Текст книги "Frost Burned"

Автор книги: Patricia Briggs

Соавторы: Patricia Briggs
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“If Kyle is dead”—and didn’t that suck to say—“we still need to know it. I don’t think he is; I think I’d feel it through the pack bonds because Warren is as mated to him as Honey was to Peter.” That thought steadied me. I’d felt Honey’s grief—still did, for that matter.

“We are going in after Kyle—and, Stefan, we can’t leave a pile of bodies behind. We can hide your part in this. I’ll tell everyone that you are a weird kind of werewolf if I have to. But people know about Kyle and Warren. Warren doesn’t advertise what he is, but it will come out because he doesn’t hide it, either. The bad guys—whoever they are—want Adam to kill an important man in a public way, so that the werewolves are blamed. I have the distinct impression that the last part is as important as the first. If we leave piles of dead bodies in our wake, we’ll be accomplishingat least half of what the people who started this want.” I sucked in a breath. “I do not enjoy helping my enemies.”

Stefan frowned at me. He could just go in and kill them all, regardless of what I said. But his name was the Soldier—not the Killer or the Commander. (Yes, those are real vampires. I’m told that we’re lucky they don’t live anywhere near here.) Stefan had ceded me leadership because this was my problem.

So I was in charge, but I wasn’t dumb enough to think that made me competent—I needed Stefan for that. Fine. I wouldn’t authorize killing them all, but there should be other options.

“Could we go in quietly to check and see if we can find Kyle?” I asked. “I might be able to scent him from outside. If he’s not here, we can leave them waiting for no one. If he is there, maybe we can get him out without killing people.”

He shook his head.“Mercy. They have already proved themselves capable of taking a werewolf pack. Kill them or leave.”

I glanced down at Ben; he was in no shape for battle. The danger wasn’t just that his wound would slow him, and they could hurt him more easily, though that was part of it. If Ben killed tonight, wounded and shaken by Peter’s death, he could lose control of his wolf and never regain it.

“We might be under attack by the government,” I told Stefan. “We can’t afford to lose the moral high ground. As long as we don’t do any harm, the public will support us and force the government to back down. We’re not going in to kill everyone in sight.

“You are welcome to leave, if you’d like,” I said grimly, stripping my shirt off with my bra. He wouldn’t abandon Kyle, I knew it. I was mad at him because I wanted to let him dictate our plan of attack, but I couldn’t because I knew I was right. I kicked off my shoes. We were talking toomuch, and it was time to move. “I’m not leaving Kyle to rot when I might be able to do something for him. I’m going to look for Kyle. When I find him, I’ll do whatever it takes to get him out. I will try to leave as few bodies behind as I can manage.”

“If we fail, Adam is the one who loses,” Stefan said.

“Kyle is pack,” I explained. “He is vulnerable. Adam is Alpha and strong. So we need to make sure Kyle is safe first because that’s what pack does, Stefan. The strong protect the weak.”

Stefan’s face froze. He hadn’t been able to protect his menagerie, hadn’t realized that he needed to protect them from Marsilia, the woman he’d given his loyalty.

I hadn’t meant to hurt him.

I jerked down my jeans and underwear so I was naked on the dark sidewalk. Anyone looking out their window or driving by would get a show. I didn’t care. Being a shapeshifter had gotten me over modesty by the time I was old enough to know what the word meant.

That didn’t mean I was comfortable running around naked in front of everyone I knew. Once upon a time, Stefan had kind of had a thing for me. Not so much in love, but interested in that direction. I usually avoided being naked in front of him just like you don’t hold out a slab of meat in front of a lion while planning on keeping the food to yourself.

“We have an opportunity to save Kyle. A chance you did not have when Marsilia took your people.” I told him. “Will you help me?”

I changed to coyote without waiting for a reply and shook the change off my fur. Stefan gave an odd laugh, not happy or humorous—but it sounded like him this time and not the vampire Stefan, so it was all right. Then he picked up my clothes and tossed them into the car, his motion smooth and almost human. He hesitated with his head in the car.

My gun was under the front seat. I almost changed back to let him know, but decided not to. I couldn’t carry it, and I was the only one who would be more dangerous with a gun in my hand tonight.

“Blood and humans and sweat and

” Stefan stood up and shut the back door. “Mercy, you let me talk to Marsilia about this before you return her car.”

I gave him a brief nod and trotted toward Kyle’s house. Ben was on three legs, but he had no trouble keeping up. Stefan brought up the rear.

