Frost Burned (Mercy Thompson #7)(51)

"What if the pack isn't a factor?" asked Asil, soft-voiced. "What if they're all dead? Does she hate you enough to go after them? She cut her teeth in Italy during the Renaissance; a little sleight of hand is not beyond her now."

"She knows about Bran, knows I was raised in his pack and that he is fond of me. If it turns out that she was involved, he'd wipe her seethe from the face of the earth, and she knows it. No." I thought about it. "No, it isn't her. There are too many downsides and no profit in it for her. She actually likes Adam, I think, and he's pretty easy for her to deal with. Straightforward. Another Alpha might not be so accommodating."

Though without Adam, would there be a pack here in the Tri-Cities? He'd been brought in to deal with a lone wolf who had decided to build a pack, then started killing humans. Adam had stayed because the backbone of his business was security contracts with government contractors, and the Tri-Cities was full of them.

That wouldn't benefit Marsilia either, though, because weakened as she was, she counted on Adam to keep the nastier unallied supernatural creatures under control and keep others from settling here at all.

"Ah," Asil said, as I pulled into the apartment complex. He opened his eyes as we slowed. "Disappointing. I had hoped the responsible party would be the vampires. I could kill vampires, I think, without losing control. If it is humans who are our enemies, I shall have to find another means of stopping them." He showed his teeth. "Age catches up with us all, and I enjoy the kill too much to be allowed it. If we are to be allies in truth, Mercedes, you should know my weaknesses before they become an issue."

Most of the werewolves who belong to the Marrok's pack are there because they can't function in a normal pack. Asil, it seemed, wasn't an exception.

"Okay," I said after discarding several versions of comments that mostly boiled down to "please, please don't kill anyone, then."

I drove past Sylvia's apartment, still thinking about the likelihood that Asil would be put in a position of killing someone. There were no empty spaces to park anywhere. I guess most people were still home at seven thirty in the morning on a Saturday with rain coming down in sheets more common on the other side of the state. Go figure.

I finally found a place next to the Dumpsters a few apartment blocks down. The little Corolla that had followed us from Kyle's house, presumably full of Hauptman Security personnel, had to keep going. I gave them a little wave as they went by.

I opened my door and got out - and something hit me in the back.

The weight dropped me flat on my face on the pavement. The suddenness of it held me still more than any hurt - though pain came right on the heels of the realization that someone had landed on me. I'd hit the ground limp, raising my head just a little to protect my face - years of karate benefiting me yet again. It set my knee and cheekbone off again. "Don't fight me," said the woman perched on my lower back. "I don't want to hurt you." She put something narrow and hard around my right wrist and reached for my left, braced for me to pull at the trapped hand.

Instead, I rolled sideways toward the hand she'd already gotten, one knee under me to add additional force. The move knocked her against Marsilia's new car with a thump that wasn't hard enough to do real damage. At least not to her. Even as the sound of her head on the oh-so-sleek side of the car chimed my if-I-live-through-this-I'm-dead meter and raised it a few notches, I changed. The odd little cuff that had been tight on my wrist dropped off my coyote paw, and I slid out from under the woman completely.

I also acquired an additional opponent - clothes. I slid out of Kyle's sweatpants when I slid out from under the woman. I leaped with my back feet and rolled in midair, pulling my head and front paws out of the sweatshirt and left it behind. My panties clung to my left foot and my tail, but the real trouble was my stupid bra.

I landed, took two more running leaps, and tumbled head over teakettle when my bra fouled my front legs - which meant that her first shot slid along my fur instead of wherever she'd meant the bullet to go.

I focused on her as I rolled on the ground maybe fifteen feet out, fighting the too-stretchy-to-break straps. Leaping away had been the wrong thing if she was shooting. At least if I was rolling around tangled in clothes on top of her, she couldn't aim.

I had a blink of time to see her rise to a shooter's crouch, a dark-skinned woman with white hair in a waist-length braid and a young face. She would have looked more at home in an anime convention than holding a big gun made bigger by the silencer on the barrel. "I didn't want to do it this way." She took aim at my wiggling body. "Dead doesn't pay as much."

And then something dark, shadow-quick, passed over the roof of the car and landed on her. I heard the snap of bone before my eyes registered that Asil crouched on top of her, his face eerily calm with eyes the color of citrines.

"Half-breed fae," he grunted, examining her face as I changed back to human. It wasn't an epithet, just an observation. "That gun has too much metal for a full-blooded fae to handle even with leather gloves."

I opened my mouth to argue with him instinctively - Zee had no trouble with metal - but the dead woman kept the words in my mouth. My head caught up with events and I realized that, although he seemed to be calm enough, his bright eyes said differently. I'd been raised among werewolves and I'd never seen anyone, not even Adam, who was pretty damn fast, move that quickly. Just a feeling of motion, then she was dead, and Asil was there.