Frost Burned mt-7 Read online

  If he knew all that, Charles had been busy, because he was more current than Ariana had been when she left. Armstrong was watching him with sudden wariness. Apparently he hadn’t known how much Asil knew.

  “Did you kill them, Agent Armstrong?” I asked. Most people didn’t know that werewolves could hear lies, and those who did thought I was human.

  “No, ma’am. But my people were responsible for the cleanup. There was an anonymous call to my superiors.” He grimaced. “I’ve spent most of the last twenty-four hours playing cleanup, catch-up—and all sorts of other things that end in -up when things go to hell.”

  Asil nodded at me. Like me, he’d heard the truth in the agent’s voice. Armstrong had not killed them and “unhappy” was a very small word for what he was feeling about their deaths and the involvement of Cantrip agents in the whole thing. My nose could sense more than just lies. Emotions, especially strong emotions, have scents, too.

  “You told the police that they wanted your husband to go after Senator Campbell, Ms. Hauptman,” Armstrong said.

  I lifted my chin. “That’s right.”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t scan. These guys were the real deal, Ms. Hauptman. They make a lot of money by not shooting their mouths off. There is no way that they told you that.”

  Asil met my eyes. He knew how I got my information. He tilted his head a little and gave a shrug.

  He was the dominant wolf in the room. If he didn’t care what I told a federal agent about how werewolf magic works, maybe I shouldn’t, either.

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again, visions of being locked up in a white room somewhere with someone asking, “What is Adam looking at, Ms. Hauptman? Is it a triangle or a square?” in my head. It was probably the result of too much Mystery Science Theater 3000 at a young age, but there was also a real danger in telling people too much.

  “You know how you told us that there were things you couldn’t tell us?” I said. “It’s like that. There are things I cannot reveal to you at this time. Need-to-know things.”

  Armstrong grunted, but he could hardly complain. “On a scale of one to ten, how sure are you that the threat was aimed at Campbell?”

  “Zero,” I told him, because I’d thought long and hard about this. “The threat was aimed at the werewolves. Campbell might be a secondary target—or maybe he was scheduled to be miraculously saved at the last moment. It’s easy to thwart an assassination when you know the who, where, and when. I don’t know why they picked Adam.”

  “He’s become a public figure,” murmured Asil. “People like him, and they trust him. When newspapers and magazines want to talk to a werewolf, they try for Adam because he’s pretty and well-spoken. Three-quarters of the people interviewed on the streets of New York for a recent morning news story could pick Hauptman out of a lineup. Better than either of the last presidential candidates or the mayor of New York did.”

  “You think this was aimed at Adam specifically?” I asked.

  Asil frowned at me. Maybe we weren’t supposed to be talking in front of Agent Armstrong. “I think,” he said slowly, “that we don’t know enough.”

  “And our enemies know too much,” I said. “They knew all of the pack—and there are a number of our members who aren’t out. They came looking for Jesse and me. Where did they get their information?”

  “Jesse?” Armstrong asked.

  “Adam’s daughter,” I said. “She’s not a werewolf. We’d gone out shopping, had a car wreck, and ended up at my garage, where Ben had come to tell us that the pack had been taken.”

  “Ben?”

  I tipped my empty cup toward the werewolf stretched out on the floor near me, but not touching. Ben was pointedly not looking at Asil—though he was still keeping his body between us. “This is Ben. He was upstairs when the rent-an-army broke into our house and took out most of the pack in one fell swoop. He managed to get away and warn me.”

  There was a funny pause, and I looked up.

  “I thought.” Armstrong swallowed. “I thought that he was just a big dog. I like dogs.”

  I looked at Asil, then back at Armstrong. “You do know that Asil is a werewolf, too?”

  The fed rubbed his face. “I’m too old for this. I’ve been up for twenty-four hours.”

