Shutting it up in a closet had seemed rude. Maybe it hadn’t been the walking stick’s fault.Īdam nodded and set the walking stick on the top of my chest of drawers, which had become its usual resting place. “Maybe I just had a nightmare,” I told him. Experimentally, I reached out and touched the walking stick again, but my fear didn’t return. I opened and closed my hands several times the fierce knowledge that something was wrong had faded. One thing I have learned is: don’t give magical things to Coyote. My life so far has been a learning experience. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I’d given it to Coyote. Then I killed with it-or it had used me to kill something. It would not stay with the fae when I tried to give it back to them. And even very minor artifacts, given enough time, can gain in power. But fae things are rarely what they seem. When it had followed me home like a stray puppy the first time, it had seemed harmless. The wood was gray with age, varnish, or both. The stick was pretty but not ornate, simple wood shod in etched silver. It was a fae artifact-a minor fae artifact, I’d been told. Until he’d drawn my attention to it, I hadn’t even realized that it had, once again, shown up where it shouldn’t be. I flexed my fingers, frowning with annoyance at the walking stick. “Did you bring this into bed last night?” he asked. He frowned, then crouched beside the bed and gently pulled the walking stick away. Something bad.” I closed my fist on the walking stick that lay against me. “No one else in the house is disturbed,” he said, turning his head to look at me. My link to the Columbia Basin werewolves was through simple membership, but Adam was the Alpha. I felt him stretch his awareness through the pack, though I couldn’t follow what he learned. He let me go and rolled off the bed and onto his feet. It felt like I’d heard something, but I’d been asleep, and now I couldn’t remember what had startled me. “I heard something,” I told Adam, though I wasn’t certain it was true. If there were something wrong, his voice would have been crisp and his muscles stiff.
Whatever had awakened me hadn’t bothered my husband. “Mercy?” Adam’s voice was rough with sleep.
Body stiff with tension, I listened for whatever had awakened me, but the early-summer night was free of unusual noises.Ī warm arm wrapped itself around my hips. I sat up in bed, a feeling of urgency gripping my stomach in iron claws.
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