Frost Burned (Mercy Thompson #7)(73)

I lifted my head so I could see his face. "That does surprise me."

"I killed the rest of them and let Honey kill Jones." He watched my face closely. He'd hidden what he was from his first wife, who had been entirely human, and she'd still run away from what little she'd glimpsed.

"Good," I said. "That way, I won't have to."

He laughed again, and his body softened as much as it ever did - there just wasn't much soft about Adam. "I love you," he said.

"I know," I told him seriously. "How could you help it?"

He laughed again and rolled over until I was on the bottom, and flexed his hips against mine. "I tried," he whispered in my ear. "But it didn't work."

I breathed into his ear for the pleasure of feeling him shiver against me. "Of course not." He smelled like home, like safety, like love. "Of course not."

"I promise I won't spank you," he told me, his voice rough and low as he added, "not unless you ask me to."

I let him feel my laugh against his shoulder. "That's because you aren't genuinely suicidal."

We loved again then, the short nap of the rug soft under my skin and the warmth of him surrounding me.

Afterward, he fell asleep while he was eating, between one bite and the next, like a toddler. I don't think that he had slept since the pack was taken. He didn't even stir when I pulled away from him to go put my clothes on.

The room might have been finished, but it was not heated. Adam was a werewolf, which meant the colder the better for him - not so for me. Fully clothed, I sat down next to him to watch over him while he slept.

The quiet time didn't last.

The door between house and garage opened no more than twenty minutes after Adam dropped off. Warren called, "Sorry, boss. You're needed if you don't want Kyle to shoot the rest of the pack."

He didn't speak that loudly, but Adam's eyes opened up anyway. He smiled at me, and said, "Good to know. Tell Kyle to hold up, and I'll be right down."

Warren steadied the rope ladder when Adam tossed it out of the trapdoor. "We've put the pack downstairs in the big room to create some space apart from the Sandoval girls." The big room was the largest room in the house, and it had a pool table and a stairway leading to an outside door into the backyard. Kyle's house was bigger than ours, but not set up for groups of people quite this large.

"They wouldn't do anything on purpose," Warren said, as I climbed down the rope ladder behind Adam. "But we're all on edge."

"Silver-sick doesn't help," I said. "Tad can help with the silver."

"And then we'll send most of them to their own homes," said Adam. "Even if our enemy has teeth left, it will take them a while to regroup. For the short term, we should all be safe enough."

Warren grunted, and, with my feet safely down on the cement floor, I took a good look at him. Warren was my first friend in Adam's pack - he'd been my friend before he'd joined the pack.

"You look better than I expected you to," I said, and, to my surprise, he flushed.

"Food," he said with a shy smile.

Adam snorted. "Kyle."

"Well, yes," agreed Warren, then his eyes went cold as he tossed the rope ladder back up into the hole in the ceiling. "Mercy, next time you see our favorite bloodsucker, you tell him I owe him one."

"I'll tell him, but he did it for Kyle."

Warren nodded and hopped on top of the metal shelving that lined the wall so he could close the trapdoor properly.

There were no digs, humorous comments, or even sly looks when Adam, Tad, and I joined the pack in the great room in the basement. I took that as a sign of how bad everyone was feeling.

Some of the wolves were notable by their absence.

"Darryl and Auriele went to their home," Warren told us. He glanced at Adam. "They seemed mostly recovered from the silver, and he is supposed to participate in a conference call with some Chinese scientists on Sunday."

"All the most dominant wolves seem to be pretty well clean of silver," Tad said.

"He told us it's because you used your mate bond to pull the silver out of Adam, and through Adam, the pack," said Honey. She was sitting on the pool table with her legs crossed underneath her. She was pale, and her mouth was tight, but other than that she looked mostly like herself. "I didn't believe him until Kyle showed us the silver on the floor." She frowned at me. "What kind of freak are you?"

Any other time, I'd have said something cutting. I felt Adam stiffen beside me, and I put my hand on his arm to forestall whatever he wanted to say. Honey had never liked me much - and since I had forced the pack to take a new look at their hierarchy, particularly the way women's ranks were awarded, she'd liked me even less.

Honey was as dominant as Peter had been submissive, and a female wolf is supposed to take her rank from her mate. She wanted the role she'd been assigned as his mate rather than the one that should have been rightfully hers as a dominant wolf. She didn't want to be who she was; she wanted to be delicate and ladylike and feminine. She resented me for challenging that.

I wasn't afraid of her. She wasn't the type to take her dislike to the next level and try to kill me. Normally, I'd have given her as good as I got, but she'd just lost Peter. We all had just lost Peter.