Winter Lost

8

Mercy

I wasn’t sure I had actually heard the spider’s voice—a warm, amused feminine voice that quivered a little around the edges, as if the speaker were elderly. I could have just imagined it—though it wasn’t the type of voice I’d expect such a creature to have.

Just now it didn’t matter. Real or imagined, the “feeding” part was accurate. I could see it as soon as I looked.

“Jack?” Elyna sounded worried. “What’s wrong?”

“Mercy?” Adam asked.

“The spider,” I said absently, trying to understand what I was seeing. “It’s not really a spider—not only a spider. I think it’s feeding on Jack.”

Elyna pulled off her shoe, but when she tried to approach the spider, she ran into some sort of a barricade. When she threw the shoe instead, it hit the spider with a crack, like a baseball hitting the side of a barn, then rolled to the side. The spider appeared unharmed.

And amused. I didn’t want to know how I knew that.

I raised a hand. “Hold off. I don’t think you can do anything to her that way. I might—” I lost track of what I was saying.

Jack was a ghost—and a disturbingly strong one at that. He wasn’t a friend, or even an acquaintance. Maybe if the spider consumed him, it wouldn’t be a bad thing compared to the damage a strong ghost could cause.

But my instincts told me it was wrong, and I was in the habit of listening to my instincts.

Afterward…afterward I wondered why I knew what I had to do in order to understand what the spider was doing. And why I thought that I had to understand it before I could stop it. But that was later.

I’d spent the better part of the last two months trying to shut down the way the Soul Taker had ripped open my senses. Yes, I sensed things in a way I never had before. But that raw knowledge, that seeing into people without them or me having any say over what I saw—that intrusive, overwhelming ability had disappeared when Zee destroyed the Soul Taker.

Mostly. The quick glimpses into people—like the way I’d seen forests in Uncle Mike’s gaze—were nothing compared to the overwhelming comprehension the Soul Taker had given me before it was destroyed.

At that moment, I knew, knew that the only way to save Jack was to see the world as the Soul Taker had forced me to see it.

Opening that extraordinary, abominable sight felt like peeling bandages off and opening wounds that were raw and oozing. Festering. I exposed the changed part of my mind that the Soul Taker had made and forced it back into the light.

I was very careful not to look at Elyna, and I tried to only observe the stuff Jack was made of—energy and magic and soul. I told myself I didn’t notice the events of his life and what kind of person he had been when he was alive.

I tried not to see the bonds of spirit and soul that entwined him with the vampire. When I failed at that, I tried not to get lost in the sudden understanding of how her vampiric nature allowed him to hover so near to being alive, not a vampire but held by the necromancy that kept vampires walking when they should be corpses.

There was no time for that, and it was knowledge I should not have.

Dangerous knowledge, agreed the spider, sounding intrigued.

What I was doing was reckless, dangerous. My mind wasn’t built to hold this much, to understand this much. If it lasted too long, I didn’t know if I would die or turn into someone—something—not me.

“Mercy.” Adam’s voice was a growl, and it centered me.

I focused on the strands between Jack and the spider, but those didn’t tell me enough. I had to examine the way the spider was feeding, and my choice was to see too much of Jack—who he was and how he was made—or to see too much of the spider. Reading the spider with my mind open like this struck me as a good way to get lost.

Jack was covered in fine silver threads that encircled him and wove around him like a lovingly knit sweater. The spider silk concentrated around the ends of his arms, and the bright magic made me want to close my eyes against the power of it. Instead, I stepped closer to Jack and reached out to touch the threads.

My head ached with the amount of information pouring into me, from my eyes and my fingers and my skin. Most of the information didn’t matter; I needed to know how the spider was feeding from him so I could see how she could be made to stop.

I couldn’t prevent her snacking on him by manipulating the web, but there was a chance I could do something else. It was the only option I could find. Knowledge acquired; it was time to stop seeing.

That proved easier said than done. I fought to reseal the Soul Taker’s rips in my mind, but it was harder to close those paths than it had been to tear them open. I flailed, drowning in the river of enlightenment.

My mouth tasted of copper and salt—and then I was safe, my feet on the ground and my mind my own. I stared into my mate’s golden eyes and all that I saw was him, the taste of blood on my tongue.

I thought for a moment that I’d bitten my tongue or something and the pain had brought me back. The blood in my mouth tasted like pain. Then I saw that Adam’s mouth was bloody, too, and there was a fresh wound healing on his forearm.

He’d bitten himself and pressed his mouth to mine. Blood strengthens bonds, and he’d used his to give me the power to save myself from the Soul Taker’s cursed gift. Adam was the most loving person I’d ever met, though sometimes his love language was painful to everyone involved. I’d learned that I had to be brave to love him.

