Frost Burned

Asil looked at me.“Your vampire friend is Marsilia? Mistress of the TriCities’ seethe?”

I snorted.“Don’t be silly. Marsilia hates me and would love to see me rot in Hell. I stole her car so that the bad guys couldn’t find me—and because I wrecked my car. Ben’s already bled all over her Mercedes, though, so a few more miles on the odometer won’t make her any madder.” I caught sightof Ben. He was watching me intently and told me as clearly as he could without words that he didn’t intend to be left behind.

“You need to change back,” I told him. “You’ve been shot and dragged all over the place, and you’ve been wolf for nearly two days. Time to change back and rest up. All I’m doing is picking up Jesse and Gabriel and coming back here. Bran sent Asil over to be useful, so he will be and, unless I’m much mistaken, we’ll also have an escort of Adam’s finest trained professionals to make sure I make it back safely.”

“I’ll keep her safe,” Asil told Ben solemnly.

“Besides,” I said, “I’d like to leave Kyle with some real backup in case something happens.”

It was the truth—and that one worked. Ben liked Kyle—and Ben didn’t like very many people.

6

ADAM

Fear was a familiar friend. Adam sometimes thought that he’d been afraid since he’d stepped on the bus that took him to basic training all those years ago. And the older he got, the more he had to fear. Right now, he was afraid for Mercy, who didn’t have the sense to be afraid for herself.

When he’d been a boy, he’d thought that if you were just strong enough, tough enough there wouldn’t be anything to be afraid of—except for God, of course. His parents had been small farmers, patriots, and devout Baptist God-fearing Christians and raised him to be the same. But their best efforts had met the world, and, mostly, the world had won.

He’d left the farm first, and Vietnam had done its best to scour him of his patriotism. It hadn’t succeeded entirely, though he reserved the right to think most elected officials could do with a little jail time to mend their ways. Vietnam had also taught him that the tougher and smarter you got,the more afraid you learned to be. It had also taught him that there were monsters in the world—and he had become one of them.

Then he’d come back home and found out that war didn’t cause fear—love did. He loved Mercy with a fierceness that still surprised him.

Adam took a deep breath, and it didn’t hurt. Silver didn’t burn in his joints and dull his senses anymore. He tested his body, just to be sure. Someone watching would only see that he continued to sit with his back to the wall of the cold stone room where the pack had been imprisoned. He tightened and released muscle groups that responded with their usual quickness and force.

He didn’t understand what Mercy had done. No, that wasn’t quite true—she’d taken the silver poisoning his body into herself. He understood that was how the pack bonds worked for her, that she saw things in symbols and pictures while he smelled things. Samuel had once told him that he and Bran bothheard music. What he didn’t understand was how she’d used the pack bonds and magic to do the impossible.

And what really scared him was that he was fairly certain that Mercy hadn’t known what she was doing, either. She could have killed herself. Silver wasn’t poisonous to her. However, if someone had injected an average Joe human with the amount of silver that had been in his body, it wouldn’t have been good for the human, either. He wasn’t a doctor, but he was pretty sure it would have been fatal.

He could feel her, so she wasn’t dead, but the link felt

off—and that really scared him. He had to control the urge to run, to bull through anything that stood between them so he could protect her. But he wouldn’t waste her efforts, he would wait until the proper time, then he would go hunting.

Something changed in the room, and Adam pulled his head into the here and now. He listened. The almost constant soft clink-clink was the sound of his bound wolves moving restlessly, even drugged into almost unconsciousness because the pain of the silver in their bodies and in the chains that held them made it impossible for them to lie still. He could smell them, smell silver and sickness in spite of all that he could do for them.

Judging from their condition, the sacrifice he’d intended would not have helped the pack enough. Jones was afraid, and he’d pumped them all too full of silver. Adam, though, was now free of the effects of all those darts. He could do more for the pack, but he didn’t want Mercy to deplete herself keeping him healthy. So he would wait until it was necessary.

Perhaps the soldier who moved like water through the densely populated room would give him other opportunities. The human stepped over Warren’s still body and crouched, finally, in front of Adam. He settled in close, because Adam could feel the disturbance the man’s breath made in the air.

“Alpha,” said the man who’d reprimanded Mr. Jones after he’d shot Peter, the one who seemed to be in charge of the military or pseudo-military rank and file.

Adam opened his eyes. The other man was crouched so his head was level with Adam’s, close enough to see the whites of his eyes. He was wearing the familiar black armor, and his face was blackened and mottled with a fresh application of greasepaint.

Warren was lying just behind him, and Adam saw the gleam of his eyes in the darkness. Darryl slid closer, his chains silent as the big man moved. Adam made a move with the hand away from his enemy observer, and Warren, then Darryl subsided.

Adam was in no danger. Free of the silver and drugs, Adam could have crushed his throat before the man took his next breath. It was tempting. Very.

But this one wasn’t the man who’d killed Peter, so Adam waited to see why he was here. Killing was easy. It could be done at any time.

“We are going,” the other man said in a conversational voice. “Leaving our employment here.”

Adam lifted his head and met the other man’s gaze. After a brief count, his opponent turned his head.

“You aren’t as foggy as my employers think, secret knock ’em out darts that work on werewolves or not,” said the enemy soldier. “They don’t affect you the way they are supposed to, I saw that right off, even ifJones chooses not to. So you might have picked up that I had some men waiting at Kyle Brooks’s house with orders to capture your wife, your daughter, and Ben Shaw because our intelligence said that was where they would probably go. Early this morning, the police broke up the party—” He quit speaking for a moment and stared at Adam’s face. “And how do you know that?” He shook his head and spoke to himself. “Freaking supernatural bullshit. I told them we should stay out of it, but the money was too good, and we always like to keep the government happy with us. Keeps us employed.”

He sat there in front of Adam and thought some more. Patience, Adam counseled himself, there was more information here, and it would be easier if the man chose to tell him about it himself.

“So we ended up with one of ours dead and three in custody—and your wife is talking to the police about how someone kidnapped your pack and wants you to go kill the good Senator Campbell. I thought maybe one of my boys talked out of turn—which they wouldn’t. But maybe she knew about it the same way you know what went down this morning, huh?”

He waited a moment, but both he and Adam knew that Adam wasn’t going to respond.

“Now my outfit is pretty big news, and we make good money. With no civilians dead, it didn’t take our lawyers long to get the rest out—and once out, they’re all the way out. Too many eyes on them to make them useful for this operation. No worries, we have the resources to replace them with operatives with clean slates and redeploy the hot ones somewhere less worrisome—out of the country until certain people forget the ones who work for a paycheck and keep after the people who pay the money, you know what I mean?”

Adam didn’t say anything, just waited for the man to get to the point.