The guy next door to Kyle had died a while ago and the house was still empty with a FOR SALE sign in the tidy front yard. The gate to the backyard was open, so I led my posse in that way.

There was an eight-foot stone fence between the yards, but someone had left a ladder next to it. Had old Mr. What’s His Name been sneaking into Kyle’s swimming pool before he died, or—and this was more troublesome—had someone been spying on them? In any case, it was not much effort to get over the fence. Even on three good legs, Ben didn’t have to use the ladder; nor did Stefan. As a coyote, I’m outclassed by the werewolves and the vampires in everything except blending in.

Like the empty house, someone kept Kyle’s yard neat and tidy so that we ghosted over grass rather than rustling through the leaves of fall. We kept to the shadows, though I don’t think that anyone would have seen Stefan if he’d walked through the middle of the backyard. He was doing something, some vampire magic, that made him really hard to focus on.

I kept a sharp eye out, but I didn’t see anyone keeping watch. That didn’t mean they weren’t there, but between Stefan’s mojo and the concealing pack magic that Ben and I were pulling around ourselves, only truly bad luck would allow a human to see us anyway.

I could smell it before we hit the house. There was blood on the lawn. I abandoned the shadows to cast out until I found where the dark wet stuff splattered the grass, because it was Warren’s blood I smelled.

Ben sniffed beside me and snarled soundlessly, exposing his fangs as he turned his eyes to the house. From the back, it was as dark as the front, but this near the house, we could both hear the murmuring of voices from inside. They were being quiet, and had we been human, we would not have heard them at all. As it was, I couldn’t hear what they were saying, just a rumble of men’s voices.

They’d taken Warren here, in the backyard. He’d been in human shape—a werewolf’s scent changes when they are in human form, becomes diluted. That they took him in the yard was good. That I smelled only his blood was also good. That meant that all of Kyle and Warren’s friends who’d come overfor Thanksgiving probably weren’t in the middle of a firefight. That was good news, and not just for Kyle and Warren’s friends. Once these people began killing innocent humans, there was no way back. Their only survival path would then be to kill everyone who knew about them—including Adam and the whole pack.

As long as the dead were werewolves, it was unlikely that they had to worry much about the consequences as far as the human justice system was concerned. With the fae, the courts had already demonstrated that when put to the test, fear beat out justice.

For us, right now, that was a good thing. As long as we could keep the villains off the defensive, Adam should be okay.

What Stefan had said was true. They were obviously waiting for someone, and Jesse, Ben, and I were the logical targets. I had to assume that they were prepared to deal with Ben and me. Stefan would throw a wrench in their plans, but I didn’t know if it was a big enough wrench.

While I was debating, someone started speaking. The voices were coming from Kyle and Warren’s bedroom on the second floor. I looked up and saw that the blinds weren’t drawn—unusual for Warren, who was quite aware that there were things that could look in your window in the dark.

“They aren’t coming,” someone said. “We can’t afford to wait until daylight. We need to find them. Orders are to get the information.”

“Yessir,” a second man said. “How far can I go?” The second man gave us a total of at least four. I could still hear the rumble of the other two down in Kyle’s living room.

“Get the information,” the first man said, and I heard the bedroom door shut and the footsteps of someone leaving.

“You hear that, Johnny?” There was a sick eagerness in his voice. “He said I could go as far as I want.”

Another man, presumably Johnny—giving me a count of five bad guys—said, softly, “Only until we get the information, Sal. You hear that? Give us what we want, and I’ll stop him. Sal was captured by the Afghanis a while back and didn’t come back quite right. He likes torture. Tell us where they are likely to have gone to ground and everything stops.”

Silence.

“So where would they go?” someone asked, and there was the sound of flesh on flesh.

Someone made a noise, and the hair on the back of my neck rose as my lips pulled back from my teeth. Kyle. They were hitting Kyle.

“Staying quiet isn’t helping, son,” said the soft voice. “I don’t want to do this. Boss don’t want to hold your lover any longer than we have to. Takes a lot of people to hold a werewolf pack—and some of them are going to get dead. If we can get Hauptman’s daughter and wife, we can let the rest of you the fuck go.”

I wonder if Kyle heard the lie.

“Fuck you,” he said.

Maybe he had. A divorce attorney, I expect, would have a lot of practice telling when someone was lying.

