Tad waited until I’d finished working it out. Then he nodded. “Your buddy talked to me a couple of times. So I was prepared when he opened the cell where I’d been spending my alone time when they weren’t torturing Dad to get me to perform for them.” He sucked in a breath, and muttered, “Don’t look like that, Mercy. They’ll regret that for the rest of their short lives because . . . hey, it’s Dad. And they’ve forgotten what Dad can do.”

There was something dark and not-Tad in his voice. I was used to that when dealing with the werewolves. Sometimes in the middle of the conversation, there would be a switch, and instead of talking to my friend Warren or my husband Adam, I was talking to someone a little more direct, someone who could eat little coyotes for breakfast. So I was used to it, but I’d never seen something . . . someone so dark and violent in the man I thought of as a kid brother, a guy who was a little bit of a clown to cover up just how competent he was.

It was only for a moment. His voice was faintly cheerful as he said, “So your buddy opened the door, and he had Dad with him—and this kid. He told us that was as much as he could do, but that the kid could get us out and on our way. The kid, Aiden, had agreed to do this in return for my father’s help in gaining him a little time—twenty-four hours of safety under the pack’s protection. Hoping—as you probably have figured out—to see if he could finagle that into something really useful, like getting him away from here to somewhere else. Somewhere that he’s not so likely to end up back with the fae”—the darkness was back, just for that one word—“who would like to take him apart to see how he works.”

“We’ll see,” said Adam, as if Tad had asked him a question. “We need to know a lot more about him than he’s told us. I’m not unhappy to thumb my nose at the fae—but I won’t do it over someone who will turn around and stab my friends in the back. Not even if that someone looks like a helpless little kid.”

Tad looked down at his computer screen and brushed it with a forefinger. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember he’s not just a kid, Adam. He was just human, not witchborn or anything. No one knows how he can do fae magic the way he does—not even the fae. They know it’s something Underhill did, and they’re jealous—as if Underhill stole something they thought belonged to them and gave it to a human.”