Frost Burned

ago accepted that he was not going to make it to Heaven.
    He’d thought that they’d been stowed in some sort of government facility—there were a lot of places out in the Hanford Site near the nuclear facilities that were all but deserted. But as he paced through the long hall, he realized that this was some sort of commercial building rather than a government building. There was a sign leaning back-out against the wall. He pulled it away from the wall until he could see the front. TASTING ROOM , it said. He was in the unfinished basement of a winery.
    That would explain the high ceilings and large, empty rooms. Their jail cell had been meant to hold racks of barrels of aging wine, as were the rooms on either side of the hallway he now paced down.
    The winery had not been put to use for its intended purpose—he couldn’t smell any grapes or wine. The half-dirt, half-tile floors and the hallway drywall
sans
tape and texture meant that someone had stopped while the building was still in the construction phase.
    The basement was empty, though it was obvious that there had been people here fairly recently. They left behind the smell of body armor, gunpowder, and greasepaint as well as trails of footprints and marks where things had been dragged. Two of the rooms, identical to where they had been held, had been used as living quarters. The only difference was that the heavy wooden door that had been barred to keep wolves in was removed and set inside the rooms that had housed the mercenaries. Presumably so that no one could keep them in.
    The mercenary commander who had talked to him had been right, Adam decided. Under other circumstances, Adam would have liked him, too.
    In the distance, Adam heard diesel engines start up, the same engines, he was pretty sure, that had hauled the pack out to whatever distant proto-winery Cantrip had found to use as werewolf storage. The mercenaries had either parked a fair distance away from their temporary HQ, or—and he thought it more likely, given the dismantled doors—they had pushed the vehicles away from the building until someone deemed it safe to start them. The noise was faint to Adam’s ears. He doubted a human would hear it even if he’d been listening for it instead of asleep.
    He found the stairs and climbed them silently. They brought him to an empty room, designed to be open and airy. The walls were unpainted, but the floors were tiled in sandstone that was difficult to walk across without allowing his claws to click. A double door designed to open easily at a push led to the outside. He pushed one of the doors, and it opened. He went outside to take a recon of the layout and was unsurprised to find that they were out in the boonies somewhere. There were dead grapes everywhere—he’d been right about the winery. The building was surrounded by maybe a couple of hundred acres’ worth of gray vines that had been dead well before winter hit. He could see the sad-looking dried-up starts of grape bunches.
    He padded out onto what had been meant to be a grand wraparound porch, but it was missing the railing and several sections of flooring. A parking lot had been laid out, one big enough for ten cars or maybe a bus or two, but it hadn’t been paved. There were four black SUVs and a Nissan with a plate frame advertising a national chain of rental cars in the lot.
    The house/winery was about halfway up a hill from a two-lane highway that stretched in either direction and vanished around the wrinkled, hilly country. An orchard of apple trees bordered the would-be vineyard to the west and a rather better tended vineyard on the east.
    Neither of the nearest properties looked to have a house on it. The closest neighbor was out of sight—doubtless it was the reason this place had been chosen by . . . whoever had chosen it. He’d find out who that was.
    He considered crippling the cars, but decided against it. He turned back into the house. It was time to show these people why they should be afraid of werewolves.
    He followed the sound of breathing to a hallway with rooms on either side, as if the original designs for the winery had also provided for a bed-and-breakfast.
    The first room had the same unfinished walls as the public rooms did, but here the floor was also unfinished. The plywood squeaked just a little under his weight, but the man sleeping on the temporary cot didn’t wake up. He was in his thirties, from the look of his face, which was . . .