Worth it.

He stepped back, and turned me to face the fading ghost. I hadn’t been lost in the flood of understanding for long, I thought. The spider had only consumed a few more inches of his extremities. But when I looked into Jack’s face, I saw that his awareness, his sharp fear, was fading, too—his bright blue eyes were dulling.

“Jack,” I said urgently. He looked at me, but I couldn’t tell if he really saw me. This wouldn’t work if he didn’t help.

“Jack O’Malley,” I said, stealing all the dominance I could from Adam. My voice carried an Alpha’s authority and my own power over the dead.

The demand hit the ghost and he swayed, lifting one of his arms in a futile effort to touch me. There was so little of him left.

I had understood what I needed to do just a second ago. But while I wasn’t paying attention, that knowledge had drifted away like a half-remembered dream. I couldn’t tell Jack how to save himself because I couldn’t remember.

Memory. Ghosts are like a memory, I thought, and in that moment, I understood exactly why that was. Then the understanding left me, but I didn’t need to know why.

When we see a ghost, pay attention to it, it becomes more attached to our world, my brother had once told me. His next words, if I remembered them correctly, had been, So don’t do that.

“I see you,” I told Jack, focusing on him, trying to capture his eyes as if I were a vampire instead of a…whatever I was.

“Rory,” Elyna said urgently. “His name is Jack Rory O’Malley.”

Names are important—the fae won’t reveal their true names, and change them as often as they can. Names have power. Names remember.

How was it that Peter Pan saved Tinker Bell? It wasn’t the children clapping their hands—although they had. Peter Pan was a story. Fiction. A lie. But stories are powerful lies because they are true in a way that real life isn’t.

“I see you, Jack Rory O’Malley,” I said.

Peter Pan had saved Tinker Bell with belief.

“Jack Rory O’Malley.” This time I said Jack’s name with authority, knowing with absolute certainty that Jack stood before me now. In that moment, I believed that he was real.

The spider couldn’t feed upon him if he was real.

I wasn’t expecting the crack of sound, like a blown fuse, or the sudden flash as all the lightbulbs in the big chandelier over my head, all the lightbulbs in the reception room, the little connected office, and at least some of the ones in the hall lit up.

For just a moment, the moment it took for the lights to remember that there was no electricity to power them—for that instant, when the little reception room was lit up as bright as day, Jack O’Malley was visible to everyone, whole and complete, and as real and solid as flesh and blood and life. I could hear the thump of his heart.

Adam stiffened.

Elyna cried, “Jack?”

She reached for him, but before she could touch him, the lights went out and her hands passed through him.

“Jack?” This time Elyna’s voice was nearly a whisper.

There was a soft sound that did not originate from anyone in the room. It might have been a laugh. It might have been “Good girl.” I looked, but I didn’t see the spider.

“Is he gone?” Adam had his command face on, and that told me he didn’t know what to think, either. At some point he’d cleaned off his lips. The wound on his arm had healed, though his skin was still stained with blood. “Is Jack gone?” he clarified, directing the question at me.

“No.”

Jack was trying to comfort Elyna, though he could not touch her and she could not hear him. But I wasn’t worried about him just now.

“Did you see where the spider went?” I asked.

Adam helped me look. The room wasn’t big, but then neither was the spider, by comparison. We started at opposite ends and searched thoroughly. I noticed that Adam had quit treating Elyna as an enemy. I thought it was probably due to her obvious distress over Jack. My husband was a romantic at heart. He was still keeping an eye on her, still alert, but not wary.

“If it’s here, we’re not going to find it,” Adam said, moving the couch back to its original position.

I crouched so I could look under the end table. There was a wad of bubble gum, but no silver spiders. I flopped down on my butt.

“Oh, it’s still here,” I said direly.

Beside me, the chair creaked as Elyna sat on it with the grace of someone who’d grown up in an era when women only wore dresses, knees and ankles together. She rubbed her hands before putting them on her thighs to still them.

She was uncomfortably close. I turned to face her and shoved myself back a couple of feet in the process.

“Mercy,” the vampire said. Then she looked away from me and blinked rapidly. Tears, I thought. But it could have been some other emotion.

“I don’t have any photos,” she said in a small voice, still turning her face away from me as if there was something fascinating about the wreath on the door. “The ones I’d had…before…were gone. I haven’t seen my husband’s face since…for nearly a century.” She looked at me then, and I couldn’t read the expression on her face at all. “Since the day I killed him, in fact.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

“I am a monster, after all,” she said. “We are all of us monsters in this room, I think.” She pointed at Adam. “Werewolf,” she said. She pointed at herself. “Vampire.” She made a whirling “somewhere” gesture and said, “Ghost.” She pointed at me and waited.

