Frost Burned: Mercy Thompson Book 7 (30 page)

“But,” Adam continued, “I think the damage the information man can do is done. So there is no great urgency in running him down.”

“Let’s be clear here, in this room,” said Armstrong. “Are you talking about killing him?”

Adam shook his head. “Killing him is a lot more problematic than just keeping an eye on him. The past few days aside, we try our best not to go around killing humans, Mr. Armstrong.”

“You don’t consider yourself human?” asked Armstrong.

Asil raised his eyebrows at Adam, who shrugged, and said, “‘Humans who are not werewolves’ is too wordy to say more than once. We are as human as we can be.”

“So we’re left with the money man and the potential assassin in Senator Campbell’s security team.” Tony was leaning forward intently.

Adam leaned back and stretched out his legs. The tension in the room ratcheted down four notches, proof that werewolves aren’t the only ones who can read body language. “Let’s deal with Senator Campbell’s problem as the more manageable evil. I’ve sent word to Senator Campbell through people I know in the security industry, but it might be better, Agent Armstrong, if you warned the senator yourself. Keep in mind that whoever this traitor on his security detail is, he is not necessarily driven by any agenda other than money. If he is only a gun for hire, taking out the Cantrip people who wanted to kill Senator Campbell might be enough to stop him. If he is a zealot, of whatever stripe, he’s likely to get impatient and try on his own.” Adam paused and raised an eyebrow. “You can tell the senator that I am happy to send a couple of trained security professionals who are werewolves to ensure his safety if he would allow it. No charge.”

Armstrong’s mouth quirked. “Have you ever met the senator?”

“No, sir.”

“I have. He might just take you up on your offer. He is not as anti-werewolf as he is painted. He just doesn’t like it when they go around eating people.”

Put like that, he didn’t sound so bad. But I’d heard some of his speeches.

Adam nodded, but his voice was reserved when he said, “It would please me if he accepted. If something happens to him at this point, it will cause people to blame the werewolves. I’d rather he and his family be safe and sound for years to come.”

“And that leaves the money man,” said Kyle.

“Yes,” said Adam. He looked at Armstrong. “Do you have any idea where the money is coming from?”

“No. Alexander Bennet—he was the man in charge, and probably the one who shot your man—Bennet’s financials show nothing unusual and neither do those of any of the people who were likely associated with him. FYI, identifying those people is going to be a nightmare. Looking for people in Cantrip who have problems with werewolves and the current legislation is like looking for cheese in Wisconsin. Bennet just didn’t show up for work one day, and there are two more like that. One of them had a heart attack and is in the emergency room of a hospital, the other is likely to be ashes here—unless she ran off and got married or something. We have to check out everyone who is working from home, on leave, on vacation—or used to work for Cantrip at some point in time. If you had left the bodies, it would have made that part of my job much easier.”

Warren, who until that point had been silent, said, “I have driver’s licenses for you—though we don’t have any ID for the people that were buried next to Peter. You’ll be able to figure out who they are from their bodies.”

Adam looked at him.

“If you’ll pardon me, boss, you weren’t in any condition to be thinking of things like that. But it occurred to some of us that we might find it useful to know who our enemies are.” He looked at Armstrong. “I’ll give you copies and keep the originals.”

Armstrong looked as though he’d like to argue, but under Warren’s scrutiny, he subsided.

“Okay,” said Tony. “One more thing. Adam, you are going to have to come up with a story to tell the press that will fly with my superiors.”

Adam nodded. “Jim Gutstein is going to call in a few favors, and tonight I’ll talk to the press out of Kyle’s office. I’ll take Mercy’s story and run with it.”

“Let me help,” said Armstrong. “I have some experience in taking scary things and making them ordinary.”

“This is all well and good,” said Sylvia. “But you need to explain to me why Maia told me she rode here with a dead body.”

“That is
my
fault,” Asil said.

“More bodies?” said Armstrong.

“I thought there weren’t any bodies at Sylvia’s?” Tony was frowning.

“Someone sent a team of assassins after Jesse and Mercy,” Tad said, and looked at me. “They were waiting for you, Mercy. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I think they were in place before I even got to Sylvia’s to watch over the kids.”

