“But,” I agreed. “I don’t know if it is only when the witch is present—or if it’s like the vampire thing.”
“I’ll ask around,” Adam told me.
* * *
• • •
I felt awful for the next four days. Nothing specific, just headachy and sore-muscled. When I went to the garage, Tad made me man the front desk while he worked on the cars. On the second day, Zee worked on the cars, too. On the third day, Dale brought Stefan’s bus over—and I stood up to the two overprotective louts and fixed her myself.
There were things more painful than my sore muscles, like the press conference. Luckily, I didn’t have to say much. The reporter was a woman, so she was much more interested in talking to Adam than to me. The debriefing by the FBI wasn’t fun, either. But in my hierarchy of painful things, Paul’s funeral and the tasks surrounding it topped them all.
We had him cremated—and Sherwood went to watch while it was done. We weren’t going to let Paul be slipped out and donated to science while our backs were turned. Sherwood, I think, was more concerned that his body might be stolen and made into a zombie. Maybe it was just paranoia, but it gave us something to focus on.
And there were more zombies.
Our pack got called to Pasco to deal with a zombie cat—a stray this time, so at least there were no crying children. I didn’t go, but apparently there was quite a chase before Ben caught it. And then there was the cow.
They didn’t call us in for the cow until it had already killed two people and injured a handful more. I wish I had gone for that one, but I had to settle for a secondhand account of Warren roping it from the back of his truck at thirty miles an hour. He secured the rope and had the driver hit the brakes. The resulting snap of the rope ripped the rotting head right off.
Adam thought the witch—or witches, because we really weren’t sure—was playing with us.
Adam dealt with the FBI, the Secret Service, and all of the hoopla that happens when you don’t actually die when a bomb goes off. The secret meeting wasn’t so secret anymore, and Bright Future, undeterred by their association with the bomber, held a sit-in at John Dam Plaza, a little park in the middle of Richland. I heard they gave out free ice cream cones.
Ford died in custody. The public was being held in suspense but our new friend in the Secret Service told Adam that no one knew why he died. It wasn’t suicide, but it didn’t look like murder, either.
After a couple of days, the news stories all concentrated on the upcoming meeting between the fae and the government. The bombing sort of faded to the background. After all, all of the bad guys died. They only had a driver’s license photo of Paul, and a few words from Adam about how he was a good and faithful employee—not enough to make a story out of Paul.
Paul only wanted Adam and the pack to know that he was a hero. He wouldn’t have cared, much, about what they said in the news.
Senator Campbell did a series of interviews with both conservative and liberal press. I caught several of those.
The senator was a handsome man—he could have starred in one of the 1950s Westerns that my foster father had been addicted to. He looked like a man you could trust.
He looked me directly in the eye. Or at least he looked in the camera and spoke as if he were talking to me.
“In the view of the fae,” he said, “we broke faith with them when we denied justice to one of their own. But they are willing to step up to the table one more time. It doesn’t matter what you or I feel about the fae, the fact of the matter is that we are less safe from them right this minute than we were before. An agreement will make us safer, make them safer, and make the lives of our children safer.”
Still looking at me through the TV, he said, “This is not a chance that is likely to come again in our generation. And I am not going to let the actions of a homegrown terrorist get in the way of making my country a safer place to live.”
He was an effective speaker. And his opinion was made more weighty by the common knowledge that he was the poster child for the anti-fae groups.
* * *
• • •
While the pack was herding zombies and Adam was dealing with investigators and reporters, Mary Jo, George, and I cleaned out Paul’s apartment. It took us two evenings to pack up his things. It seemed to me that it should take more time to bundle up a person’s life.
“Is his ghost here?” asked Mary Jo as we sorted books into boxes.
I looked around and shook my head. “I haven’t seen anything while we’ve been here.”
She closed up the box she was working on and taped it shut. “I called Renny. We’re going on a date on Saturday.”
“Good,” I said.
“Is it?” she asked pensively. “Pensive” was not an emotion I’d ever seen in Mary Jo.
“He loved me, you know,” she told me. “Paul, I mean. I know you didn’t see the best side of him, but he could be a lot of fun.” She was quiet for a moment, then she said, “I wish I had loved him back.”
She cried—and didn’t push me away when I gave her a hug. George came over and crouched beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder. He said what we’d all been thinking.
“He didn’t have anyone but pack,” he said. Then he rubbed her shoulder gently. “But he did have us, darling. We had his back when things went rough—and he had ours.”
“He saved my life,” I said.
I met Mary Jo’s wet eyes—mostly to avoid looking at Paul’s shade, who had shown up, looking lost, as soon as Mary Jo had acknowledged that he had loved her.
She nodded. “He was not an easy man, Mercy. But he was a good person to have at your back.”
“I know,” I told her sincerely.
“What he wasn’t,” George said, “was sentimental. Back to work, me hearties. Time and tide wait for no one.”
“We’re not sailing anywhere,” said Mary Jo. “So we don’t care about the tide, even if we were anywhere near the ocean. Maybe you should lay off the pirate game for a while. It’s warping your brain.”
“His brain is already warped,” I said.
George grinned at me. “I know you are, but what am I?”
I stuck my tongue out at him and we all got back to work. Paul lingered, touching a book or two as we packed them or fingering the empty bookcase. Sometimes he would reach out and almost caress Mary Jo—but not quite.
This shade wasn’t really Paul, I could tell—not like when he’d talked to me just after he’d died. But his shade made me sad. Sadder. So I didn’t look at him. At it.