“Success?” Adam asked.
Tad looked up. For a moment his face was somber and . . . old. Then his mask came back up. “You betcha. I have really missed”—he raised his voice—“playing with you guys.” There was a universal, but friendly, groan that echoed through the room where people, intent on their own laptops, were draped over various seats and couches like cats in a dry sauna, limp and happy.
“And they all died before me greatness, the scabbied old lot of ’em,” he said. “Who is the greatest pirate of all?”
“Me,” declared Paul. “The king of CAGCTDPBT. The ruler of ISTDPBF.” CAGCTDPBT and ISTDPBF were the pack’s favorite computer games. Codpieces and Golden Corsets: The Dread Pirate’s Booty Three, and Instant Spoils: The Dread Pirate’s Booty Four, respectively. “You talk too much—and now you are dead, you lowly deck scrubber. Nothing but a landlubber with salty aspirations. Yarr harr and yohoho.”
“Argh, verily, argh!” chorused the rec-room occupants obediently, though none of them raised their gazes off their monitors. Cookie woke up and barked a couple of times.
Tad looked at his laptop and scowled. “Now, that’s not right. No one should die buried in fish eggs.”
He looked back at us. “Jesse’s in her room—she said something about ‘homework waits for no woman,’ and barred the door. I decided keeping an eye on Aiden would be useful. But after the barbecue, he wandered around the house, then retreated down here. I think he’s asleep now.” He frowned at his keyboard, debating with himself. Then he said, “He locked the window bars and came out ten minutes later and locked the door from the inside. He looked pretty spooked, and the locks make him feel safer.” Tad glanced at the door to Aiden’s room and shivered. “I don’t know how long he was in Underhill, but a week would be enough to make me sleep in the closet with the door shut. It’s not a place that feels like it could ever be safe.”
I’d been there once, by accident. It hadn’t lasted long, but it had not felt safe. I crouched, balancing on my heels, so my head was more on a level with Tad’s. “What can you tell us about him?”
Tad shook his head. “Not much. Your buddy who broke us out brought him to us.” He waited.
“What buddy?” I asked.
Tad raised his eyebrows and waited.
“You know which buddy,” said Adam. “Think about it.”
There was a certain Gray Lord who’d promised to help Tad and Zee in return for my giving him back the walking stick. But the walking stick hadn’t stayed with Beauclaire, so I’d figured that he would count that bargain null and void. “Buddy” wasn’t a word I would ever apply to Beauclaire.
“Okay,” I said. “I know what buddy you’re talking about. Though I’m a little surprised because—” Because I still had the walking stick. I swallowed my words. If Tad didn’t think it was a good idea to talk about Beauclaire, then I would go along with his judgment. The whole pack knew that Beauclaire had come to me to get the walking stick, so I couldn’t mention the stick or the reason I was surprised Beauclaire had helped them.
Tad waited until I’d finished working it out. Then he nodded. “Your buddy talked to me a couple of times. So I was prepared when he opened the cell where I’d been spending my alone time when they weren’t torturing Dad to get me to perform for them.” He sucked in a breath, and muttered, “Don’t look like that, Mercy. They’ll regret that for the rest of their short lives because . . . hey, it’s Dad. And they’ve forgotten what Dad can do.”
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.”