Patricia Briggs - Frost Burned

I couldn’t help her with him. I had to trust that she was strong enough, good enough to protect herself, because I had another job—there were thirteen more ghosts in the room. And I had to figure out a way to keep Frost from eating them all. One of them was right next to me. I grabbed her by the wrist. My hand started to pass through, but I focused my sight on her and she became more solid, just as Peter had.

“Tell me your name,” I said to her, giving my command that borrowed-from-Adam Alpha wolf push.

“Janet,” she told me, her voice vibrating up my arm.

“Janet,” I told her. “Leave.”

She tried, but Frost’s net held her. Her eyes were terrified. I tried stripping the net from her with my hands, but it didn’t work. She wasn’t pack, so I couldn’t use pack magic to free her.

I pulled Zee’s sword out and invoked its larger form. For Zee and Tad, Hunger had been a black long sword. For me, it turned into a plain-bladed katana with a gaudy red-and-purple hilt.

It didn’t do anything to the net, though I had the feeling that in sunlight, when a vampire’s magic would be at its weakest, it would have been able to eat the magic that bound the ghost. I even tried stabbing her with it. I felt it taste her briefly, and she looked even more terrified, if that were possible. But when I pulled the sword back, she was still there, encased in Frost’s trap. I talked the reluctant sword back into its smaller form and stuck it back in my coat pocket.

The clank, clank, clank of the iron bar stopped suddenly, and I looked up to see it arc over the wall of the basement and safely out of useful range. Marsilia popped her shoulder back into joint without so much as a grimace and reengaged Frost. Without the bar, he was not so overwhelming—but she was still hurt. And then he reached out, almost casually, and ate another ghost. It was quick, and I was too far away to do anything about it—even if I could have figured out how. He smiled at me before he hit Marsilia in her damaged shoulder.

Desperate, I pulled my lamb-and-dog-tag necklace off my neck. Armed by my faith, the symbol of the Lamb of God had defended me against vampires. Maybe it would work against vampiric magic.

“Please, dear Lord,” I said. “Let this work.”

Then I pressed it against the net—which shrank away from the little golden lamb, twisting, curling, and lessening until the ghost stood free. I touched the lamb to her forehead, and said, “Janet. Be at peace.”

She vanished in a bright flash of light.

“Yes!” I shouted in triumph and more than a little awe. My little lamb had outperformed Zee’s sword.

From across the room, Stefan smiled at me.

“ Holy symbols , Batman,” I told him. “We have help .”

I went after the ghosts, trying to avoid the fighting. It was more difficult than it might have been because Frost had heard my exclamation as well, and he kept trying to get to me. Marsilia redoubled her efforts to keep him away. I had to give up on two of them because Frost got too close. I was under no misconception about how fast Frost could kill me, not after seeing the damage he and Marsilia had been exchanging.

I had just freed a man wearing a dark blue suit and a Gryffindor tie when Asil’s shout made me turn to see Frost right on top of me. Then Wulfe smashed into him like a freight train, if a freight train had been thrown by a Chinese vampire.

“Sorry, sorry,” said Wulfe calmly to Frost as I sprinted across the room away from them. “But you need to watch what you’re doing, or you’re going to get hurt by your own teammates.”

I pulled another ghost around and asked him his name without looking at his face because I was using the lamb to destroy Frost’s magic.

“Alexander,” he said.

My gaze jerked up, and I looked at Peter’s killer. Why couldn’t he have been one of the ghosts Frost had eaten? “You killed my friend,” I told him.

“Yes,” he sighed. “Werewolf, you know. Dangerous and evil.”

“No,” I told him. “Alexander Bennet. Dangerous and stupid.”

“Are you arguing with a ghost, Mercy?” asked Wulfe in an interested voice from somewhere on the far side of the basement from me. “Good for you.”

Wulfe was a mess, and in the darkness it was hard to tell what was soot and what was blood. Though he was not as obviously hurt as either Shamus or Hao—even water can’t avoid being hit by two opponents forever. Hao was letting Shamus chase him toward a wall at breakneck pace. Wulfe had left them to it, evidently so he could watch me, though he made no move to stop what I was doing.

Hao stripped out of his golden shirt and ran at the wall. The shirt seemed to hover for a second, held in Hao’s hand, which stayed where it was while his body pivoted on that axis as he ran his feet up the wall. The shirt ended up on Shamus’s head at about the same time that Hao did a quick in-the-air somersault and landed with both feet on Shamus’s back, driving the other vampire’s head into the wall.

If I survived this fight, I was going to forever regret not having a DVD of it. Not that recording devices ever captured vampires correctly. They weren’t that much faster in general than werewolves or me, but they could make very small movements incredibly fast, and it gave modern cameras fits.

The drizzle of rain earlier in the day had stopped for a while. But as the ghost started to tug on my hand, the one with the necklace in it, the rain began to fall again in earnest.

“Please,” said Alexander, who had killed Peter. “I am so tired.”

Me, too. I was also wet and cold and fiercely regretting I knew what the right thing to do was. But I finished the job I’d stopped in the middle of—cleaning off Frost’s magic.

Instead of making soup of the ash on the floor, it was so cold the rain hit and turned to ice—freezing rain.

“Alexander,” I told him forcefully. “Go.” And I added the next bit because it was the right thing to do, too—even if I didn’t know if it had any real effect. “Be at peace.”

Like the others, he disappeared in a flash of light. If I had secretly hoped that the awful darkness that swallowed the bad guy in Ghost would come and haul him down into the abyss, well, that was a disappointment I’d just have to live with.

Fingers numbing, I went back to catching ghosts. I’d lost count somewhere—or maybe Frost had gotten another one when I had been preoccupied. But when I finished with the woman in the cocktail dress and turned to find the last one, there were no more.

The fighting had gotten more uncontrolled and violent as the combatants lost their footing on the ice and slid into spectators, debris, or walls with equal force. I slithered, slipped, and twice fell off my original perch after I finally reached it.

Shivering miserably, I shoved my hands in my pockets. I’d take forty degrees below zero any day over this miserable, wet, slick stuff. I could dress for forty below, but the wet went through whatever clothes I wore. My jeans were clinging to my thighs like an icy lover, and my coat, shoulders soaked through, was losing the war to keep me warm.

Something grabbed me by the back of my coat and tossed me onto the ground. Taken totally unaware, I tumbled over and landed flat on my back. My head slammed the floor hard, and I saw stars and little birds. I rolled anyway, tasting blood as I tried to get out of easy reach of my attacker.

Above me was the dead fae assassin I’d all but forgotten about. Her head bobbed at an unnatural angle, and weirdly, there were two of her crouched on the place I’d been perched. She jumped at me, and I pulled my cold hand out of my pocket and Zee’s sword slid into her like a hot knife through ice cream. I was nearly as surprised as she was because the move had been instinctual and not planned—and I hadn’t called the sword out.