Frost Burned: Mercy Thompson Book 7 (11 page)

“Your Warren is our prisoner,” said the bald man, back to his Mr. Nice Guy persona. “He can do nothing to help you.”

Kyle smiled. “You just keep telling yourselves that.”

The younger man bounced a couple of times on his feet and feigned a strike. Kyle pulled his head out of the line of fire and the man hit him in the shoulder with a spinning back kick that launched Kyle’s chair over onto its side. If he’d hit him in the head with that foot, Kyle would have been dead.

On the floor, Kyle’s face was aimed right at me. He blinked twice and shook his head. “Get the hell out of here.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Brooks, but we can’t do that,” said the bald man with mock sorrow, unaware that Kyle hadn’t been talking to him. The other man put a foot on the chair and rocked it a little.

Stefan had stood up so there was room for Ben to put his head on the ground next to me and look below the curtain, too. When he saw Kyle, the werewolf went still.

Ben was not the largest werewolf in the pack—though he was big enough. But he was among the most dangerous. He was fast—and he wasn’t bothered by the thought of killing someone, even when he was as human as he ever got. He had been abused, severely abused when he was a child. People, outside the pack and Adam’s family, just weren’t real to him. We were working on that, Adam and I, but I discovered right then that Ben considered Kyle one of the pack.

Better to aim my weapon than to let it go off half-cocked. I bumped him, and when I had his attention, I pulled my nose out from under the curtain. Then I looked up at the top of the curtain and back to him. Shapeshifting makes all of us pretty good at charades.

Ben stood up and kept going until he stood balanced on his good hind leg with a front paw on the side of the house next to the sliding door. I backed out of the way—and realized that Ben and I were alone on the balcony. Stefan had disappeared.

I nodded sharply, and Ben’s free front paw slammed the curtain, rod and all, onto the ground, where it would not interfere with us. I’d gathered myself to leap, but what I saw made me pause because there was no one to attack.

Stefan was already in the room, lowering the bald man to the ground with gentle care. The first man, the man who’d hurt Kyle, was dead, his eyes starting to fog over and his body draped over Kyle. Stefan had incapacitated both men without either making a sound. Pretty efficient, the coyote in me thought, and the rest of me was very, very glad that Stefan was on my side.

Despite my earlier stand, even knowing it could come back and bite us, I couldn’t deny that I was happy that Stefan had killed Kyle’s assailant.

I changed back to human and hauled the dead man off Kyle while Ben aimed himself at the bindings on Kyle’s wrists that held the rest of him into the chair. Stefan touched Ben’s nose and moved it out of the way.

He looked at the bindings for a moment. Yellow nylon rope wrapped Kyle’s wrists and wove in and out of the sturdy wooden chair. “There is no way the police are going to believe you broke out of that.”

And that was the first sign I had that Stefan really had taken what I’d told him to heart. We were going to call the police—and Kyle, very human Kyle, was going to rescue himself.

Stefan put a hand on the seat of the chair and the other on the back. “Brace yourself,” he warned Kyle, then pulled the chair apart. The ropes fell away like magic.

Everyone but Kyle froze, listening for any sign that someone else had heard us.

“Sweats,” Kyle whispered to me, rolling off the chair like it hurt. “Top drawer of the bigger chest of drawers. You can steal a pair, too.” He looked at the chair pieces, and murmured, “The bedroom is supposed to be soundproofed. Doesn’t work on Warren, but maybe we’ll luck out with less gifted listeners.”

The first drawer I found had underwear, so he must have meant the other top drawer. They were sorted and army neat, matching bottoms and tops folded together. I grabbed the top two sets.

No one came boiling up the stairs, so either they hadn’t heard the chair go—or they thought it was part of the interrogation.

Stefan helped Kyle up and steadied him when he was a little wobbly on his feet. I handed over a pair of bottoms. Stefan continued to hold him upright while Kyle pulled the sweats on with great concentration. Once Kyle had the pants on and both feet on the floor to steady himself, Stefan took the rope and started to tie up the bald man.

“How often do the people downstairs come up?” Stefan said.

“The only time anyone has come up here was a few minutes ago,” Kyle told him. “Could be back in a minute, or next week.”

