“Was he on our side all this time?” I asked.
Stefan shrugged. “Who knows. I’ve seen him be a lot more lethal than he was tonight. There were no firebombs, for instance. But he doesn’t always remember how to perform magic—that’s what he tells us anyway. And Hao is well-known for his ability to fight.”
Hao shrugged. “Frost is dead. If Wulfe were mine, I would kill him, but Marsilia’s seethe is no concern of mine.”
When we left the remains of the winery, Hao and Stefan were killing the vampires who had collapsed against the wall of the basement. Marsilia’s Mercedes was gone, though the seethe’s other car was in the lot. There was no sign that Adam had brought a car, so we all piled into Warren’s truck—the werewolves in the back. We went home.
We gave the Rabbit a Viking funeral.
She sat a battered warrior—or a decrepit pile of junk—perched on a pile of wood three feet high and a foot bigger around than the car. I’d drained her fluids and stripped her of any parts that were usable before the pack had lifted her to her final resting place.
Those parts were now tucked in and around the junker Rabbit that still graced the space between my old home and my new one. Sure, I could have found somewhere else to put the parts, but Adam had yelled at me about fighting the vampire one too many times.
I know I’d scared him—I’d scared me, too. I also remembered how mad I’d been at Adam when he’d hurt himself kissing me because he thought it would break the fae’s magic that held me. He’d been right to kiss me, though it burned him, and I’d been right to help Marsilia with the vampire. I’d yelled at him anyway.
Which was why the old junker only got to wear a pair of tires on its trunk instead of getting something rude painted in fluorescent pink or (and I was saving this one for something serious) a solar-powered blinking red light that I’d found at Walmart on the ill-fated Black Friday shopping expedition.
The fire burned hot and long past the time when the last of the marshmallows and hot dogs were roasted. Even with the heaping mounds of firewood, the car wouldn’t have burned to ash without Tad’s help.
It had been two weeks since Frost died.
Adam’s appearance on TV had cemented (if it needed cementing) his reputation as a hero and a pillar of all that was good and civil. It was a fortunate thing that no one had gotten a picture of him tearing into Frost’s body. Tony assured me that the police were satisfied with the abbreviated story Adam and Agent Armstrong had given them.
Kyle forgave me the shirt I’d destroyed, and he’d helped us look for his car without a word of complaint. He was, I think, happy we hadn’t found it that night and covered his buttery leather upholstery with soot and blood.
Warren told me, as we drove through nameless dirt roads through seemingly endless vineyards and orchards, that Adam had just suddenly gotten out of the chair he’d been sitting in at Kyle’s office and sprinted out the door, leaving the rest of them to soothe the reporter who’d lingered to get a few more details.
Adam had taken off in Kyle’s Jaguar and left the rest of them to call a taxi to get home.
Adam had explained, a little sheepishly, that all he knew was that I was at the winery with the vampires—but he hadn’t been really certain how to get there. He could feel me, but the roads kept turning the wrong way. Finally, he’d abandoned the car and taken off on four feet.
It took us three days to find the Jaguar—and then only because someone called the police and reported an abandoned car in their vineyard.
I gave the sword back to Tad as soon as I saw him again, a couple of days after our adventure.
“What did you do to it?” he asked me. “It feels …”
“Frightened?” I suggested.
He grimaced. “Subdued.”
“Wulfe—you know the crazy vampire? Wulfe used it to kill another vampire.”
He grimaced. “That would do it. You should ask Dad about Wulfe sometime. It’ll give you nightmares.”
Tad was living at his father’s house still, but he quit being a hermit. He’s helping me at the shop again. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed working with someone I liked. I might still have to close down the shop eventually, but not for a while.
Peter’s funeral, held as soon as we could manage, had taken place in sunshine, though it was still cold. The pack mourned, as was fitting. It was a quiet affair without the usual speeches because Honey didn’t want them. I agreed with her; speeches weren’t necessary. We all knew what we had lost.
Asil went home directly afterward. As did Agent Armstrong, who had stayed for the funeral, though he’d never met Peter.
“It is a good thing to remember the victims,” he told me at the grave site. “It gives me perspective.”
Adam made Honey stay with us for a couple more days before moving back to her house. Mary Jo planned on giving up her apartment in the next few weeks and moving in with her. Mary Jo, firefighter, and Honey, princess, seem to me a disaster in the making—but neither of them like me for a lot of reasons that boil down to my being a coyote and not a werewolf. Maybe that will give them enough in common to let their roommate situation work out.
The last of the flames under the Rabbit died down just as the snow began to fall in earnest.
“Come inside,” Adam suggested. “Everyone’s gone except Jesse, and she’s asleep.”
