Frost Burned mt-7

by Patricia Briggs

  “What time is it?” I asked, hopping out of the bed and stumbling over Kyle’s feet. The room was dark, but there were no windows. The darkness reminded me that Adam had suggested going to the vampires. Maybe I ought to. But there was something … Tad. Oh holy wow, I’d forgotten about Tad. I’d told him that I’d get right back to Sylvia’s as soon as I made sure Kyle was okay. If it was really dark outside, he’d been watching them for a whole day, expecting me to return soon.

  I took a step toward the door, which was a mistake. Every muscle hurt, my face throbbed, and I almost blacked out from the sudden way my body informed me that it wasn’t happy with me. My stomach, then the rest of my muscles, seized in the worst charley horse I’d ever had.

  “Mercy?” asked Kyle, rolling onto his feet with a little less than his usual grace.

  Ben whined.

  And I threw up silver goo all over the beautiful stone floor of Kyle’s guest room.

  5

  I stared at the floor—and Kyle did the same. Ben jumped off the bed and put his nose near the mess. He backed away quickly, his ears came up, and he looked at me. The expression on the wolf’s face quite clearly said, “What the hell?” even if I hadn’t been familiar with reading expressions on monster-sized wolf faces.

  Kyle’s floor was covered with silver. I licked my hand and looked at the result. My palm was gray where the saliva touched it. “I think,” I told them, torn between triumph—because all that silver on the floor meant it wasn’t in Adam—and terror. Having that place where Adam and I touched be something that I could drag something as physical as silver through was terrifying in its implications. “I think I’d better wash this off.”

  There was a bath attached to the guest room, and I staggered into it, washing out my mouth and scrubbing wherever the silver had touched. Kyle opened the sink cabinet and handed me a new toothbrush and one of those little travel toothpastes. I used it, twice. My lips were still black, like one of those thirteen-year-old goth girls who wore black lipstick.

  “I used to know a couple of guys who painted their lips with silver nitrate to turn them that color,” Kyle said. “I thought it was pretty stupid. Your lips weren’t black when you went to sleep. What happened?”

  “I’m afraid to guess,” I said. Silver nitrate sounded familiar. I was pretty sure that was what Gerry Wallace had used in his tranquilizer concoction. “Give me a few minutes, and I might have something worked up that sounds vaguely coherent, okay?”

  He looked worried but nodded. I looked in the mirror again and touched my lips. They felt just like they usually did. I grabbed a towel and went out to clean up the mess, but stopped when I got to it. The silver sludge was thickening. What if the towel stuck to it and made a bigger mess? And there was a lot of the stuff, more than I’d thought. If all of this had come from Adam, he should have been dead.

  “Well,” I said. “What do I do with this?”

  “What? Never vomit on a floor before?” Kyle asked conversationally as he perched on the side of the bed. “Or never vomit silver?”

  Ben, sitting far enough away from the mess that there was no chance he’d touch it, stared at me. He leaned toward me and sniffed before settling back, his eyes intent.

  I lifted my arm and smelled it, smelled Adam on it. I suppose if I could suck silver through the mate bond, it made sense that Adam’s scent could follow me, too.

  “It’s magic,” I told them, and Kyle rolled his eyes.

  “Look.” I was speaking as much to myself as to him and Ben. “This shouldn’t have worked. You can’t do this.” I waved at the mess. “I shouldn’t have been able to do this. Pack magic, mating magic means that I can talk to Adam sometimes when we aren’t near each other. It doesn’t mean that I can suck the silver out of his body and bring it back with me.” I looked at the mess again. “And if there had been this much silver in his body, he’d be dead—and look like the Tin Man.”

  Kyle blinked. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite so … neutral.

  “You can talk to Adam when he’s not in the room, and you don’t have a phone?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He closed his eyes, and I could read his expression when he opened them again. “Thank you, dear Lord,” he said with relief. “I thought I was going crazy.”

  In spite of everything, I couldn’t help but grin.

  “Warren’s a little nervous about how much werewolf stuff you can absorb without running for the hills,” I said half-apologetically.

