn’t doubt that she was telling the truth about the Gray Lords. Fae always tell the truth. They usually respond to taunts, too—which is why I added a smug tone to my voice as I said, “Most especially because you don’t know what it is, either.” “The Silver Borne,” she said. She wasn’t looking for the book. I had no idea what “the silver borne” was, but the book was made of leather and embossed with gold; there wasn’t anything silver about it. I had nothing to bargain with for Gabriel. So

Pack is for comfort when you hurt, I thought, putting my head back down. And for the first time in a long time, maybe the first time ever, I appreciated being a part of one.

“Figure out the results you want and do what you can to get them” was one of Bran’s favorite sayings. Well, then, exactly what results did I want?

Kyle told me that one of the secrets of being a lawyer was never to ask a witness a question you didn’t know the answer to.

For a split second everyone stared at him, as if they couldn’t figure out where all that blood had come from. “Stop the bleeding,” I said. Though I made no move to do it myself. The rat could die for all I cared. “That was a lead bullet. He’ll be fine.” Though he wouldn’t be talking—or challenging Adam—for a while. “When he’s stable, put him in the holding cell, where he can’t do any more harm.” Adam looked at me. “Trust you to bring a gun to a fistfight,” he said with every evidence of admiration. Then he looked at his pack. Our pack. “What she said,” he told them.

There were some awful things about being a werewolf. Lots of them. But there were some okay parts, too—and some that were nice. One of those was knowing that as long as the Alpha was around, you had a safe place to be.

I knew that Samuel—my Samuel who was at that very moment dressing in the backseat—would never stand by and watch a human get hurt. He was the only werewolf I knew who cared that much about mundane humans, just because they were mundane humans. Most werewolves, even the ones who liked being werewolves, actively resented, if not hated, normal people for being what they could no longer be.

“Samuel Cornick,” she said, her eyes catching mine. “Samuel Marrokson, Samuel Branson, Samuel Whitewolf, Samuel Swift-foot, Samuel Deathbringer, Samuel Avenger.”

“And I told Ariana that if she ever needed me, I would come. It was a promise and a threat, though I didn’t mean it that way at the time.” Alicia Brewster—whom Samuel had apparently known as Ariana—hummed three notes and started to talk. “A long time past in a land far from this one,” said Alicia in a storyteller’s voice, “there was a fae daughter who could work magic in silver and so she was named. In a time where fae were dying from cold iron, their magics fading as the One God’s ignorant followers built their churches in our places of power, the metals loved her touch, her magic flourished, and her father grew envious.”

“He was a nasty piece of work,” said Samuel, his eyes on the woman’s wrinkled face that sometimes wore scars on her cheek or at the corner of her eye. “Mercy would call him a real rat-bastard. He was a forest lord whose greatest magic was to command beasts. When the last of the giants—who were beasts controlled by his magic—died, it left him a forest lord with no great power, and he resented it as Ariana’s power grew. When the fae lost their ability to imprint their magic on things—like your walking staff, Mercy—she could still manage it. People found out.” “A great lord of the fae came,” continued Ariana. She didn’t seem to be listening to Samuel, but she waited for him to quit speaking before she started. “He required that she build an abomination—an artifact that would consume the fae magic of his enemies and give it back to him. She refused, but her father accepted and sealed the bargain in blood.”

She stopped talking, and after a moment Samuel picked up the story. “He beat her, and she still refused. His was a magic sort of like the fairy queen’s, in that he could influence others. It might have been more useful, but he could only influence beasts.” “So he turned her into a beast.” Ariana’s vo...

“In those days, the fae’s magic was still strong enough that it was harder to kill them unless you had iron or steel,” said Samuel. He didn’t seem worried about Ariana, but Zee was. Zee had gradually moved off his chair until he was crouched between Jesse and the scarred fae woman. “He used his powers to torture her,” Samuel said. “He had a pair of hounds who were fae hounds. Their howls would drop a stag in its path, and their gaze could scare a man to death. He set them at her every morning for an hour, knowing that as long as he went not one moment more than an hour, she could not die—because that was part of these fear hounds’ magic.”

“She broke,” Ariana said hoarsely. “She broke and followed his will as faithfully as his hounds. She knew nothing but his commands, and she built as he desired, forged it of silver and magic and her blood.” “You didn’t break,” said Samuel confidently. “You fought him every day.”

