Frost Burned: Mercy Thompson Book 7 (18 page)

“My doctor tells me if I don’t quit smoking, I’ll die of cancer someday,” he said.

“If it ruins your endurance, it’ll kill you sooner than that,” said Adam. “Smokers don’t run as fast or as long.”

The man laughed. “Tell you what. A couple of days ago word came to me that these folk aren’t Cantrip. Oh, they work for the agency all right. But they’ve gone rogue, and Cantrip has a group out looking for them.” He looked at his cigarette, then put it back in his mouth and inhaled. “Cantrip’s problem-solver got into town last night—just in time to do the cleanup on my boys.”

A small red light flashed on his wristwatch. He tapped the watch and ground the cigarette out on the sole of his boot. “Son,” he said. “If I have to depend upon running fast to stay alive, I’m already dead. Got to go now.” He pulled out a key and frowned at it. “It’s a strange old world, you know? Never know who you’re going to find yourself in bed with.”

He stood up and tossed the key toward Adam, who let it fall to the ground next to him.

“Good luck, now.” The mercenary stepped over Darryl on the way to the door. “You aren’t a bad sort for an abomination.”

“I could say the same to you.”

The mercenary glanced back and laughed. “Yeah. There is that.” He opened the door, and said, quietly, “I heard one of them say that there’s another assassin on the senator’s security detail.”

“Aimed at whom?” asked Adam.

The mercenary nodded. “I do like you. That is the right question. For you if you succeeded, for the senator if you didn’t.” He left without another glance.

As soon as the door shut behind him, Darryl and Warren both looked up at Adam. Darryl inhaled and gave a soft growl, too drugged from the ketamine to bring out words.

“Yes,” said Adam. “I’m better.” He didn’t say why or how. They’d think it was Bran, and his legend would help them get up and on their feet.

He used the key to free himself and opened the shackles that held Darryl first, then Warren. When Warren sat up, Adam dropped the key into the old cowboy’s hand. Warren was in the best shape next to Adam.

“Free everyone, but stay here until I get back or summon you,” he told Warren. “Free Honey last, and be ready in case she really loses it.”

Then he stood up and stripped out of his clothes. The final thing that he had learned in Vietnam, even before he’d been turned into a werewolf, was that he was good at killing.

Naked, he walked to the door and turned the knob—his mercenary visitor had left the door unlocked and unbarred. It opened into the small antechamber where Mr. Jones’s desk was still in place. The room was dark, but they were underground—or so his nose told him, though the ceilings were higher than usual for a basement.

The steel bar that kept them imprisoned was lying on the floor. Adam bent down, picked up the bar, and set it on the ground next to Darryl, who closed his hand on it and tried to get to his hands and knees. Adam’s second was functioning on instincts.

“Shh,” Adam told him, and put a hand on his shoulder until he subsided. “Wait and protect. I’ll be back. See if you can get them to change.”

Warren’s yellow eyes met his.

“I’ll save Mr. Jones for Honey,” he told Warren, then let the wolf take him.

By the time he rose on all four feet, most of the pack had been freed of their chains, but they were still unable to stand. Honey looked up into his face.

“Are you going to kill them all?” she asked him.

Murder, his father had taught him, was a sin.

Honey had been in his pack for nearly thirty years, she knew better than to ask if he
could
kill them all. He nodded once and loped out of the open door with an eagerness he made no attempt to check.

Adam had long ago accepted that he was not going to make it to Heaven.

He’d thought that they’d been stowed in some sort of government facility—there were a lot of places out in the Hanford Site near the nuclear facilities that were all but deserted. But as he paced through the long hall, he realized that this was some sort of commercial building rather than a government building. There was a sign leaning back-out against the wall. He pulled it away from the wall until he could see the front.
TASTING ROOM
, it said. He was in the unfinished basement of a winery.

That would explain the high ceilings and large, empty rooms. Their jail cell had been meant to hold racks of barrels of aging wine, as were the rooms on either side of the hallway he now paced down.