They hit him again. Beside me, Ben was vibrating.

Stefan said, sounding hungry,“Mercy, there are only two of them in that room.”

I shifted back to human so we could talk.

Ben nudged my knee, hard.

“I know,” I told him. “Can we take them without alerting the others?” I shivered. The TriCities wasn’t Montana, but it was still too cold to stand around naked in November. Or maybe I was shivering with my coyote’s desire to go kill someone.

The first man said something ugly, and Kyle made a noise.

Yep. It was the go-kill-someone shiver.

“We can,” Stefan said. “And if not—I can kill them all.”

That didn’t sound like a bad plan, standing out here listening to them hurt Kyle. Iknew it would be stupid to leave bodies, but his pain was putting paid to my good sense.

“Throw me up,” I told him, and turned back into a coyote.

I looked at Stefan, and when he met my eyes, I jerked my chin to the balcony that came off the bedroom. He frowned at me doubtfully. I rose up on my hind legs and bounced once. Then lifted my muzzle toward the balcony again.

His eyebrows rose, but he picked me up and threw me. I cleared the railing but had to twist hard, so I landed in the middle of a planter instead of on top of the lawn furniture that might squeak under me.

Ben jumped to the top of the railing, and Stefan followed. Stefan hopped off and landed on the balcony with bent knees and no sound. Ben’s ears flattened at me, so I moved off the planter and let the heavier werewolf use it as a stair so that he didn’t have to land so heavily. Hard to land quietly on a hard surface with werewolf-sized claws.

4

The brocade drapes were an inheritance from the people who had built the house. Kyle loved the fabric but complained a lot about the way they left six inches between the bottom of the curtains and the floor.

I dropped to my knees and peered through the bottom of the sliding glass door that Kyle planned to replace with french doors next summer along with the drapes.

Kyle and Warren’s bedroom was decorated in a minimalist and very civilized style. The blood on the carpet looked like the single contrasting note one of those designers on TV liked to recommend.

There was so little furniture that the villains had had to bring up a chair from the dining room so they had something to use to stage their interrogation. They’d tied Kyle to the sturdy chair naked. His feet were free, but it didn’t matter because they were also bare. Unless you are a werewolf or maybe Bruce Lee, bare feet can’t do much damage unless you have more of a strike opportunity than being tied to a chair presents.

From the looks of him this wasn’t the first round of abuse he’d taken. I kept my growl to myself, though I could do nothing about the snarl that wrinkled my nose. Kyle’s face was bruised, the aristocratic nose sat at an angle, and dried blood covered his chin and upper chest. A cut above one eye had bled, too, and that eyewas swollen shut and purple. There were red marks on his cheekbone and stomach that were fresher, having not had time to bruise.

The two men in the room were dressed all in black, and they wore the same body armor the men who held Adam had worn. The taller man was bald, his skin tanned by a life spent outdoors. I put his age between twenty-five and thirty. The other man was heavier built and not so tan, his hair the shade of rust and cut tightly against his scalp.

The bald man’s body language was relaxed, and that made the worry he projected in his voice even more of a lie than the words.

“I don’t like letting him free to do as he wants, Mr. Brooks. It isn’t good for him or you. He might do some serious damage. Things that can’t be repaired. I can stop him if you just let us know where you think she might go. We’ll get out of your hair, and you never have to see us again.”

Kyle spat out blood.“You must be fae. I never heard so much truth built into a lie. Did your mother have wings and pointed ears?” he asked, his voice as cool as it was in the courtroom.

Hadn’t Kyle ever heard that you weren’t supposed to antagonize your kidnappers? Especially when they were beating on you?

At least he had their attention fully on him.

Taking advantage of their preoccupation, I changed back to human and reached up to the catch on the glass door, which was, luckily for us, unlocked. Hopefully, the heavy drapes would disguise the cold outside air now wafting into the room as I carefully, quietly slid the door open. It was good for us and for Kyle that he had not had time to replace either the door or the drapes.

As soon as I had it opened, Stefan dropped to his knees to get a good look through the gap between the floor and the drapes, and I shifted back to coyote. My four-footed shape might not be as impressive as one of the wolves, but it was more lethal than my human shape. I squeezed next to Stefan and looked again.

The bald man’s face had lost its pleasantness, though he’d taken his time to answer Kyle’s taunt. “Your mouth is dangerous to you, Mr. Brooks. I’d suggest you use it to give us the information we want, or you might not be able to use it at all.”

