Frost Burned: Mercy Thompson Book 7 (20 page)

“After you retrieve Adam’s daughter, you really still intend to contact the vampires?” Asil asked when we were nearly at our destination.

“Can’t do that until it gets dark,” I told him, then took a good look at the sky. “Nighttime dark, not daybreak dark. I don’t know what new delights this day will bring; however, if we all make it to this evening, then, yes, I do. Marsilia owes the pack. Much as she’d like to see me roast on a good hot fire for a long time, that’s personal. Business is more important. Business means that she doesn’t want to get on the bad side of the werewolves, especially right now. She’s down four of her five most powerful vampires. Two of them betrayed her to a vampire trying to take over her seethe and were kicked out. Stefan left the seethe about the same time. The one powerful vampire left to her is mostly crazy as far as I can tell. She can’t afford to offend us.”

“What if the pack isn’t a factor?” asked Asil, soft-voiced. “What if they’re all dead? Does she hate you enough to go after them? She cut her teeth in Italy during the Renaissance; a little sleight of hand is not beyond her now.”

“She knows about Bran, knows I was raised in his pack and that he is fond of me. If it turns out that she was involved, he’d wipe her seethe from the face of the earth, and she knows it. No.” I thought about it. “No, it isn’t her. There are too many downsides and no profit in it for her. She actually likes Adam, I think, and he’s pretty easy for her to deal with. Straightforward. Another Alpha might not be so accommodating.”

Though without Adam, would there be a pack here in the Tri-Cities? He’d been brought in to deal with a lone wolf who had decided to build a pack, then started killing humans. Adam had stayed because the backbone of his business was security contracts with government contractors, and the Tri-Cities was full of them.

That wouldn’t benefit Marsilia either, though, because weakened as she was, she counted on Adam to keep the nastier unallied supernatural creatures under control and keep others from settling here at all.

“Ah,” Asil said, as I pulled into the apartment complex. He opened his eyes as we slowed. “Disappointing. I had hoped the responsible party would be the vampires. I could kill vampires, I think, without losing control. If it is humans who are our enemies, I shall have to find another means of stopping them.” He showed his teeth. “Age catches up with us all, and I enjoy the kill too much to be allowed it. If we are to be allies in truth, Mercedes, you should know my weaknesses before they become an issue.”

Most of the werewolves who belong to the Marrok’s pack are there because they can’t function in a normal pack. Asil, it seemed, wasn’t an exception.

“Okay,” I said after discarding several versions of comments that mostly boiled down to “please, please don’t kill anyone, then.”

I drove past Sylvia’s apartment, still thinking about the likelihood that Asil would be put in a position of killing someone. There were no empty spaces to park anywhere. I guess most people were still home at seven thirty in the morning on a Saturday with rain coming down in sheets more common on the other side of the state. Go figure.

I finally found a place next to the Dumpsters a few apartment blocks down. The little Corolla that had followed us from Kyle’s house, presumably full of Hauptman Security personnel, had to keep going. I gave them a little wave as they went by.

I opened my door and got out—and something hit me in the back.

The weight dropped me flat on my face on the pavement. The suddenness of it held me still more than any hurt—though pain came right on the heels of the realization that someone had landed on me. I’d hit the ground limp, raising my head just a little to protect my face—years of karate benefiting me yet again. It set my knee and cheekbone off again. “Don’t fight me,” said the woman perched on my lower back. “I don’t want to hurt you.” She put something narrow and hard around my right wrist and reached for my left, braced for me to pull at the trapped hand.

Instead, I rolled sideways toward the hand she’d already gotten, one knee under me to add additional force. The move knocked her against Marsilia’s new car with a thump that wasn’t hard enough to do real damage. At least not to her. Even as the sound of her head on the oh-so-sleek side of the car chimed my if-I-live-through-this-I’m-dead meter and raised it a few notches, I changed. The odd little cuff that had been tight on my wrist dropped off my coyote paw, and I slid out from under the woman completely.

I also acquired an additional opponent—clothes. I slid out of Kyle’s sweatpants when I slid out from under the woman. I leaped with my back feet and rolled in midair, pulling my head and front paws out of the sweatshirt and left it behind. My panties clung to my left foot and my tail, but the real trouble was my stupid bra.