“Not a werewolf, vampire, or ghost.” I didn’t owe her my identity, and too often others’ ignorance of who and what I was had saved the day. Instead, I gave her a part of the truth, the part she already had. “Psychopomp sometimes.”

She looked blank. That was okay. It was a weird word.

“I have a knack with ghosts,” I clarified.

“Okay,” Elyna said after a moment that she used to tell me she knew I wasn’t giving her the whole truth. “Okay. That spider—”

“That was not a spider,” said Jack with emphasis.

I’d been looking everywhere but at him. I’d spent the last ten minutes searching for a spider I knew we weren’t going to find and trying to figure out what to do about Jack. More specifically, what to do about whatever I’d done to him. I worried about it. He didn’t feel the same as he had before the spider—or whatever she was—had tried eating him. He felt more solid, grounded.

There was a path dead souls were supposed to follow when they left the realm of the living. I always knew where that path was; I could feel it in the same way I knew where the sun would rise each morning. I didn’t like any of the words I’d been given for it. “Heaven” felt too small, “the light” too vague.

Jack wasn’t going there, whatever I called it, not without more help than I could provide. He felt—permanent.

I, on the other hand, felt as though I had been manipulated into doing that to him. I didn’t know why it was important for Jack to be trapped here, neither alive nor quite dead anymore, but I was pretty sure I was following the spider’s script.

“Not a spider.” Elyna corrected herself because she’d heard Jack, not because she’d read my mind.

Jack had been able to make her hear him before this. Sometimes. I was afraid it would take him a lot less effort now.

“Not a spider,” I agreed. “Or not one of the usual ones.”

“You seemed to know something about it,” she said.

Adam looked at me, too. I shrugged and decided I didn’t want to have a conversation while I was sitting on the floor. I got up and noticed there was a wet Mercy-butt spot on the polished surface. I was tired of running around in wet clothes.

“I’ve only seen that spider once before,” I told them. “Yesterday.” I glanced at the clock on the wall in the office and watched the second hand tick past midnight. “Day before yesterday now.”

Adam’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t say anything about a spider.”

“It was at Uncle Mike’s,” I said. “Uncle Mike had a Christmas tree”—outside of a fae-dominated bar I could call a spade a spade and a Christmas tree a Christmas tree—“that had spiders spinning tinsel-like strands. Lots of little golden spiders, and the one silver one. I didn’t tell you about it because it was at Uncle Mike’s.”

“Lots of strange creatures at Uncle Mike’s,” agreed Adam. “You are sure it doesn’t have anything to do with the Soul Taker?”

I shrugged again. Instead of telling Adam that my newly acquired weird senses didn’t think the spider tasted like the Soul Taker or its god, as I might have if we’d been alone, I said, with equal truth, “Uncle Mike hustled me away from the tree. If he thought the spider had something to do with the Soul Taker, he’d have said.”

“And he’d have known,” Adam agreed.

“Uncle Mike?” asked Elyna.

“The fae who runs our local fae bar. He’s someone who knows things,” I told her. Then to Adam I said, “The spider did seem to take an interest in me. Maybe it was because of our recent supernatural spider encounters? Or maybe she was bored and thought I was interesting.”

“So did she follow you here?” Elyna asked. “Or did she hitch a ride? Where did you drive here from?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Surely I’d have felt it, if she had been in the SUV with us. But I couldn’t be certain. I didn’t know which was worse: that I hadn’t been aware of her presence in the confined space, or that she could somehow transport herself to where I was.

Adam answered the other part of the vampire’s question. “The Tri-Cities in Washington State.”

Elyna nodded. “Is she going to attack Jack again?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea. I don’t know what she is. Absolutely no idea.”

“What did you do to me?” asked Jack.

I looked at him reluctantly. Even when I hadn’t been looking at him, he’d felt real. Now I could see things I hadn’t noticed before. His blue eyes had a dark gray ring around the pupil. He smelled of something familiar. After a moment, I identified it as ink. There were faint black smudges on his fingers. Ballpoint pens had come into common usage in World War II, I remembered. Before that, it had been all fountain pens.

“Were you a journalist?” I asked.

He frowned at me. “Architect.”

“Architect,” Elyna answered, too.

“What did you do to me?” he asked again.

“What does it feel like I did?” I asked.

He opened his mouth, shut it again. Finally, he said, “I don’t know.” He walked to the window between the reception room and the office and knocked a pen onto the floor. “That was a lot easier.”

