Frost Burned

caught up in human manners. It would be wrong. But wolves are gregarious, far more so than humans or coyotes, for that matter. Normally, Ben would be pressing against me if I was in distress. Asil must still have been worrying him.
    When my head quit feeling quite so breakable, I looked up—and Asil handed me a glass of water from the bathroom. I drank the whole thing and felt better.
    “Don’t worry,” he told me when I handed him the empty glass. “I expect the effect is temporary. It’ll probably go away once the silver is out of your system entirely.” He touched my lips, a light, quick touch that didn’t allow me time to react.
    He showed me his fingertips—which were red, as if he’d put his fingers in a flame. I touched my lips, too, remembering how black they were.
    “They used to use colloidal silver in nose drops for people with asthma or bad allergies,” he told me. “People who used them regularly sometimes had their skin turn blue—there is a man who ran for the Montana Senate who is blue-skinned. I thought your lips were from lipstick—though you are a little older than most of the young ladies wearing black makeup.”
    I stared at him in horror. “It won’t go away,” I told him. “I’m not a werewolf, my body won’t reject silver the same way yours does.” Gabriel’s little sister, Rosa, had done a report in school about a girl whose skin had turned gray when she was a teenager back in the fifties and nothing anyone had tried had made any improvement. I’d proofread it for her.
    I scrambled to my feet and went into the bathroom to look at the mirror again. I took a washcloth and scrubbed at my lips, but they stayed black.
    Asil didn’t follow me into the bathroom, but he stood at the door.
    “You told Armstrong that you think this was aimed at the werewolves.”
    “Don’t you?” I asked.
    Asil shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what I think. Let’s look at the world through their eyes a moment. If Adam did exactly as they asked him to, what would be the result?”
    “They kill the pack anyway—can’t have witnesses. They’d kill Adam, so he doesn’t kill them. The senator’s dead or wounded by werewolves. The people who think the only good werewolf is a dead werewolf would have more power.” I ticked them off on my fingers, then said, “Kyle and I, Adam and I, and just I have gone through this a hundred times.”
    “Okay,” Asil said. “The rogue Cantrip agents like the last part, the one that lets them go hunting werewolves. Maybe they like the dead senator part, too. Campbell has been standing between them and their kill-’em-all hunting license for a long time. But who is after Adam or the pack? You think they are the ones this is aimed at—so who benefits?”
    “Shouldn’t we do this part downstairs?” I asked, my throat tight. I didn’t want to go over and over how much danger Adam and the pack were in—I knew. “We were discussing this with Armstrong.”
    Asil shook his head. “What happens if Adam and the pack are gone?”
    I bared my teeth at him. “I go out for revenge—I don’t do peanut butter much anymore. But if they aren’t afraid of the pack, they aren’t going to be afraid of me. Bran is scarier—but they probably don’t know about Bran.”
    “Maybe they do,” said Asil. “Maybe they’re after Bran.”
    “They knew about Gerry Wallace’s silver/DMSO/ketamine cocktail,” I conceded. “They knew every wolf in the pack. Maybe they do know about Bran.”
    “Mercy?” Kyle called up from the floor below. “Are you through telling the werewolf all the things we mere mortals shouldn’t know, yet? I’m making breakfast, and the sun’s coming up.”
    “What were you planning on doing next before Agent Armstrong and I arrived?” asked Asil.
    “I was going to go to get Adam’s people, the ones who work for his company, to see if they can figure out where the money is coming from. See if they can tell if it is government money or private. I was going to the vampires to see if they knew anything about where someone might be holding a pack of werewolves—they run this town’s supernaturals like the mob ran Chicago back in the day.” There was something else. Something I was supposed to be remembering. “Damn it,” I said, diving for my dirty, bloody jeans. “Tad. Damn it.”
    I pulled out Gabriel’s sister’s phone and saw that I’d missed calls—and had twenty new text messages. There were fifteen calls exactly