The weaver nodded slowly. “I understand. Now your truth?”
He looked small and powerless—an object of pity.
I turned my head to watch Nonnie Palsic pull James up to a sitting position. Saw him turn his head and heard his voice, soft and rough, say, “Nonnie.”
I thought of Anna and Dennis, of Ben who had had all the trauma he ever needed in his life well before the weaver had bitten him, of Stefan helpless—bound and tortured. Of a young hitchhiker and Lincoln, a wolf I didn’t know but whom James Palsic had mourned.
“Your name,” I said, “is Rumpelstiltskin.” And then, because it felt like the right thing to do, I said it two more times, pronouncing it carefully each time. “Rumpelstiltskin. Rumpelstiltskin.”
In the story, the little man danced about in a rage until the earth opened up beneath his feet and swallowed him, never to be heard from again. Today, the little weaver’s rage was spent, but the earth still opened up and swallowed him, shaking under my feet and sending me staggering forward. If Adam’s strong hand had not grabbed my wrist, I might have fallen in as well.
That was twice he’d stopped me from falling to my doom. Or at least to my harm. Adam was good at saving people other than himself.
The earth closed again with a final crack, leaving only a thin break in the asphalt of the circular drive where the hole had been.
A voice by my elbow said, “That was fun.”
I looked down at Tilly without favor. I swallowed the first three things I wanted to say because none of them would have been smart. Duplicitous, sneaky, and horrible she might be. But she was unimaginably powerful, and old, and we still had to hold to our bargain, another bargain, to make Aiden available to her.
Adam was watching me, letting me take point on this one because I had just demonstrated that I had a little more information than he did.
“I wish you hadn’t given him the answer to his question quite as thoroughly as you did,” she continued when I didn’t say anything. “He’s not going to be as fun a playmate as he usually is, at least not for a while. He knows how to hold a grudge.”
“How is it that you are able to come here?” I asked, because it was worrisome. There was a limit to the distance she could travel from one of her doorways—or so I had been led to believe. “There is no door to your realm near this place.”
“No,” she agreed sadly. “But he drew this circle we stand in with power he got from me.” She frowned up at me. “I did not intend for you to figure that out.”
“I imagine not,” I told her.
“Mercedes Thompson Hauptman,” she purred with one of her mercurial mood changes. “You are more interesting than I imagined.”
And the circle broke. The sun brought light, a breeze blew away the last remnant of smoke—and Tilly disappeared with a crack that sounded like a great rock breaking in half.
Ben said, “Get this freaking collar off me. And get me a phone. We need to check on the house. He was in my head you—you nitwits. And he had Harolford like he had me. Harolford and Fiona knew we left the house, left the children, the humans with only Joel to protect them. They knew. And I couldn’t get you to pay attention, to listen to me.” As if to make up for the “freaking” and “nitwits,” he devolved into a solid stream of swear words.
I lost the gist of what he was saying because I was sprinting for Jesse’s car, where I’d left my cell phone.
I had twelve missed calls. I called Lucia on the grounds that she would know what had happened and no one else here would try calling her first. She picked up on the second ring.
“They came,” she said, not waiting for me to say anything. “A woman and a man. They shot Joel—he is fine. One thing that tibicena spirit is good for is that it takes more than a bullet to hurt my Joel. Libby grabbed one of the rifles from your gun safe and, from your upstairs window, she shot the man who had the gun. The female carried him back to their car and they left.”
I sucked in a deep breath of relief and met Adam’s gaze across the twenty yards of driveway—because even as I’d run for my car, Adam had run for the SUV. He, too, had a phone against his ear. I gave him a thumbs-up.
He nodded, then went back to his call.
JAMES WAS GOING TO SURVIVE. ADAM OFFERED THEM all a place in the pack if they wanted it.
James shook his head. “Not that I’m not grateful,” he wheezed. “But I had a couple of hours that felt like a year to contemplate what you-all go through living in Crazytown. Bran invited us to Montana. Said we could take some time up there to catch our breath. Maybe find another good pack in a few months.”
“Or years,” said Nonnie.
James nodded, pointing a finger in her direction.
Kent got to his feet. “Fi and Sven won’t be best pleased with us. If we are going to go, I suggest we go now. We’re packed. I’ll get the car, and Li Qiang and I will get it loaded.”
“Careful,” said James. “That’s what I was doing and then ‘poof,’ I was a rock.”
I called Bran to tell him they were coming, and watched Adam’s face out of the corner of my eye. There was a white line on his cheek from the clenching of his teeth.
I hung up. “He says someone will meet you in Spokane to escort you the rest of the way. That way you aren’t trying to drive the dirt roads in the mountains of Montana in the middle of the night.”
I gave Bran’s number to Nonnie—James’s phone had not survived its time as part of a rock. And I gave her the number of the pack member they would meet in Spokane.
We saw them off. They drove an Accord with a V6. I don’t know what happened to the bug I’d repaired for James.
Once they were gone, we dusted ourselves off and looked at our available rides home.
“My car is fine,” Jesse said cheerfully. “Dad, you and Mercy have got to take better care of your stuff. Do you think that money grows on trees?”
JOEL TOOK A FEW HOURS TO DOWNGRADE FROM HIS tibicena form to the presa Canario. But the more-mortal dog showed no signs of having been shot. A few hours later—without help from Aiden—Joel was able to wear his human self for the rest of the night. Despite Adam’s belief that Joel’s unexpectedly long stint as a human was a result of the time Joel had spent in tibicena form, any number of the pack offered to shoot him again—or get Libby, the sharpshooting heroine of the hour, to do it.
I called Beauclaire and told him most of what happened to Rumpelstiltskin. And warned him that Underhill was amassing power for something.
“Yes,” he said, “we have noticed.”
I almost said, Thanks for the warning, but not thanking the fae is a good general rule for people who want to live a healthy and free life. The same could probably be said for sarcasm.
Instead I said, carefully, “The clues that you gave to me when we talked were instrumental in allowing me to identify Rumpelstiltskin.”
“I am happy that I was of service,” he said.
“May I ask one question?”
“Of course.”
“Why did Rumpelstiltskin’s magic not feel like fae magic to me?”
“He is of an older lineage. Most of them were gone when I first came to the earth—and that was a good long time ago. The reason he survives is probably because of the friendship he developed with Underhill.”