Frost Burned mt-7

by Patricia Briggs

  “You think they’re being held somewhere out in the Area?” I asked. The Area was the secured section of land surrounding the Hanford nuclear power plant.

  “I am sorry, Liebling. I cannot help you at this time. Perhaps if the talks between the Gray Lords and Bran Cornick go well, we can discuss this again. Until that time, we are forbidden to give aid to anyone associated with the werewolf packs.” Another slight pause. “This was very clearly expressed to me. Very clearly.” His voice held an edge that was sharper than his knife—and his knife was legendarily sharp.

  “If you know anyone who is talking to Bran right now,” I said, “would you please have them tell him what’s going on here? This information might not help the fae’s cause with the Marrok, but you might let someone understand that not passing on this information will be a statement the Marrok will take very seriously. And I will make sure that Bran knows the fae were given this information.”

  “You phrase your suggestion very well,” Zee said, sounding pleased. “I will let the ones who are talking to Bran know all that you have told me.” He paused. “I will have to be creative to do it in such a way that they do not know that we have been talking on the phone.” He hung up without another word.

  I had missed the turn off at Queensgate and had to drive all the way to Benton City, adding more time onto the trip. Rather than travel back down the interstate, I took the back highway, where there should be fewer police, hoping I could make up some time.

  As soon as I was on the right road, I called Zee’s house. The phone rang and rang. After a few minutes I hung up and tried it again. Zee wouldn’t have given me that number for nothing. Maybe he’d rented the house out to someone he thought could help me. Maybe there was another fae who, like Ariana, was powerful enough to defy the Gray Lords. Or maybe the fae had left designated spies outside to keep track of things they couldn’t monitor from their barricaded reservations, someone who owed Zee a favor. I was still coming up with fantasy scenarios when someone picked up the phone.

  “What?” he snapped impatiently.

  “Who is this?” I asked, because, gruff and sharp as that answer had been, he sounded like Tad. Zee’s half-human son would not have come back here without letting me know.

  “Mercy?” Some of the grumpiness left his voice and I was certain.

  “Tad? What are you doing home? How long have you been there, and why didn’t you tell me you were home?”

  Tad had been his father’s right-hand man in the VW shop when he was nine, and I first met him. He’d kept on as my right hand and chief tool wrangler when his father had retired and let me buy the shop. Tad had left to go to an Ivy League school back East giving out scholarships to fae as a way to show how liberal and enlightened they were.

  We’d e-mailed once a week since he left, and I called him once a month to keep up. Tad was the little brother I’d never had, and in some ways we were closer than I was to my half sisters. We had more in common: neither of us quite fitting in to either the world of the humans or the world of the supernatural. He because he was only half-fae and I because I was the only shapeshifting coyote in a world full of werewolves and vampires.

  When the fae had pulled their disappearing act, I’d called him, both on his cell and on his dorm-room phone, to no avail. I’d decided he’d gone to the reservations with all the rest of the fae.

  Apparently not.

  “Tad?” I asked, because he hadn’t answered any of my questions.

  He hung up on me. Evidently, he didn’t want to talk about it. Fair enough. I was a little short for time, too.

  I dialed again.

  “Go away, Mercy,” he said.

  “Your dad told me I should call his house for help,” I said, speaking quickly. “Bad guys are after Jesse and Gabriel. I have them staying with Gabriel’s mom in the hopes that no one will think to look for them there. But if they do, if the bad guys come, there isn’t anyone there who can protect them.”

  I could almost feel Tad’s reluctance to listen to me instead of hanging up again. Something must have changed in him while he was at college. I’d seen no sign of it in our correspondence or during his infrequent visits home. Maybe it had something to do with the reason that he was out here instead of in the reservation with the rest of the fae.

  “You think I could protect them, huh?” he said, finally.

  It was a fair question. Tad was half-fae, but I had no idea what that meant. From a few things that Zee had let slip over the years, I knew Tad wasn’t one of the half fae who were as powerless as most humans. But that was all I knew.