“I can’t see you, Jack,” Elyna said. “But I can hear you more clearly.”

She hadn’t heard everything he said, though.

“Will it last?” Jack looked as though the answer mattered to him very much. I could see why it would.

“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “Usually I try not to make the ghosts I see stronger than they already are.”

He grinned at me, a charming, boyish expression—but he was still wearing that gun. As soon as I noticed it, I could smell the gun oil.

“I can understand that,” he said. “Encouraging ghosts doesn’t make for restful sleep.” Then he sobered. “If they knew what you can do, they’d never leave you alone.”

“No,” I said. “If they—if you—knew what I can do, you’d all stay far away from me.”

I usually tried not to think about the night in Prague when I’d destroyed all the ghosts, using the power of that destruction for my own purposes. It still made me sick.

He looked at me a moment. “Wow. Okay. I’ll keep it in mind, then.”

Abruptly, there were only three of us in the room.

“He left,” I told the other two, then yawned, one of those jaw-cracking, inescapable yawns. “Is there any chance I could get to sleep sometime before the sun rises?”

Adam held up his purloined key. “Ms. Gray, we should head to bed.”

“Good night, then, Mr. and Mrs. Haupt—” She stopped midword. Frowned. “Hauptman. Tri-Cities, Washington. Werewolf. You’re them. Adam and Mercedes Hauptman.”

“Yes,” Adam agreed.

She whistled softly. “You are the Hauptmans the Lord of Night has taken such interest in.”

“Bonarata,” I said, and watched her flinch just a little. I wondered if she thought he’d appear if I said his name three times.

Maybe he would.

“What did you do to enrage him?” she asked me. “Your husband and pack he wants dead—he offers substantial rewards to the vampire who manages to kill any of them. But you, Ms. Hauptman, you he wants alive. Any vampire who harms you will regret the day they were made. He has made it clear he wants you for himself.”

“Do you intend to try for Bonarata’s reward?” I asked without answering her question. It was a long story, and I didn’t feel like sharing it. It was also the second time I’d said his name out loud.

She smiled. “To the extent of not harming you, yes.” She looked at Adam and shook her head. “I highly doubt Bonarata knows I exist, and I’d love to keep it that way.”

The third time his name had been spoken here tonight, and he hadn’t shown up or called. Maybe that was because my cell phone wasn’t working.

Elyna paused. “In point of fact, I owe you quite a lot. Jack is—” Her voice cracked. “Jack is necessary to me.”

She gave a short nod, as if to herself, then she spoke briskly. “You are looking for your brother. I will help you in any way I can. If you fear that he is lost in the woods, I can help look. The winter holds no fear for me. Vampires can freeze”—her face tightened just a bit, but her voice continued on pleasantly—“but we are rather like goldfish and will thaw without many issues. I am strong and I see very well in the dark. I can also find heat signatures”—her lips quirked up—“rather like a mosquito.”

“Thank you,” I said warily.

“You saved my husband,” she told me. “Without him…” She chose not to finish that sentence.

“Would you be willing to talk to us about the other people trapped at the resort with us?” Adam asked.

“The lodge,” she said. “It’s not really up to resort standards yet, is it? The entryway and some of the rooms, yes, but not the whole building. Everyone calls it the lodge—especially the people who work here.”

The people at the gas station had called it a resort. But I had to agree that “lodge” fit the building better.

“But you don’t expect someone here is involved with your brother’s disappearance, do you?” Elyna went on. “Most of us are just here for the wedding.”

I looked at Adam. For all we knew, Elyna was the one who’d taken the harp.

“Elyna Gray,” Adam said, “from Chicago.”

She looked surprised and a little wary. “Yes?”

Maybe no one else would have been able to tell, but I could see Adam relax.

“I’ve heard stories about you, Ms. Gray,” Adam said. “You killed the Mistress who made you—and she was an old and powerful vampire. Then instead of taking over the seethe, you chose to move to Chicago and live as a lone vampire. When the Master of Chicago objected, you killed him, too. The new Master treats you with care and leaves you alone.”

She let out a burst of ugly laughter, and for a second there was nothing human about her face. She recovered quickly. “That makes me sound like a total badass, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said honestly.

Her mouth twisted bitterly. “I killed my Mistress and left the seethe because I lacked the power to hold it. They would have killed me in a day. I fled to Chicago. It had been my home, and it is a big city. The Master who ruled there kept a small seethe, and I thought I could stay hidden from him. I was wrong. I didn’t kill him, at least I didn’t kill him by myself. But he died because of me. The new Master is grateful for the old one’s death. And it is a gratitude that has no fear of me—he knows just how powerful I am not in the world of the nosferatu. I live by his grace as long as I cause no trouble.”

