Frost Burned

I glanced at the sky. It was still dark, but the clock in Marsilia’s car said it was five thirty in the morning. “You’ll be cutting the daylight thing pretty close.”

“There is time,” he said, his voice as gentle as I’d ever heard it. “I can get home in very short order should I need to. Do not worry about me. We will worry about the others, yes? Hang up now and drive.”

I hung up and hoped I’d done the right thing. Exposing the pack’s vulnerability to the local vampires wasn’t a smart thing to do. Marsilia would happily dance on our graves if the pack and I, especially I, were utterly destroyed. I trusted Stefan. I did. But Stefan was a vampire and I could never forget that.

Kyle’s house in West Richland was a generous half-hour drive from Sylvia’s apartment in Ke

Had I done the right thing leaving Gabriel and Jesse? It had felt like I was getting them out of harm’s way when I’d done it. But what if whoever had taken Adam did think of Sylvia? Gabriel was strong and smart, but he was also an unarmed teenage human. Had I just given our enemies more victims? I thought of the bullet that hit Peter and was pretty sure that the person who had fired it at a helpless man could shoot one of Gabriel’s little sisters, too.

Somewhere nearby, Adam was being held. I had no real reason to think that they would be hunting Jesse. Not one. But I was uneasy leaving them without protection.

I called Zee. He hadn’t said good-bye when he’d retreated to the fae reservation, just left a note telling me to be patient and not contact him. But he liked Gabriel and Jesse—and adored, though he’d never have admitted it out loud, the little hellions who were Gabriel’s sisters.

His cell phone rang and rang as the interstate carried me past Richland. My finger was on the button to end the call when Zee said, grumpily,“Liebling, this is not a good idea.”

“Zee,” I told him, “I am completely out of good ideas and am doing my best with the bad ones I have left.” I explained the whole thing again. When I finished, I said, “The fae owe us, Adam and me, they owe us for the otterkin and for the fairy queen. Is there some way you could keep a watch over Gabriel’s mom’s house? You probably won’t have to do anything at all. I’mprobably being paranoid—it’s that kind of night. But all they have keeping them safe is my hope that no one would think to look there—and that reasoning gets weaker and weaker the farther away I get.”

“I agree that you are owed a debt,” Zee said heavily, at last. “There might be some who would argue that the otterkin’s deaths were a tragedy. I am not one of those people. No one can argue that you were sent on an errand for us that put you in danger, and where you took much harm. And no one, not even the most anti-human of us”—the way he said it made me think that he had a specific fae in mind—“can argue you are owed for the downfall of the fairy queen, who caught so many of us in her web and might have taken us all, unaware as we were.”

He made a clicking noise with his tongue that I recognized as the sound he made when confronted with a particularly difficult fix on a car.“It brings me sorrow, but at this time it would wipe the slate clean of favors owed to you if they knew that I had even answered this phone—which phone I am not supposed to have at all because it is corrupt human technology.” He bit out the last part of the sentence as if he found it a

After a long pause, he said, carefully,“I could not tell you to call my house and speak to the one there. I could not tell you to think about the kinds of places that could be fortified to hold a pack of werewolves, which would not be easy. A place where people in pseudo-military garb might not be remarked upon or where they could getin and out u

“You think they’re being held somewhere out in the Area?” I asked. The Area was the secured section of land surrounding the Hanford nuclear power plant.

“I am sorry,Liebling. I ca

“If you know anyone who is talking to Bran right now,” I said, “would you please have them tell him what’s going on here? This information might not help the fae’s cause with the Marrok, but you might let someone understand thatnot passing on this information will be a statement the Marrok will take very seriously. And I will make sure that Bran knows the fae were given this information.”

“You phrase your suggestion very well,” Zee said, sounding pleased. “I will let the ones who are talking to Bran know all that you have told me.” He paused. “I will have to be creative to do it in such a way that they do not know that we have been talking on the phone.” He hung up without another word.

I had missed the turn off at Queensgate and had to drive all the way to Benton City, adding more time onto the trip. Rather than travel back down the interstate, I took the back highway, where there should be fewer police, hoping I could make up some time.

As soon as I was on the right road, I called Zee’s house. The phone rang and rang. After a few minutes I hung up and tried it again. Zee wouldn’t have given me that number for nothing. Maybe he’d rented the house out to someone he thought could help me. Maybe there was another fae who, like Ariana, was powerful enough to defy the Gray Lords. Or maybe the fae had left designated spies outside to keep track of things they couldn’t monitor from their barricaded reservations, someone who owed Zee a favor. I was still coming up with fantasy scenarios when someone picked up the phone.

“What?” he snapped impatiently.

“Who is this?” I asked, because, gruff and sharp as that answer had been, he sounded like Tad. Zee’s half-human son would not have come back here without letting me know.

“Mercy?” Some of the grumpiness left his voice and I was certain.

“Tad? What are you doing home? How long have you been there, and why didn’t you tell me you were home?”

Tad had been his father’s right-hand man in the VW shop when he was nine, and I first met him. He’d kept on asmy right hand and chief tool wrangler when his father had retired and let me buy the shop. Tad had left to go to an Ivy League school back East giving out scholarships to fae as a way to show how liberal and enlightened they were.

We’d e-mailed once a week since he left, and I called him once a month to keep up. Tad was the little brother I’d never had, and in some ways we were closer than I was to my half sisters. We had more in common: neither of us quite fitting in to either the world of the humans or the world of the supernatural. He because he was only half-fae and I because I was the only shapeshifting coyote in a world full of werewolves and vampires.