  “Ben won’t hurt you,” I told him, just as Asil got up to put his empty cup on the low table between the chairs. Ben surged to his feet, growling—but with his head tilted so he didn’t meet the more dominant wolf’s eyes. Armstrong spilled his coffee, jerking away. The sudden move attracted Ben’s attention, and he showed his fangs to the Cantrip agent.

  “Armstrong, drop your eyes.” Kyle’s voice was calm and easy.

  I reached for Ben’s ruff, but as soon as my fingers got close, he slid away from my hand.

  “It’s my fault. We need to get this over with before someone gets hurt.” Asil finished setting his cup down and looked at Ben, though he spoke to the rest of the room. “You will have to excuse us while this wolf and I have a talk.” He reached down and snapped his fingers in front of Ben’s face. “Come with me.”

  I stepped between them. Ben couldn’t put himself between us again without knocking me over—so he nipped me on the back of my knee. A very quick nip, not enough to hurt, just a protest.

  Asil tilted his head and smiled. “I do like you, Ms. Hauptman. You are not exactly what I expected, but I like you. By all means, come with us.”

  “What exactly are you going to settle?” asked Kyle, sounding a little hostile.

  Asil examined him for a moment. “I won’t hurt him, Mr. Brooks, but Ben is trying to protect Ms. Hauptman from me. There is no need, but he has to decide that himself. It will be a lot easier on him if we do this without an audience.”

  “It’s okay,” I told Kyle. “It’s a good idea if we are likely to spend much time in each other’s company.” And I could question Asil without Agent Armstrong listening in—and he could question me.

  “Guest room,” suggested Kyle. “The one we were sleeping in. Apparently this house is low in rooms that are really possible to secure. Otherwise, you’ll have to make do with a bathroom. Agent Armstrong and I can wait here.”

  I waved and took the lead out the door and up the stairs. Ben followed me as close as he could get without touching me, leaving Asil trailing behind us.

  “Kyle Brooks is mated to your third,” Asil said, as we hiked up the stairs, his voice thoughtful. “He is a lawyer. He was tied up and being tortured by a pair of professionals, and he managed to get himself loose and break one man’s neck and knock out the other without killing him. Such an enterprising and ambitious thing for a human lawyer to do to a pair of men who make their livelihood from killing people. How wonderful that he managed it.”

  “Kyle Brooks has a black belt,” I said very quietly. “He’s in good shape and was rescued by a vampire friend of mine who killed the man who hurt Kyle and let the other live because I asked him not to kill everyone in sight.”

  There was silence on the stairs behind Ben and me.

  “I believe I misheard,” said Asil, who’d stopped on the stairs. “English is not my first, nor even my fifth, language. Did you say ‘a vampire friend’”

  “I did.” I half turned to look at him as I stopped, too.

  “The world,” he said, “is a very strange place, and just when I thought I’d witnessed all the wonders it had to teach—here is another one. This ‘vampire friend’ of yours did it for a price?”

  “He did it because he is my friend and Kyle’s friend,” I said.

  “Impossible.”

  There was something in his voice that sent Ben surging up against my legs, which wasn’t so bad—but then he bounced away like a ping-pong ball, and I almost lost my balance because I’d braced for his impact. I did lose my temper.

  “Maybe for you,” I snapped at Asil, turning to finish the last four-or-five-stair climb to the second floor. “Me? I have friends.”

  There was another of
those speaking silences, then he laughed. “Please tell me I won’t end up with eggs in my pillowcase or peanut butter on my car seat.”

  I threw up my hands involuntarily and turned to him to face him again. Walking backward, I said, “I was twelve. Don’t you wolves have anything better to gossip about than things that happened twenty years ago?”

  “Mi princesa,” he told me, his voice deep and flirty, “I was in Spain and I heard about the peanut butter. Two decades are nothing, I assure you—we will speak of it a hundred years from now in hushed voices. There are big bad wolves all over the world who tremble at the sound of his name, yet a little puny coyote girl peanut-buttered the seat of Bran Cornick’s car because he told her that she should wear a dress to perform for the pack.”