“You fought, and he called his hounds until his magic failed him because he used it one time too often. I had this story from someone who was there, Ariana. You fought him and stopped, leaving the artifact incomplete.” “It is my story,” she growled, and she turned those black eyes on Samuel. “She failed. She built it.” “Truth belongs to no one,” Samuel told her. “Ariana’s father visited a witch because his magic was insufficient to work his will.” There was something in his voice that made me think that he knew and hated that witch. “He paid the price she demanded for a spell that combined witchcraft with his magic.” “His right hand,” said Ariana.

“I think he wanted to call his hounds,” Samuel said. “But they had strayed too far for him to influence. He got something quite different.” “Werewolves,” said Ariana, then she turned her back to us, hunching her shoulders. I saw that there were scars on her back, too. “We attacked because we had to,” Samuel said gently. “But my father was stronger than we were, and resisted. He killed her father. We stopped, but she was so badly hurt. A human would have died or been reborn as one of us. She only suffered.” “You doctored her,” I said. “You helped her heal. You saved her.” Ariana crumpled—and Samuel leaped over all of us and caught her before she hit the floor. Her body was limp, her eyes closed, and the scars were hidden safely behind her glamour again. “Did I?” Samuel asked, looking down at her with his heart in his eyes.

“The scar on the top of her shoulder was one I gave her.” Hot damn, I thought, watching him. Hot damn, Charles. I found something for Samuel to live for. Samuel had been upstairs with Adam when the fairy queen called to tell us what she was looking for. Silver Borne.

“You saved her,” I told him. “And you loved her.” “She didn’t know, did she?” said Jesse, sounding as caught up in the story as Ariana had been. “You doctored her up, and she fell for you—and you couldn’t tell her what you were. That’s really romantic, Doc.” “And tragic,” said Zee sourly.

“Zee said she wants the Silver Borne,” Ariana said. “That is the object of power I built for my father—although it never quite worked as the one who commissioned it would have liked. For many years I thought I had destroyed all my magic by making it.” She closed her eyes and smiled. “I lived as a human, except for my long life span. I married, had children . .

“Right. It’s a very old thing, and many of its owners have died in various ways. The fire thing came later.” Her face grew contemplative. “And quite spectacularly.” “Aren’t you its owner?” Jesse asked. “Not if I want to keep my magic—I’m only its maker. That’s why it’s called the Silver Borne.” “Ariana means silver in Welsh.”

Fairy prisoners can be rescued by stealth, by battle, or by bargaining.”

“It can be a contest—usually musical, because fairy queens tend to be musically talented. But there are stories of footraces or swimming contests. My father has a wonderful old song about a young man who challenged a fairy to an eating contest and won.”

“I’ve seen your scars,” he said. “I am a doctor and a werewolf. I saw those wounds when they were new and raw—scars do not bother me. They are the laurels of the survivor.”

“I can hold it for about an hour,” Zee told us. “Ariana can use the stone to find the way back to me. If you see the light begin to flicker, it means I am at the end of my strength, and you need to get back here. So long as this door is open, the time in the Elphame will sync with the time outside. If this door closes, you might get out, but I don’t know when you’ll find yourselves if you do.”

The floors were white marble shot with gray and silver, and pillars of green jade rose gracefully to support an arching ceiling that would not have looked out of place at the Notre Dame Cathedral. Silver trees with jade leaves grew out of the marble floor and shivered, disturbed by a wind I could not feel. When the leaves knocked together, they chimed musically. Graceful benches carved out of pale and dark woods, like a wooden chess set, were placed artfully around the room, occupied by lovely women and beautiful men, who all looked at us when we entered the room. At the far side of the hall there was a raised dais with a silver throne, delicately made and decorated with gems of green and red, each as big as my hand.

“Go ahead,” said Bran. “He would give anything for you to touch it again.” “Mine,” I said. “Mine.” But I still didn’t touch it. With that superior humor he occasionally used, which made me want to hit him every time, Bran said, “I’m sure he can find someone else who wants it.” I grabbed it with both hands—and not because I was worried there would be someone else, no matter what Bran thought. But because we belonged together, Adam bound to me, me to him. I loved it when he let me make him laugh—he was a serious man by nature and weighed down by the responsibility he held. I knew he would never leave me, never let me down—because the man had never abandoned anything in his long life. If I hadn’t taken the gold rope of our bond, I knew Adam would have sat on me and hog-tied me with it. I liked that. A lot.

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.