“You said that she was supposed to be dead,” I said as I wondered who Fiona was working for—and didn’t like the obvious answer much. There were other people who wanted us dead besides the witches. She had been sincere when she told me that Adam and I could take three of our people and leave—so maybe she was here to create a base for herself, a pack independent from the Marrok and too important to his schemes for him to destroy.

“I was assured of her demise five or six years ago,” he agreed. He could remember that I had not glitter-bombed his office when I was fifteen, but he didn’t remember how long ago Fiona had died?

“Did you have her killed?” I asked, remembering the bitterness in Fiona’s voice.

“I would have,” he told me. “But no. She was working for a witch and the deal went bad.”

“Deals with witches frequently go bad,” I muttered. “Exactly so,” he said gently. “You should tell Adam that the Palsics and Chen Li Qiang I would prefer saved if possible. Kent? Other than which pack he is affiliated or not affiliated with, I haven’t heard anything about Kent since the sixties, which I find concerning. Either he is hiding from me, or he has settled down into a boring life with a small blip when he joined the rebels in Galveston.”

“We don’t work for you anymore,” I said dryly. “You can’t just dictate to us.”

“Why am I helping you, then?” he asked equally dryly.

He had a point. And we’d try to do what he asked as far as the Palsics and Chen were concerned. I’d seen Carlos’s face when he talked about Chen. And I’d found myself liking James Palsic. I didn’t know about Nonnie—she hadn’t done or said anything remarkable, but it might be nice to have another woman in the pack. But I’d had to give Bran a hard time about his assumption that we’d obey his orders, if only for form’s sake.

“Okay,” I conceded. “I will inform Adam that you suggest that we should kill Fiona—and her mate?”

“Mate?” Bran asked.

“Harolford,” I told him.

“I’d forgotten about Harolford,” he said. “But by all means kill Harolford, too. Just remember that Fiona is the more dangerous of the two.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “We’ll do our best to absorb the Palsics and Chen into the pack and make up our own minds about Kent.”

“Good girl,” he said, and I could hear the squeak of his chair and knew he was leaning back in it. That was how you always knew he was happy with you.

And if I was pleased about making him happy, I was sure as shooting not going to let him know that.

“So have I solved one of your problems?” he asked.

“Nope,” I told him promptly. “But you’ve told me how you see it—and you have more information than we do. And I know that you are rooting for this experiment—our pack, the fae, and the vampires working together for the good of all—to work, so you are on our side in this. Which means we will take your advice seriously. And that, oh Marrok, makes it easier for us to solve our own problem.”

“Good,” he said, sounding pleased again. Making me think for myself, was he? As long as I thought what he wanted me to think, he liked it when I thought for myself.

“Now, about your problem with Wulfe.” His voice grew darker and arctic.

Just from that tone, I realized that someone had told Bran that Wulfe had been the reason that Bonarata, the king of the vampires (or at least the de facto ruler of the vampires), had captured me and taken me to Europe. Bonarata had asked Wulfe who the most dangerous person in the Tri-Cities was. Wulfe, who has an abysmal sense of humor as well as an almost fae-like ability to lie with the truth, told Bonarata that it was me. I am still not quite sure of the logic that Wulfe used.

“I think you can leave Wulfe to Adam and me,” I said hastily. “He’s just playing, I think. He saved my life. I don’t mean that he’s one of the good guys, but …” I drew in a breath and centered myself.

I didn’t want Bran to come destroy Wulfe, because it would be wrong. He had done nothing, up to this point, that deserved aiming Bran at him. Besides, I tried really hard not to aim Bran at anyone. I had a policy of not using nuclear devices to take out pesky flies because that tended to yield mixed results. I tamped down the small voice that wondered if even Bran could take on Wulfe. I needed Bran to be immortal and unstoppable.

Right this moment, I had to convince Bran not to kill Wulfe.

“I hurt him—badly, I think,” I told Bran. “He was trying to help us for whatever twisted reason guides him—maybe because Marsilia asked him, maybe because he was bored. But he was trying to help us and got caught in the backlash of me trying to lay the spirits of zombies to rest. It broke something inside him.”

Bran muttered something that might have been, “I can break something inside him, too.”

