“It’s not time to panic yet,” he told me. “Marsilia thinks we can make a difference. She’s not stupid, and she understands power games. We’ll start with Wulfe and work our way to Marsilia’s real problem. It is possible that there are just things she didn’t want to tell us. Marsilia is not beyond being manipulative for her own ends.”
“Keep an open mind?” I said.
He smiled at me. “Usually works better at this stage of the game.”
4
We pulled in to find lights on at home. I’d been looking forward to going directly to bed, though it had been unlikely Jesse would have gone to bed before she found out what happened tonight.
Adam parked in our usual spot, looked at the cars, and said, “Looks like Jesse has friends over.”
One of the cars belonged to Jesse’s best friend, Izzy, and the other was Tad’s. Looking at Tad’s car, I sighed theatrically.
Adam raised an eyebrow.
“I miss Tad,” I told him mournfully. “Zee scared away the last assistant I hired before he’d worked a full shift.”
Four weeks, three people who no longer wanted to work for me. I really regretted the first two.
The last one I was pretty sure I’d have had to fire in a few days anyway, because he didn’t know how to fix things without directions. People like that don’t make good mechanics. They can work at a new shop, where all they have to do is replace the part that a computer tells them needs to be replaced.
But working on old cars is generally a matter of understanding why cars run and what can interfere with that. Fixing them can be quirky. I have used bread tabs and dental floss when the new parts don’t fit a forty-year-old car the way they would have fit the car when it was new.
“If Zee is going to scare all of your help away, you should make him hire the next one,” Adam told me, not for the first time.
Tad, my former assistant and Zee’s son, had taken a new job.
“I have to take it,” Tad had assured me earnestly when he’d turned in his notice, which was handwritten on the back of a shop receipt. “They were very persuasive—and it comes with a free education. If I don’t take it, I might have a partial college education forever and be stuck in a job like this.”
Tad had once had a full-ride scholarship to an Ivy League university back East. He’d left it unfinished and never told me why. More interestingly, he’d never told Zee why, either.
I thought that Tad hadn’t talked to me because he was worried I might tell his dad, which was sound reasoning. I didn’t think he was worried about what I’d do. But if I ever found out who had sent our Tad home with his optimistically sunny view of the world ripped away as if it had never been there... maybe he was worried about what I’d do, too. I might not be a powerful fae like his father, but I was pretty good at revenge.
When he’d left me the first time, finding a good assistant to man the phones, do the billing, and help out in the shop hadn’t been too difficult. But then Zee had only been coming in now and then when I got behind or he got bored. Since matters had heated up around the Tri-Cities, Zee came every day.
“To keep an eye on things,” he’d told me.
To keep a watch out for Tad and me, I understood. He wasn’t unhappy that Tad had taken a new job, under the circumstances, but he was old and cranky and had very little patience. It took more than a few weeks to see through the crusty interior to the (very small and well-hidden) kindness beneath. I hoped I could find someone before I woke up one day to discover I was the new assistant.
I glanced at Jesse’s car as we walked by it, and I took stock of it reflexively. It still needed a new paint job, but we’d sprayed the exposed metal with an undercoat that would stop the rust even if it gave the old car a somewhat leprous appearance. There were no new dings, no key marks, no spray paint.
As the daughter of the local Alpha, Jesse had watched her world get smaller and smaller as our enemies had grown more numerous and more powerful. She was human and a target for anyone who wanted to attack our pack.
Jesse had altered her plans to go to school in Seattle on her own, knowing that we could no longer spare the manpower to give her the protection she’d need living in a different city. There was a pack in Seattle, but since we had been separated from the Marrok’s care, they could not help us. Jesse had also turned down her best friend’s offer to co-rent an apartment next to the local Washington State University campus because she was afraid that our pack trouble would affect Izzy, too.
It wasn’t just supernatural attacks she had to deal with. Adam was a celebrity, local and otherwise. And everyone in the Tri-Cities knew him and his family (Jesse and me) by sight.
The first week of classes, a group of students organized by the anti-supernatural organization Bright Future had begun following her around with protest signs everywhere she went. While they were doing that, someone vandalized her car with a can of spray paint. Parking lot cameras caught an unhelpful image of a hooded figure in jeans and tennis shoes.
Jesse told us about the car because she hadn’t been able to get the paint off before she had to come home. But Izzy, who had been witness to some of the rest of the harassment, called Tad and told him about all of it.
Tad showed up while I was still trying to get the spray paint off. I know a few ways to get paint off, but it’s tricky to do that without removing the car paint, too. Tad was better at it than I was, but when we’d finished, a new paint job was inevitable. I’d called and made arrangements, but my painter does show cars and was a couple of months out.
The next morning, Tad was waiting next to Jesse’s car when she came out to drive to school. The ensuing argument got pretty heated. I was in the living room, but my hearing is very good. I didn’t start out deliberately eavesdropping, but I didn’t try to tune it out, either. Adam came in about halfway through the argument, just about when things got interesting.
That’s how we learned that the car had been the tip of the iceberg. The only reason Adam stayed in the house was that when Jesse drove to school, Tad was in the passenger seat.
I don’t know, don’t want to know, what Tad did, but Izzy told me that the people with signs only made a brief appearance that morning, and did not reappear again after Tad spoke to them. When the three of them walked to Jesse’s car at the end of the day, it was in the same condition it had been in when they parked it.