Frost Burned: Mercy Thompson Book 7 (21 page)

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. If
Marsilia
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 place
I’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.

Asil had a baseball bat and was using it like a katana—turn and turn and never let the bastard get a good hard strike on your weapon. The Japanese had had lousy steel and had learned to compensate. Tad had a pair of kitchen knives and was keeping the fae from getting into a good rhythm with them—unhappily, it was interfering with Asil, too.

The fae fought well. Like someone who had learned the sword when it was the weapon of choice.

Not all fae were long-lived. Some had lives comparable to insects’—a few seasons, then gone. Most of those, Zee had told me once when he was a little drunk, were gone in truth. Their more fragile lives incapable of dealing with the steel and concrete that was conquering the earth.

Others lived nearly human long—twenty years for some, a hundred and fifty for others. Originally only a small percentage of fae were nearly immortal. The rise of humans and technology had selected for those tougher fae, and they now accounted for a far higher percentage of the fae than they ever had before.

A human lifetime was long enough to become an expert swordsman—my own karate sensei was accounted quite good in various weapon forms, including the sword. But Asil was a famous swordsman with centuries of practice, and this fae was more than holding his own. He was old.

Tad wasn’t doing badly—his father had taught him, he’d told me once. If Tad had had something bigger than kitchen knives, if he and Asil had fought together before, they could have worked together. As it was, they had difficulty staying out of each other’s way.

I slunk down low and, keeping to the outside edge of the room, slowly moved closer to the fight. I slid under the bed. Under
my
bed, dust bunnies, underwear, and a random shoe or two were common residents, but Sylvia was more organized than I and all she had under her bed was one of those thin plastic containers full of wrapping paper. I crawled from the head to the foot of the bed and, with my nose under the bedspread, watched for a chance to be of use.

The fae, leaping back to avoid Asil’s baseball bat, hit Sylvia’s desk and rolled over it, sending monitor and keyboard crashing off the top, along with a small clay jar filled with writing implements. Several neat stacks of rubber-banded papers escaped the hit. The fae hissed and damn near levitated off the desk like a cat thrown in a swimming pool and all but crashed into Asil to get away.

In the Tri-Cities, whose population has largely been employed by the government in one way or another for more than half a century, there is an abundance of those old, clunky steel desks straight out of the 1950s. I’ve seen them at rummage sales and every other kind of sale—and once, memorably, a good friend went to a government sale and thought she was bidding on a pallet with two desks and a dozen broken chairs, but ended up with a row of pallets—nearly fifty desks, three hundred and fifteen broken office chairs, a nonfunctional electric pencil sharpener, and four boxes of pink erasers. My office chair at the garage was actually four of those chairs, all Frankensteined into one that worked.

These industrial-strength desks were painted various shades of gray and institutional green or yellow. Sylvia’s desk was of the yellow variety and, like all of them, made of steel.

Which meant that unlike the dead woman, and despite the big sword he was waving around so skillfully, this fae could not bear the touch of cold iron—or steel.

Tad dropped his knives and lunged—but Asil had just pushed the fae directly in front of me, so I didn’t wait to see why. I sprang out from my hiding place and buried my teeth in the fae’s left calf.

I don’t have jaws like a bulldog, but I locked my jaws as best I could anyway. Asil swore at me in Spanish—I knew it was me because he ended it with “Mercedes.” I knew it was swearing because, even in lyrical—if to me mostly unfathomable—Spanish, swearing sounds like swearing.

Asil also struck the sword on an upswing to keep the fae from hitting me with the pommel. The sword, edge against the wood of Asil’s weapon, sliced the bat in two, leaving Asil with eighteen inches of wood to fight the fae’s magicked blade. It hadn’t felt any different to my senses than any other sword until the edge touched wood—and then it tasted like Zee’s magic.

The fae laughed as my weight caused him to stumble. He said something in Welsh that in less dire circumstances I might have been able to translate or at least guess at. He aimed the sharp end of his sword toward me as he caught his balance.

