Frost Burned

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 dothis.” 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 whatI 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 orthe 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 notCoyote’s daughter,” I said firmly. I glanced at the floor. “And it’s not slime, anymore. Joe Old Coyotewasn’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 doingfreaky stuff with Adam—as fine as he is—did you figure outwhere 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 somethingfreaky anduseful 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.