Frost Burned (Mercy Thompson #7)(48)

But the gunfire did one thing. Mr. Jones opened his door, a gun in his hand. Adam dropped his head and roared at him. It was a sound the lesser wolves could not make, more like a lion than a wolf. The woman behind Jones screamed and screamed. Jones shot twice before Adam hit him, but he hadn't stopped to aim, hadn't been able to control his fear. One bullet skimmed Adam's side, but the other missed him altogether - hitting a moving target isn't easy.

Adam deliberately bumped Jones with his shoulder and knocked him off his feet. The woman's screams intensified, and he pinned his ears at her. His father had taught him only a cowardly man would hurt a woman. But this woman had agreed to kill people because they were associated with his pack, to kill the children.

Still, Adam killed her quickly and as painlessly as he could. And when the silence of her death filled the room, his father's admonitions rang in his ears.

Jones made an incoherent noise and scrabbled with his gun, trying to get his shaking hands to work. Adam left the woman's body and grabbed the gun out of the human's hands and crushed it. He dropped it, now unusable, to the floor.

His jaws ached to finish Jones ... but he'd promised Peter's killer to Honey, even if she hadn't been in a state to know it. Revenge was a dangerous thing, but a quick clean act sometimes allowed the victim closure. So he left Jones for Honey and went to deal with the only other Cantrip agent he'd left alive.

The door was solid wood and locked against him. Adam hit it with his shoulder and cracked the wood, breaking it free of its hinges. It hurt, and he stopped to tear it to bits. Only when the door lay in broken shards did he come back to himself.

The man was on the floor, blood pouring from a bullet wound - either Jones's gun had been a bigger caliber and gone through the door, or it had gone through the wall. His gun lay on the floor beside him, and his hand couldn't get a grip on it.

"Tiger, tiger burning bright," he stuttered, looking at Adam as he choked on his own blood. "In the forest ... in the forest." He drew in a breath, looked Adam in the eye, and said again, quite clearly, "Forest." His body convulsed once more, then he lay still.

Did He who made the lamb make thee? Adam responded silently with the appropriate line. It was a question that he held dearly: Had God made werewolves? How could He have done so and still be benevolent?

Adam stared at the man until a stray sound reminded him that, William Blake's poetry aside, all of the Cantrip agents weren't dead yet.

He called out to his pack, summoning them to the last of the hunt. They came, stumbling and slow, and mostly in wolf form now. The change would help them fight off the effects of the drugs. Warren, Darryl, and a couple of others held on to their humanity. They stopped when they saw him waiting at the top of the stairs.

Warren's nostril's flared, and Darryl ran a hand over his mouth. Adam looked at Honey, and the golden wolf swayed a little. He caught her eye, then glanced behind him to send her hunting.

Only when her impassioned snarl behind him signaled that she'd found what he'd sent her after, did he step aside and motion the rest of the pack on by. When the last of them had passed him, he started his change back to human. There had been a landline in the planning office. His change was faster than usual - whether due to Mercy's meddling or the killing field he'd made of the ground floor of the winery, he didn't care to speculate.

The phone worked, which was nice, because otherwise he'd have had to use one of the Cantrip agents' phones, and with the taste of the hunt on his tongue, that would have been unwise.

He called Mercy first. He needed to hear her voice to remind him that he was not entirely a killer, not entirely a monster. But her cell rang three times. And then a recorded voice informed him that her line was unavailable. He fought down instinctive panic.

She was smart, she would have destroyed her phone to keep them from tracking her. If she were dead, he would know.

Human form or not, he was still too close to the monster who had ripped a door apart for being a door, and that monster needed to hear his mate. He took a deep breath and thought human thoughts for a few minutes.

Adam called Elizaveta and got one of her grandsons, though he could hear her cranky voice in the background.

"Who is calling at such an hour?"

As soon as her grandson told her, she took the phone from him. "Adamya," the old witch said. "We have been so worried."

"I need a cleanup," he told her abruptly, so weary he leaned against the wall. "This is a landline, can you trace it?"

"Da, this is not a problem. How many bodies?"

He couldn't remember. Hadn't kept count. He looked at his hands and realized that they were black with blood.

"That many," she said into his silence. "We will come and do what is necessary."

"It has to be done before dawn," he told her. "They are sending a helicopter at dawn."

"Then they will find nothing," she told him.

"We need transport, too," he said. "For thirty wolves."

"This we can also do," she promised him.

"And I need to know where Mercy is," he said.

"She is at Kyle and Warren's house," Elizaveta told him. "I thought you would ask, so I sent one of my grandsons to follow her."

"Good," he said. "Come as soon as you can."