Free Frost Burned: Mercy Thompson Book 7 by Patricia Briggs Page A

pulled over on the side of the road. My speed had crept up, and I slowed. The coast was not clear to speed just because one police car was occupied.
    My phone rang as I passed the cop car, but the Mercedes’s windows were very dark. It was unlikely that anyone could see into the interior even if Rosa’s phone was so encrusted with plastic gems it ought to emit its own light. Risking a ticket, I answered the phone. “Yes?”
    “Mercy?” said Stefan. “What do you need? And why are you calling me on someone else’s phone?”
    By the time I finished verbally reliving Peter’s death, I was shaking with anger and … terror. So much rode on my playing the game right, and I didn’t even know the rules.
    At least with that much adrenaline flowing, I wasn’t tired anymore—but I also wasn’t paying attention to driving. Part of me, the part that remembered I’d totaled the Rabbit a few hours and a lifetime ago, tried to remind me that wrecking Marsilia’s car would only make a bad situation worse. But the rest of me was focused on more immediate matters.
    “Peter was a good man,” said Stefan when I was finished. “I will meet you at Kyle’s house.”
    I glanced at the sky. It was still dark, but the clock in Marsilia’s car said it was five thirty in the morning. “You’ll be cutting the daylight thing pretty close.”
    “There is time,” he said, his voice as gentle as I’d ever heard it. “I can get home in very short order should I need to. Do not worry about me. We will worry about the others, yes? Hang up now and drive.”
    I hung up and hoped I’d done the right thing. Exposing the pack’s vulnerability to the local vampires wasn’t a smart thing to do. Marsilia would happily dance on our graves if the pack and I, especially I, were utterly destroyed. I trusted Stefan. I did. But Stefan was a vampire and I could never forget that.
    Kyle’s house in West Richland was a generous half-hour drive from Sylvia’s apartment in Kennewick. I’d spent a lot of time this night traveling back and forth along the same stretch of highway. To my right, the Columbia was a murky presence as the houses of Kennewick passed by the window to mark my progress.
    Had I done the right thing leaving Gabriel and Jesse? It had felt like I was getting them out of harm’s way when I’d done it. But what if whoever had taken Adam did think of Sylvia? Gabriel was strong and smart, but he was also an unarmed teenage human. Had I just given our enemies more victims? I thought of the bullet that hit Peter and was pretty sure that the person who had fired it at a helpless man could shoot one of Gabriel’s little sisters, too.
    Somewhere nearby, Adam was being held. I had no real reason to think that they would be hunting Jesse. Not one. But I was uneasy leaving them without protection.
    I called Zee. He hadn’t said good-bye when he’d retreated to the fae reservation, just left a note telling me to be patient and not contact him. But he liked Gabriel and Jesse—and adored, though he’d never have admitted it out loud, the little hellions who were Gabriel’s sisters.
    His cell phone rang and rang as the interstate carried me past Richland. My finger was on the button to end the call when Zee said, grumpily, “
Liebling
, this is not a good idea.”
    “Zee,” I told him, “I am completely out of good ideas and am doing my best with the bad ones I have left.” I explained the whole thing again. When I finished, I said, “The fae owe us, Adam and me, they owe us for the otterkin and for the fairy queen. Is there some way you could keep a watch over Gabriel’s mom’s house? You probably won’t have to do anything at all. I’m
probably
being paranoid—it’s that kind of night. But all they have keeping them safe is my hope that no one would think to look there—and that reasoning gets weaker and weaker the farther away I get.”
    “I agree that you are owed a debt,” Zee said heavily, at last. “There might be