“You’re a dead man,” Kyle said. “Warren doesn’t take kindly to people who hurt me.”

We had to get in there—and now the only obstacle was the curtain. If we could be quiet enough, the men downstairs would not hear us.

“Your Warren is our prisoner,” said the bald man, back to his Mr. Nice Guy persona. “He can do nothing to help you.”

Kyle smiled.“You just keep telling yourselves that.”

The younger man bounced a couple of times on his feet and feigned a strike. Kyle pulled his head out of the line of fire and the man hit him in the shoulder with a spinning back kick that launched Kyle’s chair over onto its side. If he’d hit him in the head with that foot, Kyle would have been dead.

On the floor, Kyle’s face was aimed right at me. He blinked twice and shook his head. “Get the hell out of here.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Brooks, but we can’t do that,” said the bald man with mock sorrow, unaware that Kyle hadn’t been talking to him. The other man put a foot on the chair and rocked it a little.

Stefan had stood up so there was room for Ben to put his head on the ground next to me and look below the curtain, too. When he saw Kyle, the werewolf went still.

Ben was not the largest werewolf in the pack—though he was big enough. But he was among the most dangerous. He was fast—and he wasn’t bothered by the thought of killing someone, even when he was as human as he ever got. He had been abused, severely abused when he was a child. People, outside the pack and Adam’s family, just weren’treal to him. We were working on that, Adam and I, but I discovered right then that Ben considered Kyle one of the pack.

Better to aim my weapon than to let it go off half-cocked. I bumped him, and when I had his attention, I pulled my nose out from under the curtain. Then I looked up at the top of the curtain and back to him. Shapeshifting makes all of us pretty good at charades.

Ben stood up and kept going until he stood balanced on his good hind leg with a front paw on the side of the house next to the sliding door. I backed out of the way—and realized that Ben and I were alone on the balcony. Stefan had disappeared.

I nodded sharply, and Ben’s free front paw slammed the curtain, rod and all, onto the ground, where it would not interfere with us. I’d gathered myself to leap, but what I saw made me pause because there was no one to attack.

Stefan was already in the room, lowering the bald man to the ground with gentle care. The first man, the man who’d hurt Kyle, was dead, his eyes starting to fog over and his body draped over Kyle. Stefan had incapacitated both men without either making a sound. Pretty efficient, the coyote in me thought, and the rest of me was very, very glad that Stefan was on my side.

Despite my earlier stand, even knowing it could come back and bite us, I couldn’t deny that I was happy that Stefan had killed Kyle’s assailant.

I changed back to human and hauled the dead man off Kyle while Ben aimed himself at the bindings on Kyle’s wrists that held the rest of him into the chair. Stefan touched Ben’s nose and moved it out of the way.

He looked at the bindings for a moment. Yellow nylon rope wrapped Kyle’s wrists and wove in and out of the sturdy wooden chair. “There is no way the police are going to believe you broke out of that.”

And that was the first sign I had that Stefan really had taken what I’d told him to heart. We were going to call the police—and Kyle, very human Kyle, was going to rescue himself.

Stefan put a hand on the seat of the chair and the other on the back.“Brace yourself,” he warned Kyle, then pulled the chair apart. The ropes fell away like magic.

Everyone but Kyle froze, listening for any sign that someone else had heard us.

“Sweats,” Kyle whispered to me, rolling off the chair like it hurt. “Top drawer of the bigger chest of drawers. You can steal a pair, too.” He looked at the chair pieces, and murmured, “The bedroom is supposed to be soundproofed. Doesn’t work on Warren, but maybe we’ll luck out with less gifted listeners.”

The first drawer I found had underwear, so he must have meant the other top drawer. They were sorted and army neat, matching bottoms and tops folded together. I grabbed the top two sets.

No one came boiling up the stairs, so either they hadn’t heard the chair go—or they thought it was part of the interrogation.

Stefan helped Kyle up and steadied him when he was a little wobbly on his feet. I handed over a pair of bottoms. Stefan continued to hold him upright while Kyle pulled the sweats on with great concentration. Once Kyle had the pants on and both feet on the floor to steady himself, Stefan took the rope and started to tie up the bald man.

“How often do the people downstairs come up?” Stefan said.

“The only time anyone has come up here was a few minutes ago,” Kyle told him. “Could be back in a minute, or next week.”

I handed Kyle a sweatshirt. He shook his head, and said,“That’s the wrong top for these.”