Adam looked at me. His face told me that he thought it would be handy to have the vampire as backup. He thought we could trust her. Maybe he knew more about her than what he’d said. But Gary was my brother; this was my call.

I considered her. “Have you stolen or rightfully recovered an object from anyone in the past week?”

She blinked at me. “I begin to think that your quest is more interesting than I expected. No, Ms. Hauptman, I have not taken anything from anyone in the past week. Not as a gift. Not as an unwilling gift. I have stolen nothing this week, nor have I recovered property belonging to me—or anyone else. Is that good enough?” She gave me a sudden grin. “If you have a mystery, I want in. Our wedding preparations, never intended to be elaborate because there were fewer than thirty guests invited, have been halted because of the storm. The power is out, so I can only use my laptop sparingly, and when I do, there is no Internet. This evening’s events aside, I have found myself as bored as I’ve ever been in my somewhat-longer-than-usual life.”

Adam asked, “Is there somewhere we could talk where we won’t be overheard?”

“By someone who might have very good hearing,” I said. Because if we were dealing with a stolen fae artifact, there was a good chance that the thief might have better than average hearing. Supernatural hearing.

Elyna’s grin turned triumphant. “Yes. I know of just the place.”

Elyna brought us through the heart of the lodge and out the far door. We forged through less-deep snow on a covered walkway, woefully inadequate for the current weather, that led to a cluster of small, picturesque buildings at the edge of the steaming lake. There were more of the strings of Christmas lights that decorated the entrance of the resort, as well as faux-Victorian streetlamps, none of which were lit.

Elegant signs, gold on black, noted the use of each smallish building—changing rooms, showers, storage. Snow covered the sides and tops of the buildings, and I glanced back at the lodge’s roof. Hard to judge from my angle, but it looked to me like the snowpack there was nearing a foot despite the steep slope of the roof.

Snow had weight. I wondered if someone was planning on getting up there to clear it or if the building would collapse before the storm was over.

Adam saw me looking—and raised an eyebrow when he examined the roof, too. “Lot of snow up there,” he said. “Someone should clear it before it collapses.”

“The lodge is nearly as old as I am,” said Elyna unconcernedly. “We’ve both survived a lot of winters.”

At the end of the path was a taller-than-me stone wall with a heavy rustic door that looked so forbidding that I was a little surprised when it opened easily.

Beyond the door, cobblestone pavement stretched from the wall to the side of the lake, half of it covered by a roof, the other open to the sky. Along the edge of the lake were five soaking tubs, and to either side of them were soaking pools built into the side of the lake with what looked like native stone. Steam rose from the lake, the tubs, and the cobblestones as the heat of the lake met the frost giant’s storm.

Against the back wall under the roof were a series of hooks that held fluffy white robes. Elyna walked past those and flipped a switch—and soft moody music accompanied the trickling sound of water. If we talked quietly, even sharp ears wouldn’t be able to hear us.

“I thought the power was out,” I said.

“Everything out here is part of the system that pumps the water into the pools and the resort to heat both,” Elyna said. “That pump is integral to keeping the place habitable, so it’s part of the infrastructure supported by the generators.”

She laughed at my expression. “Jack is…was an architect. He is fascinated by this place. He can’t ask questions, so I have to.”

Still under the roof, if only barely, was a propane fireplace surrounded by benches. Elyna lit the fireplace, brushed the accumulated snow off a bench, and sat down. Adam and I were wearing coats and boots—Elyna was still in her light shirt and trousers. Cold bothered vampires even less than it bothered werewolves.

Adam brushed the snow off the bench next to her, sat down, and lifted his arm for me to sit beside him, because even the fireplace and the heated floor could not fend off the bitter wind.

We’d dropped off our luggage in the room Adam had chosen, but I hadn’t taken time to change. In the warmth of the lodge, I’d forgotten my clothes were damp. I remembered as soon as we stepped out into the snow. I appreciated the windbreak.

“It’s supposed to be haunted, you know,” said Elyna in a thoughtful voice, her eyes past my shoulder.

I didn’t look behind me. I knew what the old building looked like—and I knew it was haunted.

“Jack doesn’t talk about such things,” she said. “I don’t know…how much of him is still left. It occurs to me that I am talking to someone who might know.”

She pinned me with her eyes. It wasn’t a vampiric power—it was raw need.

I closed my eyes against her question, then opened them. She had the right to ask.

“Ethically, I’m in uncharted territory,” I said, and Adam’s arm tightened over my shoulders. His coat was well insulated, so it was just pressure, not warmth. It still felt good.

