Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

leave me.”
    â€œDid you tell him to kill Chad?” I asked coolly, as if the answer were mere curiosity.
    â€œAh, now, that is the question.” He shrugged. “That’s why I need you. No. He ruined my game. If he’d done as I’d told him, you’d have brought yourself here and given yourself to me to spare your friends. He made them run. It took me half the day to find them. They didn’t want to come with me—and ... Well, you saw my poor Amber.”
    I didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to ask the next question. But I needed to know what he’d done to Amber. “What did you eat that let you make zombies?”
    â€œOh, she’s not a zombie,” he told me. “I’ve seen zombies three centuries old that look almost as fresh as a day-old corpse. They’re passed down in their families like the treasures they are. I’m afraid I’ll have to get rid of Amber’s body in a week or so unless I put her in the freezer. But witches need knowledge as well as power—and they’re more trouble to keep than they are worth. No. This is something I learned from Carson—I trust Catherine or John told you about Carson. Interesting that one murder left him unable to do anything with his powers, when I—who you’ll have to trust when I tell you that I’ve done much, much worse than a mere larcenous homicide—had no trouble using what I took from him. Perhaps his trouble was psychosomatic, do you think?”
    â€œYou told me how you keep Catherine and John,” I said. “How are you keeping Amber?”
    He smiled at Chad, who was standing as far from his father as he could get. He looked fragile and scared. “She stayed to protect her son.” He looked back at me. “Any more questions?”
    â€œNot right now.”
    â€œFine—oh, and I’ve seen to it that John won’t be coming back to visit you anytime soon. And Catherine, I think, is best kept away, too.” He closed the door gently behind him. The stairs creaked under his feet as he left.
    When he was gone, I said, “Oakman, do you know when the sun goes down?”
    The fae, once more sprawled on the cement floor of his cage, turned his head to me. “Yes.”
    â€œWill you tell me?”
    There was a long pause. “I will tell you.”
    Corban stumbled forward a step and swayed a little, blinking rapidly. Blackwood had released him.
    He took a deep, shaky breath, then turned urgently to Chad and began signing.
    â€œI don’t know how much Chad caught of what’s going on ... too much. Too much. But ignorance might get him killed.”
    It took me a second to realize he was talking to me—his whole body was focused on his son. When he was finished, Chad—who still was keeping a lot of space between them—began to sign back.
    While watching his son’s hands, Corban asked me, “How much do you know about vampires? Do we have any chance of getting out of here?”
    â€œMercy will grant me freedom this Harvest season,” said the oakman hoarsely. In English this time.
    â€œI will if I can,” I told him. “But I don’t know that it’ll happen.”
    â€œThe oak told me,” he said, as if that should make it as real as if it had already happened. “It is not a terribly old tree, but it was very angry with the vampire, so it stretched itself. I hope it has not... doneitselfpermanentharm.” His words tumbled over each other and lost consonants. He turned his head away from me and sighed wearily.
    â€œAre oaks so trustworthy?” I asked.
    â€œUsed to be,” he told me. “Once.”
    When he didn’t say anything more, I told Corban the most important part of what I knew about the monster who held us. “You can kill a vampire with a wooden stake through the heart, or by cutting off his head, drowning him in holy water—which is impractical unless you have a swimming pool and a priest who will bless it—direct sunlight, or fire. I’m told it’s better if you combine a couple of methods.”
    â€œWhat about garlic?”
    I shook my head. “Nope. Though a vampire I know told me that given a victim who smells like garlic and one that doesn’t, most of them will pick the one who doesn’t. Not that we have access to garlic or wooden stakes.”
    â€œI know about the sunlight—who doesn’t? But it