Burn Bright

CHAPTER 7

The darkness was so profound that the lights of Asil’s Mercedes barely penetrated—or else there was just nothing to see. Anna saw a flash of reflective tape, and Asil’s slow progress drew to a halt.

When Anna started to open her door, Asil shook his head as he turned the engine off. “Wait up a moment.”

They sat in silence for a while, the lights of the car fading to off. Anna had gotten used to being able to see in the dark, and the stygian lack of light started to make her feel claustrophobic. And other kinds of phobic, too.

Finally, Anna couldn’t stand the silence anymore.

“So why are we sitting here waiting?” she asked him.

“Because if we get out before Wellesley acknowledges our presence, bad things will happen. Wellesley was once an ordnance sergeant.”

“A what?” Anna asked.

He snorted softly. “I keep forgetting how young you are. ‘Ordnance sergeant’ means that he blew up a lot of things with chemicals found around battlefields, farmyards, and nineteenth-century factories. He has this whole place—maybe the whole side of the mountain—wired to blow. Or so Bran told me once.”

“Okay,” Anna said thoughtfully. “Does it worry you that Leah sent you and me here together? She’d happily see us both dead. You more than I, generally, but not at the moment.”

“Not in the slightest,” Asil told her. “I am not destined to be blown to bits by a mad and talented artist. No artist would willingly destroy such a work of art as I am.”

There was a clicking sound, then lights turned on around them.

“Now we can get out,” Asil said. Which would have been more reassuring if he hadn’t murmured softly, “I think.”

Anna hesitated, but remaining in the car was unlikely to protect her if Wellesley did decide to blow them to kingdom come, so she got out. As she closed the door, she took her time looking around.

The entrance had been natural, but the track they’d followed in looked more like a mine shaft complete with hand-scraped timbers holding up the dirt ceiling and railroad track unmoored and piled up along the wall.

The place where they’d stopped had been widened so it could accommodate three cars. Presently it held Asil’s Mercedes, an elderly Jeep, a motorcycle, and a snowmobile—the last two occupying one space. The ceiling directly over the parking area was ten feet high, if it was lucky, and I beams supported giant concrete blocks that (hopefully) endeavored to hold the mountain off their heads.

A narrow and irregular opening just in front of the motorcycle drew attention to itself by being more brightly lit than anywhere else. Anna followed Asil past the motorcycle and into the opening, noticing that Asil seemed completely relaxed. If she were with anyone else, she’d have been reassured. But Asil had spent over a decade waiting for Bran to kill him—he didn’t care as much about safety as she did.

There was a small landing just inside the opening followed by a sort of winding stairway. This wasn’t a hand-carved work of art like she’d seen at Hester’s home. This was a round, mostly vertical tunnel with dirt sides and chunks of two-by-fours stuck into the earth at irregular intervals, more like a ladder than a stairway, really.

Climbing up proved to be interesting. Sometimes the boards worked as treads for her feet—and sometimes she had to duck the boards above her in order to climb. About twenty feet up, there were far fewer boards. She had to jump and grab the one above her, chin-up until she could throw a leg over it, then stand on it and do it all over again.

The boards were pitted with claw marks, and it occurred to her that this would have been a much easier climb in her wolf form. She also noted that there were holes in the dirt wall where boards used to be. A thirty-foot fall was unlikely to kill her—but all the boards she could hit on the way down might just do the job.

At the top, there was a gap with no helpful two-by-fours for a distance about twice as high as she was tall. Asil had led the way, and he made the jump easily. He stood at the edge at the top for a moment, blocking her way. Then he stepped to the side and bent, giving her an arm to grab at the top. She had a moment to visualize herself jumping high enough to make it but then having no way to move sideways at the top of the leap. A childhood of Bugs Bunny cartoons allowed her to picture it all quite clearly.

As it was, she managed the business with about half of Asil’s grace, even with his arm. But at least she didn’t end up back at the bottom.

The hole through which they’d emerged was centered in a small, plain room without windows, which was illuminated by a single electric bulb. The flooring was simple, packed dirt except for the rim of metal around the edge of the hole. The walls of the room were rough-finished concrete. The only door was flat metal without visible hinges or any way to open it from their side.

“If this is what it takes to reach the people on our list,” Anna told Asil, “we’re going to be at it all night and then some.”

“Wellesley will be the most difficult,” Asil told her. “His trouble makes him a little paranoid. I thought that we should start with him and work down to the one where the only thing we can do is put a note in a mailbox and hope he checks it sometime this month.”

“List?” said a gravelly bass as the door opened.

Asil was right. His voice did sound like Johnny Cash’s, if Johnny had been born in the Carribbean instead of Arkansas.

He was a black man of about average height, with a barrel-chested build and thick, stubby fingers. For a werewolf, his face was weathered and his mouth soft.

He looked like he should make candy for a living, or stuffed toys, or some other blameless occupation. He didn’t look like an artist, and he didn’t look like someone who could harm a fly. But as much as she loved his art, he was still one of Bran’s wildlings—he was plenty dangerous.

Asil said, “List of wildlings we are visiting today.”

Wellesley was looking at Asil’s knees, but he abruptly shook his head—a decidedly canid movement that involved his shoulders. His nostrils flared, and he inhaled noisily twice. He jerked his head, rocking back on his heels, then looked at Anna with widened eyes.

Almost immediately, he ducked his head so his gaze hit somewhere near Asil’s boots. She got the impression that he wanted to look anywhere but at her.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’ve forgotten my manners. I don’t usually get guests. Would you like to come into my house and have some . . . oh, tea, I suppose. I also have a little cocoa and some orange juice.”

