Frost Burned

pack.”
    Stefan raised an eyebrow—he was right. Who else would they be?
    “We don’t know who is backing them or what their endgame is,” I continued doggedly. “We don’t even know if Kyle is there. What I
do
know is that we can’t go in to kill.”
    Stefan frowned at me. “I forget that you are too young to remember the lessons of Vietnam. Go in to win, Mercy, or do not go in at all. How many people are out here who could help Adam?”
    “Us,” I said wretchedly, then added, “Maybe Ariana, though she was pretty freaked-out when we left.” I knew what he was saying. I did.
    By that logic, we should leave Kyle to his fate. But I wasn’t just Adam’s wife, I was his mate. That made me second in rank—and that meant I had to protect the pack. It meant that I especially had to protect the weakest members first. We had already lost Peter. Kyle needed to be protected—and we could do it without killing everyone.
    “These people have taken down an entire pack of werewolves, Mercy,” Stefan said coolly. “We cannot afford to take risks, or we might throw away the game trying to find out what they have done with Kyle.” He lost the distant-vampire thing when he said Kyle’s name. Stefan liked Kyle, who was snarky and happy to argue tactics in
Scooby-Doo
episodes as if defending a doctoral thesis. “If they are waiting at Kyle’s, whom do you think they want? The only people important to Adam they don’t have are you, Ben, and Jesse. And there is this: if they see me, if they understand what I am and do not die before they can tell their superiors over their communication devices, then we will lose more than just Kyle this night.”
    People don’t know about the vampires. Oh, they know the stories—Bram Stoker and all his ilk made good use of the old legends. But they think they are just stories. The problem, for the vampire, is that now that the fae and the werewolves have admitted what they are, people are ready to believe that the old stories might be true. If Stefan was the vampire who gave those legends new life, Marsilia would kill him. I understood why he thought killing the enemy was the best way.
    Part of me even agreed with him about killing them all. These people had killed Peter and taken Adam and put my world into danger.
    “Kyle is human, and they were not worried about leaving Peter dead,” Stefan said, saying what I didn’t want to hear. “Kyle is less valuable than Peter was. He only matters to you and Warren. Adam would not kill someone, risk the werewolves’ standing in the human world, for Kyle. A hostage is a lot more work than a dead body, Mercy. There is a real chance Kyle is already dead. If you aren’t willing to kill—you need to leave them alone.”
    “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 accomplishing at 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