“If,” said Adam, “if you had come to my house and knocked on the door, Mercy would still have done everything she could do to find Coyote and get the walking stick back for you. You have, as Lugh’s son, a just claim on the artifact. If you had done that, matters would have been even between us.”

“No,” said Beauclaire. “I would have owed you something for the service you had given me. I will not owe a human for anything.” Substitute “slimy toad dung” for “human,” and he might have said it the same way.

“Neither my mate nor I is, strictly speaking, human,” said Adam. “But you made your choices. And so the consequences will follow in due time.”

Beauclaire bowed without looking down or losing Adam’s gaze. His bow was almost Japanese in all the things it said and didn’t say. I accept that there will be trouble between us, though I will not seek it more than I already have. I disturbed your peace deliberately, and the consequences are upon my head. It was a long conversation for such a simple gesture.

I held out the walking stick. “Here. Coyote said he taught it a few things.”

Beauclaire looked at me. “I don’t know Coyote,” he said. “Maybe I will have to remedy that.”

Adam’s lips curled up in satisfaction. “I would pay money,” he said.

Beauclaire, who still hadn’t reached for the walking stick, narrowed his eyes at my mate.

“Oh?”

“You never get quite what you expect from Coyote,” I told him. “He was amazingly helpful this time, so I expect that something horrible will happen to us in the near future.” I wished I hadn’t said that as soon as the words left my mouth. I already knew that something horrible was coming. I wiggled the walking stick. “Would you take this already?”

“Of your free will,” he said.

I rolled my eyes as I repeated the phrase. “Of my own free will, I give you this walking stick”—and I kept going, though that was the end of the usual phrase I’d spoken every time I’d tried to give the walking stick back to a fae—“fashioned by Lugh, woken by the oakman, and changed by blood, changed by death, changed by spirit. Change comes to all things until the greatest change, which is death. This I entrust to your care.”

I tried to pretend that I’d intended to say all that from the very beginning, tried to ignore the way the walking stick was warmer than it should be in my hands and felt almost eager, as if it wanted to go to Lugh’s son. Adam knew I was acting, I could tell because the pressure of his hand on my back changed. Other than a sharp look, Beauclaire didn’t seem to have heard anything he wasn’t expecting.