Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

GARAGE WHEN I got there. The Bug I’d loaned Sylvia was parked where she’d left it, but it was trashed. Someone had pulled the driver’s side door off its hinges, the front window was smashed, and there was blood on the seat of the car.
    Samuel wasn’t through changing.
    â€œStay here,” I told him, and got out of Adam’s truck.
    â€œHe’s not a dog,” Jesse said on the way to the shop.
    â€œI know.” I sighed. “And he’s not going to listen to me anyway. Let’s get this done as fast as possible.”
    Zee had moved the chairs around in the office, pulling them out of their usual line so that three of them were facing one another—all that was missing was a kitchen table. When he saw Jesse with me, he looked a little surprised but pulled out another chair.
    â€œI’m the facilitator,” Jesse explained. “She can talk to me instead of you.”
    I wasn’t surprised to see that Zee’s companion was the older woman from the bookstore—though I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a complete stranger either. She was subtly different from the grandmotherly woman I’d met earlier. The kind of difference that made Little Red Riding Hood say, “What big teeth you have, Grandmother.”
    â€œMercy,” Zee said, “you may call this woman Alicia Brewster. Alicia, this is Mercedes Thompson and”—he paused—“Jesse.”
    He gave me a look. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.
    â€œHaving her here will speed things up,” I said. “When we’re finished, she’s going home.”
    â€œAll right,” he said, and sat down next to Alicia.
    â€œYou came to my grandson’s store looking for him,” the fae woman said to me without acknowledging the introductions. “And to return what you’d borrowed.”
    I looked at Jesse. “When I saw Alicia at Phin’s store, I was trying to bring Phin’s book back to him. He’d called Tad—Zee’s son—to have him ask me to take care of it. It was odd, that phone call, and the fae who’d moved in next door to Phin was odder. By the time I got to the bookstore, I was ready to believe that there was a problem. When I saw Alicia at the counter, and she couldn’t tell me anything about where Phin was or when he was coming back, I decided that I wasn’t going to give her the book to return to him. I also decided that someone needed to see if they could figure out where Phin was.”
    â€œSo you came back at night and looked for him at the store?”
    â€œI thought,” I said to Jesse, “that we were coming here to find out where Gabriel is and how to rescue him.”
    â€œAnd I choose to ask questions of you first so that I may decide how much I want to tell you,” Alicia said.
    That implied heavily that if I chose not to answer her questions, she’d tell us nothing. If she knew anything. I looked at Zee, who shrugged and lifted his hands an inch off his lap—he had no influence with her.
    My other option was to wait for the fairy queen’s call.
    â€œAll right,” I told Jesse. “You already know that Sam and I went to check out the bookstore at night to find out if something happened to Phin. We found that his store had been trashed by a water fae and two forest fae of some sort.”
    â€œThere was a glamour in the store,” said Alicia. “A strong glamour that I couldn’t penetrate, though I knew it was there. I was so afraid that my grandson’s body was lying next to me, and I could not sense it.”
    â€œThere’s a cost for magic,” said Zee, folding his age-spotted hands over his little potbelly. “Glamour has less than most now, but there is still a cost for sight and sound, a cost for physical dimensions. There are few fae with good noses, so less effort is spent there and more on the other senses. Magic works . . .” He glanced my way.
    â€œ ‘Oddly’ is what I usually say,” I told him.
    â€œOddly on Mercedes. Some works fine, some not so well. But she has a keen nose, and that allows her to penetrate glamours. I’ve seen her break through a glamour set by a Gray Lord. This one we are after is no Gray Lord.”
    â€œPhin bled on that floor, Jesse,” I said. “I don’t have much hope that he survived his encounter. But we didn’t find his body. We