There was something dark and not-Tad in his voice. I was used to that when dealing with the werewolves. Sometimes in the middle of the conversation, there would be a switch, and instead of talking to my friend Warren or my husband Adam, I was talking to someone a little more direct, someone who could eat little coyotes for breakfast. So I was used to it, but I’d never seen something . . . someone so dark and violent in the man I thought of as a kid brother, a guy who was a little bit of a clown to cover up just how competent he was.
It was only for a moment. His voice was faintly cheerful as he said, “So your buddy opened the door, and he had Dad with him—and this kid. He told us that was as much as he could do, but that the kid could get us out and on our way. The kid, Aiden, had agreed to do this in return for my father’s help in gaining him a little time—twenty-four hours of safety under the pack’s protection. Hoping—as you probably have figured out—to see if he could finagle that into something really useful, like getting him away from here to somewhere else. Somewhere that he’s not so likely to end up back with the fae”—the darkness was back, just for that one word—“who would like to take him apart to see how he works.”
“We’ll see,” said Adam, as if Tad had asked him a question. “We need to know a lot more about him than he’s told us. I’m not unhappy to thumb my nose at the fae—but I won’t do it over someone who will turn around and stab my friends in the back. Not even if that someone looks like a helpless little kid.”
Tad looked down at his computer screen and brushed it with a forefinger. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember he’s not just a kid, Adam. He was just human, not witchborn or anything. No one knows how he can do fae magic the way he does—not even the fae. They know it’s something Underhill did, and they’re jealous—as if Underhill stole something they thought belonged to them and gave it to a human.”
Like Tad, I thought. Mostly the half fae were just messed up, but Tad had come out with a powerful talent for metal magic—which was rare even in full-blooded fae. Were they jealous of that, too?
Tad rubbed his face. “He’s just human. But all I can think of is Star Trek and ‘Charlie X.’”
“Star Trek?” I asked, puzzled.
Adam grunted. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Charlie is a kid who survived a spaceship crash and was rescued by aliens,” he said grimly. “They gave him powers so that he could survive. And, after a very long time, the Enterprise and her crew show up and rescue him. So he survived and is rescued . . . but he has all of this power and is turned loose on the universe without the experience of growing up human. He doesn’t understand how to interact with people, how to listen when someone tells him ‘no.’ And because of his power, no one can make him stop. Eventually, the aliens have to come and take him back with them, where he will be alone for the rest of his life—because it’s not safe for him to be out with the rest of the universe.”
Tad nodded earnestly. “Now, your buddy who was repaying a favor to you, for a fae, he is pretty softhearted. I think he couldn’t stand to watch what the fae were prepared to do to figure Aiden out. They killed the last one of these kids they found—last year. That one was water touched. They told Aiden that the water-touched boy was crazy, but from what your buddy told me, he wasn’t crazy when he came out of Underhill. That happened later.” He took a breath. “I don’t think your buddy knows any more about what this kid is like than you or I do. I think he felt sorry for him. I do, too. He sure deserves a chance, don’t you think? After surviving Underhill for all those centuries?”
“But ‘Charlie X’ weighs on your mind,” Adam said. “Are you guarding him from harm, or us from him?”
Tad smiled. “Both, if you don’t mind.”
“You need to sleep,” I said.
He nodded around the room at the occupied chairs and sofas. “I’ll sleep down here just fine. Let Zack have the bedroom.” He took a breath and smiled brightly. “I’d just as soon not be alone for a while anyway.”
Paul glanced at him obliquely, met Adam’s gaze, and nodded. Our pack had Tad’s back. Tad could keep Aiden safe, and us safe—and the pack would keep him safe.
—
I made Adam strip and let me look at his shoulder.
There were bruises and swelling—a testament to how bad it had been. There had been other hurts, too. Places where I could see the faint remnants of bruises and damage. I touched those to make sure that what I was seeing was true healing and not some inner bleeding finding its way out.
Something that had been tight since I watched him run up the bridge for the first time relaxed. He was okay. He’d fought a troll and come out okay.
“Your turn,” he said, while I ran my hands over a bump on his lower ribs.
“My turn?” It was an old bump, gotten before he’d become a werewolf. He’d told me that it used to be much worse: ragged, purple-edged scars over a broken rib where someone had shot him in another life on another continent. Some of his scars had disappeared overnight after he was Changed. But that one was fading gently. Someday it would be gone.
“Your turn.” His voice was dark with something other than pain. “That’s how we do this, remember. You check me out, I check you out.”