Frost Burned (Mercy Thompson, #7)(99)

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 unnatural angle, and weirdly, there were two of her crouched on the place I’d been perched. She jumped at me, and I pulled my cold hand out of my pocket and Zee’s sword slid into her like a hot knife through ice cream. I was nearly as surprised as she was because the move had been instinctual and not planned—and I hadn’t called the sword out.

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 connected to the dead body with greasy ties.

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?nnen Sie nicht etwas tun?”

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.

If the pommel was hot, though, it was nothing compared to the sword. The fae’s body turned to ash on top of me between one moment and the next, mingling with the ash of the winery fire and the wet ice. I rolled and scrambled frantically to my feet, dropping the sword as I did.

There was nothing left of the zombie fae woman. I tried to wipe her ash off my coat and jeans, but I was so wet it just smeared. When I dropped it, the sword had burned down through the thin layer of ice on the ground, but it had cooled rapidly to the point where it was gaining another coat of ice from the freezing rain. It lay there in the muck, and the magic it had sent spinning through me was gone.

I didn’t want to touch it—but I wanted even less to leave it here, where one of the vampires would get ahold of it. When I touched the hilt, it was so cold it burned my blistered and reddened hands again.

It fought me when I tried to shrink it down. That’s why it was still in my hands when Frost hit me and knocked me a dozen feet away. I rolled to my feet and used the sword the way I’d practiced once a month for years when Sensei chose to have us work on weapon forms. Adrenaline meant the ache of my cheek and knee, the misery of being wet, cold, and afraid, was no more than a shadow upon my awareness. All the rest of me was caught in the blade and the dance of martial combat.

I’m not strong by vampire or werewolf standards, but I am fast, and armed with a sword, I fought with as much speed as I could summon. I didn’t manage to hit him—but he couldn’t get close enough to hit me, either. I was focused on him, but I caught a glimpse of the rest of the building here and there.

Marsilia was down. Her body was too broken for her to stand although she was trying to keep her promise because she was crawling toward our battleground.

Wulfe was down as well. He lay in the sludge, covered with ice, not too far from our dance, and I took care not to end up too close to him.

Hao and Shamus were somewhere behind me. I could hear them fighting, but I couldn’t see them.

Stefan had a wrestler’s hold on Asil, and he was yelling at him. “Stand down. Stand down, wolf. I don’t want to have to kill you.” Honey just watched my battle with yellow eyes.