Winter Lost

10

Mercy

“Flotsam?” I heard myself say to the fae who’d emerged from the kitchens. I thought I sounded normal, but Adam’s hand moved to rest on the small of my back. “I thought you needed an ocean for us to be flotsam.”

Our host was a green man. I didn’t need the Soul Taker–born curse to feel his magic. It tasted like Uncle Mike’s power.

“Liam is the night manager,” Elyna had said, picking at the ice trying to form on one edge of the hot tub. “He was manning the desk when it became obvious that the roads were becoming too dangerous for travel. He called upper management and told them to keep the staff at home, that he and Emily—with the help of Hugo, a retiree who usually works a couple of days a week as the custodian and gardener—could handle it.” She paused. “Hugo can’t talk above a whisper—throat cancer or something—but he’s a sweetheart. He tends the greenhouse and brings each of the guests flowers every evening.”

As I stared at the smiling Irish fae who had been working as a night manager at a very small in-the-middle-of-renovations lodge in the wilds of Montana, I thought, sixteen people. Seventeen with Jack. All of us trapped on sacred ground by a snowstorm controlled by a frost giant. Seventeen people, and there was a werewolf, a vampire and her necromancy-augmented people, a ghost, and not one, not two, not three, but five fae—goblins count as fae. Also me. The only actual normal humans here might be Emily and Hugo the gardener.

We weren’t flotsam, because flotsam was accidental and random. We had been brought together deliberately. I wondered who had done that and why.

I wondered if I was going to be able to save my brother.

“Perhaps you are right,” said Liam, the desk clerk and night manager, whose power flowed around me like the mist rising from the hot lake had last night. “Not flotsam.”

The green man who was not Uncle Mike made a show of considering his words. He said, “Let us say, then, far travelers who have arrived at our doors, blown in by the north wind. Winter lost.” He spread his hands. “Welcome, guests, to Looking Glass Lodge.” He smiled. “Resort. I meant ‘resort.’ ”

Emily had followed the green man out of the kitchen. She gave an exasperated hiss. “Dramatic much? Don’t mind Liam. He grew up in Ireland.” She said it the same way my mother said “She was raised in a barn” to apologize for one of her more socially inept friends. “And all the signs say Looking Glass Hot Springs.”

I used my senses to check Emily again. Nope, still human.

The green man, Liam, threw the dish towel he’d been holding at her and laughed when she snatched it out of the air.

“You go help Hugo with the dishes, you troublemaker,” he admonished. “There’s not a thing wrong with Ireland—or my manner.”

She grinned and vanished through the doorway again.

“Adam and Mercy Hauptman,” said my husband, stepping forward with an outstretched hand. “We came in last night. I took a key and left a note at the front desk.”

“Mr. Hauptman.” Our host shook Adam’s hand and then his eyes widened just a touch. I saw comprehension dawn and he quit meeting Adam’s gaze by briefly looking at me, rather than by dropping his own gaze. A move that did not challenge Adam’s rank—nor admit to a lesser status. People learned those kinds of manners when they hung out around werewolf Alphas. Or when their magic was geared to making their guests feel welcome and comfortable.

“Ah, that Hauptman,” the fae said. “Forgive me for not making the connection. It is an honor to have such guests. I am, for my sins, Liam Fellows—please call me Liam. I have not been to the desk yet this morning, not expecting anyone could make it through the roads. I hope you find our hospitality up to your needs.”

“Sir,” Adam said. When Adam is wary, he gets military. I was pretty sure he couldn’t feel what Liam Fellows was, but he knew that I had been surprised.

He also didn’t accept the role of guest that our would-be host offered. Offered again. Guesting laws are very important to the fae. They’d provide some protections—but also restrict what we could do.

If we were Liam’s guests, we could not, for instance, steal the lyre without consulting him about it ahead of time. If the lyre was a fae artifact—not all of them were, and the frost giant had not been clear—I wasn’t sure any fae would be okay with us giving it back to someone who was not fae.

“Mrs. Hauptman.” Liam held his hand out to me. I wasn’t surprised that he air-kissed my knuckles. Uncle Mike did that kind of courtly greeting occasionally, too.

“Mercy, please,” I said.

