Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

gauged Sam for his reaction.
    Sam’s stance—intent on my words—told me that he was making the leap with me. Or at least his wolf was. Just how smart was the wolf half of the werewolf?
    â€œBut things didn’t go quite as they planned. I disarmed Heart right off the bat. They could hardly shoot me while I held the gun I was supposed to be shot with, right? But when Adam showed up, then the police, they decided to try to create a little chaos: a feeding frenzy fueled by magic. But Zee took care of that—and spotted their shooter. They had to run from Ben and leave the field.”
    I rubbed my damp palms on my thighs. “It sounds far-fetched, I know. But there is the book and the phone call to Tad that ties me to the fae who came into Phin’s bookshop and destroyed it. They beat Phin until he bled, then took off with him. Violence and fae—just like this morning. And the only common factor is me. Coincidences happen, I know. Maybe I’m just egocentric, thinking it’s all about me.”
    I waited in the bookstore until I realized I was waiting for Samuel to say something. But Samuel wasn’t here: it was just Sam and me.
    â€œOkay, that’s enough make-believe for me.” I dusted off my jeans. I’d have been hoping that I was wrong, but the way my life had been going the past year—this almost sounded tame. No vampires or ghosts, right? No Gray Lords who terrified even other fae. If I was wrong, I was afraid that it was only because the reality was even worse. “Let’s keep looking. I’d feel really dumb if Phin turns out to be hidden in the basement.”
    Sam found a door behind about three bookcases. Happily, it opened away from us, so we just had to scramble over the top to drop to a landing. Straight ahead was a brick wall; to the right of the door we’d entered through was a set of narrow and steep stairs that led down into a pit of inky blackness: the bookstore had a basement.
    I didn’t think that anyone would notice if I turned on the lights here because I was pretty sure that there weren’t any windows in the basement. I’d have noticed.
    It took me a minute to find the light switch. Sam, apparently unfazed by the darkness, had already continued down on his own when my hand found the right place.
    With light to guide my way, I could see that the basement was mostly a storage facility with cardboard boxes set in piles. It reminded me of the hospital’s X-ray storage room in that there was obvious order to the stacks. The ceiling height was deeper than usual for basements this near the river, but I could detect no trace of dampness.
    Just to the right of the stairway, a section had been used as an office. A Persian rug delineated the space and stretched out beneath an old-fashioned oak desk complete with clamp-on desk lamp. There was a large framed oil painting of an English-type garden placed just in front of the desk, where someone sitting might use it as a mock window.
    At one time the desk had held a computer monitor. I could tell because the monitor was lying in pieces on the cement floor next to the rug. There were more broken things on the ground—what looked to be the remains of a scentless jar candle, a mug that might have held the pens and pencils that had scattered when they hit the cement, and an office chair minus a wheel and the backrest.
    â€œBe careful,” I told Sam. “You’ll end up with glass in your paws.”
    The stack of boxes nearest the desk was the only one that had been disturbed. Five or six boxes had been knocked around, spilling their contents on the floor.
    â€œNo blood here,” I told him, and tried not to be relieved. I did not want to discover Phin’s body. Not while I was alone with Sam, the wolf. “They were just looking—and not very seriously at that. Maybe they were interrupted, or this is how far they got when Phin finally broke down and started to talk.”
    â€œFee fie foe feral,” said a man’s voice, hitting my ears like the blast of a barge’s horn. “I smell the blood of a little girl.” He rhymed “girl” with “feral,” something only possible because of his cockney-accented English. “Be she hot, be she cold, I’ll wager this, me lads—she won’t get more old.”
    All I could see was two feet on the stairs. I’d had no warning that the man was in the building at