Frost Burned (Mercy Thompson, #7)

by Patricia Briggs

“Mercy?” Jesse asked. “Uhm?” I answered, swerving into the next lane over to avoid being hit by a minivan. “When are you and Dad going to have a baby?”

“Ben’s better,” I murmured. “He’s more creative when he swears.” “He does it in that English accent, which is too cool.” Jesse relaxed a little and started listening with more interest and less worry.

And Zee was holed up in the fae reservation in Walla Walla and had been since one of the Gray Lords killed a US senator’s son and declared the fae to be a separate and sovereign nation. Within minutes of the declaration, all of the fae had disappeared—and so had all of the reservations.

He had officially broken up with her in September, when he left for Seattle and college—though they hadn’t been officially dating. But he’d sat next to her at Thanksgiving dinner a few hours ago and flirted as hard as he could given that her sharp-eyed father was at the same table.

“It is what it is,” he’d said. “Some people have to live in their mate’s head to feel secure. How did you feel when we were doing that?” He’d grinned at me when I’d tried to apologize. “Don’t fuss. I love you just as you are, Mercy. I don’t need to swallow you whole, I don’t need to be in your head at all times. I just need to know that you’re there.”

Ben of the British accent and foul mouth as he buried his face against my stomach, so I put the crowbar I’d snagged off the counter back where it belonged without smashing in his head. He moved his head until my shirt rucked up, and his beard-rough cheek was against my skin. I’d had another werewolf do that before, felt the same tremors and ragged breathing. I was reasonably sure that Ben wasn’t feeling hungry (like the other wolf had been) because it hadn’t been that long since turkey dinner. So I put a hand on his head and glanced at the pair of shell-shocked teenagers standing in front of a shelf of old, mismatched hubcaps. It was dark inside the shop, but coyotes like me can see in the dark. Ben half growled, half spoke, but I couldn’t parse anything he said. From the heat of his skin against mine, he was trying to fight off the change.

“He was drugged,” I said, sniffing the hypodermic just to make sure. It smelled familiar. “It looks like that stuff that killed Mac.” Jesse inhaled. “Mac?” Gabriel asked.

“Most of the wolves who got hit with the stuff were fine, but new werewolves are more vulnerable, and it killed Mac.”

“Is Ben going to be all right?” asked Gabriel. “Can we do something for him?” “Burning it out,” Ben growled. I wasn’t sure I heard him right, his voice was slurred and thick. “Ben? You’re burning out the drug?” His skin did feel feverish. “Boosting your metabolism?” I didn’t know werewolves could do that. “Burning it good,” he said, which I took to be an affirmative. “But it’ll . . . a minute.” “What can we do to help?” I asked. “Water? Food?” I had some granola bars in here somewhere. “Just you,” he said. “Pack smell, Alpha smell. It helps.” He shuddered hard against me. “Hurts. Wolf wants out.”

“I heard,” he told me. “I waited. Whole pack was down there. Then Adam said, ‘In all Mercy, Benjamin Speedway.’ Adam said that ‘Benjamin Speedway’ like he was swearing, but I knew. I’m Benjamin. Mercy is you. Speed meant go. He was ordering me to run, to find you. Disguised the order to give me a moment of grace before they figured it out. There were people out the back, and they saw me jump out the window. Hit me with the damned dart, and I ran for the river. Doubled back and found Gabriel. Made him drive. But you weren’t here. You were supposed to be here.”

“Yes?” It came out clear and crisp-upper-crust-British, as Ben, with his excellent four-letter-laced vocabulary seldom did. But he didn’t let me pull his face up so I could see it. “Where are you hit?” “Tranq. Arse.”

Adam’s pain was a roar in my heart, and I was going to make everyone who hurt him pay and pay.

It was like triage. Decision one—preserve those who were safe. Decision two—retrieve the rest. Decision three—make the ones who took them regret it.

“Your eyes are gold, Mercy,” said Gabriel as he slid into the front seat. “I didn’t know they did that.” Neither had I.

Before I’d married Adam, Samuel had been my roommate. He still came by to visit a lot. A wolf, especially a lone wolf, needed the presence of others. Though Adam was Alpha and Samuel was very dominant, they had a cautious friendship. Samuel had a condo in Richland right next to the river, where land prices were at a premium. He could care less what his home looked like—he had lived with me in my elderly fourteen-by-seventy trailer for two years, more or less, without much complaint—but he loves the water. What he paid for that condo could have bought a huge house anywhere else in town.

When the door finally opened, it wasn’t Samuel but Ariana, Samuel’s mate.

“Ariana,” I said, “I thought . . .” “That I had retreated to the reservation with my kin?” she asked. “My mate is here. I am no follower, and my allegiance is no longer to the Gray Lords, if it ever was. They chose to allow me to stay here under the condition I do nothing to draw attention to myself.” She grinned mischievously at me.

“They required us to bring any artifacts or magical items we hold. I brought the Silver Borne with me—they were surprisingly eager to let me leave with it.”

I pulled the sweats up to my nose and shook my head. If someone had come to my house, even someone I liked, I’d have been damned before I gave them Adam’s clothes to wear—especially if it was someone he used to live with.

tried to send him power through our bond and felt him snatch it and pull. I staggered and grabbed his shoulders to steady myself. He felt solid under my fingers, but I couldn’t see my own hands.