There was no way around it. If we were going to remain at the lodge, it would have to be as guests. We wouldn’t be able to find the artifact if we were staying however many miles up the mountain at the ranch my brother worked for.

“With that storm outside we are”—not grateful, good grief, Zee would have my hide if I said something that stupid to a fae, especially a powerful fae I did not know—“happy to be your guests.”

Liam’s body relaxed. I was surprised that he let me see that—or that it mattered so much that we accepted his hospitality.

I’d asked Zee one time why Uncle Mike wasn’t a Gray Lord. Zee had told me that within the walls of his pub, Uncle Mike’s power was formidable, but outside of his center of power, he was too vulnerable to be a Gray Lord. We were in Liam’s territory here. He would have no trouble chucking us out if he wanted to. I wondered why he didn’t want to.

“Good, good,” Liam said. “Let’s hope this storm ends soon, but we should have sufficient fuel for the generators and food for our guests for the next few days.” He smiled. “I am not ashamed to say that I am a good cook. So perhaps the food will make your stay with us worth the price of the storm.”

Uncle Mike would have known if someone brought an artifact into his pub. Adam and I needed to talk to Liam Fellows at a time and place when there weren’t all these other ears listening. The first step to that was to establish that though he knew who we were, we also knew who he was. Or at least what he was.

“You remind me of a friend,” I told him. “He likes to feed people as well. Most of us call him Uncle Mike.”

Beside me, Adam drew in a breath—so I’d been right. He hadn’t known what Liam was.

Our host’s smile became careful, and he assessed me more deeply. “Runs a pub up your way, doesn’t he? Aye, I know him. You also remind me of someone, Mrs. Hauptman.” He paused and said, deliberately, “Mercy.”

“My brother, Gary, is a caretaker for the ranch up the mountain from here,” I said.

“Ah, of course,” he said, as if that had not been the person he’d been thinking of. “You do remind me of Gary.”

Had he been talking about someone else? Who else could I remind him of? Coyote? A green man living in the wilderness might have met Coyote.

“Sure and your brother’s a fine fellow,” Liam, the green man, continued. “He was supposed to come down with the horses yesterday, but I expect the storm derailed his plans. With the phones being disobliging, there was no way to check. Do you intend to try to reach him today? I feel it’s my job to discourage that. It’s not the kind of storm to be careless with.”

“We’ve already been there,” my husband told Liam. “He’s not at the ranch. The truck he usually drives was gone.”

All true, if misleading. The deception wasn’t directed at Liam, but for our audience, I thought.

I glanced around the room and was surprised to see that we were no longer the center of attention. Given our sudden appearance, I was pretty sure that their disinterest was probably something Liam was doing. I’d seen Uncle Mike redirect a crowd now and then in the same way.

Peter had retaken his seat. His fellow police officers and his daughter were cleaning the last bits of food off their plates. The hikers had their heads together and were speaking rapidly. I should have been able to hear what they were saying, but the perfectly judged volume of the music did its job. All I could catch was the occasional consonant.

At the Heddars’ table, Dylis was back to picking at her food with even more disinterest than before we’d come in. I was starting to think that my initial impression that she was on something was correct. Addiction could be the source of the wrongness I felt in her magic. I wondered what medication she could possibly be on.

The only person who was still paying attention to us was her husband, Andrew. He was staring at Adam the way one Alpha looks at another, assessing the threat. He saw me observing him and abruptly pulled out his charm and smiled.

I smiled back. With teeth.

Liam noticed the exchange, glanced around the room, then took a step away from us toward the kitchen.

“Your brother is a man of rare sense,” Liam told me. He was a fae and could not lie. Maybe “rare sense” meant something other than “good sense.”

He must have seen my disbelief, because his smile widened and turned genuine for a moment. “He is. A storm—even this kind of storm—is not going to harm him.”

“I’m glad you think so,” I told him rather than agreeing.

“We should talk more about Gary,” Liam said. “But you have caught me in the middle of making breakfast, so talk will have to wait. The house is serving eggs, bacon, and pancakes today. Or I can whip up something special if you wish?”

“No need to make anything special. Breakfast sounds lovely,” I told him, carefully avoiding anything that would put us in his debt.

