Frost Burned (Mercy Thompson #7)(46)

"Aimed at whom?" asked Adam.

The mercenary nodded. "I do like you. That is the right question. For you if you succeeded, for the senator if you didn't." He left without another glance.

As soon as the door shut behind him, Darryl and Warren both looked up at Adam. Darryl inhaled and gave a soft growl, too drugged from the ketamine to bring out words.

"Yes," said Adam. "I'm better." He didn't say why or how. They'd think it was Bran, and his legend would help them get up and on their feet.

He used the key to free himself and opened the shackles that held Darryl first, then Warren. When Warren sat up, Adam dropped the key into the old cowboy's hand. Warren was in the best shape next to Adam.

"Free everyone, but stay here until I get back or summon you," he told Warren. "Free Honey last, and be ready in case she really loses it."

Then he stood up and stripped out of his clothes. The final thing that he had learned in Vietnam, even before he'd been turned into a werewolf, was that he was good at killing.

Naked, he walked to the door and turned the knob - his mercenary visitor had left the door unlocked and unbarred. It opened into the small antechamber where Mr. Jones's desk was still in place. The room was dark, but they were underground - or so his nose told him, though the ceilings were higher than usual for a basement.

The steel bar that kept them imprisoned was lying on the floor. Adam bent down, picked up the bar, and set it on the ground next to Darryl, who closed his hand on it and tried to get to his hands and knees. Adam's second was functioning on instincts.

"Shh," Adam told him, and put a hand on his shoulder until he subsided. "Wait and protect. I'll be back. See if you can get them to change."

Warren's yellow eyes met his.

"I'll save Mr. Jones for Honey," he told Warren, then let the wolf take him.

By the time he rose on all four feet, most of the pack had been freed of their chains, but they were still unable to stand. Honey looked up into his face.

"Are you going to kill them all?" she asked him.

Murder, his father had taught him, was a sin.

Honey had been in his pack for nearly thirty years, she knew better than to ask if he could kill them all. He nodded once and loped out of the open door with an eagerness he made no attempt to check.

Adam had long ago accepted that he was not going to make it to Heaven.

He'd thought that they'd been stowed in some sort of government facility - there were a lot of places out in the Hanford Site near the nuclear facilities that were all but deserted. But as he paced through the long hall, he realized that this was some sort of commercial building rather than a government building. There was a sign leaning back-out against the wall. He pulled it away from the wall until he could see the front. TASTING ROOM, it said. He was in the unfinished basement of a winery.

That would explain the high ceilings and large, empty rooms. Their jail cell had been meant to hold racks of barrels of aging wine, as were the rooms on either side of the hallway he now paced down.

The winery had not been put to use for its intended purpose - he couldn't smell any grapes or wine. The half-dirt, half-tile floors and the hallway drywall sans tape and texture meant that someone had stopped while the building was still in the construction phase.

The basement was empty, though it was obvious that there had been people here fairly recently. They left behind the smell of body armor, gunpowder, and greasepaint as well as trails of footprints and marks where things had been dragged. Two of the rooms, identical to where they had been held, had been used as living quarters. The only difference was that the heavy wooden door that had been barred to keep wolves in was removed and set inside the rooms that had housed the mercenaries. Presumably so that no one could keep them in.

The mercenary commander who had talked to him had been right, Adam decided. Under other circumstances, Adam would have liked him, too.

In the distance, Adam heard diesel engines start up, the same engines, he was pretty sure, that had hauled the pack out to whatever distant proto-winery Cantrip had found to use as werewolf storage. The mercenaries had either parked a fair distance away from their temporary HQ, or - and he thought it more likely, given the dismantled doors - they had pushed the vehicles away from the building until someone deemed it safe to start them. The noise was faint to Adam's ears. He doubted a human would hear it even if he'd been listening for it instead of asleep.

He found the stairs and climbed them silently. They brought him to an empty room, designed to be open and airy. The walls were unpainted, but the floors were tiled in sandstone that was difficult to walk across without allowing his claws to click. A double door designed to open easily at a push led to the outside. He pushed one of the doors, and it opened. He went outside to take a recon of the layout and was unsurprised to find that they were out in the boonies somewhere. There were dead grapes everywhere - he'd been right about the winery. The building was surrounded by maybe a couple of hundred acres' worth of gray vines that had been dead well before winter hit. He could see the sad-looking dried-up starts of grape bunches.

He padded out onto what had been meant to be a grand wraparound porch, but it was missing the railing and several sections of flooring. A parking lot had been laid out, one big enough for ten cars or maybe a bus or two, but it hadn't been paved. There were four black SUVs and a Nissan with a plate frame advertising a national chain of rental cars in the lot.