The winery had not been put to use for its intended purpose—he couldn’t smell any grapes or wine. The half-dirt, half-tile floors and the hallway drywall
sans
tape and texture meant that someone had stopped while the building was still in the construction phase.

The basement was empty, though it was obvious that there had been people here fairly recently. They left behind the smell of body armor, gunpowder, and greasepaint as well as trails of footprints and marks where things had been dragged. Two of the rooms, identical to where they had been held, had been used as living quarters. The only difference was that the heavy wooden door that had been barred to keep wolves in was removed and set inside the rooms that had housed the mercenaries. Presumably so that no one could keep them in.

The mercenary commander who had talked to him had been right, Adam decided. Under other circumstances, Adam would have liked him, too.

In the distance, Adam heard diesel engines start up, the same engines, he was pretty sure, that had hauled the pack out to whatever distant proto-winery Cantrip had found to use as werewolf storage. The mercenaries had either parked a fair distance away from their temporary HQ, or—and he thought it more likely, given the dismantled doors—they had pushed the vehicles away from the building until someone deemed it safe to start them. The noise was faint to Adam’s ears. He doubted a human would hear it even if he’d been listening for it instead of asleep.

He found the stairs and climbed them silently. They brought him to an empty room, designed to be open and airy. The walls were unpainted, but the floors were tiled in sandstone that was difficult to walk across without allowing his claws to click. A double door designed to open easily at a push led to the outside. He pushed one of the doors, and it opened. He went outside to take a recon of the layout and was unsurprised to find that they were out in the boonies somewhere. There were dead grapes everywhere—he’d been right about the winery. The building was surrounded by maybe a couple of hundred acres’ worth of gray vines that had been dead well before winter hit. He could see the sad-looking dried-up starts of grape bunches.

He padded out onto what had been meant to be a grand wraparound porch, but it was missing the railing and several sections of flooring. A parking lot had been laid out, one big enough for ten cars or maybe a bus or two, but it hadn’t been paved. There were four black SUVs and a Nissan with a plate frame advertising a national chain of rental cars in the lot.

The house/winery was about halfway up a hill from a two-lane highway that stretched in either direction and vanished around the wrinkled, hilly country. An orchard of apple trees bordered the would-be vineyard to the west and a rather better tended vineyard on the east.

Neither of the nearest properties looked to have a house on it. The closest neighbor was out of sight—doubtless it was the reason this place had been chosen by … whoever had chosen it. He’d find out who that was.

He considered crippling the cars, but decided against it. He turned back into the house. It was time to show these people why they should be afraid of werewolves.

He followed the sound of breathing to a hallway with rooms on either side, as if the original designs for the winery had also provided for a bed-and-breakfast.

The first room had the same unfinished walls as the public rooms did, but here the floor was also unfinished. The plywood squeaked just a little under his weight, but the man sleeping on the temporary cot didn’t wake up. He was in his thirties, from the look of his face, which was … ordinary. He snored a little.

It had been nearly half a century since Adam’s first kill. He’d like to have said that he remembered them all—a man should take notice when he killed another man. But there had been too many. Some of them had been sleeping peacefully.

He crushed the man’s throat with his jaws and tried not to pay attention to the taste of his blood. Since he’d become a werewolf, he’d eaten a few people, but that was harder to live with than just killing them. So he tried to avoid it when he could.

The second man was older, in his fifties, but in decent shape. He had the good haircut of a bureaucrat planning on rising in the ranks of his profession. His hair was dyed, but it was a good dye job, leaving him with just a touch of gray.

Adam didn’t remember seeing him—but he’d be the first to admit that he hadn’t been at his best since his kidnapping. This one woke up before Adam killed him, but he didn’t have a chance to cry out.

He continued down the hall. The next two who died were also easy kills.

He came to a room empty of people, but he opened the door anyway. He should have just kept going, but when he glimpsed a photo of Mercy, he shouldered the door further open and went in. One wall was filled with photos of his pack and their families, including Mercy and Jesse. Each labeled with a name so that people could come in and study the wall, get so they would recognize their targets.

It was a kill list.