  “Your father does.” I gave him the only answer I had.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I have to see if Kyle is okay,” I told him. “Adam and the whole pack have been taken tonight, and one of the pack was killed. I’m trying to—” Do what? Rescue them? Stop the bad guys? “Check on Kyle because I think that they might have done something to him when they snatched Warren. I need Jesse and Gabriel to be safe, and I’m a little short of allies. It won’t be for long. I’ll come get them after I see that Kyle is okay.” I recited Sylvia’s address and hung up without waiting for him to say anything else.

  I knew Tad. No matter how grumpy he was, he wouldn’t be able to sit around while someone was in danger. He’d flirted lightly with Jesse when he’d been home last—then spent two hours under the hood of Gabriel’s car helping him fix an electrical problem.

  And the sooner I made sure that Kyle was safe, the sooner I could let Tad off the hook. I put my foot down and hoped the cops were out watching Walmart, the mall, and the interstate routes. The big Mercedes engine gave a satisfied purr and ate up the miles through the desert back to West Richland. The speedometer said 110, but it felt more like 60. I patted the dash, and said, “Good girl.”

  The eastern sky was still dark when I neared Kyle’s house at a more lawful speed. Kyle and Warren lived in an upscale neighborhood where every house had ample garage space and driveways to catch the overflow. Usually, there were no cars on the street unless someone was having a party.

  I passed a modest, dark, American-built car parked half a block from Kyle’s house and, as I drove sedately by, I saw that there was an unfamiliar black SUV in the driveway. There were no lights on at the house. Not even the one by the door that Kyle left on all night. The SUV and the car had California plates.

  I drove right past and turned the corner, parking Marsilia’s dark, not-American-built car in front of a house twice the size of Kyle’s, where it looked much more at home than the cars I’d just passed. I got out and opened the back.

  “It doesn’t look good for Kyle,” I whispered to Ben. “Did you see those cars?”

  His ears flattened, and he stood up in the back seat, his sharp claws digging into the leather, even through the blanket, in a way that might have caused me to wince on any other day.

  “No,” said Stefan, scaring me out of what was left of my wits.

  If he hadn’t covered my mouth with a cool hand, I would have awoken the neighborhood. He made soothing sounds until I quit struggling—which was an embarrassingly long time. I was tired and my head had just blanked out for a little bit and it took a while to realize what had happened.

  “There now,” Stefan said, his voice pitched low enough that a human standing next to him might have had trouble hearing. “Better? I am sorry. I didn’t want to alert anyone.”

  Sorry for sneaking up on me or sorry for holding my mouth shut? I couldn’t tell and didn’t care. He was here, and I didn’t feel so alone. Stefan was smart, dangerous, and competent. I hoped that I was the first two, but it was the third I really needed for this.

  “Kyle’s in trouble,” I whispered back. Keeping our voices down made sense. People ignore the sounds of cars, but most of them will wake up to the sound of a strange voice. I didn’t want to wake the neighborhood watch and try to explain to them what we were doing. “There is a car and an SUV parked by his house that shouldn’t be there an
d no outside light. Kyle always turns on the porch light.”

  Stefan released me and took a couple of steps back, leaving me to grip the open car door for balance when Ben bumped against me as he got out.

  Stefan was wearing a dark polo and slacks and I missed the Scooby-Doo shirts and jeans. I hadn’t seen him wear them for a while, not since he’d left the seethe. He wasn’t emaciated, but he had never regained the healthy look that he’d had before Marsilia had laid waste to the menagerie of humans he fed from. Marsilia’s betrayal and the destruction of his menagerie had nearly destroyed him.

  “I had a few minutes to check out the house while I was waiting for you,” he said. “There are two strangers in the living room opposite the kitchen. There may be more on the upper floor because the lights are on.”