“I have guesses,” I told her, “but they are only guesses. I don’t know if I helped either of you tonight. Furthermore, I’m not sure telling you what I think is going to—” Make you happier. Add to your peace. Make anything better. “—be useful.”

“I saw him tonight,” she said. “I’ve lived with him—with him as a ghost—for nearly a decade.”

I cleared my throat. “He’s been dead longer than a decade.”

Her mouth tightened unhappily. “Closer to a century. But I didn’t find him again until about a decade ago.” She paused. “When I returned home.”

I nodded.

“I can hear him sometimes, sometimes not,” she continued. “He has opinions and he’s saved me. More than once. But we don’t converse. He seldom touches me, and I can’t touch him at all. I read him books.”

She stopped speaking, and tears welled up in her eyes, spilling down her cheeks.

“I’ve read all the books about ghosts,” she said.

“Most of them are garbage,” I told her. “But I don’t know which ones.”

She gave me an unhappy smile. “I understand you aren’t certain of what you know. But I need to know this is really Jack.” She looked around.

“He’s not here,” I told her.

She wiped her eyes. “I murdered my husband, Ms. Hauptman. And I need to know that he’s forgiven me. That he is capable of forgiving me.”

“Oh,” I said. “That. I have seen ghosts my whole life. I used to think I knew about them. Now I think I don’t know any of the important things.”

All around us, the formless wisps of white that might have once been ghosts blended in with the fog off the lake and the blowing snow. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of them. They didn’t approach us, though. Something, the vampire’s presence maybe, kept them at bay. I tried not to notice them, dropping my eyes to my boots. We were sheltered from the wind and snow, but my toes were cold again.

“One thing I’ve been almost sure of is that a person’s soul is not meant to linger here after the body is gone,” I said. “It’s bad for the dead person—and it is harmful for the living.”

Elyna had quit breathing and leaned forward, the firelight reflecting in her eyes.

“Most ghosts are just a lingering impression,” I told her. “It still can act like the original, but it is not the person who died, any more than a photograph or a video is. And that’s right and proper. I’ve seen what happens when the soul is trapped in its ghost, and I worked really hard to stop the—” Vampire, I almost said, but I thought that might lead to a digression. Frost had been a monster even among monsters. “—the creature doing that. It was an abomination.” I didn’t know how to explain the wrongness I’d felt about what Frost had done. One of his victims had been a friend of mine.

“Jack—” I fumbled as I tried to express something I sensed, something I didn’t entirely trust, in a way that would do the least harm. “His soul is trapped.”

Elyna’s face closed down, though that had been the answer she’d hoped for before I started talking. “I see.”

“Here’s where it gets unclear,” I said.

“Woo-woo,” murmured Adam with more humor than the situation called for.

“Well, yes,” I snapped. “I am going by instinct. Jack doesn’t feel like an abomination. He doesn’t feel wrong in the same way that other ghosts with souls have felt to me.” For whatever that meant. “But his soul is still stuck, and I’m very much afraid I made that permanent tonight.”

She sucked in a breath and looked away. “Ah. So, he’s really here?”

“Yes.”

“And it is bad for him.” She stared at the row of white robes on the back wall. “Is this something I have done to him? Called him back with my need and trapped him here?”

I shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t have those answers.”

When I’d been trying to help Jack with the spider, I’d understood why that was—how something about the necromancy that kept Elyna up and moving affected what Jack was.

“Spilt milk,” said Adam briskly. “He is here. You can’t change it. Make the best of it and move forward.”

The icy wind blew through my jacket and I shivered, tucking myself closer to Adam. The fire was pretty, but it was too small and too far away to provide any warmth.

Elyna wiped her eyes and kept her face covered for a moment before she brought her hands down to her lap and straightened her back. “Thank you,” she said.

“Be careful what you ask for,” I offered.

“No,” she said. “Information is good. Speaking of which, you wanted to know about the people trapped here in the storm.”

“That’s right,” Adam said, accepting her change of subject.

“And you want to know about something someone stole? Something that you think might have some bearing on why Gary Johnson isn’t up at the ranch where he should be.”

I was keeping my chin tucked in my coat so I couldn’t see Adam’s face, but I heard the smile in his voice. “That’s right, too.”

“Maybe,” she said, “if you tell me more about your mystery, I will be more use to you.”

Fair enough.

“My brother has been cursed,” I told her. “Because of the nature of the curse, he can’t communicate. He showed up at our house yesterday. We came here looking for a way to help him. But before we can do that, we need to find an artifact—you know what those are?”