I landed, took two more running leaps, and tumbled head over teakettle when my bra fouled my front legs—which meant that her first shot slid along my fur instead of wherever she’d meant the bullet to go.

I focused on her as I rolled on the ground maybe fifteen feet out, fighting the too-stretchy-to-break straps. Leaping away had been the wrong thing if she was shooting. At least if I was rolling around tangled in clothes on top of her, she couldn’t
aim
.

I had a blink of time to see her rise to a shooter’s crouch, a dark-skinned woman with white hair in a waist-length braid and a young face. She would have looked more at home in an anime convention than holding a big gun made bigger by the silencer on the barrel. “I didn’t want to do it this way.” She took aim at my wiggling body. “Dead doesn’t pay as much.”

And then something dark, shadow-quick, passed over the roof of the car and landed on her. I heard the snap of bone before my eyes registered that Asil crouched on top of her, his face eerily calm with eyes the color of citrines.

“Half-breed fae,” he grunted, examining her face as I changed back to human. It wasn’t an epithet, just an observation. “That gun has too much metal for a full-blooded fae to handle even with leather gloves.”

I opened my mouth to argue with him instinctively—Zee had no trouble with metal—but the dead woman kept the words in my mouth. My head caught up with events and I realized that, although he seemed to be calm enough, his bright eyes said differently. I’d been raised among werewolves and I’d never seen anyone, not even Adam, who was pretty damn fast, move that quickly. Just a feeling of motion, then she was dead, and Asil was there.

I pulled the bra all the way off to give myself time to think—and the scary werewolf time to calm down. Realizing I was standing naked next to a very full parking lot that might soon be filling with people, I put the bra on correctly and pulled up the panties. The sweatshirt lay between Asil and me and I had to force myself to walk toward him and pick it up.

“She is also truly gone,” he said impersonally. “Full-blooded fae are usually harder to kill than this.” He patted down her body with a speed that indicated long familiarity with the process. His voice was a little darker than it had been before, a little more strongly accented.

“She didn’t see you in the passenger seat,” I said, glancing at the Mercedes. The windows were darkened beyond strictly legal limits, especially the glass on the back and side of the car. For Marsilia it was a safety measure—if she happened to be out too long, the sun would be kept at bay. For me it meant that the fae woman hadn’t noticed that there were two of us in the car. The passenger door was opened where Asil had exited.

“Careless,” Asil agreed, standing up and looking at me. I pulled the sweatshirt over my head and carefully didn’t look up to his eye level as I pulled the shirt down.

There was subtle tension in his body to match the predator’s gaze, and I thought of his warning not two minutes earlier. I wondered if killing a half-blood fae was close enough to human to be an issue. He seemed to be handling it okay so far—but with the wolves, that could change awfully fast. And that calm of his was ringing all sorts of bells in my hindbrain.

“We need to hide her before someone walks out to dump their garbage,” I told him, approaching him and kneeling. It was a submissive posture—even if I did it to grab the sweatpants that lay at his feet.

He didn’t say anything, just watched me. I didn’t look up to see him doing it, but the back of my neck felt his eyes. The ground was really cold on my butt, and I pulled the pants on with more energy than usual. I’d kept one sock on—I try not to think about how ridiculous I must look in coyote form when I have to change without losing my clothes first, but I couldn’t help but wince as I looked about for the other sock.

I didn’t find the sock, but my shoes were next to the driver’s side door of the Mercedes. The sight of the door put the search for my sock, the dead woman, and the werewolf who’d just killed her, momentarily right out of my mind.

“Damn, damn, damn,” I said, putting my hand on the dented metal. When I’d knocked her into the car, the would-be assassin/kidnapper’s head had left an impression in the driver’s side door—cars aren’t as tough as they used to be. My old Rabbit could have taken a blow twice that hard without even noticing it. I took another step closer, and my cold bare toes bumped into warm flesh.

