Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

up?”
    I looked at him. “I can’t answer your first question. And Zee is almost always grumpy. Don’t let it bother you.”
    â€œI’ll call him,” said Auriele.
    â€œWait before . . .” I hesitated to say anything about her calling Zee, not knowing just how far I could go without triggering the fae’s spell. But Auriele understood and sat back down.
    â€œDid anyone hear anything that might pinpoint where she was calling from?” asked Jesse—who watched several forensic police procedural TV shows regularly.
    â€œNo trains,” Mary Jo said dryly. She pushed the table so she wasn’t pinned anymore. “No water noises. No highway or car sounds. No airplanes. No distinctive church chimes. No dolphins playing in the background.”
    â€œWhich eliminates a lot of places,” said Auriele. “I’m pretty sure it was indoors. I heard a hum that might have been a fluorescent light fixture.”
    â€œI heard echoes, like she was in a room with hard sides,” said Darryl. “Not a huge room, though. It didn’t sound hollow.”
    â€œWhen—” I couldn’t say “she hit him,” because I’d promised not to talk about the fairy queen or Gabriel’s danger to the werewolves. “When Mary Jo heard something, there was a slight scuffing sound,” I said. “Like a chair sliding on cement.” I closed my eyes and thought about the feel of the background sounds.
    â€œThe lack of outdoor noises might mean that she was in a basement instead of just indoors,” said Darryl. “If she’s not from around here, she’d need to acquire someplace secure—not a hotel. Rentals are hard to find in the area right now—one of my coworkers was complaining about it. If Phin is dead, maybe the fae is using his house.”
    â€œHe lived in an apartment, one of the newer ones in West Pasco—and he has nosy neighbors.” I got up and got a dishcloth and wet it down so I could clean up the cocoa.
    â€œThe bookstore, then,” said Auriele. She took the cloth and tossed it to Mary Jo. “Your mess, you clean it up.”
    Mary Jo’s shoulders were tight, but she started to clean up without protest.
    â€œSam and I were in the bookstore’s basement tonight,” I said. “But the lighting there is incandescent—no buzzing. Beyond that, the sound was wrong. There were a lot of books down there, so it wasn’t as echo-y. The room in the phone call sounded emptier.”
    â€œYou were at the bookstore? Did you catch a scent?” Ben had been dozing, I thought. Even after he spoke, his eyes were closed. The stress of his wounds and the full belly from Warren’s mysterious ice chest of roasts would work like a narcotic.
    â€œDo you need to go downstairs and sleep?” I asked.
    â€œNo, I’m fine. Did you find out anything?”
    â€œWe picked up Phin’s scent—and four other fae who had been in there. One of them, some kind of forest fae, came back, and Sam killed it. There was another forest fae, a female we didn’t meet. She was the same kind as the one Sam killed—I’m pretty sure of it. And then there was one who smelled of swamps and wet things who hopefully is her knight of the water. The fewer allies she has, the happier I am. I met the fourth, who left traces in the bookstore earlier today . . . I guess that’s yesterday now. She looked like a happy-grandmother type. I couldn’t tell what she was.”
    â€œWas it her?” asked Ben, and nodded at the phone.
    â€œI can’t answer that,” I told him.
    â€œBut you can answer me,” said Jesse. “Was the old woman the one who took Gabriel?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. I closed my eyes and thought about what had happened and when. “No. She was looking through Phin’s records, trying to find out who Phin gave something to. The bad guys had already tried to kill me once—if you didn’t pick up on it, the incident at my garage yesterday morning was aimed at me. They knew where they were looking.” Maybe if I could have talked to her, we’d know more about what it was that the fairy queen wanted.
    â€œShe’s not smart, this fairy queen,” said Ben. “If she were, she’d have known that you weren’t human.”
    â€œI don’t exactly advertise,” I told him. “And, other than my