Not everyone did. There were a lot more fae in the Tri-Cities than there were most places in the US. Artifacts were mostly a fae thing.

“An artifact?” she said. “Like a fae artifact?”

“Yep,” I said, my voice wavering with the chattering of my teeth. “Well, not fae, I don’t think. But an object bound with magic.” I thought of the deal we’d made. “If we don’t find it, the being who is causing this storm isn’t going to let anyone leave here alive.”

Silence—except for the howl of the wind—hung in the air.

“There is no reason for you to freeze while we talk,” Elyna said. “Let’s go soak in the hot water.”

I glanced at Adam. He’d been treating Elyna like an ally since he’d matched her to a vampire whose story he had heard. I didn’t know if that would make him willing to share a hot tub with her. It sounded like a good idea to me. Except for the “stripping naked in subzero temperatures in a snowstorm” part.

Elyna didn’t wait for us to agree. She stood up and removed her clothing.

When Adam stood up, I knew we’d be doing it, too. I was a shapeshifter—nakedness didn’t bother me. All of my reluctance was temperature-based.

Adam frowned at me. “Are your clothes still wet, Mercy?”

There was a bite in his voice that I ignored.

“What happens after we are all toasty and have to get up and run for cover?” I asked, fumbling with the zipper of my coat.

“You can run pretty fast,” Adam said. “I noticed that when I was courting you.”

His words were teasing, but his mouth was tight as he brushed aside my hands, which were being pretty fumbly. Sitting out here talking had made me colder than I had realized. My jeans wanted to cling—and Adam ripped them down both outside seams.

“Hey,” I protested, stepping out of the pile of rags that used to be my pants. “You werewolves might destroy clothes on a daily basis because they get in your way, but I’ve had those jeans for years. They have good pockets.”

I expected him to make some quip like the ones I’d made when he’d ripped his own jeans.

Instead, he said, “You need to warm up, and they were in the way of that.” He picked me up and pulled my boots off. One sock came off with the boot, but the other one stayed on.

His voice was biting when he said, “Before God, Mercy. Were you going to wait until your toes fell off?”

I took a good look at my bare foot. “That’s not—”

I was still wearing my T-shirt, bra, underwear, and one sock when he strode to one of the steaming tubs and dropped me in. When my cold extremities hit the hot water, I made a sound I wasn’t proud of and instinctively tried to hop out. He put his hands on my shoulders and kept me there. Only when I quit struggling did he start to take off his own clothes so he could climb in, too.

“—not frostbite.” I completed my sentence once my brain was functioning past the pain. “Which is good, because you aren’t supposed to stick frostbitten toes in boiling water.”

My toes ached all the way up to my knees, and I bounced my legs, trying to defer the familiar pain of flesh warming up to normal temperature, while I struggled to remove the last of my wet clothing with fingers that burned from the sudden warm-up. The utter agony of the process told me that Adam’s diagnosis of frostbite hadn’t been that far off.

He was right to be angry. I’d been stupid. I knew better than to stay wet in this kind of cold. I wasn’t a werewolf or vampire, and I couldn’t judge my endurance by theirs.

He should have been angry at me—but he wasn’t. He was angry at himself. I’d scared Adam. He counted on me to take care of myself, to draw boundaries with him and the pack so neither of them put me in a situation I couldn’t handle.

The hot tub Adam had chosen could have fit maybe eight people comfortably, more if they were good friends. It had enough space that we three predators could share it for a time. Elyna had climbed into the far side sometime when I wasn’t paying attention. Adam climbed in next to me.

“You,” he said, “warm up a bit while I tell our new friend what we’re doing here.”

I sank lower in the water, closed my eyes, and drifted for a moment. The ache of my feet and hands subsided as Adam’s voice rumbled beside me.

Elyna’s voice got a little shrill now and then. She knew what frost giants were, but not that they weren’t figments of Norse mythology. It is always an uncomfortable adjustment when the rules of the world get rewritten over the course of a conversation. But Elyna’s problems weren’t mine.

When he finished speaking, we all soaked for a little more and listened to the hissing as the storm met the waters of the lake.

“There’s a piano here,” Elyna said, “and one of the staff members has a guitar she’s learning to play. But I haven’t heard any harp music. Do you know what it looks like?”

“He said we’d know it when we saw it,” I offered. “Silver with blue gemstone inlay. Not crystallized stone, but turquoise shaped to fit. A pair of wolves on the ends of the arms—or yoke.”

I had a sudden thought and sat up a little straighter before ducking back down to keep my shoulders in the water. “He called it a harp. But now that I think about his description, it sounds more like a lyre”—I made a yoke shape with my hands and then a straight horizontal line across the imaginary top—“than a harp.” I swooped my hands in the graceful fall a harp makes as the strings vary from the deep-toned long strings to the shorter, higher-pitched ones.

