Frost Burned

huge dog if no one is looking for werewolves.
    Ben was in no condition to play harmless, which wasn’t his best thing anyway. That he was wounded meant that if someone got jumpy, Ben would take it to the next level. Lying down next to the wall ten feet from the door was as good as it got. I stood between him and the door.
    “Okay,” said Kyle. “No one is armed or—” I think he started to say dangerous but stopped himself. He’d told me that no one should lie to the police; the trick was not to tell them much until you had a lawyer. “No one is armed.”
    The door opened, and the police cautiously entered, giving Ben a wide berth—which was probably smart. He might be tracking a little better than I was at that point, but not much better. And he didn’t like being cornered by strangers in uniforms at the best of times. We all held very still while they examined the two men on the ground without touching.
    “I killed the first guy,” said Kyle, sounding shaky. I couldn’t tell if it was an act or not. No one would believe a lawyer would confess to murder unless he was in bad shape, but Kyle didn’t want them looking at Ben.
    “No bite marks that I can see,” said one of the officers, who was kneeling by the dead man. “I’m not a doctor, but I can’t turn my head that far around. I’d say his neck was broken.”
    The tension in the room immediately dropped, replaced by a curious elation.
    “No one wants a werewolf kill on their watch,” Tony explained quietly to me when he saw my expression. “And Adam has been very helpful from time to time. And no shots were fired, no one died at our hands, none of ours was hurt—and we got to play heroes. This operation went down slick and smart. It is a very good day when we can say that.”
    Of course, it wasn’t over then. They took us to the Richland Police Department—I didn’t ask why they didn’t use the West Richland office.
    They interviewed Kyle and me separately; he’d told me that would happen. I didn’t know the policemen who talked to me, and at least one of them was terrified of Ben.
    I had told them that Ben needed to stay with me, and they didn’t argue after I pointed out to them that if I wasn’t with Ben, I wouldn’t be there to stop him if he got upset. I’d removed his bandages, and they’d taken photos of his wound—which still wasn’t healing. I’d refused medical care for him (by that time he was in a foul temper—in pain, his vulnerability exposed and photographed, and
hungry
). Someone had found a first-aid kit, and I’d rewrapped his leg.
    His presence made the police who were talking to me start out a little unfriendly. No one likes to be afraid, and only an idiot wouldn’t be a little afraid of Ben in his current mood. They also seemed to be a little slow, asking me the same questions over and over again.
    Then they went out for a bit and came back actively hostile.
    Fine. I could be hostile, too. Adam was being held by crazy people with guns—and I was stuck arguing with a pair of officers I was beginning to think of as Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber. Maybe Ben wasn’t the only person in a bad mood.
    They were convinced that the attack couldn’t have been unprovoked. What had the pack been involved in that got such a response? The attack on our house looked a lot like some of the drug cartel attacks. Did I know about the way the cartels were blackmailing the field hands at the paper-pulp tree farms to plant drugs between the rows of trees near Burbank?
    About the fiftieth time we were going through the same old thing—they had a problem with me being unwilling to tell them where Jesse and Gabriel were hidden—a youngish man in a very well-tailored suit came in and introduced himself as Loren Hoskins, my lawyer. He advised me not to say another word, so I shut up and let him do his job.
    An unpleasant three and a half hours later, he escorted me outside, a firm warning to me that I leave the police work to the police ringing in my ears. Presumably that meant that they didn’t want me out looking for Adam because the police are so well equipped to take on guys capable of taking out a whole werewolf pack. I might have said something to that effect as we were leaving. But they didn’t have a werewolf’s hearing, so the only one who heard me was my lawyer.
    “They have training that you don’t,” said the lawyer in a very quiet voice.
    That was true. But they didn’t have a mate bond and a werewolf