“Fashion princess.” I rolled my eyes and gave him the other top, noticing only as it unfolded that it proclaimed, “I’m prettier than your girlfriend,” in purple glittery script. I recognized it because I’d given it to him for his birthday.

“I have news for you, Kyle, it’ll be a while before you are prettier than anyone’s girlfriend. Bruises are not your best color. Are you sure you don’t want the other top?”

He glanced at me and gave me a crooked smile.“You look worse than I do. These goons get to you, too?”

We were all keeping our voices as quiet as possible.

“Car accident.” I pulled on the sweatpants. They were tight, but Warren’s would have been tighter and left me with a foot of material to trip on.

“They have Warren,” Kyle said, his eyes, briefly, looking as terrified as I was.

“I know,” I told him. The top that matched the sweatpants I wore was a spiffy teal. “They have the rest of the pack, too.”

“So I gathered.” Kyle indicated with a tip of his head that his information had come from the bald man. “Are we on the side of the angels?” Kyle pulled on his top, though not without wincing.

Stefan looked up from the bald man, and said,“The first one I killed because I don’t let people who hurt those I care about live. He is dead in such a way that a human could have killed him. Since Mercy has been so concerned with the body count, the second man is merely out—and I made certain he did not see me. If you choose to call in the police, there is nothing that can be used against us—werewolf or vampire.”

“So our halos are nice and bright,” I told Kyle. I looked at Stefan. “Is calling the police smart? Won’t we be putting pressure on the bad guys to get rid of their hostages?”

“No.” Stefan turned his gaze on me. “If this is a government operation, having the local police involved will force them out into the open, and they cannot afford the bodies any more than the werewolves can. If it is something spearheaded by renegade agents—which is what it sounds like—involving the police will alert the agency involved and bring us new allies. That’s how we’ll do this, Mercy. If we can, we trap them in their actions until the only move they have left is what we want them to do.”

He took a breath—which he doesn’t have to do unless he wants to talk, though he usually does if only out of consideration for we breathers who get distressed if the people we’re around don’t breathe for a few minutes. “You were right, Mercy. I was thinking like a vampire before. These people want to separate the werewolves from the protection of society. So we’ll get society on our side instead. It helps that Kyle is human.”

Kyle smiled like it hurt.“Quite human. I am a black belt—got it ten years ago and haven’t practiced much since. But it could explain how I took down two trained men with Mercy and Ben’s help.” He looked at the dead man, and nodded sharply. “Thank you for that, Stefan. He’s no loss to the world.”

“Will you get in trouble for his death?” I asked Kyle. He was a lawyer—family law—but he should still know.

He shook his head.“Self-defense in a slam dunk.” He looked at Stefan. “Do you know who is responsible?”

“Renegade Cantrip agents is our working hypothesis,” I said. FBI agents would have had too much experience to react out of fear the way Mr. Jones had. Homeland Security, I didn’t know enough about. But Cantrip—short for Combined Nonhuman and Transhuman Relations Provisors—had attracted a number of anti-nonhuman zealots. I knew that they had training but not much field experience—and they’d have access to as much information as the government could amass on the werewolves. For firepower, they’d have to have help. “And a hired troop of competent mercenaries for muscle. Here”—I jerked my chin toward the two men on the floor—“we have the mercenaries. There are at least three more downstairs. I didn’t see anyone else, but they’d be dumb not to have someone out keeping watch.”

“Mercenaries mean money,” said Stefan. “A lot more money than most Cantrip agents make.”

Kyle smiled briefly.“Follow the money. Fine. You’re sure that the police would be helpful?”

“Wait.” There had been a click. Everyone fell silent—and then air started to blow out of the registers in the floor. I’d heard the heat turn on. Stefan went to the door, cracked it open, and took a quick peek outside. He shut it noiselessly and shook his head.

But he was quieter when he talked than we’d been before. “They only really need one person alive to blackmail Adam. The rest are just a precaution. If Adam and the pack are hostages, they need every one they can keep their hands on.” He frowned at us both. “That doesn’t mean they are safe—idiots are the hardest people to plan around, and anyone who captures a werewolf pack without killing every last one is an idiot.”

“Okay,” said Kyle. “Let’s see if we can’t make this a little uncomfortable for them.” He walked to the side of the bed and picked up his cell.

I grabbed his hand and looked at Stefan.“What if they’re listening to the phones?”