  Now that we were not touching, I could see the awkwardness the older vampires I’d met exhibited—as if he knew how he should act but couldn’t quite feel it anymore. As if by giving up his Scooby-Doo shirts and his beloved Mystery Machine, Stefan had given up his last firm anchor to his humanity. Still, the Mystery Machine, Stefan’s old VW bus with the cool paint job, remained parked in his driveway, so I had hope.

  “You didn’t see Kyle?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see him. I don’t have your nose to follow a scent, and I didn’t want them to know I was watching. They were just a little too alert for my comfort. I could smell blood, though. I don’t know whose it was.”

  I would. He waited, and I considered.

  “Let’s go around back,” I said. “I can slip in through the back porch; there’s a dog door Kyle put in for Warren. I can check out the house and call you in when I find him.”

  “I think that sending you into the house alone is the stupidest of our many options,” said Stefan repressively. “Ben should be at the front door, you should go to the back—and wait in the yard, Mercy—and I will go in.”

  The oldest and most powerful vampires acquire names that define their most prominent characteristic. Stefan’s name among his kind was the Soldier. This was the sort of situation in which he excelled. I felt the relief of having an expert make the calls.

  “They are only human,” Stefan said, and there was a familiar look in his face, though I was more used to seeing it on the wolves: hunger. “I will kill them, and Ben will kill any who get past me. You can let us know if anyone tries to get away out the back, and we will kill them, too.”

  Stefan had always liked people. I hadn’t noticed before that he also enjoyed killing them. Maybe that was part of the new, more vampiric Stefan.

  So much for letting someone else make the calls.

  “We don’t need to kill them,” I pointed out reasonably. “As you said, they are only human, and there are only two.”

  “That we know of,” he said.

  “We don’t know anything about them,” I told him. “We aren’t even certain that the two men in Kyle’s living room have anything to do with the people who took the pack.”

  Stefan raised an eyebrow—he was right. Who else would they be?

  “We don’t know who is backing them or what their endgame is,” I continued doggedly. “We don’t even know if Kyle is there. What I do know is that we can’t go in to kill.”

  Stefan frowned at me. “I forget that you are too young to remember the lessons of Vietnam. Go in to win, Mercy, or do not go in at all. How many people are out here who could help Adam?”

  “Us,” I said wretchedly, then added, “Maybe Ariana, though she was pretty freaked-out when we left.” I knew what he was saying. I did.

  By that logic, we should leave Kyle to his fate. But I wasn’t just Adam’s wife, I was his mate. That made me second in rank—and that meant I had to protect the pack. It meant that I especially had to protect the weakest members first. We had already lost Peter. Kyle needed to be protected—and we could do it without killing everyone.

  “These people have taken down an entire pack of werewolves, Mercy,” Stefan said coolly. “We cannot afford to take risks, or we might throw away the game trying to find out what they have done with Kyle.” He lost the distant-vampire thing when he said Kyle’s name. Stefan liked Kyle, who was snarky and happy to argue tactics in Scooby-Doo episodes as if defending a doctoral thesis. “If they are waiting at Kyle’s, whom do you think they want? The only people important to Adam they don’t have are you, Ben, and Jesse. And there is this: if they see me, if they understand what I am and do not die before they can tell their superiors over their communication devices, then we will lose more than just Kyle this night.”

  People don’t know about the vampires. Oh, they know the stories—Bram Stoker and all his ilk made good use of the old legends. But they think they are just stories. The problem, for the vampire, is that now that the fae and the werewolves have admitted what they are, people are ready to believe that the old stories might be true. If Stefan was the vampire who gave those legends new life, Marsilia would kill him. I understood why he thought killing the enemy was the best way.

  Part of me even agreed with him about killing them all. These people had killed Peter and taken Adam and put my world into danger.

  “Kyle is human, and they were not worried about leaving Peter dead,” Stefan said, saying what I didn’t want to hear. “Kyle is less valuable than Peter was. He only matters to you and Warren. Adam would not kill someone, risk the werewolves’ standing in the human world, for Kyle. A hostage is a lot more work than a dead body, Mercy. There is a real chance Kyle is already dead. If you aren’t willing to kill—you need to leave them alone.”