Liam smiled (again) in appreciation of my considered wording, and this time his expression was more than a little sly. I found myself wanting to like him, and had to remind myself that he wasn’t Uncle Mike. He was our host and he’d abide by the guesting laws, but that didn’t make him our friend.

“It is no trouble at all,” he said. “Food will be out shortly. Pray take a seat wherever you like.”

As if he had already made his calculations, Adam led us to the hikers’ table without hesitation. I would have chosen the Heddars’ so I could ask Dylis about the music she heard in the walls.

But the hikers’ sudden appearance in this remote location had made them top candidates for most likely suspects, even before I’d known they were fae. I couldn’t argue with Adam’s decision. It was good I was happy, because the hikers were unhappy enough for all of us.

Able stiffened when Adam pulled out a chair opposite Victoria and motioned for me to sit. As usual, Adam had chosen our seats strategically. Our backs were to the kitchen, but we had good views of all the people at the other two tables.

It was an unnecessary strategy, though, because everyone at Peter’s table rose when Adam and I sat down. As soon as the last of that group exited the room, the Heddars left, too. No one stopped to introduce themselves—just as they would not have had we been staying in a generic hotel under normal circumstances. That probably meant that no one realized just how bad the storm outside was.

The pair at our table started to get up and leave with everyone else. But Adam waved them back into their seats.

He was an Alpha—it hadn’t been a request. They sat back down, though I could tell that neither of them quite knew why.

“We met Elyna Gray last night,” Adam told them. “You must be the hikers that she mentioned—Able and Victoria. Not part of the wedding party.”

They didn’t respond.

“Able and Victoria,” Adam said. “Siblings and mountain climbers.”

“Yes,” Victoria said tightly.

“Goblin killer,” her brother hissed at Adam. “We’ve done nothing. Leave us alone.”

Adam hadn’t killed any goblins that I knew about—which would be anytime in the last decade. I hadn’t killed any goblins, either. I had led a team of pack members with the intention of confronting a fugitive goblin who had killed a human child. He’d ended up dead at the hands of the goblin king, but I’d been there, too. I would have killed that goblin if I’d had to.

I wondered what stories were going around that had Adam labeled as a goblin killer. Or maybe the question should be who was telling the stories.

Victoria’s hand shot to her brother’s knee, and he quit talking. Adam bumped me lightly with his shoulder. They were more worried about him. Adam thought I needed to be the one to talk to them.

Fair enough, I thought.

Elyna hadn’t known anything about them other than that they apparently made good money GoPro-ing themselves climbing mountains, then posting their adventures to social media.

I needed to find out who had the artifact so I could return it. I didn’t think arguing that Adam hadn’t killed any goblins was going to help with my main goal, so I set it aside.

A rather long silence had stretched out between us as I decided how to approach this. We were alone in the room, and that opened up a few possibilities.

“Nasty weather out there,” I said to Victoria, ignoring her brother. “Do you know what caused it?”

“A low-pressure system bringing in arctic air?” she answered. She had a death grip on her brother. “Are you some kind of meteorologist?”

I’d hoped for a more direct answer. Questions were neither truth nor lies.

“No,” I said. “I’m a mechanic. But I know why this storm is going to keep going for a while.”

The timing was right for them to have been involved with the theft. For the first time I wondered if my brother had really been the thief. I’d just accepted Hrímnir’s assessment. It didn’t make sense that he’d stolen the artifact, left it here, then run to me.

Goblins were excellent thieves, and this pair knew about mountains in winter. If I had to pick someone to go rob a frost giant, this pair would be a very good choice. They had enough magic to slip in and out of locked places, but not so much that they drew attention. They had opportunity, and possibly the means for the theft.

As for motive…

If I reached out and closed my hand, I’d hold Lugh’s walking stick. There were a lot of fae who resented that, an artifact held by someone who wasn’t fae, even if they couldn’t do anything about it. The walking stick had decided, for whatever reason, that it belonged to me.

Hrímnir wasn’t fae. I didn’t know if his missing artifact had been created by the fae. But I did know that most of the fae looked upon all artifacts as theirs. Zee certainly did. And Underhill had not yet forgiven me for giving the Soul Taker—which had certainly not been fae—to Zee for destruction.

