And the circle broke. The sun brought light, a breeze blew away the last remnant of smoke—and Tilly disappeared with a crack that sounded like a great rock breaking in half.

Ben said, “Get this freaking collar off me. And get me a phone. We need to check on the house. He was in my head you—you nitwits. And he had Harolford like he had me. Harolford and Fiona knew we left the house, left the children, the humans with only Joel to protect them. They knew. And I couldn’t get you to pay attention, to listen to me.” As if to make up for the “freaking” and “nitwits,” he devolved into a solid stream of swear words.

I lost the gist of what he was saying because I was sprinting for Jesse’s car, where I’d left my cell phone.

I had twelve missed calls. I called Lucia on the grounds that she would know what had happened and no one else here would try calling her first. She picked up on the second ring.

“They came,” she said, not waiting for me to say anything. “A woman and a man. They shot Joel—he is fine. One thing that tibicena spirit is good for is that it takes more than a bullet to hurt my Joel. Libby grabbed one of the rifles from your gun safe and, from your upstairs window, she shot the man who had the gun. The female carried him back to their car and they left.”

I sucked in a deep breath of relief and met Adam’s gaze across the twenty yards of driveway—because even as I’d run for my car, Adam had run for the SUV. He, too, had a phone against his ear. I gave him a thumbs-up.

He nodded, then went back to his call.

JAMES WAS GOING TO SURVIVE. ADAM OFFERED THEM all a place in the pack if they wanted it.

James shook his head. “Not that I’m not grateful,” he wheezed. “But I had a couple of hours that felt like a year to contemplate what you-all go through living in Crazytown. Bran invited us to Montana. Said we could take some time up there to catch our breath. Maybe find another good pack in a few months.”

“Or years,” said Nonnie.

James nodded, pointing a finger in her direction.

Kent got to his feet. “Fi and Sven won’t be best pleased with us. If we are going to go, I suggest we go now. We’re packed. I’ll get the car, and Li Qiang and I will get it loaded.”

“Careful,” said James. “That’s what I was doing and then ‘poof,’ I was a rock.”

I called Bran to tell him they were coming, and watched Adam’s face out of the corner of my eye. There was a white line on his cheek from the clenching of his teeth.

I hung up. “He says someone will meet you in Spokane to escort you the rest of the way. That way you aren’t trying to drive the dirt roads in the mountains of Montana in the middle of the night.”

I gave Bran’s number to Nonnie—James’s phone had not survived its time as part of a rock. And I gave her the number of the pack member they would meet in Spokane.

We saw them off. They drove an Accord with a V6. I don’t know what happened to the bug I’d repaired for James.

Once they were gone, we dusted ourselves off and looked at our available rides home.

“My car is fine,” Jesse said cheerfully. “Dad, you and Mercy have got to take better care of your stuff. Do you think that money grows on trees?”

JOEL TOOK A FEW HOURS TO DOWNGRADE FROM HIS tibicena form to the presa Canario. But the more-mortal dog showed no signs of having been shot. A few hours later—without help from Aiden—Joel was able to wear his human self for the rest of the night. Despite Adam’s belief that Joel’s unexpectedly long stint as a human was a result of the time Joel had spent in tibicena form, any number of the pack offered to shoot him again—or get Libby, the sharpshooting heroine of the hour, to do it.

I called Beauclaire and told him most of what happened to Rumpelstiltskin. And warned him that Underhill was amassing power for something.

“Yes,” he said, “we have noticed.”

I almost said, Thanks for the warning, but not thanking the fae is a good general rule for people who want to live a healthy and free life. The same could probably be said for sarcasm.

Instead I said, carefully, “The clues that you gave to me when we talked were instrumental in allowing me to identify Rumpelstiltskin.”

“I am happy that I was of service,” he said.

“May I ask one question?”

“Of course.”

“Why did Rumpelstiltskin’s magic not feel like fae magic to me?”

“He is of an older lineage. Most of them were gone when I first came to the earth—and that was a good long time ago. The reason he survives is probably because of the friendship he developed with Underhill.”

“Friendship?” I said.

“Not all relationships look alike,” he said.

“Indeed,” I agreed. “Are we friends?” I probably should have waited until I’d had a good night’s sleep before calling him, I thought. That was not a safe question.