I handed Kyle a sweatshirt. He shook his head, and said, “That’s the wrong top for these.”

“Fashion princess.” I rolled my eyes and gave him the other top, noticing only as it unfolded that it proclaimed, “I’m prettier than your girlfriend,” in purple glittery script. I recognized it because I’d given it to him for his birthday.

“I have news for you, Kyle, it’ll be a while before you are prettier than anyone’s girlfriend. Bruises are not your best color. Are you sure you don’t want the other top?”

He glanced at me and gave me a crooked smile. “You look worse than I do. These goons get to you, too?”

We were all keeping our voices as quiet as possible.

“Car accident.” I pulled on the sweatpants. They were tight, but Warren’s would have been tighter and left me with a foot of material to trip on.

“They have Warren,” Kyle said, his eyes, briefly, looking as terrified as I was.

“I know,” I told him. The top that matched the sweatpants I wore was a spiffy teal. “They have the rest of the pack, too.”

“So I gathered.” Kyle indicated with a tip of his head that his information had come from the bald man. “Are we on the side of the angels?” Kyle pulled on his top, though not without wincing.

Stefan looked up from the bald man, and said, “The first one I killed because I don’t let people who hurt those I care about live. He is dead in such a way that a human could have killed him. Since Mercy has been so concerned with the body count, the second man is merely out—and I made certain he did not see me. If you choose to call in the police, there is nothing that can be used against us—werewolf or vampire.”

“So our halos are nice and bright,” I told Kyle. I looked at Stefan. “Is calling the police smart? Won’t we be putting pressure on the bad guys to get rid of their hostages?”

“No.” Stefan turned his gaze on me. “If this is a government operation, having the local police involved will force them out into the open, and they cannot afford the bodies any more than the werewolves can. If it is something spearheaded by renegade agents—which is what it sounds like—involving the police will alert the agency involved and bring us new allies. That’s how we’ll do this, Mercy. If we can, we trap them in their actions until the only move they have left is what we want them to do.”

He took a breath—which he doesn’t have to do unless he wants to talk, though he usually does if only out of consideration for we breathers who get distressed if the people we’re around don’t breathe for a few minutes. “You were right, Mercy. I was thinking like a vampire before. These people want to separate the werewolves from the protection of society. So we’ll get society on our side instead. It helps that Kyle is human.”

Kyle smiled like it hurt. “Quite human. I am a black belt—got it ten years ago and haven’t practiced much since. But it could explain how I took down two trained men with Mercy and Ben’s help.” He looked at the dead man, and nodded sharply. “Thank you for that, Stefan. He’s no loss to the world.”

“Will you get in trouble for his death?” I asked Kyle. He was a lawyer—family law—but he should still know.

He shook his head. “Self-defense in a slam dunk.” He looked at Stefan. “Do you know who is responsible?”

“Renegade Cantrip agents is our working hypothesis,” I said. FBI agents would have had too much experience to react out of fear the way Mr. Jones had. Homeland Security, I didn’t know enough about. But Cantrip—short for Combined Nonhuman and Transhuman Relations Provisors—had attracted a number of anti-nonhuman zealots. I knew that they had training but not much field experience—and they’d have access to as much information as the government could amass on the werewolves. For firepower, they’d have to have help. “And a hired troop of competent mercenaries for muscle. Here”—I jerked my chin toward the two men on the floor—“we have the mercenaries. There are at least three more downstairs. I didn’t see anyone else, but they’d be dumb not to have someone out keeping watch.”

“Mercenaries mean money,” said Stefan. “A lot more money than most Cantrip agents make.”

Kyle smiled briefly. “Follow the money. Fine. You’re sure that the police would be helpful?”

“Wait.” There had been a click. Everyone fell silent—and then air started to blow out of the registers in the floor. I’d heard the heat turn on. Stefan went to the door, cracked it open, and took a quick peek outside. He shut it noiselessly and shook his head.

But he was quieter when he talked than we’d been before. “They only really need one person alive to blackmail Adam. The rest are just a precaution. If Adam and the pack are hostages, they need every one they can keep their hands on.” He frowned at us both. “That doesn’t mean they are safe—idiots are the hardest people to plan around, and anyone who captures a werewolf pack without killing every last one is an idiot.”