“Let go,” yelled Tad—and the steel desk hit the fae with a boom that would have done credit to a cannon. Papers, bills, bits and pieces of computer parts, and office detritus flew out the previously made hole in the wall, along with the fae and me. Landing jolted me enough that I lost hold of his calf, only then realizing that Tad’s “let go” had been aimed at
me
.

The desk landed right next to my head before rolling onto the fae, leaving me half-stunned on the grass.

The fae shrieked, a pain-filled, rage-filled sound that hit my ears like a blow. If I’d heard it from a mile away, I’d have known it didn’t come from a human throat. I smelled burning flesh, and he lifted the desk off and tossed it into the road, where it bounced once and cartwheeled into a battered truck.

He started to reach past me for his sword, which lay a dozen feet from us where it had fallen, but someone else got there first. The fae hesitated for a bare moment, his eyes on the sword, but the sound of sirens up close and personal—or maybe it was the face of the man holding his sword—made him turn on his heels and run. Tad called insults from the open hole in the wall of Sylvia’s bedroom.

The man who stood over me tossed the fae sword aside and dropped down to sit beside me. Gentle hands moved over me, but I couldn’t focus, couldn’t breathe—hoped so hard that it took longer to regain my ability to pump air into my lungs. As soon as I did, I shifted back to human and squirmed into his lap.

“Adam,” I said, clutching him like a ninny while something tight in the middle of my chest softened. Tears slid down my cheeks. It would have been humiliating if he hadn’t been clutching me back just as hard.

I wiped my eyes and pulled away to look at him. He was a little the worse for wear, his beard at the scratchy stage, and his eyes were … It had been bad. However he’d escaped, it had cost him.

He kissed me, and it was a hard, possessive kiss. He pulled back, and said, “So I went hunting you and got here just in time to see you flying out of a hole in the third story of an apartment attached to a man’s leg.”

There were burns on his lips, and I reached up to touch them.

“Silver,” I said. It was important, because I didn’t want to hurt Adam, but I lost track of what I was saying.

“Hey, you two lovebirds,” said Tad dryly. “I couldn’t help but notice that Mercy is buck naked and we have police arriving. So I fetched her clothes.”

Adam looked up and smiled at Tad, but he spoke to me. “Better get dressed, Mercy. Tad’s right.”

I bounced out of his lap and grabbed the clothes from Tad and pulled them on with more speed than grace. Everything hurt and—I looked at Adam, who was rising to his feet—nothing hurt at all.

Tad strode over to the blade on the grass and looked at it assessingly. “Come here, then,” he told it, and held his hand up. The sword flew into his grip, then … disappeared. He closed his hand over a small bit of metal and shoved it into his pocket.

“That will make it a little hard to explain the bat it cut into two, but it’s too dangerous to allow it to get put into police custody,” he told me. “Dangerous for the police.”

My head felt fuzzy, but then I’d just been tossed out of a third-story window and discovered Adam was safe. And here. And that meant I didn’t have to be in charge anymore.

With Adam here, I had no worries left at all. None. Something happened, some magic that smelled like fae had just been waiting for that moment, but I was too happy to worry about that, either.

I tied the drawstring at my waist, and asked Tad, “Your father made that sword, didn’t he? Out of something that isn’t iron or steel so that the fae could use it.”

Tad nodded, looking at me closely. “I think there were five of these swords, each a little bit different from the other. Dad has one. All of them are bad news. If someone’s not using them to slaughter a crowd of people, then some damned Gray Lord is blathering about how such a fae treasure needs to be protected. The Gray Lords are amassing fae artifacts like dragons amassing gold. And if this is too dangerous for the police, it’s way too dangerous to be putting it into the hands of the Gray Lords. I’ll give this one to my dad, and he can worry about dealing with it.” He looked at me carefully and tilted his head. “Touch your nose, Mercy.”

I put my hand on my nose, but it felt like my nose. If there was some smudge or something, I couldn’t tell.