8
“Well now,” said Zee, cleaning his hands with the gritty orange soap we used to get tough grease and other substances off. “You stepped on a spider-like half-fae creature and got punctured. And the vampire told you to have me check your feet.” He paused. “In a dream.”
“It sounds really stupid when you say it like that,” I told him, in an irritated voice that was meant to cover up the butterflies in my stomach. I suddenly really, really didn’t want him to look at my feet.
He dried his hands off and then looked at me. “I can’t help how it sounds, Liebchen.”
The phone rang, and he gave a hiss of irritation and his eyes flashed with real temper. “I am going to pull that thing out of the wall,” he growled. He looked at Adam and lowered his lids in consideration—the expression made him look like a fiend contemplating the next child he was going to eat.
“You,” he said, “and you.” He looked at Adam and then George. “Go out and answer the phone. Keep the people who come to bother me—”
“Customers?” said Adam dryly.
Zee brushed that away with a flick of his fingers. “Customers. Pests. Nenn sie wie Du willst.”
“Let’s call them customers, please,” I said. “They pay me so I can pay you.”
Zee snorted dismissively and waved his hands at my mate and George. “Go and tell them we are closed for an hour at least.”
I waited... hoped... for Adam to take offense at Zee’s tone. Then maybe I could delay Zee examining my feet.
Adam gave me a shrewd look, jerked his head at George—who was the one who looked stung by Zee’s attitude. When Adam closed the door behind him, it did have a bit of a snap, but he left me alone with Zee anyway.
And that was good, right? Because I needed Zee to look at my feet. I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t want him to do it.
“I cannot do this,” Zee told me with a frown, “without a payment.”
Which was the beginning of negotiations. There were good reasons for the fae to bargain when you asked them for favors. Balance was very important for fae magic, and it ran in their blood and bones the way that the need for success ran in human culture. Despite the shard of hope I felt at his first words, it soon became apparent that Zee was feeling mellow. Or maybe he was worried about my feet, because he didn’t bargain very hard.
As payment for his doctoring, he demanded I tell him everything that had happened, starting with my bruised face and ending with me sitting on the cold concrete floor of the shop with my feet in Zee’s lap while he sat on the short mechanic’s stool.
I’d negotiated so I could leave out the bit about Sherwood because that was pack business and had nothing to do with the mess the vampires were in. I could probably have left out the part about the missing and dead witches—and the dead young man at the grocery store. But Zee was a useful source of information. The more I told him, the better the chances were that if he knew something, he could tell me about it.
“Spiders,” said Zee thoughtfully as he ran a grease-darkened finger over the bottom of my foot.
I had been getting more and more uncomfortable, almost jittery. My hands and butt were too cold from the chill concrete. The garage stank of burnt oil, diesel fuel, and rubber—which it always did, but now it made me feel as though I couldn’t breathe. The overhead lights were too bright. Mostly, I very much didn’t want the old iron-kissed fae to put his hands on my feet. Not at all.
Overcome by a desperate urgency, I pulled one of my feet away, but managed to keep from trying to free the one Zee was holding. Zee’s eyebrow went up—and he tightened his hand around the ankle of the foot he still held.
Adam opened the door and stuck his head in the garage bay. “What’s wrong?” he said sharply. He must have felt my sudden panic.
“Mercy has been infected by a particularly malicious bit of magic,” said Zee clinically. “Next time some fae spider shoves a bit of themselves into her, could you bring her to me right away? It would have been a lot easier to fix right after it happened.”
When I jerked my leg, he kept his hold on my ankle without visible effort.
“I think,” Zee said thoughtfully, “that you and your comrade should clear out the office, lock the door, and put up the ‘Closed’ sign. When you are done, both of you come in here. This will take a bit longer than I had assumed.”
He glanced toward the front of the garage, and the motors that powered the bay doors switched on. The big doors clanged and shivered and closed me in.
—
I didn’t actually see much while Zee was working on my feet because I spent most of the time facedown on the concrete. George held me down with a knee between my shoulders and both hands wrapped around my wrists, which he held in the small of my back.
It wasn’t comfortable at all, the kind of hold that would usually be used on someone Adam felt was really dangerous. But I’d broken free of the first two holds they’d tried. Adam had a leg over the back of my knees and held my feet so I couldn’t kick anyone while Zee worked.
“Certain kinds of fae can reproduce this way; several of those share some characteristics with spiders. Though they like to claim that spiders share characteristics with them,” Zee said as he worked. “Some of them have bodies covered with fine quills designed to break off inside their victim’s flesh.”
The foot he worked on burned, and flashes of electric pain shot up my leg and through my spine and wrapped around my forehead like one of those awful contraptions that black-and-white science fiction and horror movies so love. I screamed.