Frost Burned by Patricia Briggs Page A

his Mr. Nice Guy persona. “He can do nothing to help you.”
    Kyle smiled. “You just keep telling yourselves that.”
    The younger man bounced a couple of times on his feet and feigned a strike. Kyle pulled his head out of the line of fire and the man hit him in the shoulder with a spinning back kick that launched Kyle’s chair over onto its side. If he’d hit him in the head with that foot, Kyle would have been dead.
    On the floor, Kyle’s face was aimed right at me. He blinked twice and shook his head. “Get the hell out of here.”
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Brooks, but we can’t do that,” said the bald man with mock sorrow, unaware that Kyle hadn’t been talking to him. The other man put a foot on the chair and rocked it a little.
    Stefan had stood up so there was room for Ben to put his head on the ground next to me and look below the curtain, too. When he saw Kyle, the werewolf went still.
    Ben was not the largest werewolf in the pack—though he was big enough. But he was among the most dangerous. He was fast—and he wasn’t bothered by the thought of killing someone, even when he was as human as he ever got. He had been abused, severely abused when he was a child. People, outside the pack and Adam’s family, just weren’t real to him. We were working on that, Adam and I, but I discovered right then that Ben considered Kyle one of the pack.
    Better to aim my weapon than to let it go off half-cocked. I bumped him, and when I had his attention, I pulled my nose out from under the curtain. Then I looked up at the top of the curtain and back to him. Shapeshifting makes all of us pretty good at charades.
    Ben stood up and kept going until he stood balanced on his good hind leg with a front paw on the side of the house next to the sliding door. I backed out of the way—and realized that Ben and I were alone on the balcony. Stefan had disappeared.
    I nodded sharply, and Ben’s free front paw slammed the curtain, rod and all, onto the ground, where it would not interfere with us. I’d gathered myself to leap, but what I saw made me pause because there was no one to attack.
    Stefan was already in the room, lowering the bald man to the ground with gentle care. The first man, the man who’d hurt Kyle, was dead, his eyes starting to fog over and his body draped over Kyle. Stefan had incapacitated both men without either making a sound. Pretty efficient, the coyote in me thought, and the rest of me was very, very glad that Stefan was on my side.
    Despite my earlier stand, even knowing it could come back and bite us, I couldn’t deny that I was happy that Stefan had killed Kyle’s assailant.
    I changed back to human and hauled the dead man off Kyle while Ben aimed himself at the bindings on Kyle’s wrists that held the rest of him into the chair. Stefan touched Ben’s nose and moved it out of the way.
    He looked at the bindings for a moment. Yellow nylon rope wrapped Kyle’s wrists and wove in and out of the sturdy wooden chair. “There is no way the police are going to believe you broke out of that.”
    And that was the first sign I had that Stefan really had taken what I’d told him to heart. We were going to call the police—and Kyle, very human Kyle, was going to rescue himself.
    Stefan put a hand on the seat of the chair and the other on the back. “Brace yourself,” he warned Kyle, then pulled the chair apart. The ropes fell away like magic.
    Everyone but Kyle froze, listening for any sign that someone else had heard us.
    “Sweats,” Kyle whispered to me, rolling off the chair like it hurt. “Top drawer of the bigger chest of drawers. You can steal a pair, too.” He looked at the chair pieces, and murmured, “The bedroom is supposed to be soundproofed. Doesn’t work on Warren, but maybe we’ll luck out with less gifted listeners.”
    The first drawer I found had underwear, so he must have meant the other top drawer. They were sorted and army neat, matching bottoms and tops folded together. I