Every single one of the pack was on it—and their immediate families, human and wolf alike, young and old. Sylvia Sandoval was there and so were her girls.

They were planning on killing the children.

Adam’s next three kills weren’t so clean after that, nor so silent. He let the fourth one scream because he was sleeping with a smile on his face.

They were planning on killing children, and this one was smiling.

When Adam got through with him, the man’s corpse reeked of terror and pain. Adam needed to control himself better; he couldn’t afford to lose control of the wolf because he might never regain it. He had a job that no one else could do to his satisfaction, a duty. The thought settled him; he knew about duty, both man and wolf.

The next bedroom was empty, though it smelled of a woman. He memorized the scent because if she’d taken flight, he’d have to hunt her through the dead vineyard. Part of him, the human part, knew he would have to give that hunt to someone less … eager than he was. Warren. Darryl, Adam’s second, was still too much a gentleman to kill a woman without suffering for it. Warren was more practical.

The modern doorknobs designed for handicapped access were so much easier for a wolf to open than the traditional round ones were. The whole ground floor was designed especially for handicapped access, so he made no sound as he opened the next room to discover that there would be no need for him to hunt anyone yet. He’d found the woman from next door, and she and Mr. Jones had evidently found themselves too involved in each other to notice his last victim’s cries.

He’d promised Jones to Honey.

It was harder than it should have been to leave them alone, but he closed the door as quietly as he could. There were three more people to kill—he could hear them. He was getting hungry.

He broke the next man’s neck with a swat of his paw—like a grizzly. It was quick and clean. The second one was a woman, crouched behind her cot, which she’d knocked over to provide cover. He had a momentary thought that someone had been watching too much TV, because a cot is no kind of protection at all—and then the woman pulled out one of the dart guns and started firing.

The first dart hit badly and bounced off his shoulder. Warned, he dodged the second two and jumped the cot to crush her skull between his jaws. He shook her once to break her neck and make sure of the kill, then dropped the body. He didn’t enjoy killing women.

He stopped where he was, the corpse on the ground halfway between his front paws, and fought off the urge to eat her. Woman or not, his wolf was hungry, and dead, she was just meat. He didn’t have time for it—and the strength of the urge meant the wolf was gaining the upper hand. When he was certain he had himself under control he headed off to hunt down the next one.

That one had barricaded himself in one of the rooms Adam had visited earlier. The door was ironbound and thick, meant to look like the old colonial Spanish doors. It stopped the bullets that the man shot into the door as soon as Adam touched the doorknob—it must not have been a large-caliber handgun.

But the gunfire did one thing. Mr. Jones opened his door, a gun in his hand. Adam dropped his head and roared at him. It was a sound the lesser wolves could not make, more like a lion than a wolf. The woman behind Jones screamed and screamed. Jones shot twice before Adam hit him, but he hadn’t stopped to aim, hadn’t been able to control his fear. One bullet skimmed Adam’s side, but the other missed him altogether—hitting a moving target isn’t easy.

Adam deliberately bumped Jones with his shoulder and knocked him off his feet. The woman’s screams intensified, and he pinned his ears at her. His father had taught him only a cowardly man would hurt a woman. But this woman had agreed to kill people because they were associated with his pack, to kill the children.

Still, Adam killed her quickly and as painlessly as he could. And when the silence of her death filled the room, his father’s admonitions rang in his ears.

Jones made an incoherent noise and scrabbled with his gun, trying to get his shaking hands to work. Adam left the woman’s body and grabbed the gun out of the human’s hands and crushed it. He dropped it, now unusable, to the floor.

His jaws ached to finish Jones … but he’d promised Peter’s killer to Honey, even if she hadn’t been in a state to know it. Revenge was a dangerous thing, but a quick clean act sometimes allowed the victim closure. So he left Jones for Honey and went to deal with the only other Cantrip agent he’d left alive.

The door was solid wood and locked against him. Adam hit it with his shoulder and cracked the wood, breaking it free of its hinges. It hurt, and he stopped to tear it to bits. Only when the door lay in broken shards did he come back to himself.