  He narrowed his eyes. “Warren doesn’t get to keep me in the dark.” Then the temper faded out of his face. “I’d put up with all sorts of werewolf shit if it meant he was back here and safe.” His words were raw, and I felt them on my skin because I knew exactly what he meant.

  “Yeah,” I agreed with feeling. “But the silver? I think that was more about what I am than any weird werewolf magic.”

  “Being Native American made you toss up silver?” asked Kyle skeptically, but Ben gave me a look of sudden comprehension. The pack knew about Coyote.

  The mess on the floor was definitely becoming solid. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to come off with a little soap and elbow grease—and heard Coyote laugh in my ear. A silver dollar, when they were still silver, was a troy ounce of .90 pure silver. I have a host of trivia in my head.

  “How many troy ounces in a pound?” I asked because that wasn’t some of the trivia I knew.

  “I don’t know,” said Kyle soberly. “That looks like a lot of troy ounces to me.”

  Coyote magic, I thought, breaks rules. I looked at Kyle and decided that he could be trusted, just like the rest of the pack. “It’s not Indian magic—or not just Indian magic anyway. It’s Coyote magic.”

  “Coyote?” asked Kyle. “Are you talking about your other form or the Coyote?”

  Ben just narrowed his gaze.

  “My father was a Blackfeet bull rider from Browning, Montana, named Joe Old Coyote,” I told Kyle. “But before he was Joe Old Coyote, he was the Coyote of song and story. After Joe Old Coyote died in a car wreck, he was Coyote again.”

  I understand from people who have seen him in court that Kyle is mostly unflappable until he chooses to be otherwise. Being in love with a werewolf had raised his ability to nearly supernatural levels.

  He didn’t blink, didn’t pause, just said, “So the silver slime is because you are Coyote’s daughter?”

  “I’m not Coyote’s daughter,” I said firmly. I glanced at the floor. “And it’s not slime, anymore. Joe Old Coyote wasn’t Coyote.” Because if he had been, my father hadn’t just died, he had abandoned me, abandoned my mother, and I would have to hunt him down and hurt him.

  “Okay,” Kyle said. “You’re rambling.” He reached out and touched me. “Are you okay? You look flushed, but you’re cold.”

  As he spoke, a shiver rolled up my spine. I crouched down and held my hand over the silver slab that covered a couple of squares of stone tile.

  “That is the freakiest thing that ever happened to me.” I nodded toward the mess. “And if you knew my life, you’d realize just how freaky that is. While I was sleeping, I drank the silver out of Adam, woke up, and threw it up on your floor—sorry for that, by the way—and now my lips are black.”

  Kyle took in a breath. “While you were doing freaky stuff with Adam—as fine as he is—did you figure out where he is?”

  I shook my head, and he sighed. “That’s good.”

  I raised my eyebrow. He grinned, tiredly. “That would have been useful, Mercy. And having something freaky and useful would have been too good and sent the spirits of evil gods on our tail.”

  I stared at him.

  His grin grew less tired. “You might have been raised by werewolves, Mercy, but I was raised by a Scottish granny while my parents were out earning their millions. When the fae came out, she just harrumpfed, and said, ‘There’ll be trouble now.’ And she was right about it, just as every doom-filled prediction she ever made was right.” />
  I let myself fall down onto my butt because my knee was remembering I’d been in a car accident, and it had had enough of my kneeling. Ben steadied me briefly, then jerked away.

  “Thanks,” I told Kyle. “I’ll keep the wrath of the dark gods in mind. Any more cheery thoughts?”

  “Not until Warren is standing right here chipping up the mess you made,” he said soberly.

  I reached over and wrapped my hand around his ankle to comfort him just as the doorbell rang.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  Kyle glanced at the watch on his wrist. “Too early for company. Four thirty in the morning.”

  His cell rang, and he picked it up.

  “Mr. Brooks. There are two men on your doorstep. A white male, mid-forties, about six feet tall, in better than average shape who looks very comfortable in the suit he’s wearing and extremely uncomfortable about his companion. The second man is shorter, younger, mixed-race, and in very good shape. Might mean he likes to work out—might mean he’s a werewolf. Do you want us to intercept and send them away?”

