Frost Burned

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’taim.

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.