Tad cleared his throat and gave me a sheepish smile. “I felt them when I got there. It’s one of the reasons I got close enough that the kids spotted me. After a while, when nothing happened, I figured that there was someone like me living in the apartment complex—half-fae and not required to be in the reservation.”

“I thought all fae were required to go,” Armstrong said. “That was our briefing.”

Tad shook his head. “No. Only those deemed powerful enough to be of use. But these assassins, like Agent Armstrong’s people, were renegades—”

The door popped open, and a wet and bright green swimming-suit-clad Sofia Sandoval flew in. “Mercy,
Mercy
. Gabriel says come quick. Someone hit your car. Smooshed the trunk.”

I was dead. Marsilia was going to kill me for killing her car, and I didn’t really blame her at all.

Everyone in the meeting boiled out to look—as much to get out and move than because anyone else was concerned. It wasn’t quite five o’clock, but this late in the fall, the sun had set while we’d been talking, and the rear of the car was beyond the streetlight. I have good night vision, but even my eyes need a minute to adjust between indoor artificial light and darkness.

But it didn’t matter, because I didn’t get to the car before Gabriel snagged me and pulled me aside with some urgency.

He spoke quickly and quietly. “I think we are in real trouble. We’d just finished getting the kids out of the hot tub in the backyard. Jesse and Mary Jo took everyone else upstairs to dry off and change, but Sofia stayed out to help me put the cover back on the hot tub. We heard a crash and came out front to see what happened. I thought at first someone had just done a hit-and-run on the car.”

He gestured, and I could see the top of the trunk, which had a reverse dent rising from the middle. “I sent Sofia in for you so I could shut the trunk before she saw the body. I didn’t see anyone driving off. Just a woman on the street. Looked like she was jogging, you know? Making good time, too. I thought about heading after her to see if she’d seen anything, but then I noticed just how odd the trunk was, so I took a better look.” He leaned in, and said, very softly. “The body was gone, Mercy. And the sound we heard was her hitting the lid of the trunk so she could get out.”

All of the werewolves—Asil, Adam, Ben, and Warren who had been looking down the street, presumably for whoever hit the car—turned to look at Gabriel and me. Asil opened the trunk.

“She was dead,” he said. “I swear to it. I know she was fae, but I have killed them before. She was dead. When we walked by here earlier, I could smell the body starting to decompose.”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “Zombie fae. That’s all we needed. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to get a
really
good night’s sleep with zombie fae running around. I’ll go see if I can track her.”

“Mercy,” Adam said.

“I won’t approach,” I promised. “I’ll just see where she’s going and come back and get you. By the time any of you wolves can change, she’ll be long gone.”

Since young Sandovals were beginning to filter out of the house to see what the excitement was all about, I didn’t strip before changing into my coyote. Adam helped me get the sweatshirt off when my coyote-self got stuck in it—and only then did I remember that I’d shifted right in front of Armstrong and Tony, neither of whom had known what I was.

One of my foster father Bryan’s favorite sayings had been, “No use crying over spilt milk.” Besides, Tad must have used the distraction to get the fae cuffs out of the trunk because I caught a glimpse of him slipping Peace and Quiet under his shirt, so something good came out of it anyway.

I put my nose down and was off and running. Asil was right—she’d begun to rot, and she left a very clear trail.

Adam ran beside me in his human form. Apparently he didn’t want me out zombie hunting on my own. Coyotes run a great deal faster than people can, and I run faster than most coyotes. Werewolves are good runners, but even a werewolf can run only so fast in their human form—four-footed travel is a lot quicker than two. He was keeping up with me, and moving faster than any human could have—and maybe I wasn’t running at my top speed. Not even close, really.

Having Adam beside me if I had to confront a zombie fae assassin was worth slowing down for.

I thought we were going to catch her. It hadn’t been five minutes since Sofia had broken into the meeting—and how fast could a zombie fae assassin run?