“Okay,” said Kyle. “Let’s see if we can’t make this a little uncomfortable for them.” He walked to the side of the bed and picked up his cell.

I grabbed his hand and looked at Stefan. “What if they’re listening to the phones?”

Stefan smiled. “Then they’ll have warning and either run—or they will attack us up here.”

A lot of things could have gone wrong. We settled down to wait, ready to defend ourselves if the men downstairs decided to check on Kyle.

Stefan left when the sun started coming up. Ben and I waited with Kyle, despite Kyle’s protests that he could handle this on his own. We were safely out of it; if we left, we gave the enemy no one to follow … Kyle had a lot of arguments, which he delivered with the cell on mute.

I wasn’t leaving Kyle alone in a house full of bad guys. I finally stole his phone, took it off mute, and introduced myself to the operator. I explained that I thought that these same men were responsible for launching an attack at my house—yes, I was married to the local Alpha. One of the pack had escaped and found me—and we’d figured out something was wrong. We snuck in through the upstairs window just after Kyle had managed to free himself. I told her about the blood we’d found in the backyard that belonged to Kyle’s boyfriend, a pack member, who had been taken off the premises by these bad guys, presumably to be held by whoever had taken the rest of the pack.

Kyle listened hard, since it was the first time he’d heard a lot of what I said. I didn’t give the police the whole truth. There were too many things the werewolves didn’t want getting out, and I wasn’t mentioning Stefan. But I stuck to it as closely as I could.

When I’d finished, it was not just the SWAT team who were headed our way, but a fair percentage of a number of different police departments—and, to my relief, someone was going to go check at the firehouse where Mary Jo worked as well as the houses of our married pack members who hadn’t come to our Thanksgiving dinner but had been taken just the same. They’d make sure that there were no other hostage situations.

I handed Kyle back his phone. He shook his head at me but took it in one hand, put it against his ear, and opened the gun safe in his closet with the other. The safe held two handguns and Warren’s rifle—it was a Spencer repeating rifle dating back to the Civil War. He’d let me shoot it a couple of times.

Kyle took Warren’s .357 in hand and gave me his own 1911 because that fit my hand better than Warren’s gun would have. My own gun was still in Marsilia’s car. Kyle left the rifle in the safe when he closed it.

Warren’s father had carried it during the War Between the States and at his death it had come to Warren, who was eight or nine at the time. That’s as much as I knew about Warren’s life as a human except that he considered himself a Texan and had spent a long time as a cowboy.

I agreed with Kyle’s decision: the Spencer was too important to be risked if the police decided to take the guns. If we had to shoot someone, it was probably going to be within handgun range anyway.

“Stay quiet and find a good hiding place,” said the 911 operator on the other end of the phone; she’d been giving us all sorts of good advice and updates.

“We are taking cover in the bathroom,” said Kyle, and gave her the basic layout of the house—which took a while because it was a big house.

He was steady and cool while we watched the door between his bedroom and the rest of the house. The bathroom afforded us a little protection—the walls were marble slabs, and we weren’t in direct line of sight from the door.

Kyle kept the phone tucked between his ear and shoulder, and I could hear the operator keeping him up-to-date on what was happening. I had a sudden sick thought that we really didn’t know if we could trust the police. What if the government really was behind it all? What if the police were in on it, too?

Paranoia: the gift of the survivor and the burden of the overtired, stressed, terrified coyote.

I thought about the likelihood of the police being under the control of the bad guys and came up with it as being unlikely—but not as unlikely as a group of humans descending on pack HQ and abducting a pack of wolves—including wolves who were not out to the public. Since the latter had happened, it made me feel less paranoid for suspecting the former.

“Okay,” said the operator. “The police are there and in position, just hang tight and wait for them.”

As the sounds of rapid-fire orders seeped into our bolt-hole, I became more and more uneasy about trusting the police to be on our side.

About that time, there was a gentle tap on the bedroom door.

“Mr. Brooks? This is Kennewick PD, sir. Please put down your weapons. We have the suspects in custody and you are safe.”