He laughed. “Perhaps tentative allies? Definitions are not always useful, are they? Mercedes, thank you for dealing with the smoke weaver. We will open our gates at dawn and allow our people to go about their business.”

He had thanked me. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

“Good,” I said.

I called Marsilia next, but she did not pick up the phone. Five minutes later she called Adam.

He told her basically the same story I’d just conveyed to Beauclaire—edited for the audience.

“Ah, that explains Stefan’s sudden improvement,” she told him. “We despaired of his survival the past few nights, but he held on.”

I remembered how bad he had been when I’d seen him in my otherness. “Can we go see him?”

She heard me. “No. He wouldn’t want you to see him this way. I will call you as soon as he is better—or should he worsen again.”

And I had to be satisfied with that.

Like Stefan, Ben didn’t just step back into who he had been before the weaver had taken him. Being in someone else’s power was pretty much a reliving of his worst nightmare. He had four weeks of vacation time built up at work, and he took those and stayed with us.

The goblins found Harolford’s body in a shallow grave near the river. Dead from a silver bullet wound, presumably Libby’s. I asked, but all of the witnesses were pretty sure that Fiona could not have known who it was that shot him.

The goblins did not bring us the body. They texted photos to Adam’s phone. When Adam asked what they’d done with it, Larry the goblin king laughed and said, “Finders keepers,” before he disconnected.

Fiona was still a problem.

We stayed on high alert and bunked up for the three days following the banishing of the smoke weaver. But when Charles called with news that Fiona had been sighted in Wichita, Adam told everyone to go back to normal.

“People can only stay alert for so long,” he told me. “And she is only one werewolf.”

“Charles is only one werewolf,” I told him, and he laughed.

Adam was doing … “better” was the wrong word. More stable was probably closer to the answer. There had been no further appearances of the monster, and when the moon hunt came, Adam wore his wolf’s form just as he usually did.

But I had seen his wolf fading, and I worried. The pack was uneasy, though no violence broke out. Adam still would not open our bond. But he put back on some of the weight he had lost and he did not seem to be getting worse, so I bided my time. I had a date circled on the calendar—and if matters did not change, I was going to have another conversation with Bran.

A month went by. Jesse started school and began looking for an apartment. Aiden started school, too.

We enrolled him in sixth grade, which was a compromise. He would look younger than most of his schoolmates but not so much so as to be an outcast. Tutoring by Jesse and the pack had brought his math skills up to high school level, but his reading skills were below sixth-grade level. The translation spell did not help him read or write in English.

We had none of the paperwork for him, but Adam and I sat down with the school district superintendent and told him the whole story, a heavily edited version of the whole story. We didn’t tell him about the fire, just that we’d found Aiden in Underhill, where he’d been trapped for a very long time. We didn’t tell him that Aiden could burn the school down if he wanted to. I figured that most kids in sixth grade could burn down a school if they wanted to anyway—they would just have to work a little harder at it than Aiden would.

The superintendent agreed that the circumstances were unusual and gave us a paperwork path to follow that would let Aiden start school. We managed to get it done (thanks to Kyle, who knew family law and could make it dance to his tune), and Aiden made it to the first day.

There were a few rough patches the first month of school, but Aiden finally settled in with a group of computer gamers. He still had those moments that reminded me that he was centuries older than he appeared, but mostly he looked happy.

I didn’t visit Stefan, but he called me twice and sounded nearly himself the second time. He said that the hope I’d given him was still helping him cope. I didn’t know what to say to that.

“I didn’t want to lose you,” I said, finally.

“Thank you,” he’d said. And he’d disconnected shortly thereafter.

The pack killed a pair of ghouls who had tried to settle in near Lourdes Medical Center in Pasco. Apparently hospitals are a favorite hunting ground of ghouls. We helped Marsilia roust a couple of itinerant vampires who tried to set up shop in West Richland. Renny started coming to Sunday breakfasts with Mary Jo and struck up an unlikely friendship with Ben, our candidate for wolf most likely to end up in jail. Anna’s ghost waved at me whenever I drove past my old place. I didn’t wave back.

Life happened. And we forgot to worry about Fiona.

14

I COULDN’T SLEEP.

A heavy arm wrapped around my shoulders.

“Feeling restless?” The growl in Adam’s voice made my toes curl—they knew what that roughness meant and they liked it.