  “No,” said Kyle. “We have backup in the house, right?”

  “That’s right, sir. And someone watching the porch.”

  “Then let me go see if these are allies or enemies. I’ll give you a peace sign if they’re okay.”

  Kyle hung up and changed his clothes to slacks and a polo he had folded up on the lone chest of drawers in the room. I had the choice of wearing his clothes that I wore all yesterday, or mine that I had worn the day and night before. Since the latter were still bloodstained, I pulled on his sweats, their pleasant teal color doing a fine job of emphasizing the bruises on my skin, and followed him down the stairs, Ben at our heels like a well-behaved guard wolf. He wasn’t limping—which made one of us—so he must finally have started healing.

  As soon as we were on the stairs, the doorbell quit ringing. Either they had given up, or they could hear us on the carpeted stairs through the door.

  Ben and I hung back as Kyle opened the door to a pair of men, one of them unsurprisingly around six feet tall wearing a black wool coat that emphasized rather than concealed the expensive fit of the dark gray suit he wore. His face was slightly homely in the likeable way of a good character actor.

  Next to him was a smaller man who looked vaguely Middle Eastern but darker-skinned. He wore jeans, scuffed hiking boots, and a long-sleeved gray silk button-up shirt. It was cold enough to bite, but he had no coat or jacket.

  “What brings you to my door at this time of the morning?” Kyle asked shortly.

  “Kyle Brooks?” said the taller man. “My name is Lin Armstrong. Agent Armstrong. I work for CNTRP—Cantrip, if you prefer—and I was wondering if you would mind if I and my associate come in to ask you a few questions about the men who broke into your house yesterday.”

  I sucked in my breath—Cantrip was the agency I suspected our villains belonged to. I don’t know what I would have said except that when I inhaled, I caught their scents. I could smell dry cleaning fluid, wool, and some dog breed that clung to the complex scent of Agent Armstrong. I also smelled an unfamiliar werewolf.

  Ben’s posture changed. His ears flattened, and he crouched a little, but slid between me and the door anyway.

  “What pack are you from?” I asked, stepping around Ben, so I stood next to Kyle. “Excuse me?” said Agent Armstrong.

  But the other man, he smiled, a wicked white smile in his dark face. “What pack do you think I belong to, Ms. Thompson?” He had an accent: Spanish, but not the same Spanish as most of the people I knew who spoke Spanish as a first language in the Tri-Cities.

  I frowned at him. “Hauptman. It’s Ms. Hauptman. Who are you?”

  “Charles Smith asked if I would come up here and find out why he couldn’t contact anyone here when he tried,” the werewolf said, emphasizing the name because he lied when he said it. I knew who he meant anyway. The Marrok’s son Charles had recently worked with the FBI under the last name of Smith.

  This wolf had just told us a number of things. First, he had been sent here by the Marrok—Ariana must have reached him. Second, he and Armstrong were not closely associated—otherwise, he would not have lied to him. He had not, however, answered my question, which made me think that it might be important to know.

  “I asked,” Armstrong said, “through channels if I might be able to grab a werewolf to work as a … liaison. Since I believe that it is a group of rebel Cantrip agents who are responsible for your recent—” He looked stuck for the proper word.

  “Problems,” supplied the strange wolf. I knew most of the Marrok’s pack—having grown up in it. I had no idea who he was.

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say. Packs changed over the years—people move. The Marrok’s pack tended to gain problematic wolves who couldn’t function in a normal pack. This wolf’s body language told me that he was dangerous, that he spent a lot of time on the edge of violence, that his wolf was very close to the surface.

  The wolf in human-seeming spoke into my silence. “When word came to Charles to see if there was someone who could … play ambassador with you and Mr. Brooks, I was already on my way, sent here by the whispers of the fairies.” He paused, and … preened a little, as if he enjoyed being the center of attention, then looked at Kyle. “Mr. Brooks, it is rather cold out here. Would you mind calling off the gentleman who is aiming at us from your neighbor’s roof and letting us in?”

  “Who are you?” I asked the werewolf, again.

