2
“I don’t have the walking stick,” I told Beauclaire.
He should know that. I’d told Zee, and, according to his son, he had told some of the other fae to protect me from exactly this scenario.
If he didn’t know, was it only because he was not from the nearby Walla Walla fae reservation? Or did that mean that Zee didn’t trust him?
“Where is it?” His voice slid silk sweet and dangerous into the room.
If he didn’t know, I didn’t want to tell him. He wasn’t going to like it, and I didn’t want to enrage a Gray Lord while he sat at my kitchen table.
“I tried to give it back to the fae,” I told him, stalling for time. “I gave it to Uncle Mike and it just came back.”
“It is very old,” Beauclaire said, and his voice was halfway apologetic. “The fae don’t have it, at least none of the fae in the local reservation. Do you know where it is, now?”
He was assuming that I’d given it to the fae again. If it hadn’t been for the apology in his voice, I think I might have been happy to … not lie, not precisely. Because I didn’t know where the walking stick was, I only knew who it was with.
“Not exactly,” I told him, then stalled out. Zee had been very clear that the fae would not be amused at where that walking stick had ended up.
“Then what ‘exactly’ do you know? Whom did you give it to?”
There was a thump from the stairs, and both of us jumped. Beauclaire focused his attention, and I felt his magic send shivers of ice along my arms.
“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll check.” Before the first word had left my mouth, I hopped out of my chair and headed for the stairway. Whoever had made the noise was likely to be someone I cared about, and I didn’t want them to get blasted by a Gray Lord.
I turned the corner, and Medea stared up at me from the fourth step from the bottom. “It’s okay,” I told Beauclaire. I picked her up, and, true to form, the cat went limp and started purring.
“What was it?” he said.
“I know it’s a horror-film cliché,” I said as I walked back into the kitchen. “But, really, it’s just the cat. I thought you put her to sleep like everyone else?”
Beauclaire frowned at my cat, the magic in the air dissipating gradually. I sat down, and the cat consented to continue to be petted.
“Cats are tricky,” he told me. “Rather like you, they tend to shed enchantments. I didn’t expect to find one in a house full of werewolves, and magic on the fly, delicate magic, is not my specialty.” He looked at me, and there was a threat in his voice when he said, “Hurricanes, tidal waves, drowned cities—those are easier.”
“Don’t feel too bad about it,” I told him, my voice conciliatory. His brows lowered, and I continued in a bland tone, “No one else has heard of a cat who likes werewolves, either.”
Medea—maybe because dangerous men with threatening voices, in her experience, were the people most apt to drop whatever they were doing and cuddle her—decided that Beauclaire was fair game. She oozed from my lap to the tabletop and began a very-slow-motion creep across the table toward him.
“We were talking about the walking stick?” he said, raising an eyebrow. I couldn’t tell if the eyebrow was at me or at my cat—watching Medea do her slo-mo cat stalk can be disconcerting.
“An oakman used the walking stick to kill a vampire,” I told him. It was either the beginning of the story or a diversion, I wasn’t certain myself.
I reached up and wrapped a hand around one of Adam’s dog tags, which hung from my necklace along with my wedding ring and a lamb. If I was going to keep Beauclaire from destroying me and my all-too-vulnerable family in a fit of pique, he’d have to understand—as much as I did—what had happened to the walking stick.
Medea made it all the way across the table and hunkered down in front of Beauclaire. She focused on him and moaned. I’d never heard another cat do it.
“The oakman told me afterward”—I raised my voice a little so it would carry over Medea—“that Lugh never made anything that couldn’t be used as a weapon.” I frowned. “No, that wasn’t quite what he said. It was something along the lines of ‘never made anything that couldn’t become a spear when needed.’”
Medea upped the volume on her yowl, then turned into Halloween kitty; every hair on her body stood at attention, and if she’d had a tail, I was sure it would have been pointed straight in the air.
Medea, who dealt with werewolves on a daily basis, was pretty much immune to fear. She even liked vampires. And she had no trouble with Zee or Tad.
Beauclaire ducked his head until he was face-to-face with Medea. He dropped his glamour just a bit, and I caught a glimpse of something beautiful and deadly, something with green eyes and a long tongue as he hissed at the cat. She all but levitated off the table and disappeared around the corner of the kitchen and up the stairs.
I felt my lip curl in an involuntary snarl. “Overkill,” I told him.
He relaxed in his seat. “So the walking stick is with an oakman now?”
I shook my head. “No. It came back after that. But last summer … the otterkin…”
“I’ve heard about you and the death of the last of the otterkin.” He shrugged. “They always were bloodthirsty and stupid. They are no loss—” He paused, looked thoughtfully at me, and said, “You killed them with the walking stick?”
“It was what I had.” I tried not to sound defensive. “And I only killed one with it.” Adam had taken care of the rest, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “There was something wrong with the walking stick when the otterkin died.” Something hungry.
“Something wrong,” he repeated, thoughtfully. Then he shook his head. “No. It is only the great weapons that are quenched when they are first made, usually in the blood of someone worthy, someone whose traits will make the sword more dangerous. The walking stick was finished long ago.”
I wondered if I should mention that Uncle Mike had thought that I’d “quenched” the walking stick. Maybe I should tell him that the otterkin wasn’t the only thing the walking stick had killed that day. Maybe I should tell him that I was pretty sure the walking stick had killed that otterkin mostly on its own.
