Frost Burned

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said slowly, as if he had all the time in the world. Maybe he did. “I asked to be in on this. You are demon spawn, you werewolves and the fae and the witches. All of you need to die, and someday I hope to be one of the people called upon to rid your scourge from the earth.”

And Adam smelled the fear on him for the first time, fear and eagerness for blood. Adam was sympathetic; he was afraid for his people, for Mercy—and hungry for blood, too.

“But I didn’t get where I am by working against the rules,” the mercenary said. “Rules keep people alive and keep the money flowing. Rules say that the people who hire us don’t get to kill us when we’ve served our part or because we know things they don’t want to get out. We don’t talk—and we police our own if someone thinks about singing inconveniently.” He met Adam’s eyes briefly again. “You know about rules, you wolves. I’ve heard that.”

The mercenary paused, waiting for a response that didn’t come. When it was clear his invitation to talk had been turned down, he continued. “So these guys had a flight out of here for the morning, but Slick—one of the ones who got away—he went over to the hotel where everyone should be and surprised a government cleanup crew and the bodies of my men who should have been alive. He managed to get away and contact me. All casualties, no survivors but Slick. He’s taking a roundabout way to a rendezvous, and I’m taking my boys out. The word to eliminate the men who were arrested didn’t come from our company—no one who works for our company is that stupid. We’re leaving; and then we’ll deal with the betrayal.”

Adam asked,“Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t like your kind,” said the mercenary. He looked around and spat on the dirt floor. “But that’s personal. Someone screws us over? That’s business. They killed my boys because they didn’t want them to talk. Don’t know what we know that is so valuable, but I’m telling you what I know in hopes that it torpedoes their plans.” He paused. “Those men took my orders, and that makes their deaths personal.”

“I understand,” said Adam.

The other man frowned at him.“I’d heard that about you, that you wore the uniform.”

“Ranger,” said Adam.

The man examined him, taken aback.

“Doesn’t mean I’m not a monster,” Adam continued. “But I do understand how a soldier works. You follow orders, and in return, you expect the men above you to have your back while you risk your life. When they don’t

” Adam shrugged. “Something needs to be done.”

The other man nodded, took a deep breath.“That’s right. Okay. Folks pay us—we work for them all the way. We don’t take better money, we don’t talk. But our employers broke the rules. If they’re afraid of something getting out—well, maybe I think that might be a start on teaching them not to betray the soldiers who work for them. The folks giving us the orders—they’re regular government—Cantrip Agency. You know, the ones who are running around screaming that the fae and werewolves and all the rest are dangerous and need to be exterminated when their job was supposed to be learning about the supernatural world and acting as intermediaries between you and the government. The rhetoric they’re spouting is that they want the power to go wolf hunting before some other agency gets it. They’re tired of having to call the cavalry because they can’t have their own army.”

The mercenary frowned at Adam.“But you probably guessed that.”

“Most of the competent people end up elsewhere,” agreed Adam. “FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, National Security Administration, Secret Service, or one of a few other agencies. Cantrip has been a dumping ground for the screwups for years, and this has the same sort of FUBAR painted all over it that I’ve seen whenever desks try to run real operations.”

The other man grinned at him.“What you said. I’m going to repeat that to my superiors.”

“Okay,” Adam said. “But where is the money coming from? I know what Cantrip’s budget is; they don’t have enough of a black-ops slush fund to work this. Maybe if they all gave up their salaries, they’d be able to hire something like your operation without alerting someone. You guys are more likely to be out protecting some drug lord in South America or fighting the war when the Geneva Convention is too restrictive for the home troops.”

The other man put a finger along his nose and pointed it at Adam.“I could like you if you weren’t a hell spawn, you know? No. Cantrip doesn’t have that kind of money, though they would if a werewolf killed the Billionaire Senator, right? If his party didn’t see to it, his very rich and very, very powerful family would. Word is that the head of this operation is cooperating with some money man, a rich son of a bitch anonymous puppet master who seems to have it in for you, Hauptman. He funded this operation, and the only stipulation was that it was your pack that got elected for assassination duty. Don’t know who he is, but people are afraid of him.”

And that wasvery interesting. Adam found himself settling in, ready to hunt. That it was personal made his enemy specific. Not people who hate werewolves, which was a very large group, but a man who hated him.

“Your intelligence was very good,” Adam said. He needed to know where the information came from. “Traced cell phones for where the pack members who weren’t at my house for Thanksgiving would be—that would have been Cantrip. But how did you find all the pack members?”

The other man nodded.“Right track. It’s where I would have looked first. The list of pack members was provided to us—came from a different source. Same folks who provided the tranq. If I were to guess, I’d say it was someone high up in the military who doesn’t like werewolves. But he wasn’t the man funding this—just an interested bystander.”

The tranq and information both could have come from Gerry Wallace before he’d been killed. Adam’s pack hadn’t changed since Gerry’s death. Gerry’s job had been to keep track of the lone wolves—and to do that he had a pretty extensive list of who was in which pack as well. Adam would have to warn Bran that someone had that information and was making it available.

“Did you ever see him?”

“Which him?”

“The money man or the information man.”

The other man tilted his head.“Just the money man, once, I think. Said he was a flunky, guys with lots of money always have flunkies. He was soft-looking, looked like a civilian through and through. Dressed in a suit and looked like butter wouldn’t melt. But he made the hair on the back of my neck crawl—and I always trustmy gut. He looked soft, but he didn’t move like a civilian, get me? Moved on the balls of his feet, and when he pulled a chair up, it didn’t take him as much effort as it would have taken a civilian. He was stronger than a man who looked that soft should have been.”

“You don’t think he was a flunky.”

“You read people, too,” the mercenary said. It didn’t sound like it bothered him. “No. I think he was the money man himself. I’ve trained a lot of men. Some of them are better at giving orders than taking them. He was one of those. But subtle about it.”

“When and where?”

The other man shook his head.“Now, that is too much. More my company’s secret than my ex-employers’.” He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Crouching for that long wasn’t easy, especially if the one doing it was a human over thirty. But the mercenary didn’t seem to find it uncomfortable.

“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.”