“A woman’s face at the base,” Adam added, “with gemstone eyes.”

“I’ll ask Jack,” she said. “He’s not…reliable about things like that. But it would be stupid not to put in a request.”

“Tell us about the people trapped here with us,” Adam said.

About twenty minutes later, wrapped in the big fluffy robes and carrying our wet and frozen clothes, including the rags left of my jeans, Adam and I made our way back to our room.

Adam had chosen one on the corner of the first floor. It had windows on the north and the west walls, and shared only one wall with another room—and that room was empty. The windows were original to the lodge, which meant that the room was a little breezy, though the hot spring–fed radiator had no trouble keeping it plenty warm.

Adam had brought a flashlight, but with two sets of windows, the room was light enough for us to see. A human would have had trouble, though, between the storm and the night.

After the elegance of the reception room and hallways, the room felt distinctly utilitarian. With spare, beautifully made furniture, its tribute to Art Deco style leaned harder on the Great Depression side of 1929 than the flapper era that had preceded it.

A thick, dark green quilt folded on the foot of the bed contrasted with the white chenille bedspread, setting the color scheme in the room. The end tables and the headboard were genuine antiques, while the mattress and the chest of drawers were new. I was not an antiques expert, but anyone with a nose as good as mine could tell the difference between antique and modern. Age carries a much more complex scent.

I dropped my clothes on the floor, stripped off the robe, and dropped it, too. Then rethought that. I kicked the robe off the wet clothes. It took me two kicks. I would have crawled right into bed if Adam hadn’t caught me and dragged me into the bathroom, which was lit by his flashlight on the floor.

“You’ll thank me tomorrow when you, I, and the bed don’t all stink like sulfur,” he assured me, grinning when I growled at him.

“Why aren’t you tired?” I snipped at him as he shoved—I mean, urged—me into the large shower stall.

“I am,” he said, turning the hot water on both of us. “What I don’t have is a killer headache from saving ghosts from mythological spiders.”

I shot him a look. “I haven’t complained.”

He gave me a smile. “That’s how I know it’s bad. Turn around.”

When I turned, the water beat down on my back. It was very hot—only a few degrees cooler than the hot springs had been. It felt wonderful, and warmed up the parts of me that had refrozen in our dash from the hot tub to our room.

I rested my throbbing head on Adam’s shoulder, and he pressed his fingers against the back of my neck, working the knots out.

“I am, at this moment, really, really glad you abandoned all of your duties to come with me,” I announced. “Just so you could— Eep!” I couldn’t stop the yelp as he hit a knot just under my shoulder blade. “Right there.”

The stiffness left my whole body, and I sagged against him in relief. He laughed—a low, soft sound that made me want to purr. Eventually he said, “Can you stand on your own for a minute?”

I did, and he soaped himself up with such brisk efficiency that I found it sacrilegious and told him so. He smiled when I reached out and touched his chest and let my hand drift down his belly.

“Careful,” he cautioned. But he didn’t mean it.

Both of us were too tired for that to lead anywhere. But the feel of his skin under my fingers soothed the restless worry of all the problems I didn’t know how to solve: My brother. Me.

My fingers were less sensitive than usual, wrinkled from all the water exposure. I examined them and said, “That was a bucket list item I never thought I’d satisfy.”

“Which item was that?” Adam asked as he grabbed a small hotel bottle of something and opened it.

A strong mint scent battled with the sulfur of the hot springs and won. He dumped some on his hands, rubbed them together, and then he rubbed them on me. The small bar of soap was sufficient for his skin, but apparently not for mine.

“I think that’s conditioner,” I told him as my skin grew slick but not soapy.

The flashlight yielded plenty of illumination to take a shower with. But it was angled wrong for reading labels.

He grunted. “What bucket list item, Mercy?” His voice was a low growl, but I figured it was because of where my hands were, and not because he was unhappy about my bucket list or impatient with me.

I lost it, pulling my hands away to avoid damaging anything important as I found myself laughing helplessly. “What a day—and a night. Jeez, Adam.”

“Bucket list?” He sounded serious, but I could tell he wanted to laugh, too. He put my hands back where they had been.

“Sitting naked with you and a vampire in a hot tub. Of course, I thought it would be Stefan—or, because our lives have been very strange lately, maybe even Bonarata. But Elyna was an acceptable substitute.”

He released my hair from its braids, working it free with gentle fingers. “Kinky of you. If that bottle is conditioner, this one must be shampoo, right?”