Motive enough. If the goblin siblings knew that Hrímnir had an artifact. And where he lived. And that he couldn’t come here. The simplest explanation was still that my brother had stolen the artifact and left it with someone.

He was more likely to have done that with someone he knew better than any of the guests—someone like Liam, maybe. Liam wasn’t here, though. For now, I had a couple of goblins to question.

“Someone is missing his lyre and wants it back,” I said. “Until he gets it, none of us is going to leave here alive.”

“I told you.” Able’s voice was urgent as he leaned toward his sister. “I told you there was magic in this storm.”

True.

Victoria gave her brother a look and he subsided. No question who was in charge between the two of them.

“It would take a Power to do this,” Victoria said. “Not just a Gray Lord—one of the elementals.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what she meant by elemental.

“A lyre,” Victoria said.

“An artifact,” I told her. “It might be a harp. I’m a little unclear about that.”

I couldn’t tell if that was news to her or not. An artifact would make sense—not much else would move someone to expend the power that this storm cost.

After a moment’s silence, Victoria said, “And it is your intention to return it? This lyre or harp? An artifact?”

“If it isn’t returned, no one is leaving the lodge alive,” I told them again.

“I don’t believe you,” Able spat angrily, staring at my husband. “You humans are all liars. Werewolves, too. If you find it, you’ll take it to the Marrok, werewolf, won’t you? Because he sent you after it, didn’t he? An artifact—and oh so close to his territory.”

“The Marrok has nothing to do with this,” Adam answered. “If he wanted something, I’m not the wolf he would send for it.”

“Charles,” breathed both of the fae, stilling in their seats like a pair of rabbits who have just seen a coyote. It didn’t make them look very human.

I wondered how Charles would feel about the terror he inspired in this pair. The Marrok’s son scared me, too. And he liked me—I was mostly sure he liked me. But the fear he inspired was a useful thing. It kept people from getting hurt.

Just now, it also showed me what the goblins looked like when they were afraid.

They hadn’t been frightened about the storm. Or about someone stealing an artifact from a being powerful enough to control the weather. I was pretty sure that if this pair had taken an artifact from a frost giant, they would have been more scared of the frost giant than they were of the mention of Charles.

Maybe the goblins hadn’t stolen the lyre. Harp. Artifact.

“Charles doesn’t hunt artifacts,” I told them. “Nor does the Marrok.”

The goblins both looked at me in utter disbelief. Or as if I were very stupid.

“Do you know what the Marrok has?” Victoria hissed as only a goblin could. She managed to shove a fair bit of contempt into her voice, too. “A treasury of dozens of artifacts—dozens of named artifacts. Who knows how many unnamed.”

“How else would he amass such power if he doesn’t hunt them?” asked Able. “Do you think they come to him when he calls?”

That could be a dig about my walking stick—or not. It didn’t matter right now. I was considering whether or not Bran had a stash of artifacts. I could hear that the goblins believed what they were saying.

If Bran had a bunch of artifacts, I wouldn’t know about it, would I?

Bran Cornick, the Marrok, was motivated by one thing: to keep the werewolves safe. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to accomplish that. If he’d found a use for fae artifacts, he would keep them. Even if he was only keeping them out of the hands of his enemies.

Oh hell. As soon as I’d had that last thought, I knew. Of course he was collecting artifacts. Zee was also collecting the weapons he had made—most of them artifacts of varying degrees of power. I wonder if Zee had started that because of the Marrok—to keep his most powerful creations out of the Marrok’s hands.

“The Marrok might hunt artifacts,” Adam conceded, as if he’d followed my thoughts. Or maybe he knew something I didn’t—like that Bran had a massive collection of fae artifacts. “I have no useful knowledge about that. But he’s not hunting them with us. We have a treaty with the fae.”

One that did not say we were obliged to give them any artifacts we might find.

Victoria saw something over my shoulder, and whispered, “He’s coming.” She waited long enough for someone to walk from the kitchen to our table, and then smiled. After a second, the smile became genuine.

Liam brought two plates, overflowing with food, and set them on the table in front of Adam and me. We got glasses, which he filled with orange juice from a pitcher he’d also carried. He refilled the other glasses in front of our companions.

Victoria thanked him.