But before I had a chance to speak, Beauclaire continued, “The blade you know as Excalibur was born when her blade was drowned in the death of my father.” He paused, showed his teeth in a not-smile. “I understand that you might be acquainted with the maker of that blade.”
I quit worrying about the walking stick for a moment.
Jumping Jehoshaphat. O Holy Night.
Siebold Adelbertsmiter had made blades once upon a time. He’d been the owner of a VW repair shop when I met him. He’d hired me, then sold me the shop when the Gray Lords decided that it was time that he admit he was fae—decades after the fae had come out to the public. I knew him as a grumpy old curmudgeon with a secret marshmallow heart, but once he’d been something quite different: the Dark Smith of Drontheim. He wasn’t one of the good guys in the fairy tales that mentioned him.
Part of me, still properly afraid of Beauclaire, worried that his grudge against Zee might be turned toward me. Part of me was horrified that my friend Zee had killed Lugh, the hero of hundreds, if not thousands, of stories. But the biggest part of me was still stuck on marveling that Zee, my grumpy mentor Zee, had forged Excalibur.
After a moment, I started processing the information in more practical paths. That story was the answer to why Beauclaire didn’t know what I’d done with the walking stick.
If Zee had killed Lugh, Lugh’s son wouldn’t be exchanging kind words with him or anyone who associated with him. No one holds grudges like the fae.
“But we are not speaking of one of the great weapons,” Beauclaire said, temper cooling as he pulled away from an old source of anger. “So tales of the walking stick’s being used to kill a vampire or otterkin are not germane. The walking stick is a very minor artifact, for all that Lugh made it, nor is it useful for important things.”
“Unless I decided to raise sheep,” I said, because his disparagement of the walking stick, to my surprise, stung a bit. It had been old and beautiful—and loyal to me as any sheepdog to its shepherd. If it had become tainted, that was my fault because it had been my decision to use it to kill monsters. “Then all my sheep would have twins. Might not be important to you or the fae, but it would certainly have made an impact on a shepherd’s bottom line.”
He looked at me the way my mother sometimes did. But he wasn’t my parent, and he had invaded my house, so I didn’t cringe. I narrowed my gaze on him and finished the point I’d been making, “If I were a sheep farmer, I would have found it to be powerful magic.”
“It is an artifact my father made,” said Beauclaire who was also ap Lugh, Lugh’s son. “I value the walking stick, do not mistake me. But it is not powerful; nor is its magic anything that would interest most mortals or fae. For that reason, it was left with you longer than it should have been.”
“Point of fact,” I said, holding up a finger. “It was left with me because whenever I gave it back, or one of the fae tried to claim it, it returned to me.”
Beauclaire leaned forward, and said, “So how is it that you do not have the walking stick now?”
“Is it the Gray Lord or ap Lugh who wants to know?” I asked.
He sat back. “It matters?”
I didn’t say anything.
“The Gray Lord is too busy with other matters to chase after a walking stick that encourages sheep to produce twins. No matter how old or cherished that artifact is,” said Beauclaire after a moment. He gave me a small smile that did not warm his eyes. “Even so, had I known where it was before this, I would have been here sooner to collect it.”
Which was an answer, wasn’t it?
“The Gray Lord would have gotten the short answer,” I told him. “Much good as it would have done him.”
That mobile eyebrow arched up with Nimoy-like quickness.
“Or me,” I continued. “Because the Gray Lord is not going to be happy in any case.” The son of Lugh might understand why I had done what I had done because he would understand that the need to fix what I had broken was more important than that the walking stick was a lot more powerful than it had been. The Gray Lord would only be interested in the power.
He didn’t say anything, and I drew in a breath.
“The walking stick killed one of the otterkin,” I told him. “But saying I killed the otterkin with it would be stretching the truth. I did use it to defend myself when the otterkin swung a sword at me. His magical bronze sword broke against the walking stick, minor artifact that it is.” He almost smiled at the bite in my tone, but lost all expression when I continued. “And then the silver butt of the walking stick sharpened itself into a blade, a spearhead, and killed the otterkin.” In case he didn’t understand, I said, “On its own. Without its intervention, I would not have survived.”
The long fingers on Beauclaire’s left hand drew imaginary things on the tabletop as he thought. I worried that it might be magic of some kind, but he’d promised no harm, and I could have sensed magic if he were using it.
Finally, he spoke. “My father’s artifacts acquire some semblance of self-awareness as they age. But not to alter, so fundamentally, their purpose. The walking stick was a thing of life, not death.”
“Maybe the walking stick is the first, or even the only one. I am not lying to you.” My voice was tight. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling him all of this. But he scared me, this Gray Lord who wore a lawyer’s suit and seemed so cool and calm. I was under no illusions about the civility promised by the oh-so-expensive suit—the fae were masters at donning the trappings of civilization to hide the predator inside. I needed him to understand why I’d given the walking stick away, or there was a very real chance he’d kill me.
“Maybe not,” he conceded after too long a pause. “But there are many kinds of lies.”
“Before the otterkin died, we fought the river devil, a primordial creature that came to destroy the world. Most of the work was done by others. It was a hard fight, and we almost lost. Those who fought to kill it, all of them, except for me, died.” For some creatures, death was less permanent than for others, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t died. “I had lost my last weapon. I was desperate, everyone was dead or dying. The walking stick came to my hand, and I killed the river devil with it.”