I looked down and met a pair of eyes that had been dark before death fogged them over. The half-fae woman had been stunning, but now, her magic gone, she looked merely ordinary. I glanced at the werewolf who had taken himself away from the body and now stood with his back toward me, facing the nearest apartment building, an apartment building with lots and lots of windows.

“We’ve got to get the body out of sight,” I said.

I had to pull the body out of the way to open the driver’s side door and pop the trunk. Asil didn’t move, and I didn’t ask him to. He wasn’t in the way of the door—and he was still scaring me.

She jerked a little when I moved her. I was a coyote, a predator—I’ve killed before. I knew it was only the air left in her lungs, knew that her floppy head meant a broken neck. But her abrupt motion made me jump and drop her anyway. At least I’d moved her far enough so that I could get into the car—and I hadn’t squeaked.

Only when the door was open did it cross my mind that there was a button for the trunk on the key fob in the hip pocket of the sweats. Guys’ sweatpants have neat things like pockets in them.

Asil hadn’t helped me move the body the first time, but as soon as the trunk was open, he picked her up without my saying anything, grabbing the gun and the cuffs she’d used on me when he bent down. Body, gun, and cuffs gave him no trouble. She was locked safely out of sight in the trunk nearly as quickly as he’d taken her from alive to dead. He stared at the trunk for a moment and flexed his hands while I stared at him, hoping he wouldn’t look back at me.

I’ve seen a lot of wolves in human form with those bright wolf eyes. A lot of them. And none of those eyes scared me as thoroughly as Asil’s had. There was something else at home in Asil’s head and it had enjoyed killing the woman and would have been happy to continue the little spree. Bran’s son and chief assassin, Charles, scared me, but I was confident that if Charles wanted me dead, it would be quick and painless. Asil’s beast enjoyed playing with his victims.

Oh, yes, it would not be a good thing if Asil had to kill again, but I was pretty sure it would take something bigger than me to keep it from happening. After Asil’s little speech in the car, I would have thought he would have tried harder not to kill anyone all by himself.

I opened my mouth to say something, and the bland little Corolla rolled past us again; the driver waved and shrugged. No parking for Hauptman Security. If I waved and shouted, would they come running or just keep looking for an empty parking space?

Empty parking space.

She’d been waiting right here for us, I thought. Right next to the only parking place, which, conveniently, had a garbage container for her to lie on top of—she’d jumped on me from above. I wondered if she’d glamoured the spot so no one tried to park in it. I wondered if she’d known Tad was here. I wondered …

“What if she had a partner?” I asked, and started not quite running, but moving rather more briskly than a walk toward Sylvia’s apartment without bothering to put on shoes. A case of frostbite I could deal with—not so much dead Sandoval girls. She’d been looking to take me alive, but hadn’t hesitated to pull the gun. How did that play into our villains’ plan? And if they were willing to kill me, what about Jesse? Had she already visited the Sandovals?

The only reason that I didn’t flat-out sprint was Asil. If his wolf was that close to the surface, there was a chance he’d decide I was prey if I started running away.

“Why do you think there might be another one?” he asked, sounding entirely normal.

“Because so far these guys have worked in teams of more than one.” But that wasn’t it, not really. My instincts were chattering unhelpfully—conclusions without evidence.

He caught my not-quite lie. “The group that took Adam were human, yes? Fae and human do not work well together. Yet, you are sure she is involved.”

I glanced at him. His eyes were dark again, and I was relieved.

“Mercedes? Why do you think she is part of the kidnapping plot and not of some other thing? Adam is Alpha, and you are his mate—that makes you targets for all sorts of people.”

It struck me that Asil was perfectly okay with the fact that there might be two separate groups out to kill us. “I think,” I said, “that adding another”—and remembered that he already thought there was more than one gun aimed at my pack even if they were all, mostly, working together—“adding
yet
another enemy who wants to kidnap or kill me to this soup pushes my belief in the ultimate fairness of the universe too far to one side. I just wish I knew how she knew we were coming here.”

I looked up at the back windows of Sylvia’s apartment. She was a smart woman who worked at a police station: her apartment was on the third floor. There was nothing to hint at a problem within. No bodies flying through the air, no broken glass, no little pink-clad Sandoval girl screaming as she ran from scary people with guns.