Frost Burned

She vanished in a bright flash of light.

“Yes!” I shouted in triumph and more than a little awe. My little lamb had outperformed Zee’s sword.

From across the room, Stefan smiled at me.

“Holy symbols, Batman,” I told him. “We havehelp.”

I went after the ghosts, trying to avoid the fighting. It was more difficult than it might have been because Frost had heard my exclamation as well, and he kept trying to get to me. Marsilia redoubled her efforts to keep him away. I had to give up on two of them because Frost got too close. I was under no misconception about how fast Frost could kill me, not after seeing the damage he and Marsilia had been exchanging.

I had just freed a man wearing a dark blue suit and a Gryffindor tie when Asil’s shout made me turn to see Frost right on top of me. Then Wulfe smashed into him like a freight train, if a freight train had been thrown by a Chinese vampire.

“Sorry, sorry,” said Wulfe calmly to Frost as I sprinted across the room away from them. “But you need to watch what you’re doing, or you’re going to get hurt by your own teammates.”

I pulled another ghost around and asked him his name without looking at his face because I was using the lamb to destroy Frost’s magic.

“Alexander,” he said.

My gaze jerked up, and I looked at Peter’s killer. Why couldn’t he have been one of the ghosts Frost had eaten? “You killed my friend,” I told him.

“Yes,” he sighed. “Werewolf, you know. Dangerous and evil.”

“No,” I told him. “Alexander Be

“Are you arguing with a ghost, Mercy?” asked Wulfe in an interested voice from somewhere on the far side of the basement from me. “Good for you.”

Wulfe was a mess, and in the darkness it was hard to tell what was soot and what was blood. Though he was not as obviously hurt as either Shamus or Hao—even water can’t avoid being hit by two opponents forever. Hao was letting Shamus chase him toward a wall at breakneck pace. Wulfe had left them to it, evidently so he could watch me, though he made no move to stop what I was doing.

Hao stripped out of his golden shirt and ran at the wall. The shirt seemed to hover for a second, held in Hao’s hand, which stayed where it was while his body pivoted on that axis as he ran his feet up the wall. The shirt ended up on Shamus’s head at about the same time that Hao did a quick in-the-air somersault and landed with both feet on Shamus’s back, driving the other vampire’s head into the wall.

If I survived this fight, I was going to forever regret not having a DVD of it. Not that recording devices ever captured vampires correctly. They weren’t that much faster in general than werewolves or me, but they could make very small movements incredibly fast, and it gave modern cameras fits.

The drizzle of rain earlier in the day had stopped for a while. But as the ghost started to tug on my hand, the one with the necklace in it, the rain began to fall again in earnest.

“Please,” said Alexander, who had killed Peter. “I am so tired.”

Me, too. I was also wet and cold and fiercely regretting I knew what the right thing to do was. But I finished the job I’d stopped in the middle of—cleaning off Frost’s magic.

Instead of making soup of the ash on the floor, it was so cold the rain hit and turned to ice—freezing rain.

“Alexander,” I told him forcefully. “Go.” And I added the next bit because it was the right thing to do, too—even if I didn’t know if it had any real effect. “Be at peace.”

Like the others, he disappeared in a flash of light. If I had secretly hoped that the awful darkness that swallowed the bad guy inGhost would come and haul him down into the abyss, well, that was a disappointment I’d just have to live with.

Fingers numbing, I went back to catching ghosts. I’d lost count somewhere—or maybe Frost had gotten another one when I had been preoccupied. But when I finished with the woman in the cocktail dress and turned to find the last one, there were no more.

The fighting had gotten more uncontrolled and violent as the combatants lost their footing on the ice and slid into spectators, debris, or walls with equal force. I slithered, slipped, and twice fell off my original perch after I finally reached it.

Shivering miserably, I shoved my hands in my pockets. I’d take forty degrees below zero any day over this miserable, wet, slick stuff. I could dress for forty below, but the wet went through whatever clothes I wore. My jeans were clinging to my thighs like an icy lover, and my coat, shoulders soaked through, was losing the war to keep me warm.

Something grabbed me by the back of my coat and tossed me onto the ground. Taken totally unaware, I tumbled over and landed flat on my back. My head slammed the floor hard, and I saw stars and little birds. I rolled anyway, tasting blood as I tried to get out of easy reach of my attacker.

Above me was the dead fae assassin I’d all but forgotten about. Her head bobbed at an u

Her body landed on me hard, and she was a lot heavier than she looked. Thankfully, impaled by the sword, she was also a dead weight. Only her head seemed to still be mobile and she couldn’t turn it. The odd double image was making my head hurt. If I hadn’t been worried about her doing something like biting my throat out, I might have closed my eyes. I got my left arm up and between her mouth and my neck.

But she didn’t try to attack again.

“Hunger”—her voice sounded lost—“you have the sword. Where is my Sliver if you have his Hunger?”

She kept talking, but she’d forgotten to breathe, and I couldn’t see her mouth, just feel her jaw moving against my arm. She could have been cursing me or telling me she loved me for all that I understood. I bet on the first rather than the last.

As she tried to say something, I’d realized that the strange double image I was seeing wasn’t the result of a concussion. I was seeing her ghost, almost completely severed from her body but still co

My left arm was busy keeping her off me; my right, holding the sword, was stuck between us. Since she wasn’t doing anything immediately violent—and because I really was more afraid of Zee’s sword than I was afraid of her—I wiggled my left arm down and tried not to pay attention to her cold, rotting flesh moving against my bare cheek as she vainly tried to talk. I also attempted to breathe shallowly, but it didn’t help the smell much.

My left hand found the pocket of my jeans where I’d shoved the necklace. The jeans were wet and fought me, but I managed to snag the chain of my necklace with the tips of my fingers. The jeans had the last laugh, though. The lamb snagged on my pocket, and I gave it a hard pull. The jeans released the necklace, but my icy-numbed clumsy fingers lost their hold. The necklace flew with the force of my pull, and I heard it land well out of reach.

I tried to move, but as soon as the sword wiggled, her arms and legs began to twitch again.“Okay, Hunger,” I told it. “Can’t you do something about this?”

I tried it in German because, after all, it was Zee’s sword.“Also, Hunger. K?

I felt it listening to me. Goose bumps broke out on my skin, and magic thrummed in my chest and along my body where the dead woman’s flesh pressed against mine.

In my hands, the pommel of the sword warmed. Spice’s body began to vibrate about the time the warmth became heat.

I had a terrible thought. What if the sword liked the dead fae better than the live coyote and chose to switch allegiance? I’d been warned about Hunger’s reputation for deserting its wielder. So I held on to the sword past the point where the heat became pain.