I had to work hard to keep from showing my shock. There was no way that she didn’t know Liam was fae. Maybe she didn’t realize that he was more powerful than she was? Or she was too young to know how dangerous thanking the fae was?

Liam accepted her thanks blandly, said a few hostly things, and took himself back to the kitchen. I wondered if he could hear what we were saying. I didn’t think so, because I hadn’t been able to eavesdrop over the music—and my hearing is very good.

“This elemental whose artifact was stolen is causing this storm?” Victoria asked. “It was stolen near here?”

I nodded.

“I thought you were here about your brother,” said Able. “That’s what you told Liam.”

“I am,” I said. “But it’s turned into something more complex.”

“Well,” said Victoria, “I don’t know why you’re talking to us.” She gave Adam a sour smile. “Neither of us has stolen an artifact.”

That put the goblins in the clear. Fae couldn’t lie. There were ways, I’d been told, very secret ways that goblins could lie. But her words struck me as the absolute truth—and I could tell truth from lie more accurately than any lie detector.

She pushed back her chair, stood up, and strode out of the room, Able trailing behind her.

“I thought we weren’t going to tell people about the artifact and ask them if they stole it?” said Adam, but not as though he was upset.

“Time is short,” I said. “My brother is—” I had no words for what had been done to him. I knew what it was like to be helpless. “My brother is in trouble. We can’t even get in touch with Honey to check on him. Or the pack. Or what is going down in New Mexico. And this storm.”

Even tucked deeply inside the lodge I could hear the winds blowing.

“I know storms like this, Adam. They kill people. People who are heating their homes with fireplaces and don’t know their chimney is blocked until everyone dies of carbon monoxide. People who don’t have enough money to heat their homes. Emergency workers.”

“Other people, too,” said Liam.

I hadn’t heard him approach. Adam turned his chair around, but I stood up.

The green man looked at us and frowned thoughtfully. “I think we need to talk.”

Adam leaned back and raised an eyebrow. “Here?”

Liam glanced over his shoulder to the kitchen, where I could hear the murmurs of voices. “My apartment, where we won’t be disturbed.”

That pretty much answered the question of whether he could hear what we’d been talking about from the kitchen, even over the music.

Liam’s apartment was on the third floor, where the ongoing renovations were on full display. The flooring had been taken down to the original boards, and sections of the walls had great gaping areas where the lath and plaster had been removed to expose new electrical wiring.

There was a sort of creaking sound above us. Adam crooked his neck and looked at the ceiling. “Sounds like you need to get someone up there to get the snowpack off.”

Liam stopped, looking up, too. I felt his power slide through the structure of the roof.

“Ice dam,” he said. “I’d fix it, but this old building takes magic oddly sometimes. I don’t want to bring the whole thing down on our heads. We’ll have to get someone up there to clear it manually.”

He looked at Adam, as if measuring him for duty. But then he said, as if to himself, “There is time for discussion first.”

We wove through and over construction debris to the end of the hall and around the corner to another hall, where the destruction ended and material storage began. Four pallets of flooring held up five rolls of carpet. Another pallet of five-gallon buckets of paint. Large boxes, some of them unopened and others ripped open for inspection, disgorging masses of bubble-wrapped furniture or fixtures.

“Pardon the chaos,” he said as he led us around a stack of drywall that reached past his shoulder. “Construction is not a neat or tidy business.”

But once we were past the drywall, we emerged into about twenty feet of pristine hall that did not look as though it belonged in the lodge at all. Or not a lodge built in the last thousand years.

The floor under our feet was rough-hewed wood, eighteen to twenty inches wide, with narrow gaps modern construction would never have tolerated. The walls were fieldstone fitted far more tightly than the floor.

“Granite,” I said, letting my fingers slide over the rough surface of the walls, though my eyes were on the door at the end of the hall.

Liam nodded. “That it is. Makes it feel like home.”

The door.

There was an entrance to Underhill at the edge of our backyard. It wasn’t fancy, made of thick and battered oak that looked as though it had stood there for a century and would probably stand there for another. It was a good door, solid, but not a beautiful thing.

Underhill herself had put it there when Aiden, a human child who’d been trapped in her world for uncountable years, had come to live with us. We’d moved him when our pack house had become too dangerous for innocent bystanders. We hadn’t sent him away to keep him safe—but because he was needed to keep the world safe from one of our more interesting pack members.

