“The Hardestys value family loyalty, Mercy,” said Elizaveta. “Those who betrayed their blood—they would never be welcomed to the Hardestys.” She looked at Adam. “I assume you have been looking for them.”

Adam nodded. “We think they drove an RV here and were staying in it at an RV park for a while. They left the park two days before we discovered the bodies at your house, and they haven’t been back since.”

“Frustrating,” I said.

Adam nodded at me. “How can we kill them if we can’t find them?”

Elizaveta watched him with a little smile. “They will find us, my darling,” she murmured. Then she said briskly, “Yes, well, all of this information you have now. I am an old woman and I need my rest after my long journey. I will be on my way.”

“Let us know which hotel you’re staying at,” Adam said. “We’ll keep a patrol on it.”

She straightened and looked a little less old and fragile. “Thank you, darling boy. That is very kind.”

Did Adam mean for the patrol to watch over her, or just watch her? Probably best not to ask that right this minute.

“I took a taxi here,” she said. “Might I have someone to drive me to a hotel?”

“I’ll do it,” I volunteered. “I need to pick up some more eggs anyway.”

Adam tensed, shook his head—not like he was indicating a negative, more like he was shedding something off. “Bad things happen when you go by yourself to get eggs, Mercy. I’ll take her and pick up whatever groceries you need on the way back.”

* * *

? ? ?

I didn’t talk to Adam about Elizaveta until he closed our bedroom door behind him that night.

“The talks are still on,” he told me as he unbuttoned his shirt. “The president was going to pull the plug, but apparently Campbell and a bipartisan group of senators cornered him in his office and convinced him.”

“He’s coming up for election next year,” I said. “He’s worried about how this will look.”

Adam nodded and stripped out of his shirt. He made an irritated sound because he’d forgotten to unbutton the cuffs. I started over to help him out of his shirt manacles—but he solved the problem by ripping off the sleeves. He hadn’t looked particularly upset until that point—but he didn’t usually destroy bespoke shirts casually, either.

“I’m sorry about Elizaveta,” I said.

He ripped off the rest of his shirt and tossed it into the garbage bin, just inside our bathroom door. He then carefully unbuttoned the cuffs and threw them away, too. With his back to me, he put a hand on either side of the bathroom door and bowed his head.

“I wanted her to have a good explanation,” he said.

“I know,” I told him.

“I wanted her to be . . . different than she is.”

“I know,” I said.

He looked at me, his face stark. “She was one of mine,” he said.

I slid into his arms and wrapped mine around his waist. “You can’t force people to make the right choice, Adam.”

He drew in a breath. “Every time I have ever asked her for help, she has come. She came to face down Bonarata because I asked her to.”

I nodded and just held him. Sometimes there is no way to make things better. There is only making it through. I couldn’t make Adam not hurt; I could only let him know he wasn’t alone.

* * *

? ? ?

The next day, as I put together a Jetta that someone had tried to rewire themselves, I thought about connections. Making a car run smoothly was all about connections: fuel, air, coolant, electric.

I wondered if I was becoming a conspiracy theorist because the web I was building from bits and pieces was truly Byzantine. And if all the things that seemed to be connected were, then a family of witches I’d never heard of had been responsible for an awful lot of chaos in my life for the last four years or more.

Maybe things would become more clear when Stefan got back to me with information about Frost.

I finished the Jetta and pulled a sputtering Rabbit into the garage. It died about four feet from where I needed it to be.

“You need help with that?” asked Zee as I got out of the car.

“Nope,” I said.

“Gut,” said Zee shortly. “The boy and I are busy.”

I laughed and pushed the Rabbit until it was rolling, then hopped in to hit the brakes before it traveled too far. Pushing cars wasn’t a new thing for me. I propped up the hood and contemplated the engine compartment. It was surprisingly pristine given the age of the car and left me feeling a little nostalgic for my Rabbit.

My cell phone rang as I pulled the cover off the air filter. The filter material, which should have been whitish but more often in the TriCities was brownish with dust, was an astonishingly bright orange.