  “No,” I said, getting hot about it again. I turned and stalked down the hall. “He said Evelyn—my foster mother—should know better, that she should have made sure I had a dress to wear. He made her cry.” And that was the last time I consented to play the piano.

  I opened the guest room door, and Asil paused until I looked at his face. “Yes,” he said sincerely. “Such a one deserves peanut butter on the seat of his pants.”

  And that sincerity was the last straw. I put my hand over my mouth and leaned against the door and laughed. I was worried, tired, and it felt like every muscle in my body ached—and all I could see was the peanut butter on the back of the Marrok’s elegant beige slacks and the expression on his face when he realized what had happened. I’d been hiding under bushes in my coyote shape downwind and everything—but he’d seen me anyway. Bran could always find me wherever I was hiding. He’d raised an eyebrow at me, and I’d run all the way home.

  “He always knew when it was me,” I said when I could speak.

  Asil smiled; it was a warm and friendly smile. “He told me that gave you sorrow. You would scheme and plan so no one would know—and never realized that he didn’t even have to investigate such an incident. ‘Who else could it be?’ he told me when I called him to … discuss the incident. ‘Can you imagine any of the pack putting peanut butter on the seat of my car to teach me a lesson?’”

  “Huh.” Such simple logic had been beyond me—and it just seemed right and proper that the Marrok would know everything, like Santa Claus with big sharp teeth. “He made me clean the whole car. It was worth it, though. He apologized to Evelyn, brought her flowers, too.”

  “He apologized,” Asil said slowly, and I laughed, again, because Asil said it like he was storing up information to use to torment Bran.

  “I needed that.” I waved him into the room. “Thank you.”

  He glanced around the bedroom and took in the unmade bed and, his eyebrow rising ever higher, the puddle of now-solid silver on the floor. Then he said, “One thing I have always wondered is how Bran did not notice the smell of peanut butter on his so-expensive car’s lovely brown leather upholstery.”

  “I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I put it on a paper plate with a little note that said, ‘For the Marrok,’ and set that on the dash of the passenger seat,” I told him. “He was so busy looking at it that he didn’t notice the seat until it was too late.” I looked at the silver on Kyle’s floor, too. They were probably going to have to replace the stone tile under it. “The eggs, though,” I continued absently. “The eggs were a failure. They don’t break when you want them to—the pillow cushions them too much, and they leave your victim with ammunition to use against you.”

  “Mercedes, tell me—” Asil walked around the end of the bed, which brought him closer to me, and Ben growled.

  Asil stopped where he was. “Very well. Let’s release your wolf from his predicament before we say those things that cannot be said in front of the government man.” He looked at me and pointed back at the door. “Go stand in the hall so we avoid the situation where he is torn between what his instincts say and his need to protect you.”

  It sounded okay, so I did it, standing in the doorway so I could keep my eyes on them. That left Ben and about ten feet between me and Asil. Had he meant me any harm, the distance wasn’t enough, but because he did not, it was enough to assuage Ben’s need to see me safe.

  Asil put his hand on Ben’s nose and pushed down until the red werewolf’s head was all the way on the floor. Ben gave a half groan, half growl.

  “I pledge to you,” Asil said, meeting Ben’s eyes, “that I mean you and yours no harm. I recognize that you belong to Adam Hauptman, and I have no need for you to belong to me. I am an ally while Adam cannot be here, standing in for the Marrok, who has sent me to serve in his stead as lord over all the wolves as we are all his vassals. Do you accept me as such?”

  Ben pulled his nose out from under Asil’s hand and stood up without crouching for the first time since he’d laid eyes on the other wolf. His tail and ears were up for a moment until he deliberately ducked his head and dropped his tail to a more neutral position.

  Asil smiled at him. “Good. We understand each other. Now Mercedes Thompson de Hauptman, I need you to tell me exactly what has happened and what you know. Quickly, please, we haven’t much time.”

  So I told him everything I knew.

