Frost Burned

Sofia in for you so I could shut the trunk before she saw the body. I didn’t see anyone driving off. Just a woman on the street. Looked like she was jogging, you know? Making good time, too. I thought about heading after her to see if she’d seen anything, but then I noticed just how odd the trunk was, so I took a better look.” He leaned in, and said, very softly. “The body was gone, Mercy. And the sound we heard was her hitting the lid of the trunk so she could get out.”
    All of the werewolves—Asil, Adam, Ben, and Warren who had been looking down the street, presumably for whoever hit the car—turned to look at Gabriel and me. Asil opened the trunk.
    “She was dead,” he said. “I swear to it. I know she was fae, but I have killed them before. She was dead. When we walked by here earlier, I could smell the body starting to decompose.”
    I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “Zombie fae. That’s all we needed. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to get a
really
good night’s sleep with zombie fae running around. I’ll go see if I can track her.”
    “Mercy,” Adam said.
    “I won’t approach,” I promised. “I’ll just see where she’s going and come back and get you. By the time any of you wolves can change, she’ll be long gone.”
    Since young Sandovals were beginning to filter out of the house to see what the excitement was all about, I didn’t strip before changing into my coyote. Adam helped me get the sweatshirt off when my coyote-self got stuck in it—and only then did I remember that I’d shifted right in front of Armstrong and Tony, neither of whom had known what I was.
    One of my foster father Bryan’s favorite sayings had been, “No use crying over spilt milk.” Besides, Tad must have used the distraction to get the fae cuffs out of the trunk because I caught a glimpse of him slipping Peace and Quiet under his shirt, so something good came out of it anyway.
    I put my nose down and was off and running. Asil was right—she’d begun to rot, and she left a very clear trail.
    Adam ran beside me in his human form. Apparently he didn’t want me out zombie hunting on my own. Coyotes run a great deal faster than people can, and I run faster than most coyotes. Werewolves are good runners, but even a werewolf can run only so fast in their human form—four-footed travel is a lot quicker than two. He was keeping up with me, and moving faster than any human could have—and maybe I wasn’t running at my top speed. Not even close, really.
    Having Adam beside me if I had to confront a zombie fae assassin was worth slowing down for.

10
    I thought we were going to catch her. It hadn’t been five minutes since Sofia had broken into the meeting—and how fast could a zombie fae assassin run?
    But when we got out to Bombing Range Road, the nearest main thoroughfare (so named because the area had been a bombing range back in WWII), the trail disappeared at the edge of the road. It was full dark, though it was only 6:00 P.M. , but dark doesn’t bother me much. I had a clear view in either direction for several miles, and there was no dead woman running along the side of the road. There were, however, a number of cars traveling both directions.
    “She got into a car,” Adam said, trying not to appear winded, as I cast back and forth with my nose to the ground. “Someone picked her up—or she hitched a ride.”
    Disturbing to speculate about either way, I thought, but there was nothing we could do about it now. “Disturbing” was a good word. Of all the things that had happened over the past few days, a dead fae getting up and running off might just be the
most
disturbing.
    Still—a zombie. Maybe it would intrigue Marsilia enough she’d forget about her car. Not likely, but maybe. I wasn’t sure I should feel responsible for the damage to the trunk. How could I have been expected to know that the dead fae would break out on her own?
    Adam stared down the road. “If you hadn’t slowed down for me, you might have caught her.”
    Maybe I would have—and maybe that wouldn’t have been a good thing. Warren’s truck pulled up, and Warren leaned over and opened the passenger door.
    “No luck?” Warren asked, as we hopped in. I took the middle seat.
    “No. Looks like she got in a car. Could have gone either way.”
    Warren turned the truck around and headed back before he said anything. “That’s disturbing,” he said.
    Zombies or not, the press needed to be appeased.
    Tony