Frost Burned

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. Undermy bed, dust bu

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 TriCities, 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 ca

The desk landed right next to my head before rolling onto the fae, leaving me half-stu

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 ni

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.”