Though Aiden wasn’t currently living with us, the door was still there. Underhill, in her human-seeming, used it to visit us sometimes.

Liam’s door was nothing like the door in our backyard.

His was a spectacular piece of art, though not at all in keeping with the sleek Art Deco of the renovated parts of the lodge’s ground floor. Nor even the medieval castle construction of the hall the door stood in, though the rounded top and the heavy forged-iron hinges and knob were obviously a nod to the Middle Ages. Instead, the oak leaves—carved in bas-relief all over the door and frame—made me think of Art Deco’s nature-loving fanciful predecessor, Art Nouveau.

It looked nothing at all like the entrance to Underhill in our backyard—but, like that one, Liam’s door felt like a door between worlds.

“Nice door,” Adam said.

“Yes,” Liam answered with a sly smile. “I made it myself.”

He opened the door, revealing a very modern apartment with a tile floor covered by thick area rugs. The kitchen was part of the living room and it was a chef’s workshop. All business and no fripperies, but I was pretty sure that the big gas stove was a work of art in a different way than the door was.

“Welcome,” Liam said, and there was a pop of magic as he stepped aside to allow us entry.

He hadn’t unlocked the door, but that door didn’t need a lock to keep people out any more than Underhill’s door did. I was pretty sure if we’d pushed past him before he welcomed us, something fatal would have occurred. There was a tang to magic spells that were designed to kill, a sort of eagerness or anticipation. I could sense that here.

The windows looked out on the surroundings of the lodge, the storm raging outside. I hadn’t expected that, somehow. It felt as if this room was both in the lodge and not in the lodge.

Magic doesn’t have to make sense.

Adam and I sat side by side on a soft couch that the muscles in my body—still sore from the shivering cold of yesterday—found amazingly comfortable. Because Adam was here, I let myself sink down into the gentle support. My mate perched on the front edge of the couch. He didn’t like soft seating that could slow him down if he needed to move.

“Here we cannot be overheard,” said Liam. “This morning I arose thinking I knew why this storm decided to be so inconvenient. Imagine my surprise when you told our goblin twins that it is caused by someone trapping us here until you retrieve a musical instrument—though there seems to be some confusion about just what kind of instrument you are looking for. An artifact.”

I noticed that his Irish accent was abruptly toned down, until it was only a faint lyrical note instead of a John Philip Sousa march.

Adam’s eyes narrowed. “Uncle Mike would know if someone brought an artifact into his pub.”

“Why did you think the storm was so bad?” I asked.

Liam sighed—and answered Adam. “Yes, of course he would.” He dragged a chair across the room and placed it directly in front of Adam and me. Then he sat, legs crossed at his ankles, elbows on the arms of the chair with his hands steepled.

“We,” he announced with a sigh, “are at an impasse. I cannot afford to trust you, and you cannot trust me.”

“Why not?” Adam asked. “We are all trapped here until someone figures something out.” He looked at me.

“I’m still hung up on why a green man wouldn’t know if there was an artifact at his lodge,” I said. I frowned. “And why were you surprised when we showed up for breakfast?” Had he expected the hungry ghost to take care of us? But that didn’t make sense because if that were the reason, he should have known it hadn’t. Uncle Mike would have known if something like that invaded his pub.

“Green man?” Liam said. “I haven’t heard that term in a very long time. Is that what Uncle Mike is calling himself?”

I couldn’t remember if Uncle Mike had ever named himself a green man.

“Other people have called him that,” I said, because I knew that was true—then repeated the question he’d avoided. “Why didn’t you know about us?” Or the attack on Jack. Anyone sensitive to magic should have felt something.

“What does Gary have to do with a stolen artifact?” Liam asked me, instead of answering.

If he didn’t want to answer the question, he could just say so. And also, if he wasn’t answering my questions, I wouldn’t answer his, either. “We were attacked by a hungry ghost this morning,” I said.

Beside me Adam stifled a laugh.

“You were what?” Liam stiffened, sitting forward in his chair, his hand reaching for something at his side.

“This isn’t your lodge,” I said with sudden certainty.

