Fire Touched
Page 62

Margaret said nothing, but I felt like she was going to, so I kept quiet.
“That is,” she said, “I think, very much what is between Thomas and me.” She paused. “I don’t talk about him to other people. He wouldn’t like it. But I need advice, and I don’t know how I’m going to get it without giving you the whole picture.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Excuse me,” she said. She took out her cell phone and began texting. The phone chimed as her message was returned. She texted back and forth a bit more.
“He says I should talk to you,” she said. “He” was obviously Thomas. “He says Adam says that you are a deep well. That secrets are safe in your keeping.” She gave me a considering look.
“That’s me,” I said. “Damp. Also, cold and dank.”
She laughed. “All right.” She quit laughing and looked out into the darkness. “I met Thomas when I was thirteen in Butte, Montana. Butte was . . . not what it is now—small and forgotten. Gold, then silver, and finally copper, which, in the age where all the cities of the world were stringing copper wire for electricity, meant money, and money is power. The people who flocked to the boomtown were not just human. My father came, hoping to set up a new court, I think. But his people weren’t the only fae, and there was conflict.”
She hummed a little, reached out, and turned on the radio. Classical music filled the car, replaced by country and then eighties rock before she turned it off.
“My father’s enemies used me against him. They stole me away and chained me in the mining tunnels.” Her restless fingers played with the fabric of her slacks. “The mining tunnels in Butte were five thousand feet below the earth and more, a mile deep. My father and I, our power comes from the sun.”
Silence stretched.
“Which is ironic, given that you love a vampire,” I said, trying to help her.
“Not . . . not as ironic as you might think.” She played a little more with her slacks.
“So you were trapped there for decades?”
She shook her head, gave me a quick smile, then went back to her narrative. “Not that time. For a couple of days only. But it gave my father’s enemies the idea for what they did to me later. It was still dark and frightening. I was hungry and alone, and I heard a sound.”
She swallowed. “I don’t have any friends,” she said. “Except for Thomas. I don’t quite know how to go about this.”
She didn’t know me, and it was hard to tell someone you don’t know about private things. “My foster parents both died when I was fourteen,” I told her, breaking the awkward silence. Then I realized that was the wrong part of the story to start with. “Let me backtrack. My mother was a buckle bunny when she was sixteen.”
“Buckle bunny?”
I nodded. “That means she followed the rodeo and slept with rodeo cowboys. I guess her parents were a real freak show. She left home when she was fifteen or sixteen. She took the truck and horse trailer she’d paid for and her quarter-horse mare and hit the road. Traveled wherever there was a rodeo and barrel raced. She was good enough she made money at it. But she was lonely, so she chased after the cowboys.” I paused. “Rodeo cowboys aren’t universally horrible, but they are macho, and some of them, usually not the more successful, are brutal with their animals and with women. She had hooked up with this bronc rider in Wyoming, and he got drunk and pretty rough one night. They’d been sleeping in his horse trailer—”
“In a horse trailer?” Margaret asked.
“Some of them have campers in the front,” I said. “I guess his did. Anyway, the fight spilled to the outside and attracted attention. My mother is a lot shorter than me. She was sixteen, and he was twenty-eight and big for a bronc rider. He outweighed her by a hundred pounds or more. He was snake mean when he was drunk, and the other rodeo riders were afraid of him.”
It had been a long time since I’d told this story to anyone. Even knowing what I knew about my father now, it was still pretty cool.
“But my mom was nobody’s punching bag, and she doesn’t believe in fighting fair. She kicked his butt in front of his friends. Then she turned around to get her stuff out of his trailer, and he got to his feet and came after her while her back was turned.” I could see by the tension in Margaret’s shoulders that the story was getting to her.
“There was this Native American, a Blackfeet man from Montana.” Which he sort of had been, and sort of hadn’t been. “He rode bulls, Mom said, and those bull riders are all a little crazy to do what they do. Anyway, he coldcocked that man before he got close to my mother again.”
I smiled as I got to the best part. “And my mom punched him in the stomach. She said, ‘I have a gun, you stupid son of a bitch. I could have shot him, and no one would have said it was anything but self-defense. Now he’s going to get to beat up some other woman, and it will be your fault.’”
Margaret laughed.
“I know, right?” I said. “Mom is scary. Even Adam walks softly around her. She and that bull rider hooked up for a couple of months. Then one day, he just didn’t come home. Died in a car wreck.” He’d been hunting vampires, and they’d caught up with him. “Mom was pregnant with me. Imagine her surprise when she came in to change my diapers and found a coyote puppy in my crib.”
It was my turn to be quiet for a little while. “She eventually ran down a pack of werewolves—do you know who the Marrok is?”