  When I was done, he got up off the bed where he’d been sitting and looked at the metal on the floor again. It had lost its bright color while we were talking, and now had a faint patina of black.

  “How is your stomach feeling now?” he asked after a moment.

  “Raw,” I admitted. “But it’s been that way since I wrecked my car and Adam and our pack were taken. I have no idea if it is from the silver or not.”

  Asil crouched on his heels in silence of thought, and I considered reminding him that he’d been in a hurry. At last he said, “You are certain that Peter is the only fatality?”

  “So far,” I said.

  “I find that very interesting in light of the murders of your attackers.” His eyes were bright and merry as he looked at me. Apparently, murders were good fun. “The one who killed the hired men would not bother keeping all of the pack alive. Such a man would say, ‘One werewolf is enough to keep Adam on the hook, and this many hostages are expensive and dangerous to keep.’ Which would be right. They were bloody stupid to take down a whole pack—any commander who ever had charge of a host of enemy soldiers would have been happy to explain it to them.” He lost himself for a moment, presumably in happy contemplation of the troubles our enemies had gotten themselves into.

  “Two different people?” I said.

  Asil nodded. “So it seems to me. Moreover, a man who knew to hire these men, a man they would work for, would not have killed these mercenaries out of fear of what they know. These are very well-trained, sought-after mercenaries often hired by governments friendly to the US, Charles tells me. The kind of men who stay bought and don’t take kindly to being betrayed.”

  “The Cantrip agents had the contacts but not the money to hire them,” I said slowly. “Federal agents are well paid—but not that well paid.”

  “Can you contact Adam right now?”

  “I can try.”

  “Please do so. We need to let him know what we know—and see if there is any new information he can offer us about his location or the people who have taken him.”

  I sat down on the floor and closed my eyes—reached down the rough golden rope that tied my mate and I together and—“Ow, ow, ow,” I said, my eyes watering. “Owie, owie, owie. Damn. Damn.”

  Asil looked from me to the silver on the floor. “That will teach you not to use your bonds for things they were never intended,” he told me. “Especially not silver. Werewolves and silver do not mix.”

  “Shut up,” I said fiercely and very quietly because the sound of his voice sent sharp, arcing lightning rods of pain from my eyes all the way through my skull.

  “That is quite a lot of silver,” he observed. Then, sounding intrigued, he said, “And it is pure silver, though the substance that the tranquilizer dart uses is silver nitrate—which is a white powder.�
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  Asil got up and moved around. Ben came close—I could smell him—but he didn’t get close enough to touch. Werewolves are different when they are in their wolf shape, less human and less caught up in human manners. It would be wrong. But wolves are gregarious, far more so than humans or coyotes, for that matter. Normally, Ben would be pressing against me if I was in distress. Asil must still have been worrying him.

  When my head quit feeling quite so breakable, I looked up—and Asil handed me a glass of water from the bathroom. I drank the whole thing and felt better.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me when I handed him the empty glass. “I expect the effect is temporary. It’ll probably go away once the silver is out of your system entirely.” He touched my lips, a light, quick touch that didn’t allow me time to react.

  He showed me his fingertips—which were red, as if he’d put his fingers in a flame. I touched my lips, too, remembering how black they were.

  “They used to use colloidal silver in nose drops for people with asthma or bad allergies,” he told me. “People who used them regularly sometimes had their skin turn blue—there is a man who ran for the Montana Senate who is blue-skinned. I thought your lips were from lipstick—though you are a little older than most of the young ladies wearing black makeup.”

  I stared at him in horror. “It won’t go away,” I told him. “I’m not a werewolf, my body won’t reject silver the same way yours does.” Gabriel’s little sister, Rosa, had done a report in school about a girl whose skin had turned gray when she was a teenager back in the fifties and nothing anyone had tried had made any improvement. I’d proofread it for her.

  I scrambled to my feet and went into the bathroom to look at the mirror again. I took a washcloth and scrubbed at my lips, but they stayed black.

  Asil didn’t follow me into the bathroom, but he stood at the door.