“All right,” I said slowly. “No promises implied or given.”

She smiled. “Just so.” And she disappeared. No mortar and pestle this time, she was just gone. Her scent lingered behind her.

“That’s all right, then,” said Margaret. “We needed a finale.”

“Don’t trust her,” Zee told me. He looked at Margaret. “You’re probably all right, if you’re cautious.”

“I am,” she said, tucking the card into the small handbag she’d been carrying. “And if I’m not cautious enough, Thomas is happy to point it out.” She looked at me. “Mercy. I really would like a chance to talk to you. Would you mind driving our car?” She gave her hands a rueful look. “I’m getting better, but my hands aren’t trustworthy to drive yet. Thomas, would you mind riding with Adam?”

The answer I saw on Thomas’s face was that he minded very much, but he said, “I can do that.”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll have a girl’s car and a guy’s car. It’ll be fun.”

Thomas picked Margaret up and put her in her seat, and watched gravely while she belted herself in. He shut her door and handed me the keys.

“Drive carefully,” he said.

“I will,” I promised.

He gave me a stiff nod and strode over to Adam’s SUV.

I didn’t have to adjust the seat to be comfortable. Thomas wasn’t very big to be that scary. I took a moment to familiarize myself with the car, so I wouldn’t have to do it while I was driving.

“Thank you,” Margaret said.

I gave her a startled look, because, as a rule, the fae don’t thank you—and you’d better not thank them, either. “Thank you” implies debt, and most fae will hold you to that. Margaret laughed.

“I’m not that old, Mercy,” she said. “About a hundred years, and most of that was spent in the Heart of the Hill—underground, imprisoned in a forgotten chunk of mine tunnel.”

She’d said that she’d had no food, no drink, no light. I tried to imagine what going without food and water for almost a hundred years would have been like. A werewolf would have died, starved to death like a human in that situation, maybe even faster than a human. There were degrees of immortality, some more terrible than others.

Unaware of my thoughts, Margaret had kept talking. “My father thought that it was important that we blend with the normal folk, so I don’t have a lot of the taboos the old fae do. ‘Thank you’ means just what it would to you.”