Iron Kissed

"You need to choose," he told me intently. "Adam or Samuel or neither. But you can't keep them dangling."

Adam was the Alpha of the local werewolf pack, my neighbor, and sometimes my date. Samuel was my first love, my first heartbreak, and currently my roommate. Just my roommate—though he'd like to be more.

I didn't trust either of them. Samuel's easygoing exterior masked a patient and ruthless predator. And Adam…well, Adam just flat scared me. And I was very much afraid that I loved them both.

"I know."

Warren dropped his eyes from mine, a sure sign he was uncomfortable. "I didn't brush my teeth with gunpowder this morning so I could go shooting my mouth off, Mercy, but this is serious. I know it's been difficult, but you can't have two dominant werewolves after the same woman without bloodshed. I don't know any other wolves who could have allowed you as much leeway as they have, but one of them is going to break soon."

My cell phone began playing "The Baby Elephant Walk." I dug it out of my hip pocket and looked at the caller ID.

"I believe you," I told Warren. "I just don't know what to do about any of it." There was more wrong with Samuel than undying love of me, but that was between him and me and none of Warren's business. And Adam…for the first time I wondered if it wouldn't just be easier if I pulled up stakes and moved.

The phone continued to sing.

"It's Zee," I said. "I have to take this."

Zee was my former boss and mentor. He'd taught me how to rebuild an engine from the ground up—and he'd given me the means to kill the vampires responsible for Warren's limp and the nightmares that were leaving fine lines around his eyes. I figured that gave Zee the right to interrupt Friday Night at the Movies.

"Just think about it."

I gave him a faint smile and flipped open my phone. "Hey, Zee."

There was a pause on the other end. "Mercedes," he said, and not even his thick German accent could disguise the hesitant tone of his voice. Something was wrong.

"What do you need?" I asked, sitting up straighter and putting my feet on the floor. "Warren's here," I added so Zee would know we had an audience. Werewolves make having a private conversation difficult.

"Would you drive out to the reservation with me?"

He could have been speaking of the Umatilla Reservation, which was a short drive from the Tri-Cities. But it was Zee, so he was talking about the Ronald Wilson Reagan Fae Reservation just this side of Walla Walla, better known around here as Fairyland.

"Now?" I asked.

Besides…I glanced at the vampire on the big-screen TV. They hadn't gotten it quite right, hadn't captured the real evil—but it was too close for comfort anyway. Somehow I couldn't work up too much sorrow at missing the rest of the movie—or more conversation about my love life either.

"No," Zee groused irritably. "Next week. Jetzt. Of course, now. Where are you? I will pick you up."

"Do you know where Kyle's house is?" I asked.

"Kyle?"

"Warren's boyfriend." Zee knew Warren; I hadn't realized he hadn't met Kyle. "We're out in West Richland."

"Give me the address. I will find it."

Zee's truck purred down the highway even though it was older than I was. Too bad the upholstery wasn't in as good a shape as the engine—I shifted my rump over a few inches to keep a wayward spring from digging in too deeply.

The dash lights illuminated the craggy face that Zee presented to the world. His fine white hair was mussed a little, as if he'd been rubbing his hands over it.

Warren hadn't said more about Adam or Samuel after I'd hung up because Kyle, thank goodness, had arrived with brownies. It wasn't that I was bothered by Warren's interference—I'd done enough interfering in his love life that I figured he had a right. I just didn't want to think about it anymore.

Zee and I rode mostly in silence from West Richland, all the way past Richland and on through Pasco. I knew better than to try to get something out of the old gremlin until he was ready to talk, so I let him alone until he decided to speak—at least after the first ten or fifteen questions he hadn't answered.

"Have you been to the reservation before?" he asked abruptly as we crossed the river just outside Pasco on the highway to Walla Walla.

"No." The fae reservation in Nevada welcomed visitors. They had built a casino and small theme park to attract tourists. The Walla Walla reservation, however, actively discouraged anyone who wasn't fae from entering. I wasn't quite certain if it was the Feds or the fae themselves responsible for the unfriendly reputation.

Zee tapped unhappily on his steering wheel with hands that belonged to a man who'd spent his lifetime repairing cars, tough and scarred with oil so ingrained not even pumice soap would remove it.

They were the right hands for the human that Zee had pretended to be. When the Gray Lords, the powerful and ruthless beings who ruled the fae in secret, forced him to admit what he was to the public a few years ago, a decade or more after the first fae had come out, Zee hadn't bothered to change his outward appearance at all.

I'd known him for a little over ten years, and the sour old man face was the only one I'd ever seen. He had another; I knew that. Most fae lived among humans under their glamour, even if they admitted what they were. People are just not ready to deal with the fae's true appearance. Sure, some of them looked human enough, but they also don't age. The thi

"Don't eat or drink anything," he said abruptly.

"I've read all the fairy tales," I reminded him. "No food, no drink. No favors. No thanking anyone."

He grunted. "Fairy tales. Damned children's stories."

"I've read Katherine Briggs, too," I offered. "And the original Grimm's." Mostly looking for some mention of a fae who could have been Zee. He wouldn't talk about it, though I think he'd been Someone. So finding out who he'd been had become something of a hobby of mine.

"Better. Better, but not much." He tapped his fingers on the wheel. "Briggs was an archivist. Her books are only as correct as her sources and mostly they are dangerously incomplete. The stories of the Brothers Grimm are more concerned with entertainment than reality. Both of them are nur Schatten…only shadows of reality." He looked at me, a quick searching glance. "Uncle Mike suggested you might be useful here. I thought it was a better repayment than might otherwise come your way."

To kill the sorcerer vampire, who was gradually being taken over by the demon that made him a sorcerer, Zee'd risked the wrath of the Gray Lords to loan me a couple of the treasures of the fae. I'd killed that vampire all right, and then I'd killed the one who'd made him. As in the stories, if you use a fairy gift once more than you have permission for, there are consequences.

If I'd known this was going to be repayment for favors rendered, I'd have been more apprehensive from the start: the last time I'd had to repay a favor hadn't ended well.

"I'll be all right," I told him despite the cold knot of dread in my stomach.

He gave me a sour look. "I had not thought about what it might mean to bring you into the reservation after dark."

"People do go to the reservation," I said, though I wasn't really sure of it.

"Not people like you, and no visitors after dark." He shook his head. "A human comes in and sees what he should, especially by daylight, when their eyes are easier to fool. But you…The Gray Lords have forbidden hunting humans, but we have our share of predators and it is hard to deny nature. Especially when the Gray Lords who make our rules are not here—there is only I. And if you see what you should not, there are those who will say they are only protecting what they have to…"