If Bran had a bunch of artifacts, I wouldn’t know about it, would I?
Bran Cornick, the Marrok, was motivated by one thing: to keep the werewolves safe. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to accomplish that. If he’d found a use for fae artifacts, he would keep them. Even if he was only keeping them out of the hands of his enemies.
Oh hell. As soon as I’d had that last thought, I knew. Of course he was collecting artifacts. Zee was also collecting the weapons he had made—most of them artifacts of varying degrees of power. I wonder if Zee had started that because of the Marrok—to keep his most powerful creations out of the Marrok’s hands.
“The Marrok might hunt artifacts,” Adam conceded, as if he’d followed my thoughts. Or maybe he knew something I didn’t—like that Bran had a massive collection of fae artifacts. “I have no useful knowledge about that. But he’s not hunting them with us. We have a treaty with the fae.”
One that did not say we were obliged to give them any artifacts we might find.
Victoria saw something over my shoulder, and whispered, “He’s coming.” She waited long enough for someone to walk from the kitchen to our table, and then smiled. After a second, the smile became genuine.
Liam brought two plates, overflowing with food, and set them on the table in front of Adam and me. We got glasses, which he filled with orange juice from a pitcher he’d also carried. He refilled the other glasses in front of our companions.
Victoria thanked him.
I had to work hard to keep from showing my shock. There was no way that she didn’t know Liam was fae. Maybe she didn’t realize that he was more powerful than she was? Or she was too young to know how dangerous thanking the fae was?
Liam accepted her thanks blandly, said a few hostly things, and took himself back to the kitchen. I wondered if he could hear what we were saying. I didn’t think so, because I hadn’t been able to eavesdrop over the music—and my hearing is very good.
“This elemental whose artifact was stolen is causing this storm?” Victoria asked. “It was stolen near here?”
I nodded.
“I thought you were here about your brother,” said Able. “That’s what you told Liam.”
“I am,” I said. “But it’s turned into something more complex.”
“Well,” said Victoria, “I don’t know why you’re talking to us.” She gave Adam a sour smile. “Neither of us has stolen an artifact.”
That put the goblins in the clear. Fae couldn’t lie. There were ways, I’d been told, very secret ways that goblins could lie. But her words struck me as the absolute truth—and I could tell truth from lie more accurately than any lie detector.
She pushed back her chair, stood up, and strode out of the room, Able trailing behind her.
“I thought we weren’t going to tell people about the artifact and ask them if they stole it?” said Adam, but not as though he was upset.
“Time is short,” I said. “My brother is—” I had no words for what had been done to him. I knew what it was like to be helpless. “My brother is in trouble. We can’t even get in touch with Honey to check on him. Or the pack. Or what is going down in New Mexico. And this storm.”
Even tucked deeply inside the lodge I could hear the winds blowing.
“I know storms like this, Adam. They kill people. People who are heating their homes with fireplaces and don’t know their chimney is blocked until everyone dies of carbon monoxide. People who don’t have enough money to heat their homes. Emergency workers.”
“Other people, too,” said Liam.
I hadn’t heard him approach. Adam turned his chair around, but I stood up.
The green man looked at us and frowned thoughtfully. “I think we need to talk.”
Adam leaned back and raised an eyebrow. “Here?”
Liam glanced over his shoulder to the kitchen, where I could hear the murmurs of voices. “My apartment, where we won’t be disturbed.”
That pretty much answered the question of whether he could hear what we’d been talking about from the kitchen, even over the music.
Liam’s apartment was on the third floor, where the ongoing renovations were on full display. The flooring had been taken down to the original boards, and sections of the walls had great gaping areas where the lath and plaster had been removed to expose new electrical wiring.
There was a sort of creaking sound above us. Adam crooked his neck and looked at the ceiling. “Sounds like you need to get someone up there to get the snowpack off.”
Liam stopped, looking up, too. I felt his power slide through the structure of the roof.
“Ice dam,” he said. “I’d fix it, but this old building takes magic oddly sometimes. I don’t want to bring the whole thing down on our heads. We’ll have to get someone up there to clear it manually.”
He looked at Adam, as if measuring him for duty. But then he said, as if to himself, “There is time for discussion first.”
We wove through and over construction debris to the end of the hall and around the corner to another hall, where the destruction ended and material storage began. Four pallets of flooring held up five rolls of carpet. Another pallet of five-gallon buckets of paint. Large boxes, some of them unopened and others ripped open for inspection, disgorging masses of bubble-wrapped furniture or fixtures.
“Pardon the chaos,” he said as he led us around a stack of drywall that reached past his shoulder. “Construction is not a neat or tidy business.”
But once we were past the drywall, we emerged into about twenty feet of pristine hall that did not look as though it belonged in the lodge at all. Or not a lodge built in the last thousand years.
The floor under our feet was rough-hewed wood, eighteen to twenty inches wide, with narrow gaps modern construction would never have tolerated. The walls were fieldstone fitted far more tightly than the floor.
“Granite,” I said, letting my fingers slide over the rough surface of the walls, though my eyes were on the door at the end of the hall.
Liam nodded. “That it is. Makes it feel like home.”
The door.
There was an entrance to Underhill at the edge of our backyard. It wasn’t fancy, made of thick and battered oak that looked as though it had stood there for a century and would probably stand there for another. It was a good door, solid, but not a beautiful thing.
Underhill herself had put it there when Aiden, a human child who’d been trapped in her world for uncountable years, had come to live with us. We’d moved him when our pack house had become too dangerous for innocent bystanders. We hadn’t sent him away to keep him safe—but because he was needed to keep the world safe from one of our more interesting pack members.
Though Aiden wasn’t currently living with us, the door was still there. Underhill, in her human-seeming, used it to visit us sometimes.
Liam’s door was nothing like the door in our backyard.
His was a spectacular piece of art, though not at all in keeping with the sleek Art Deco of the renovated parts of the lodge’s ground floor. Nor even the medieval castle construction of the hall the door stood in, though the rounded top and the heavy forged-iron hinges and knob were obviously a nod to the Middle Ages. Instead, the oak leaves—carved in bas-relief all over the door and frame—made me think of Art Deco’s nature-loving fanciful predecessor, Art Nouveau.
It looked nothing at all like the entrance to Underhill in our backyard—but, like that one, Liam’s door felt like a door between worlds.
“Nice door,” Adam said.
“Yes,” Liam answered with a sly smile. “I made it myself.”
He opened the door, revealing a very modern apartment with a tile floor covered by thick area rugs. The kitchen was part of the living room and it was a chef’s workshop. All business and no fripperies, but I was pretty sure that the big gas stove was a work of art in a different way than the door was.