Adam ignored him as he sent another burst of need toward me. This one was much more visceral than a simple need for strength.

The silver, his wolf said. Too many things not working right. My eyes see, but Adam doesn’t perceive.

Words were useless. Adam had to control the wolf, and I wasn’t really there to help. You always help, the wolf disagreed. He tugged on our bond and took just a little more strength from me. Always, Adam agreed, as his wolf settled around him again.

That flinch satisfied me and made me hungry at the same time—I liked his fear. I liked it very much.

I clung to Adam as tears and helpless anger wracked me, his and mine, while Honey’s agonized cry rang in my ears. I didn’t need to see it with my eyes because the pack bond and Adam told me who it was, told me it was fatal. By accident or design, Jones had killed Peter, with a clean bullet between his eyes, killed the heart of the pack, our sole submissive wolf, Honey’s mate.

and I felt his shame for the way he craved Jones’s flesh between his teeth. Jones is dead, I promised. He just doesn’t know it yet. But we are patient, we can wait until the time is ripe. Adam went still. He forgets sometimes, does Adam, that I am as much a predator as he is.

Mercy, get Samuel, get Bran. Find out where they have us. Get the pack free before I have to do what they want, Adam told me, then sent me away from him and back to my own body in Samuel’s guest bedroom.

“Not unless you scare her into doing something horrible to one of us. We need to get Jesse and Gabriel safe, then find the pack. I need you, so suck it up.” He was still struggling, and I put my mouth right next to his ear. “They killed Peter, Ben.” I whispered, but I let him hear my own grief.

Peter had once charged out with a sword and saved the pack from an enraged fae that I’d brought to their doorstep. He was a great big sweetie who loved his mate and played video games with a devastating intensity and a love of planning that led his team to victory more than once, despite his disinterest in winning or losing. He left a gaping hole in the pack that had us all reeling.

“They killed Peter,” I told Ben. “And we need to...

Ben stilled beneath me and started to shake. I released my hold but stayed on top of him, burying my face in his fur so I could hide my tears. It wasn’t only my grief that wracked me, but Ben’s, Adam’s, Honey’s, and that of the whole...

It wasn’t fair. Ben wasn’t through his change yet, maybe halfway, and at that stage, I had been assured, his skin would hurt if someone breathed on it. But I clung to him and let th...

“That’s right,” I told them. “He kept everyone centered because he didn’t have to be on top. He could say things that no one else could. And it was his right to be protected by the rest of the pack.”

A lot of the fae liked being stared at.

“The people after Jesse are human,” I told her before she could say something she couldn’t take back. “Not werewolves, fae, or anything other. They are human—and they will hurt her. And you raised a man who cannot leave someone he cares about to face that danger alone, any more than he could desert his friends just because it was the safer, smarter thing to do. Not even if his mother asked him to—because it was she who taught him how to love other people in the first place. So he is in danger, too. Won’t you hide them for a couple of days so that they will be safe?”

“Mi papá, your abuelo, is rolling in his grave. He died for this country, for good and right and freedom. He would be so sad.”

I knew Tad. No matter how grumpy he was, he wouldn’t be able to sit around while someone was in danger. He’d flirted lightly with Jesse when he’d been home last—then spent two hours under the hood of Gabriel’s car helping him fix an electrical problem.

Stefan’s face froze. He hadn’t been able to protect his menagerie, hadn’t realized that he needed to protect them from Marsilia, the woman he’d given his loyalty.

Once upon a time, Stefan had kind of had a thing for me. Not so much in love, but interested in that direction. I usually avoided being naked in front of him just like you don’t hold out a slab of meat in front of a lion while planning on keeping the food to yourself.

Stefan said, sounding hungry, “Mercy, there are only two of them in that room.”

Or maybe I was shivering with my coyote’s desire to go kill someone.

The first man said something ugly, and Kyle made a noise. Yep. It was the go-kill-someone shiver.

“You’re a dead man,” Kyle said. “Warren doesn’t take kindly to people who hurt me.”

Ben was not the largest werewolf in the pack—though he was big enough. But he was among the most dangerous. He was fast—and he wasn’t bothered by the thought of killing someone, even when he was as human as he ever got. He had been abused, severely abused when he was a child. People, outside the pack and Adam’s family, just weren’t real to him. We were working on that, Adam and I, but I discovered right then that Ben considered Kyle one of the pack.

“The first one I killed because I don’t let people who hurt those I care about live. He is dead in such a way that a human could have killed him.

Paranoia: the gift of the survivor and the burden of the overtired, stressed, terrified coyote.

“I called my father,” he said, his voice muffled by the material of the sweatshirt I wore. “Told him that if he didn’t want his friends knowing all about his gay son who was sleeping with a werewolf, he needed to release my trust to me today. In four hours, we’ll have money to throw at the problem.”

“Finish your sandwich and go to sleep in a proper bed. After sleep, we can go buy guns, then tear the Tri-Cities apart looking for our men, right?”

Are you not my daughter,

Coyote never loses, Coyote told me. Because I change the rules of the games my enemies play. What are the rules of your game?