Frost Burned

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—“addingyet 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.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe my dead assailant had been on her own.

“Add to that,” I continued almost absently because my instincts were screaming at me. Asil’s eyes were still dark, so I risked breaking into a jog. “I haven’t ticked off any of the fae lately. It’s not the vampires in a separate attack. IfMarsilia had decided to put me out of my misery today, she would have succeeded. I wish I knew how our dead fae knew to come here. Either they overheard Tad and me talking or they somehow knew to look here—” My voice trailed off because I realized how stupid I’d been.

Someone who didn’t know the soap opera of my life from close up might not realize that Gabriel’s mother and he were estranged. Sylvia’s apartment would be the last placeI’d have looked for the kids. But someone from the outside, someone who only knew that Gabriel had gone missing with Ben and Jesse and me, someone like that might very well check out his nearest relatives. I’d overestimated our enemies, and they’d found Jesse. That’s what my instincts had been telling me.

“Mercy?” asked Asil, who had sped up to keep pace with me. His beautiful accent made him sound like someone’s lover instead of a man who had killed a woman with as little thought as I gave to opening a jar of mayonnaise. Maybe less thought.

Not that he scared me anymore. Not now when I was pretty sure we were going to need him soon.“I—”

The back wall of Sylvia’s apartment blew out, spitting stucco, plaster, glass, insulation, and a man’s body down on the sidewalk below. Some of the debris must have bounced because nearby car alarms went off. The body rolled when it hit the ground, got up, ran back at the apartment building, and did a Jackie Chan up the side. I was really happy to see him moving because I’d recognized him on the way down.

“Tad!” I hadn’t intended to yell or run, but I was doing both.

Asil paced me, but we split up as we reached the apartment building. He went in the same way Tad had and I, not blessed with supernatural strength, had to run up the stairs instead.

I ran up those steps as fast as I’ve ever run. The door opened, and Jesse and Gabriel spilled onto the stairs with various Sandovals clinging, pushing, and sobbing. I counted and came up one short—no Sylvia—even as I slid over the guardrail to stand on the outside of the bars on the edge of the stairs to let the youngsters by.

“Your mom?” I said, as they passed.

“At work,” Gabriel said.

I tossed him the keys to Marsilia’s car. “Take the car, it’s over by the garbage bins three buildings that way.” I pointed appropriately. “Get to Kyle’s house but don’t speed. You have a body in the trunk and no child car seats.”

“Body?” said the oldest of Gabriel’s sisters. If I weren’t clinging to the stairway while there was a lot of noise coming from above where someone who might as well have been my little brother had gotten tossed through a wall just a few seconds ago, I could have remembered her name. Right now I could barely remember my own.

They were tough, those Sandoval kids. They’d be okay with a body in the trunk of the car.

“Bad guy,” I said. “Tried to kill me and got taken out by my backup.”

“Cool,” said one of the littler ones—Sissy.

They hadn’t paused in their downward trek, and once on solid ground, Gabriel rearranged everyone so the littles were carried. Jesse took advantage of the lull to mouth, “Dad?” at me.

“He’s alive,” I told her. “But that’s all I know. Get out of here.”

And then I rolled back over the railing and up the last set of stairs and headed into the apartment—only then remembering that I’d left my gun in Marsilia’s car. I stripped out of my clothes and let my coyote out.

In the distance, I could hear sirens. The police department wasn’t too far from here, and there was no way anyone could have ignored the noise coming from Sylvia’s apartment.

As human, I stood no chance against something that could throw Tad through a wall. As a coyote, I was definitely outmatched—but I could be distracting, and I was just that much faster on four legs than on two. Fast enough to outrun most werewolves, anyway.

I skulked into the living room—the only room I’d been in before. On top of the scent of the Sandoval family I could smell werewolf, Tad, and

something fae. The fae smell mostly like the old philosopher’s division of the world to me—earth, air, fire, water—with the addition of green growing things. Ariana smelled like forest, and so did this fae.

The noise was coming from a room farther into the apartment. Someone screamed, and I couldn’t tell who it was. I set caution aside and bolted down the narrow hallway and into the master bedroom at the end.

The dead woman’s partner was nightmare hideous. His head was misshapen and too large for his body. One large eye, emerald green and liquid, stared off to the side, while the other was only half as large and solid black. Two odd lumps that looked like nascent antlers emerged from his temples. His nose was two slits above a mouth too large for his face and filled with uneven, spade-shaped, yellow teeth. A black tongue flicked out and across his nose slits as he fought.

For all his horribleness, he wasn’t more than four feet tall. His body was slender, almost delicate-looking, with wrists smaller than mine, in human shape. His outsized, four-fingered hands gripped a sword made of some sort of black metal that was nearly as tall as he.