"Your kind of trouble, right?" she asked. "Let me guess. Werewolf trouble."
"Not werewolf trouble," I said, abruptly irritated with her assumption that all werewolves were horrible. Me, she could be mad at, but she would have to hold her tongue around me about the wolves.
"Tell Maia that her werewolf buddy is going to put his neck in the noose trying to save her big brother, who got himself kidnapped by the bad guys." Because I knew that Samuel - my Samuel who was at that very moment dressing in the backseat - would never stand by and watch a human get hurt. He was the only werewolf I knew who cared that much about mundane humans, just because they were mundane humans. Most werewolves, even the ones who liked being werewolves, actively resented, if not hated, normal people for being what they could no longer be.
Sylvia was silent. I supposed the information that Gabriel was in trouble was finally catching up to her.
"Gabriel is alive," I told her. "And we've managed to make sure his kidnappers know that his continued health is important to their goals. Police wouldn't help, Sylvia. They just don't have the tools to deal with these people. All that bringing the police into it will do is make things worse and get someone killed." Like Phin. "My werewolf friend is a little better equipped. I promise I'll let you know when I find out something more - or if you or the police can help." And I hung up.
"Wow," said Jesse. "I've never heard anyone hand Sylvia her head like that. Even Gabriel is a little afraid of her, I think." She settled back into her seat. "Good for you. Maybe it'll make her think. I mean, werewolves are scary, they are dangerous - but . . ."
"They're our scary-dangerous werewolves, and they only eat people they don't like."
She flashed a quick smile at me. "I guess that's what I meant. Maybe, when you put it that way, I can understand how she got so upset. But it seems to me that what she was saying when she made Gabriel quit working with you was that she didn't trust Gabriel's judgement. As if he were stupid and would work someplace that was dangerous."
"Someplace he might get kidnapped by a band of nasty fae?" I asked dryly, but then I went on. "As if he were her son whose diapers she'd changed. You have to forgive parents for acting like parents even though their children aren't four years old anymore. As a not-unrelated example, when your dad finds out I took you to meet a strange fae, he's going to have my hide."
She did grin then. "All you have to do is let him yell at you, then sleep with him. Men will forgive you anything for sex."
"Jessica Tamarind Hauptman, who taught you that?" I said in mock horror. Funny how she made me feel better at snapping at a mother whose son had just been kidnapped by a fairy queen . . . It sounded like "The Snow Queen" when I put it that way. I hoped that we didn't find Gabriel like poor Gerda found her Kai in the story - with a shard of ice in his heart.
* * *
ZEE'S TRUCK WAS ALREADY AT THE GARAGE WHEN I got there. The Bug I'd loaned Sylvia was parked where she'd left it, but it was trashed. Someone had pulled the driver's side door off its hinges, the front window was smashed, and there was blood on the seat of the car.
Samuel wasn't through changing.
"Stay here," I told him, and got out of Adam's truck.
"He's not a dog," Jesse said on the way to the shop.
"I know." I sighed. "And he's not going to listen to me anyway. Let's get this done as fast as possible."
Zee had moved the chairs around in the office, pulling them out of their usual line so that three of them were facing one another - all that was missing was a kitchen table. When he saw Jesse with me, he looked a little surprised but pulled out another chair.
"I'm the facilitator," Jesse explained. "She can talk to me instead of you."
I wasn't surprised to see that Zee's companion was the older woman from the bookstore - though I wouldn't have been surprised to see a complete stranger either. She was subtly different from the grandmotherly woman I'd met earlier. The kind of difference that made Little Red Riding Hood say, "What big teeth you have, Grandmother."
"Mercy," Zee said, "you may call this woman Alicia Brewster. Alicia, this is Mercedes Thompson and" - he paused - "Jesse."
He gave me a look. "I hope you know what you're doing," he said.
"Having her here will speed things up," I said. "When we're finished, she's going home."
"All right," he said, and sat down next to Alicia.
"You came to my grandson's store looking for him," the fae woman said to me without acknowledging the introductions. "And to return what you'd borrowed."
I looked at Jesse. "When I saw Alicia at Phin's store, I was trying to bring Phin's book back to him. He'd called Tad - Zee's son - to have him ask me to take care of it. It was odd, that phone call, and the fae who'd moved in next door to Phin was odder. By the time I got to the bookstore, I was ready to believe that there was a problem. When I saw Alicia at the counter, and she couldn't tell me anything about where Phin was or when he was coming back, I decided that I wasn't going to give her the book to return to him. I also decided that someone needed to see if they could figure out where Phin was."
"So you came back at night and looked for him at the store?"
"I thought," I said to Jesse, "that we were coming here to find out where Gabriel is and how to rescue him."
"And I choose to ask questions of you first so that I may decide how much I want to tell you," Alicia said.
That implied heavily that if I chose not to answer her questions, she'd tell us nothing. If she knew anything. I looked at Zee, who shrugged and lifted his hands an inch off his lap - he had no influence with her.
My other option was to wait for the fairy queen's call.
"All right," I told Jesse. "You already know that Sam and I went to check out the bookstore at night to find out if something happened to Phin. We found that his store had been trashed by a water fae and two forest fae of some sort."
"There was a glamour in the store," said Alicia. "A strong glamour that I couldn't penetrate, though I knew it was there. I was so afraid that my grandson's body was lying next to me, and I could not sense it."
"There's a cost for magic," said Zee, folding his age-spotted hands over his little potbelly. "Glamour has less than most now, but there is still a cost for sight and sound, a cost for physical dimensions. There are few fae with good noses, so less effort is spent there and more on the other senses. Magic works . . ." He glanced my way.