Frost Burned

him.
    “You don’t ever do that.” My voice, my whole body shook from the shock of the magic breaking, from my momentary inability to stop hurting Adam. “I just got you back.” The coyote inside me wanted to take a bite out of something, anything in a frenzy of . . . in a frenzy. “I can’t touch you without hurting you. Don’t let me hurt you.” The last sentence came out as a whine, and I realized I was babbling. I shut up.
    Instinctively, I backed away, so I was in no danger of touching anyone. I didn’t want to contaminate anyone with the remnants of that magic—filthy magic—on me. Didn’t want to hurt Adam again.
Didn’t want to touch him with my filthy skin, I was dirty, dirty. That was wrong.
    I knew that was wrong.
An echo of trauma that never quite left me, though its hold was not as vicious as it had been. I tried to collect myself and center on the real issue here. On Adam.
    A trace of blood trickled down Adam’s chin, but the red flush on his skin was disappearing as I watched. Silver burns. I touched my lips. It was from the silver and not some weird taint of the magic that had robbed me of my will, or a taint that lingered from that long-ago rape. I
knew
that, but it still felt like the two were entwined—the fae magic and the marks on my mate’s face.
    “That silver,” said Zee, “is something I can help you with, Mercy.”
    I looked at him, my heart still pounding—with anger at Adam, with the release of a magical spell I hadn’t really believed in until it left, and with a shadow of memory. I remembered listening to Tad tell us that I’d had my will stolen away, and I had been . . . uninterested. I’d felt that way before.
    “The silver,” Zee told me, his eyes sad as if he knew where my thoughts were dwelling. “Just the silver. The rest is over and done.”
    “Okay.” My throat was tight, and I didn’t want him to touch me. Didn’t want anyone to touch me ever again, but I knew that made no sense.
    “Mercy.”
    Adam waited until I looked over and met his eyes. “You broke the spell the minute something happened that you didn’t want. You were never really in its power. Not once you didn’t want to be.”
    His voice gave me an anchor, and I drew my unruly thoughts back in line. He’d be okay. His lips were healing a lot more slowly than usual, but as I’d yelled at him, he’d had a rough few days. He needed to eat something soon.
    “Mercy.”
    I nodded, so he’d know I’d heard him. I wasn’t ready to risk talking right away. Too many things were raw, and Adam and I weren’t alone.
    “Why didn’t the cuff act right away?” asked Asil. Maybe he’d done it to take everyone’s attention off me, but I didn’t know him well enough to be sure. “The coyote that jumped in and attacked that fae, magic sword and all, was not without willpower.”
    “It was when Adam came back,” Tad said. “It isn’t easy to steal someone’s will. With Huon’s Cup . . . before . . .” He made an unhappy sound. Looked at Asil, who might or might not know about that incident. Before. When I’d been raped because I could not resist the magic of the cup I’d drunk.
    Tad cleared his throat. “The cup that worked on Mercy before used the act of drinking out of it to imply consent,
and
it was a more powerful artifact in the first place. Peace and Quiet is a two-part spell, each lesser. The first is spelled to make the wearer happy and relaxed. Sort of like the best marijuana ever. That leaves the prisoner vulnerable so that the second one can work to make the person wearing it compliant. The magic continues to work after the cuffs have been removed, so they could be used to subdue more than one prisoner.”
    I rubbed the wrist the cuff had been on. I hadn’t felt anything from it—though I’d been busy at the time. If she’d used the other cuff first, would I just have let her take me? Instead, the magic had snuck up behind me and taken me without giving me a fair chance to fight it. It had waited until the euphoria of having Adam back had left me defenseless, then stolen my will.
    “Will the magic come back if I relax again?” I asked, swallowing bile. I was safe. Adam was here, had been here the whole time. Nothing bad had happened—though I remembered the feel of the weeping ghost’s attempt to take control of my body. What would have happened if Zee hadn’t built wards into the doorway that I could cross and the ghost could not? The walls of the