But when we got out to Bombing Range Road, the nearest main thoroughfare (so named because the area had been a bombing range back in WWII), the trail disappeared at the edge of the road. It was full dark, though it was only 6:00
P.M.
, but dark doesn’t bother me much. I had a clear view in either direction for several miles, and there was no dead woman running along the side of the road. There were, however, a number of cars traveling both directions.

“She got into a car,” Adam said, trying not to appear winded, as I cast back and forth with my nose to the ground. “Someone picked her up—or she hitched a ride.”

Disturbing to speculate about either way, I thought, but there was nothing we could do about it now. “Disturbing” was a good word. Of all the things that had happened over the past few days, a dead fae getting up and running off might just be the
most
disturbing.

Still—a zombie. Maybe it would intrigue Marsilia enough she’d forget about her car. Not likely, but maybe. I wasn’t sure I should feel responsible for the damage to the trunk. How could I have been expected to know that the dead fae would break out on her own?

Adam stared down the road. “If you hadn’t slowed down for me, you might have caught her.”

Maybe I would have—and maybe that wouldn’t have been a good thing. Warren’s truck pulled up, and Warren leaned over and opened the passenger door.

“No luck?” Warren asked, as we hopped in. I took the middle seat.

“No. Looks like she got in a car. Could have gone either way.”

Warren turned the truck around and headed back before he said anything. “That’s disturbing,” he said.

Zombies or not, the press needed to be appeased.

Tony had checked in with his boss and given him the official story that Adam and Armstrong had come up with—which was basically to leave out Cantrip’s involvement completely. The conveniently out-of-sight anonymous mercenaries took the majority of the blame. They had been hired to force the werewolves to act in violence and attack Senator Campbell, to get rid of the senator and to make the werewolves appear to be monsters.

Adam didn’t look like a monster. He looked like a handsome, charismatic man. He was very good on camera.

The person behind the plot apparently panicked when some of his mercenaries were captured while holding Kyle Brooks prisoner. He had them killed to keep them from talking.

Armstrong had done some
un
cleaning to reveal the deaths of the men caught kidnapping Kyle because it was now a useful part of the story.

When they heard about the killings, the other mercenaries left, burning the winery and letting Adam and the pack break free. Officials were trying to find the mercenaries (with an implied fat chance) and the man behind the plot (also fat chance). And hopefully, everyone would leave satisfied with nothing but the truth—if not quite the whole truth.

So Adam, Tony, Armstrong, Kyle, and Warren headed for Kyle’s office in Kennewick by way of Adam’s house so he could dress appropriately for a press conference, leaving the rest of us to hold down the fort. The good news was that between the runaway dead woman and the upcoming press conference, no one had said anything to me about the fact that I’d changed into a coyote. Maybe they all assumed I was a half-blood fae like Tad.

When Ben came up to tell me that there was a messenger from Marsilia for me at the front door, I was in one of the upstairs bedrooms reading
James and the Giant Peach
to the youngest three Sandovals. Kyle’s stash of emergency family-in-need supplies included a big box of books designed to appeal to a wide range of age groups.

“It’s just getting to the good part,” said Sofia. “We’re almost to the giant bugs.”

“Can you keep reading?” I asked Sylvia.

“Who is Marsilia?” she asked, taking the book from me.

“The woman who owns the car I’ve been driving around,” I told her.

She winced—she’d seen the car.

“Is that the vampire, Mercy?” asked Sissy, who was nearly seven going on thirty.

“Vampires?” Sylvia asked. “There are vampires, too?” And then she said, “You stole a
vampire’s
car and trashed it?”

I winced, too. “Officially, there are no vampires. If you don’t believe in them, they will leave you alone. So it’s best if you don’t believe in them.”

Maia nodded solemnly. “My best friend Penny asked me if there were vampires, and I told her, no. I did tell her I rode a werewolf, and her mama told me that lying wasn’t good. I wasn’t lying that time, but sometimes lying is good, right? Mercy, will you come to my house when they come over again and tell them I’m not lying?”

Maia was either going to grow up to rule the world or loose a planetwide plague upon the land. Maybe both. She had started kindergarten this year, or should have anyway, so we had a little time before we had to look for a place to hide from her.

“You
stole
a
vampire’s
car?” Sylvia said again.