“Bonarata broke him for real a long time ago,” I told Bran. “Wulfe is a wizard and a vampire and a witch.” That last might be a secret. I certainly hadn’t known it before the Night of the Zombies, as Ben liked to call it. But I needed Bran to understand about Wulfe so he didn’t just have him eliminated the way he’d just assigned us to eliminate Fiona. “He has spilled blood for Bonarata and for Marsilia for centuries. Tortured and killed for centuries.”

Into my dramatic pause, Bran said, with palpable irony, “Yes, Mercy, I know.”

“And his witchcraft is white.”

This time the pause was his.

“Exactly,” I said. “He is a lost soul wandering in the darkness …”

“Drivel,” said Bran, who had written that particular line for a rather beautiful song I’d heard him sing once. I think the song was a few centuries old—but he had written it.

“Mawkish sentimentality doesn’t make it untrue,” I told him. And that was a Bran quote as well. One he used both ways—true or untrue—depending upon the circumstances.

“He is dangerous,” I told Bran, “and unpredictable and all of that. But maybe he can be turned into an ally. Adam has made Marsilia an ally.”

“Adam thought Elizaveta was his ally.”

“So did Elizaveta,” I returned. “But that is beside the point.” He took a long breath, and I pictured him holding the bridge of his nose. The breath had that sort of sound to it.

“I will leave him to you and Adam, then,” he said finally. “For now.”

“Thank you,” I said, and he growled at me.

“A third problem,” said Bran. “The creature who escaped Underhill. What you know about him, even with Beauclaire’s additions, is not enough for me to figure out who he is. It may be that I do not know him, or that I only know him through attributes that you haven’t run into.”

“Okay,” I said. I had really, really hoped that Bran could help us with this one. “He has Ben and Stefan,” I reminded Bran.

“I know,” he said gently. “And I would not like to lose either of them. To that end, I have some conjectures that may be useful.”

“Okay,” I said hopefully.

“First—that Beauclaire could not give you the creature’s name. The fae place great store by names. There are a number of fae who protect their names by not allowing others to speak them.”

“Okay, so the name could be important, once we figure out who this creature is. But we are unlikely to find him just by looking for someone hiding his name—because they all do that.”

“Exactly.” He sounded pleased again.

I wasn’t a child anymore. I shouldn’t be happy that he thought I was a good pupil for his Socratic method of teaching.

“I think you should focus on the bargaining part of what Beauclaire told you,” he told me. And now I could hear in his voice that he thought I’d missed something obvious.

“But they all bargain, too,” I said. And maybe I was a little sharp.

“Indeed,” he said. And the patience in his voice made me want to dye all of his underwear purple, though that hadn’t worked out so well the first time I’d tried it.

But I was a grown-up now, so I set aside petty vengeance and thought about what Beauclaire had said about the bargain.

“But not all of the fae had a bargain with Underhill,” I said finally.

My reward for seeing what Bran had seen was him saying, “And someone I know has a door to Underhill in her backyard, and one whom Underhill treasures to knock upon it and ask her to come out.”

I thought about Tilly and sighed. “You don’t happen to have any hints for dealing with a bloodthirsty immortal being with the attention span of a ten-year-old, do you?”

“Feed her sweets,” he said promptly. “Or call Ariana and ask her. But I think something sweet, especially if you bake it yourself, might be a way to coax out whatever information she might have.” He paused and then said, “And treat her like a co-conspirator, not a naughty child who has loosed doom upon the world. She may not be able to tell you much, but she may be useful to you all the same. Something within the boundaries of the bargain she has with him.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.

“And Adam?” I asked him hesitantly. All I had told him about Adam was that Adam had shut down our bond after we’d killed all the witches.

“Blow up the bond,” Bran said. “See what happens.”

And he hung up.

I stared at my phone. I called him back, but he didn’t pick up. I guess he thought that I needed to figure it out. Did he mean that I should try to destroy the bond between Adam and me? How in the world would I do something like that? I didn’t want to do that.

I tried to call him back again. Maybe if I explained that it wasn’t just Adam changing to the wolf involuntarily? It was … what? What did I know? That Adam thought I’d be harmed if the bond between us was open?

What did Adam think it would do to me? Did he think I would get caught up in his madness—assuming he thought that he was becoming a monster? “Argh,” I said in frustration, and hit the red button on the screen.