His gruff tone and the touch of his lips on my ear told me that he had something more in mind than sleep.
“I am,” I told him, as we walked back to the house, “feeling very lucky tonight.”
“Oh? Because you didn’t die in the crash, when the assassin attacked you, or when you fought the vampire?” His voice had sharpened.
“You’ve yelled at me enough about that,” I warned him. “Your quota is now full. Besides, that’s not what makes me lucky.”
After we had left the burnt-out winery and the vampires behind us, we went home—to our home. It was battered (the front door was so bad they had to replace the frame and resurface part of the house), but the bad guys were all dead.
I tracked blood, mud, and ash across the white carpet and up the stairs. I used to feel bad when I bled all over that carpet—but tonight I didn’t care so much. Besides, Adam, still in wolf form, was even dirtier than I was.
“I’m going to shower,” Asil said. “Then I’ll sleep in the living room where I can keep an eye on the doors, just in case.”
“There’s a shower in the bathroom in the basement,” I told him. “Get something to eat. There’s food in the kitchen.”
He smirked. “Yes, Mom.”
Honey hopped onto the living-room couch with a sigh. It was white, like the carpet, but it was leather, so we could clean off anything that got on it. Probably.
Adam trailed beside me, up the stairs.
“You should eat, too,” I told him.
He gave me a look, and I let it lie. If he really needed food, he’d get some. As soon as we made it into the bedroom, he started to change back to human. He was tired, and there was no urgency, so the change was very slow.
I peeled off everything I was wearing and threw it into the dirty clothes. Then I walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. It took a long time to get clean. The ash clung with surprising tenacity, and since at least some of that ash had once been a person—a zombie person—I had to get it all off.
When I finally came out, Adam was stretched out on the bed, naked and asleep. He was clean, and his hair was wet, so he’d used the other upstairs shower.
I watched him while I towel dried my hair. Peter joined me. Dead or alive, he was a werewolf, he didn’t care that I was naked, so I didn’t bother covering up.
“He’s a good man,” he told me, looking at Adam.
“Yes,” I agreed.
Peter tilted his head down to look me in the eye, and he smiled. “You know he doesn’t believe that. He thinks he is a monster.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “What he thinks doesn’t change
the facts.”
“I told him where you were,” Peter said. “You sent me away. Sent me here. But I found Adam, and I told him where you were and what the vampires had you doing.”
“You left before I knew what they were going to ask me to do.”
“You’re a walker,” he said. “And they were facing a necromancer who could bind the dead. Of course they wanted you.”
See, even a dead man was smarter than I was.
“Peter,” I said, “it’s time for you to go. I know how to fix what Frost did to you.”
Asil had given me back my necklace in the car.
“Good,” Peter said. “But I would like to sleep beside her one more time.”
“Yes,” I told him. “Okay.”
He changed into his wolf one last time and left the room without a backward glance.
I walked over to the bed and slid my sore fingers across the damp skin of Adam’s shoulder. What if we had only one more time to sleep together? One last time.
He could have died instead of Peter.
I pulled the covers out from under him, and he was so tired he didn’t even move. But when I got in bed beside him, he reached out and tugged me close.
“So,” said Adam, holding the back door open for me as the snow smothered the last of the Rabbit’s funeral pyre. “Why are you lucky?”
“Because.” I leaned into him instead of going inside, pressing him against the doorjamb. His lips tasted like smoke and hot dog, with a touch of chocolate. He tasted warm and alive.
“Just because.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Once upon a time I proved that I will quit because I don’t like something, but I won’t quit because I can’t do something. That’s how I ended up with a degree in German—which I didn’t speak well when I graduated in 1988, and it didn’t get any better from disuse. When I decided Zee would be German, I threw in a few German phrases here and there in the first two Mercy books. I kept it simple—how hard could it be?
Then I got this lovely e-mail from a nice man in Germany who told me that he liked the books—but my German was pretty bad.
I said, “Thank you, and you know you have a job now, right?”
So from that point on, Michael Bock and his lovely wife, Susann, have given Zee’s German its authenticity. That doesn’t mean I’m right all the time; even they can’t prevent me from transferring things from his e-mail to my manuscript incorrectly. I know just enough to get it wrong.
When Zee needed a good spell to use in Silver Borne, Michael and Susann gave him voice. When Tad needed a spell in this book, Michael came through for me again. He and I worked on the English translation together.
Mirror reflect, find father’s image and voice in the depths of your senses.
His words his form, my words my form, lead, guide, drive together in a connection of your reality.
Bind our realities, our being, in nature and song.
BEST,
PATTY BRIGGS
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Frost Burned mt-7 Page 31