Books & film
Fire Touched: Adam's Pack in Mercy Thompson, Book Nine
Mercy Thompson and Adam’s werewolf pack shelter a child taken by the fae in Patricia Briggs’s 2016 urban fantasy novel Fire Touched.
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A pack can make a formidable refuge. In Fire Touched, taking someone in may also make it a target.
Patricia Briggs’s ninth Mercy Thompson novel appeared in ebook on March 8, 2016. Mercy herself is a coyote shapeshifter, while her mate Adam is a werewolf Alpha. The distinction matters: the novel brings different kinds of supernatural belonging into the same household and the same fight.
In the publisher’s synopsis, a confrontation with a rampaging troll leads Mercy and Adam to a human child stolen by the fae long ago. They and their pack choose to protect him as tensions between humans and fae threaten to break into war. The protection creates dangers of its own — including the question of what the rescued boy has become.
The premise gives the werewolves a role beyond pursuit and transformation. They must decide whom their loyalty includes, and what shelter means when the person asking for it carries a threat across the threshold.
That is an enduringly useful problem for a werewolf story: a pack’s strength may be easy to recognize from outside, while the hardest decisions happen inside its borders.
Sources
Original thematic illustration; not source film footage, book art or an actual venue.
