Jesse's cold hand gripped mine. She and Gabriel had been sort of dating for a while. "Sort of" because he was concentrating on school since he needed scholarships for college.
"All right," I told the fae.
"Second. You will bring this thing to the bookstore and give it to my knight of the water."
Fishy Boy, I thought. Though Knight of the Water didn't ring any bells. Maybe it was a title rather than a type of fae.
"Nope. I'm not bringing it to the bookstore to your knight." One of her people could kill us all, and leave her not foresworn. We needed to deal only with her.
"You will - "
"Not trust you unless it is a full exchange. You bring Gabriel, and I get him safe and unharmed in exchange for this thing I will bring you."
"I cannot bring you Gabriel unharmed," she said, sounding amused.
Mary Jo gave a very soft rumbling growl, and I poked her to stop it. Maybe the fae wasn't paying attention. She'd heard the earlier sound Jesse had made, but as Bran liked to tell me, you can have the best senses in the world, but if you forget to use them, they can do you no good.
"No more harmed than now," I said. "Himself, in his own mind, his body no more bruised than it is at this instant."
"That I can manage," she said, still sounding amused.
"I would consider death as further damage."
She laughed. The sound was beginning to get on my nerves. "So distrustful, Mercedes. Don't you read your fairy tales? It is the humans who betray their bargains. Get a good night's sleep . . . Whoops, too late. Rest, then. I'll call you at this number sometime tomorrow when I have a chance to organize a safe meeting place."
I wracked my brain because she was too happy, like she knew something we didn't.
"Gabriel is the only human you have," I said, suddenly worried that she had more hostages.
She laughed again. "You don't really think I'll answer that, do you?"
And she hung up.
"Does anyone know what area code 333 belongs to?" I asked.
"There isn't one," said Ben. "No 333, no 666. Phone company doesn't officially believe in numerology, but they have a lot of customers who do."
"You want me to call Zee right now?" rumbled Darryl. "Or does he get grumpy when you wake him up?"
I looked at him. "I can't answer your first question. And Zee is almost always grumpy. Don't let it bother you."
"I'll call him," said Auriele.
"Wait before . . ." I hesitated to say anything about her calling Zee, not knowing just how far I could go without triggering the fae's spell. But Auriele understood and sat back down.
"Did anyone hear anything that might pinpoint where she was calling from?" asked Jesse - who watched several forensic police procedural TV shows regularly.
"No trains," Mary Jo said dryly. She pushed the table so she wasn't pinned anymore. "No water noises. No highway or car sounds. No airplanes. No distinctive church chimes. No dolphins playing in the background."
"Which eliminates a lot of places," said Auriele. "I'm pretty sure it was indoors. I heard a hum that might have been a fluorescent light fixture."
"I heard echoes, like she was in a room with hard sides," said Darryl. "Not a huge room, though. It didn't sound hollow."
"When - " I couldn't say "she hit him," because I'd promised not to talk about the fairy queen or Gabriel's danger to the werewolves. "When Mary Jo heard something, there was a slight scuffing sound," I said. "Like a chair sliding on cement." I closed my eyes and thought about the feel of the background sounds.
"The lack of outdoor noises might mean that she was in a basement instead of just indoors," said Darryl. "If she's not from around here, she'd need to acquire someplace secure - not a hotel. Rentals are hard to find in the area right now - one of my coworkers was complaining about it. If Phin is dead, maybe the fae is using his house."
"He lived in an apartment, one of the newer ones in West Pasco - and he has nosy neighbors." I got up and got a dishcloth and wet it down so I could clean up the cocoa.
"The bookstore, then," said Auriele. She took the cloth and tossed it to Mary Jo. "Your mess, you clean it up."
Mary Jo's shoulders were tight, but she started to clean up without protest.
"Sam and I were in the bookstore's basement tonight," I said. "But the lighting there is incandescent - no buzzing. Beyond that, the sound was wrong. There were a lot of books down there, so it wasn't as echo-y. The room in the phone call sounded emptier."
"You were at the bookstore? Did you catch a scent?" Ben had been dozing, I thought. Even after he spoke, his eyes were closed. The stress of his wounds and the full belly from Warren's mysterious ice chest of roasts would work like a narcotic.
"Do you need to go downstairs and sleep?" I asked.
"No, I'm fine. Did you find out anything?"
"We picked up Phin's scent - and four other fae who had been in there. One of them, some kind of forest fae, came back, and Sam killed it. There was another forest fae, a female we didn't meet. She was the same kind as the one Sam killed - I'm pretty sure of it. And then there was one who smelled of swamps and wet things who hopefully is her knight of the water. The fewer allies she has, the happier I am. I met the fourth, who left traces in the bookstore earlier today . . . I guess that's yesterday now. She looked like a happy-grandmother type. I couldn't tell what she was."
"Was it her?" asked Ben, and nodded at the phone.
"I can't answer that," I told him.
"But you can answer me," said Jesse. "Was the old woman the one who took Gabriel?"
"I don't know," I said. I closed my eyes and thought about what had happened and when. "No. She was looking through Phin's records, trying to find out who Phin gave something to. The bad guys had already tried to kill me once - if you didn't pick up on it, the incident at my garage yesterday morning was aimed at me. They knew where they were looking." Maybe if I could have talked to her, we'd know more about what it was that the fairy queen wanted.
"She's not smart, this fairy queen," said Ben. "If she were, she'd have known that you weren't human."
"I don't exactly advertise," I told him. "And, other than my connection to Adam and the Marrok, I'm not important. There's no reason that she should know. Especially since she's been producing shows in California."
"She makes assumptions," Darryl said. "Most people look at you, Mercy, and wonder if you are fae or wolf and just hiding it, because you're mated to a wolf and working with a fae." He stopped and raised a speculative eyebrow. "Or she thinks you are one or the other and might react and tell her which one if she kept taunting you with being human."