Almost as if it were an echo of my words, I felt something that rocketed up through the bottoms of my shoes and up through my spine. Not quite magic, but power of some sort. It felt a lot like an earthquake, like something was pulling a firm foundation out from under my feet.

Liam’s nostrils flared and he growled, “My lodge. My home.”

His magic surged with his asserted ownership, and the trembling feeling subsided. Mostly. The hairs on the back of my neck still felt a little unhappy.

“If it is yours, why don’t you know if there’s an artifact here?” Adam asked softly. He’d thought Liam was talking to us. “Why didn’t you notice the hungry ghost in our room?” His voice dropped into the soft tones that were Adam at his most dangerous. “Or did you set that ghost on us?”

I shook my head. “He didn’t. It didn’t belong to this place.” Then I added, “He wasn’t talking to us, he was enforcing his claim on the lodge. How long have you been here, that it isn’t yours yet?”

Liam narrowed his eyes at me.

“You don’t have to answer that,” I said. I’d just wanted him to know that I understood what I’d felt.

Liam tipped his head. “You aren’t quite…whole.” He shook his head. “Not the right word. You are wounded and it leaves you open in a way that is dangerous.”

“Thank you for telling us something we already knew,” Adam said blandly. “Do you know what to do about it?”

He asked it so casually, I don’t think Liam understood it was an honest question.

“Not in the slightest,” Liam said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” He smiled a bit grimly. “Not in anyone who lived. Would you share what kind of creature caused it?”

I could feel Adam’s worry, though his face didn’t change.

“Not a creature,” I told him. “An artifact—not built by the fae.”

“Do you still have it?” Liam asked casually, a hunter’s gleam in his eye.

“Destroyed by a friend of ours,” Adam said.

“A fae friend,” I added at Liam’s indrawn breath.

He regained his butler friendliness. “Pity. If you still had it, I might have been able to figure out how it damaged you.”

“My brother came to my house the day before yesterday, cursed with an inability to understand or communicate with anyone,” I said, more to change the subject than because I had any plan in mind. But after I said it, I realized that withholding information wasn’t going to make our task any easier.

Adam looked at me. I shrugged. “We’re in the same boat right now. Maybe if we all talk, we might be able to come up with a solution. And, Adam, if he’s like Uncle Mike, if Liam has the artifact, the only way we are going to get it from him is if he gives it to us of his own free will.”

Adam hesitated but finally nodded.

Liam, for his part, didn’t react to my naming him a suspect by so much as a twitch of his eye.

I told Liam the whole thing, from the moment my brother showed up until we were attacked by the hungry ghost. I didn’t tell him about the silver spider. She seemed like something…someone dangerous to talk about. It was easy enough to do when I reduced our battle with the hungry ghost to “We won.” Even easier when I left out Jack, too, because he was Elyna’s and no business of anyone else’s.

When I was finished, Liam closed his eyes. “Coincidences. I don’t like coincidences. You tell me the storm is caused by Hrímnir, who wants his lyre back. And I believe you.”

He uncrossed his ankles and moved a little, letting his body inhabit the seat rather than simply sit in it. His change in posture seemed to alter the nature of his chair. It became a throne, not the kind used in modern royal ceremonies, but the high seat earned by a chieftain.

I couldn’t help thinking of a painting of a barbarian king, like something on the cover of a Conan the Barbarian novel. An incongruous thought, given Liam’s outward tidiness, but it felt true. In some other time and place, one that was bloody and messy, this man had been a ruler of a fae court.

I could almost see…

Liam’s eyes widened. He leaned forward, saying something to Adam when my mate blocked his way. But I couldn’t understand his words. All of my attention was focused on the vision I was experiencing of a different time and place.

—blood on a wooden floor. So much blood. A man screaming.

Liam’s fingers brushed my forehead and the visions scrolling in my head drifted away, leaving me sweaty and shivering. Hot and cold at the same time. Adam’s arm around my shoulder let me center myself.

“You need to find someone who can fix that,” Liam told me.

“I intend to,” I told him. The consequences of not fixing it were growing more obviously grave on a near-hourly basis.

Liam sat back again, once more a well-groomed, graceful man in a wingback chair.

I cleared my throat and tried to remember what we’d been talking about.

“Why do you think the storm has trapped us here?” I asked.

“To prevent a wedding,” Liam said.