  He smiled again, though his eyes were cool. “Asil, Ms. Hauptman. You might also know me as the Moor, though I find the title overly dramatic and wouldn’t have mentioned it, but that you would find it, perhaps, a little more recognizable.”

  I gripped Kyle’s arm a little more tightly. I knew who the Moor was. The Moor was a scary, scary wolf who I’d thought was merely a story, like the Beast of Gévaudan.

  “It’s okay, Kyle,” I said, hoping I was right. “Asil is one of Charles’s wolves.” Kyle would understand I meant the Marrok.

  Asil smiled because he heard the lie in my first sentence. Maybe Kyle did, too, because he gave me a sharp look before he waved at the security team with the two-finger salute immortalized by President Nixon before either of us was born.

  “I am not at liberty to tell you anything,” Armstrong half apologized as he sipped his coffee. He glanced from my face to Kyle’s, taking in the spectacular bruising Kyle was sporting and my own, more modest bruise—which started at my jaw and hit the top of my hairline. Kyle looked like he’d gone into a boxing match with his hands tied behind his back—which is sort of what he’d done.

  Armstrong grimaced. “I know it’s not fair. But I have to operate by my superior’s orders.”

  We were sitting in a room I’d actually never been in before. It was decorated in cool tones and was in the basement, with only a small window. Presumably it was one of the rooms that Adam’s security team had deemed safe—or else Kyle had some other reason to drag us down to a room that smelled of carpet shampoo and the lady who cleaned his house, with no hint of either Kyle or Warren.

  “Don’t tell me,” Kyle said sourly. “A group of Cantrip agents who were unhappy with the limited power given them to combat the scary werewolves and suddenly scarier fae decided to go off on their own. Someone decided that they needed a really big event to turn the tide of public opinion in their favor—and they decided the murder of a popular anti-fae senator would be the torch they could use to inflame the public and get, at last, the right to shoot werewolves and fae on sight. They failed when Mercy, Ben, and I managed to call the police on them, and you’ve been sent to fix the situation however you can while also finding out where they got the money to hire a private army. How am I doing?”

  For a moment, Armstrong’s friendly face wasn’t so friendly. The Moor smiled and lifted his own cup to his lips. If I wasn’t looking at his eyes, he appeared too young, too urbane to be responsible for the violenc
e he was famous for. He caught me looking, and I looked away—but not before I saw his pleased smile.

  “Don’t patronize us,” Kyle said softly, his attention on Armstrong. “You need us to find your people before they do something even stupider. I’m not sure we need you at all.”

  “Your cooperation will be noted,” Armstrong said. “That might become important for you if Bennet succeeds in making a bloodbath here that he can blame the werewolves for.”

  “Who is Bennet?” I asked, and Armstrong pursed his lips.

  “Ah, excuse me,” he said. “Let us instead say, ‘our rogue agent’ who is apparently responsible for recruiting other dissatisfied agents.” The slip of his tongue that gave away Bennet’s name seemed purposeful because he wasn’t very upset. “It is imperative that we stop him, and you can help by telling me anything you know about how Hauptman and his pack were taken. Anything about the men who held you here. Anything might be useful. In return, I assure you that we will turn our resources to locating and rescuing your people.”

  He was sincere and truthful, which surprised me somehow. I’d expected him to lie his head off.

  “We are on the same side,” Armstrong said earnestly, and he believed that, too—I could hear it in his voice.

  “Those men who broke into your house are all dead, Mr. Brooks,” Asil said quietly—and Armstrong jerked his head around so fast it was a wonder he didn’t kink his neck. He wasn’t so much surprised about the dead men, I thought, but that Asil knew about their deaths.

  I wondered if Asil had killed them himself.

  The werewolf caught my expression and smiled, showing his teeth. “Not me. I was not sent here merely as a liaison, Ms. Hauptman, but as a useful tool in your arsenal. They were released on bail last night. Because they were scheduled to fly to Seattle, then off to South America by private charter, I thought it would be expeditious to talk to them before they left. But they were dead when I went to the hotel they had checked into, and I nearly interrupted a federal cleanup of the site.” He smiled toothily, and I understood that the cleanup was of the sort meant to keep the men’s deaths from the local police as well as the public.