Staring at the orange air filter, I answered my cell without checking ID.

“This is Tory Abbot,” said Senator Campbell’s assistant, who smelled like the zombie-making witch. Darn it, “zombie witch” was easier and it flowed off the tongue better—even if it left the impression that the witch was a zombie. So “zombie witch” it was.

“What can I do for you?”

“I have some documents for you to take to the fae. We need a complete list of which fae will be there—names, attributes, and all of that.”

I pulled the phone away from my face and gave it an incredulous look. “Paperwork for the Gray Lords to fill out,” I said slowly. “Huh. That’s an interesting proposition. But they won’t do it.”

“They will if they want a meeting,” he said. “I’ll drop them by your . . . place of business this afternoon.” He said the last as if he just noticed that my place of business was a garage and not, say, a lawyer’s office.

“You can if you want to,” I told him. “But I won’t pass them on.”

“I’m afraid this is nonnegotiable,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell them that the meeting is off. And I’ll tell them why. You can explain to the president and the secretary of state why this meeting that they were so hot to have was canceled by your grandstanding. But maybe they will agree with you. That without some pieces of paper—that your side would have filled with lies if you were the fae—this meeting should not be held. Even though it is the first step in a process that might keep our country from being at war with the fae. You can start, maybe, by informing Senator Campbell.”

A short silence fell. I think he was waiting for me to continue my rant.

“Ms. Hauptman,” Abbot began, “I know that you are overset by the bombing. Maybe you should pass on your duties to someone more experienced and less obstructionist.”

“Okay,” I said. “Give me the name of someone the fae won’t object to.”

“Adam Hauptman,” he said.

“Someone made sure that Adam had a job for this meeting,” I said. “He won’t renege on an agreement he has already made.” I decided I wasn’t really interested in helping him with his hunt for my replacement. “And if you think I am an obstructionist, you should try him. Good luck with your search.”

I hit the red button and went back to the mystery of the Rabbit’s air filter. Experimentally I brought it to my nose because it looked like someone had dusted the whole filter with cheese powder from a macaroni and cheese box. But it didn’t have a smell.

I took an air hose and used it to blow off the filter, half expecting orange powder to fill the air—but nothing happened. The substance looked powdery, but it clung to the filter as if it were glue.

I poked at it with my finger. I was still wearing gloves when I worked, though Adam’s ex-wife was back in Eugene and not around to make little pointed remarks about the grease I couldn’t get out from under my nails. I hated the way my hands sweated in them. But that was made up for by the way my skin was less dry and cracked because I wasn’t using as much caustic soap on them to get the grease off. Christy had done me a favor.

There was no orange residue on my gloves.

“Hey, Zee?” I asked, holding up the filter.

“Was,” he said, perched on the edge of an engine compartment with a limberness that belied his elderly appearance. “I am busy,” he added.

“I have a bright orange air filter,” I singsonged. “Don’t you want to give it a look?”

There was the buzz of hard rubber on cement and Tad slid out from under Zee’s car, a flashlight in his hand. “Orange?” he said.

“Bah,” said Zee. “You’ve distracted the boy, Mercy.”

“What is orange and keeps air from flowing—and why would someone dump that all over an air filter?” I asked.

Tad took the air filter and stared at it. He looked at the Rabbit.

“What was supposed to be wrong with the car?” he asked.

I looked at the repair sheet I’d filled out while I’d been in exile on the front desk. “Sputters and dies,” I said.

“I guess I know why,” Tad said. And then he dropped the filter like it was a hot potato and jumped back.

“Dad?” he said in a semipanicked voice, holding up his hands. The skin on his fingers, where he’d touched the air filter, was blistering and cracking. As I watched, the tips of his fingers blackened.

Zee grabbed Tad’s hands, muttered something foul, and hauled Tad to the sink. I got there just before them and turned the water on full force. Zee held Tad’s hands under the flow of water and then SPOKE.

    Wasser, Freund mir sei,