Margaret put her hand on Thomas to steady herself and walked a few steps forward so she could take it. “My father told me stories about you,” she said. “He spoke well of you. Mostly.”
Baba Yaga smiled, her teeth white and straight. “How good of him. I speak well of him, too—mostly.” She looked at me. “I like what you’re doing, Coyote girl—even though you had to kill my favorite troll. That’s not your fault, though. I know who sent him. They are claiming they forgot how strong the call of water would be on him—that it was an accident that they lost control. You and I know better.” She held out another card, this one poison green.
“You don’t get to call upon me for a favor,” she said when I took it. She glanced at Adam and licked her lips again. “Not unless you want to share the Russian wolf.”
“No,” I said, closing my fist on the card so it crumpled into a ball.
She cackled again, and said, “If you rip that one up, it will just be harder to read. You should call me for information—I think you might need advice soon. And I will call upon you from time to time. No obligation on either side, of course. You don’t have to tell me anything, nor do I have to tell you anything. But I don’t want a war with the humans, and some idiot among us—or more properly, some idiots among us—are determined to start one. If I know trouble is coming your way, I’ll tell you. Keep that card—you’ll need it soon.”
“All right,” I said slowly. “No promises implied or given.”
She smiled. “Just so.” And she disappeared. No mortar and pestle this time, she was just gone. Her scent lingered behind her.
“That’s all right, then,” said Margaret. “We needed a finale.”
“Don’t trust her,” Zee told me. He looked at Margaret. “You’re probably all right, if you’re cautious.”
“I am,” she said, tucking the card into the small handbag she’d been carrying. “And if I’m not cautious enough, Thomas is happy to point it out.” She looked at me. “Mercy. I really would like a chance to talk to you. Would you mind driving our car?” She gave her hands a rueful look. “I’m getting better, but my hands aren’t trustworthy to drive yet. Thomas, would you mind riding with Adam?”
The answer I saw on Thomas’s face was that he minded very much, but he said, “I can do that.”
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll have a girl’s car and a guy’s car. It’ll be fun.”
Thomas picked Margaret up and put her in her seat, and watched gravely while she belted herself in. He shut her door and handed me the keys.
“Drive carefully,” he said.
“I will,” I promised.
He gave me a stiff nod and strode over to Adam’s SUV.
I didn’t have to adjust the seat to be comfortable. Thomas wasn’t very big to be that scary. I took a moment to familiarize myself with the car, so I wouldn’t have to do it while I was driving.
“Thank you,” Margaret said.
I gave her a startled look, because, as a rule, the fae don’t thank you—and you’d better not thank them, either. “Thank you” implies debt, and most fae will hold you to that. Margaret laughed.
“I’m not that old, Mercy,” she said. “About a hundred years, and most of that was spent in the Heart of the Hill—underground, imprisoned in a forgotten chunk of mine tunnel.”
She’d said that she’d had no food, no drink, no light. I tried to imagine what going without food and water for almost a hundred years would have been like. A werewolf would have died, starved to death like a human in that situation, maybe even faster than a human. There were degrees of immortality, some more terrible than others.
Unaware of my thoughts, Margaret had kept talking. “My father thought that it was important that we blend with the normal folk, so I don’t have a lot of the taboos the old fae do. ‘Thank you’ means just what it would to you.”
Adam’s SUV lit up, and I rolled down the window to wave them ahead. I didn’t spend much time in Walla Walla. If I’d been alone, I could have found my way out to the highway, but why bother when Adam could lead the way? He flashed his lights and took point.
“How did you survive?” I asked her.
“Not very well.” She held her hand up and moved it. “It’s taken me years to get this far—and the first year I spent as a total bedridden invalid. But I am better now, getting better almost every day. A month ago, I would not have been able to stay on my feet as long as I did tonight.” She paused. “That’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about. You are human.”
“Half,” I said apologetically. “My father is . . . not human.” I wasn’t up to explaining my complicated parentage to her, likeable as I found her. Besides, I was pretty sure my bloodlines weren’t what she wanted to talk about. “I can change into a coyote, and I have a few other tricks up my sleeve.”
“But your husband is still far stronger than you,” she said.
I nodded. “He is.”
“How did you get him to stop treating you like a fragile thing that might blow away in a harsh wind and take you to bed?” she said.
Holy cow. The girlfriend talk. I tried to remember the last time I’d done the girlfriend talk. Char. It had been with Char, when I’d talked her out of the very handsome but not very bright young man who would make a lovely date for someone else. That was all the way back in college.