Stefan smiled.“Then they’ll have warning and either run—or they will attack us up here.”

A lot of things could have gone wrong. We settled down to wait, ready to defend ourselves if the men downstairs decided to check on Kyle.

Stefan left when the sun started coming up. Ben and I waited with Kyle, despite Kyle’s protests that he could handle this on his own. We were safely out of it; if we left, we gave the enemy no one to follow

Kyle had a lot of arguments, which he delivered with the cell on mute.

I wasn’t leaving Kyle alone in a house full of bad guys. I finally stole his phone, took it off mute, and introduced myself to the operator. I explained that I thought that these same men were responsible for launching an attack at my house—yes, I was married to the local Alpha. One of the pack had escaped and found me—and we’d figured out something was wrong. We snuck in through the upstairs window just after Kyle had managed to free himself. I told her about the blood we’d found in the backyard that belonged to Kyle’s boyfriend, a pack member, who had been taken off the premises by these bad guys, presumably to be held by whoever had taken the rest of the pack.

Kyle listened hard, since it was the first time he’d heard a lot of what I said. I didn’t give the police the whole truth. There were too many things the werewolves didn’t want getting out, and I wasn’t mentioning Stefan. But I stuck to it as closely as I could.

When I’d finished, it was not just the SWAT team who were headed our way, but a fair percentage of a number of different police departments—and, to my relief, someone was going to go check at the firehouse where Mary Jo worked as well as the houses of our married pack members who hadn’t come to ourThanksgiving dinner but had been taken just the same. They’d make sure that there were no other hostage situations.

I handed Kyle back his phone. He shook his head at me but took it in one hand, put it against his ear, and opened the gun safe in his closet with the other. The safe held two handguns and Warren’s rifle—it was a Spencer repeating rifle dating back to the Civil War. He’d let me shoot it a couple of times.

Kyle took Warren’s .357 in hand and gave me his own 1911 because that fit my hand better than Warren’s gun would have. My own gun was still in Marsilia’s car. Kyle left the rifle in the safe when he closed it.

Warren’s father had carried it during the War Between the States and at his death it had come to Warren, who was eight or nine at the time. That’s as much as I knew about Warren’s life as a human except that he considered himself a Texan and had spent a long time as a cowboy.

I agreed with Kyle’s decision: the Spencer was too important to be risked if the police decided to take the guns. If we had to shoot someone, it was probably going to be within handgun range anyway.

“Stay quiet and find a good hiding place,” said the 911 operator on the other end of the phone; she’d been giving us all sorts of good advice and updates.

“We are taking cover in the bathroom,” said Kyle, and gave her the basic layout of the house—which took a while because it was a big house.

He was steady and cool while we watched the door between his bedroom and the rest of the house. The bathroom afforded us a little protection—the walls were marble slabs, and we weren’t in direct line of sight from the door.

Kyle kept the phone tucked between his ear and shoulder, and I could hear the operator keeping him up-to-date on what was happening. I had a sudden sick thought that we really didn’t know if we could trust the police. What if the government really was behind it all? What if the police were in on it, too?

Paranoia: the gift of the survivor and the burden of the overtired, stressed, terrified coyote.

I thought about the likelihood of the police being under the control of the bad guys and came up with it as being unlikely—but not as unlikely as a group of humans descending on pack HQ and abducting a pack of wolves—including wolves who were not out to the public. Since the latter had happened, it made me feel less paranoid for suspecting the former.

“Okay,” said the operator. “The police are there and in position, just hang tight and wait for them.”

As the sounds of rapid-fire orders seeped into our bolt-hole, I became more and more uneasy about trusting the police to be on our side.

About that time, there was a gentle tap on the bedroom door.

“Mr. Brooks? This is Kennewick PD, sir. Please put down your weapons. We have the suspects in custody and you are safe.”

Kyle put his gun down on the floor—then noticed me not doing the same thing. He reached out toward me, and Ben growled. I was not alone in my paranoia—or else Ben was just picking up on how unhappy I was. Wounded and surrounded by the dead and terrified, he wasn’t exactly Mr. Sane right now, either.

“Give us a moment,” Kyle called out. “Mercy’s pretty freaked-out. She’s had quite a night, and it’s not over. Let me talk her down.”

There was a pause, then a more familiar voice called,“Mercy, drop the gun. We’re the good guys. We’ll find Adam, but you’ve got to put down the gun and let us in.”