  “If Kyle is dead”—and didn’t that suck to say—“we still need to know it. I don’t think he is; I think I’d feel it through the pack bonds because Warren is as mated to him as Honey was to Peter.” That thought steadied me. I’d felt Honey’s grief—still did, for that matter.

  “We are going in after Kyle—and, Stefan, we can’t leave a pile of bodies behind. We can hide your part in this. I’ll tell everyone that you are a weird kind of werewolf if I have to. But people know about Kyle and Warren. Warren doesn’t advertise what he is, but it will come out because he doesn’t hide it, either. The bad guys—whoever they are—want Adam to kill an important man in a public way, so that the werewolves are blamed. I have the distinct impression that the last part is as important as the first. If we leave piles of dead bodies in our wake, we’ll be accomplishing at least half of what the people who started this want.” I sucked in a breath. “I do not enjoy helping my enemies.”

  Stefan frowned at me. He could just go in and kill them all, regardless of what I said. But his name was the Soldier—not the Killer or the Commander. (Yes, those are real vampires. I’m told that we’re lucky they don’t live anywhere near here.) Stefan had ceded me leadership because this was my problem.

  So I was in charge, but I wasn’t dumb enough to think that made me competent—I needed Stefan for that. Fine. I wouldn’t authorize killing them all, but there should be other options.

  “Could we go in quietly to check and see if we can find Kyle?” I asked. “I might be able to scent him from outside. If he’s not here, we can leave them waiting for no one. If he is there, maybe we can get him out without killing people.”

  He shook his head. “Mercy. They have already proved themselves capable of taking a werewolf pack. Kill them or leave.”

  I glanced down at Ben; he was in no shape for battle. The danger wasn’t just that his wound would slow him, and they could hurt him more easily, though that was part of it. If Ben killed tonight, wounded and shaken by Peter’s death, he could lose control of his wolf and never regain it.

  “We might be under attack by the government,” I told Stefan. “We can’t afford to lose the moral high ground. As long as we don’t do any harm, the public will support us and force the government to back down. We’re not going in to kill everyone in sight.

  “You are welcome to leave, if you’d like,” I said grimly, stripping my shirt off with my bra. He wouldn�
�t abandon Kyle, I knew it. I was mad at him because I wanted to let him dictate our plan of attack, but I couldn’t because I knew I was right. I kicked off my shoes. We were talking too much, and it was time to move. “I’m not leaving Kyle to rot when I might be able to do something for him. I’m going to look for Kyle. When I find him, I’ll do whatever it takes to get him out. I will try to leave as few bodies behind as I can manage.”

  “If we fail, Adam is the one who loses,” Stefan said.

  “Kyle is pack,” I explained. “He is vulnerable. Adam is Alpha and strong. So we need to make sure Kyle is safe first because that’s what pack does, Stefan. The strong protect the weak.”

  Stefan’s face froze. He hadn’t been able to protect his menagerie, hadn’t realized that he needed to protect them from Marsilia, the woman he’d given his loyalty.

  I hadn’t meant to hurt him.

  I jerked down my jeans and underwear so I was naked on the dark sidewalk. Anyone looking out their window or driving by would get a show. I didn’t care. Being a shapeshifter had gotten me over modesty by the time I was old enough to know what the word meant.

  That didn’t mean I was comfortable running around naked in front of everyone I knew. Once upon a time, Stefan had kind of had a thing for me. Not so much in love, but interested in that direction. I usually avoided being naked in front of him just like you don’t hold out a slab of meat in front of a lion while planning on keeping the food to yourself.

  “We have an opportunity to save Kyle. A chance you did not have when Marsilia took your people.” I told him. “Will you help me?”

  I changed to coyote without waiting for a reply and shook the change off my fur. Stefan gave an odd laugh, not happy or humorous—but it sounded like him this time and not the vampire Stefan, so it was all right. Then he picked up my clothes and tossed them into the car, his motion smooth and almost human. He hesitated with his head in the car.