Frost Burned

into the living room. “Come in, come in. Don’t be stupid. Hi, Jesse. Hi, Mercy. I didn’t see you lurking behind Gabriel, come on in.” Then she muttered something low in Spanish. I think she was talking to herself.
    I didn’t understand what she said, but Gabriel scowled fiercely at her. “Mind your tongue. Don’t talk about Mamá like that. She deserves your respect,
chica
.”
    “Does she?” asked Sylvia. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her with a hair out of place, and even at this unholy hour of the morning, her hair was smooth and shining. Her only concession to the time was a dark blue bathrobe. She folded her arms, her face was grim, and she ignored Jesse and me.
    “Of course, Mamá,” Gabriel said softly.
    Her chin was raised and her mouth tight as she stared at her son. Rosa bounced a little and looked back and forth at the two of them before grabbing Gabriel’s hand.
    “You chose strangers over your family,” Sylvia said at last. “I said, you pick. You stay here and work for Mercedes Thompson, or you come home right now. You chose her. Where is the respect in that?”
    He snorted, a bitter half laugh. “I told you this wouldn’t work, Mercy.”
    Rosa made a soft sound as Gabriel turned and took two quick strides away from Sylvia. At the door, he turned back around, and said, “Mamá, everything is black-and-white for you, but the world is gray. You asked me to abandon my friends because you thought they were dangerous. Life is dangerous, Mamá. I won’t run away from my friends, who are good people, because I am afraid. Because you are afraid.”
    “
She
put my children in danger,” Sylvia said, jerking her chin in my direction. She lost the cool anger she’d come into the room with and replaced it with heat. “She lied to me. And you chose her.”
    “Mercy can’t tell other people’s secrets, Mamá. And that wolf was more likely to dive off a cliff into the ocean than he was to hurt one of the girls. She was raised with him, she knows him.” Gabriel’s voice was soft, but his chin looked a lot like his mother’s—which didn’t make a reconciliation look likely, not if they kept talking about the incident that left Gabriel living in my house not talking to his mother, anyway.
    “You were right,” I broke in blandly. “Hanging around us is dangerous. Someone is after Jesse.” I don’t know why I said it that way, I had no real reason to believe they would go after Jesse—they already had their hands full, but my instincts were certain, and I always listened to my instincts. “They have already kidnapped her father and killed one of his werewolves.”
    “See,
hijo
? That’s what happens when you associate with the werewolves,” Sylvia said—but I saw her eyes linger on Jesse. Sylvia talked tough, but she had a heart as big as the Columbia. She also had four daughters, the oldest of whom was only a little younger than Jesse.
    “Her father is a werewolf,” Gabriel snapped, not seeing Sylvia’s softening. “She can hardly avoid them.”
    I put a hand on his arm to get him to stop antagonizing her, but it was a mistake. Sylvia looked at my hand, and her face hardened again.
    “The people after Jesse are human,” I told her before she could say something she couldn’t take back. “Not werewolves, fae, or anything
other
. They are human—and they will hurt her. And you raised a man who cannot leave someone he cares about to face that danger alone, any more than he could desert his friends just because it was the safer, smarter thing to do. Not even if his mother asked him to—because it was she who taught him how to love other people in the first place. So he is in danger, too. Won’t you hide them for a couple of days so that they will be safe?”
    Sylvia looked at me, straight in the eyes. Then she shook her head and gave a little laugh as her expression softened. “A compliment slipped inside a reprimand inside a request I cannot possibly turn down. Leave a child in danger? Leave
my
child . . .” And when Gabriel made a protesting noise, “You’ll be my child when you are fifty and I am seventy,
hijo
, so it is better that you accept it early. I am not going to leave my son, whom I love, to face danger alone for pride’s sake. Even I am not such a fool. Oof.”
    The “oof” was because Gabriel was hugging her hard, tears in his eyes that he wouldn’t shed because he was not a man who cried in front of others if he could help it. About that time