Frost Burned

me—that he’d told me he’d be sleeping here—because even getting myself into the bed was a blur. “Remember, a guy who didn’t even have the decency to be cute hit me a lot yesterday. And this room doesn’t have a rug.”
    Ben laughed at me, and I covered my nose with both hands. But I was awake now and remembered where I’d smelled breath that bad before. “DMSO from the tranq, right? DMSO gives you bad breath.” Then I saw the clock on the chest next to the bed.
    “What time is it?” I asked, hopping out of the bed and stumbling over Kyle’s feet. The room was dark, but there were no windows. The darkness reminded me that Adam had suggested going to the vampires. Maybe I ought to. But there was something . . . Tad. Oh holy wow, I’d forgotten about Tad. I’d told him that I’d get right back to Sylvia’s as soon as I made sure Kyle was okay. If it was really dark outside, he’d been watching them for a whole day, expecting me to return soon.
    I took a step toward the door, which was a mistake. Every muscle hurt, my face throbbed, and I almost blacked out from the sudden way my body informed me that it wasn’t happy with me. My stomach, then the rest of my muscles, seized in the worst charley horse I’d ever had.
    “Mercy?” asked Kyle, rolling onto his feet with a little less than his usual grace.
    Ben whined.
    And I threw up silver goo all over the beautiful stone floor of Kyle’s guest room.

5
    I stared at the floor—and Kyle did the same. Ben jumped off the bed and put his nose near the mess. He backed away quickly, his ears came up, and he looked at me. The expression on the wolf’s face quite clearly said, “What the hell?” even if I hadn’t been familiar with reading expressions on monster-sized wolf faces.
    Kyle’s floor was covered with silver. I licked my hand and looked at the result. My palm was gray where the saliva touched it. “I think,” I told them, torn between triumph—because all that silver on the floor meant it wasn’t in Adam—and terror. Having that place where Adam and I touched be something that I could drag something as physical as silver through was terrifying in its implications. “I think I’d better wash this off.”
    There was a bath attached to the guest room, and I staggered into it, washing out my mouth and scrubbing wherever the silver had touched. Kyle opened the sink cabinet and handed me a new toothbrush and one of those little travel toothpastes. I used it, twice. My lips were still black, like one of those thirteen-year-old goth girls who wore black lipstick.
    “I used to know a couple of guys who painted their lips with silver nitrate to turn them that color,” Kyle said. “I thought it was pretty stupid. Your lips weren’t black when you went to sleep. What happened?”
    “I’m afraid to guess,” I said. Silver nitrate sounded familiar. I was pretty sure that was what Gerry Wallace had used in his tranquilizer concoction. “Give me a few minutes, and I might have something worked up that sounds vaguely coherent, okay?”
    He looked worried but nodded. I looked in the mirror again and touched my lips. They felt just like they usually did. I grabbed a towel and went out to clean up the mess, but stopped when I got to it. The silver sludge was thickening. What if the towel stuck to it and made a bigger mess? And there was a lot of the stuff, more than I’d thought. If all of this had come from Adam, he should have been dead.
    “Well,” I said. “What do I do with this?”
    “What? Never vomit on a floor before?” Kyle asked conversationally as he perched on the side of the bed. “Or never vomit silver?”
    Ben, sitting far enough away from the mess that there was no chance he’d touch it, stared at me. He leaned toward me and sniffed before settling back, his eyes intent.
    I lifted my arm and smelled it, smelled Adam on it. I suppose if I could suck silver through the mate bond, it made sense that Adam’s scent could follow me, too.
    “It’s magic,” I told them, and Kyle rolled his eyes.
    “Look.” I was speaking as much to myself as to him and Ben. “This shouldn’t have worked. You can’t do
this
.” I waved at the mess. “
I
shouldn’t have been able to do this. Pack magic, mating magic means that I can talk to Adam sometimes when we aren’t near each other. It doesn’t mean that I can suck the silver out of his body and bring it back with me.” I looked at the mess again. “And if there had been