He stood back from the door and opened it a little wider in invitation, though he was still staring mostly anywhere except for Anna. It was the mostly that was disconcerting—because when he was looking at her, his gaze was yellow and desperate.

Anna could see that the living space beyond the door was the opposite of the tight little room they were in. There was lots of light, polished woods, and open spaces. She couldn’t see any paintings within the narrow visual window that the door gave her, but she smelled oil paint and turpentine.

“Not necessary,” said Asil politely. He didn’t exactly step between her and Wellesley but near enough for everyone to understand that he considered Wellesley a threat to guard Anna from. “Wellesley, we’re here to bring a warning.” He told Wellesley about the attack on Hester and Jonesy.

As soon as Asil told him Hester and her mate were both dead, Wellesley jerked the door to his house closed—as if to protect it from damage from the words Asil was speaking. The artist leaned against the closed door and heard Asil out, a hand to his mouth, his eyes closed, and his whole body twitching.

Anna hoped that there was some way to open the door from this side that she wasn’t seeing. Maybe he had another entrance?

When Asil was finished, Wellesley waited in the silence for a while. When his body was finally still, he said, in a hushed voice, “We are betrayed.”

“Yes,” Asil said simply.

Anna blinked at him a moment. And then at Wellesley. It had taken Jonesy’s note for Anna to come to that conclusion. Maybe she was stupid, and everyone else would have seen it without the note.

“It was not I,” Wellesley stated clearly. He raised his head and stared into Asil’s eyes. “I told no one by any means that Bran was gone. I have never to my knowledge spoken to a living soul other than Bran about Hester or Jonesy—though I knew them both quite well at one time.”

He dropped his eyes away from the more dominant wolf as soon as he’d finished speaking.

Anna’s ability to suss out lies was much better than it had been when she was human, but she wasn’t like Charles, who could feel them almost before they were spoken. If she didn’t know that Charles could lie to Bran . . . she’d have seen Wellesley’s declaration in front of Asil as proof positive that he had not betrayed them. It complicated matters that Wellesley’s reactions had been so all over the place in the few minutes since they’d arrived. His words felt like the truth, but she’d let Asil make that determination.

Asil bowed his head at the other male, accepting his statement. And that simply, Wellesley was clear. Anna felt a wave of relief—which was ridiculous. She didn’t know the man, just loved his work.

She wondered if they could just have all of the wildlings deny their culpability. It would make their job a lot easier. She was pretty sure that Bran could make them do that, but she wasn’t sure that Charles could. Kill them, yes. Force them to answer insulting questions? Maybe not. If Charles couldn’t, then she and Asil stood no chance.

Wellesley tapped his toe on the floor and cleared his throat. Not-staring at Asil with such intent that he might as well have his eyes locked on the other wolf. Asil’s lips curled into a smile.

“It was not I,” Asil told Wellesley clearly, catching his reluctant eye and holding him in his gaze by a willpower that Anna could feel even though she was not its focus.

“I would never willingly betray a trust given to me,” Asil said. “I told no one outside of the pack that Bran was gone.”

He hesitated thoughtfully, still holding Wellesley, made a soft sound, then continued, “I did not know Hester or Jonesy except through the stories of others. I never met either of them, though I knew they were here and approximately where they lived. I cannot recall what I have said about either of them or to whom, only that I would not speak of them in name or in any detail to anyone not in this pack.

“I would not willingly take part in any attack upon Bran’s people or upon this pack, which I now call my own. This attack was underhanded—and clumsily done. If I were to do something like this, it would have been much better handled. Five years from now, Bran would still be scratching his head and wondering what happened to Hester and her mate.”

Wellesley grimaced at Asil, then looked away from them both.

“Really,” said Anna, amused despite herself. “That’s your defense? ‘If it had been me, I’d have done it right’?”

Asil smiled at her. “And what did you hear, wolf child? Was I lying?”

Anna hesitated, then shrugged. “You could probably tell me you had four aces in your poker hand, and I’d believe you even if the ace of spades was in my hand. Sadly, I think your last statement is more persuasive to me than whether or not I could tell if you were lying.”

“Agreed,” said Wellesley.

He was being very careful to keep his gaze away from Asil, staring mostly at the wall as he spoke, but there was a confident amusement in his voice totally at odds with his body posture. “I dare you to tell that to Bran.”

“Bran would tell that to him,” Anna said with a put-upon sigh. “Bran knows Asil.”

Asil looked at her. It was a look with weight to it. She’d seen it on Charles before but not on Asil.

She raised her eyebrows in disbelief. “Really? You think I could be married to Charles and betray this pack? Charles?” And I’m not a wildling, she didn’t say, but she thought it very hard. If she thought it was just a show for Wellesley, she wouldn’t have been so annoyed. Hurt.

“I raised a witch who killed my mate,” he told her, deadly serious. “I have learned not to trust my instincts about such things.”

There was that, wasn’t there?

“Okay,” said Anna to Asil. “Here goes.” She held his eye—not that eye contact was important to a wolf who was evaluating statements for truth, most of that was their nose and hearing. But it seemed to be how they were doing this, so she could play along.

“I did not betray this pack.” She thought about the factors that spoke of betrayal, and said, “The enemy probably knows that Bran is not here. I discussed Bran’s absence with no one outside the pack. I told no one in the pack or out of it about Hester because until yesterday I had no idea who she was or where she lived.” She was getting mad, having to spell things out, so she brought it back to something simple. “I have never knowingly betrayed the pack, would never betray the pack.”

“No one not in the pack knew of Hester,” said Asil, an arrested look on his face.

“Samuel?” asked Anna.

“Oh, probably Samuel knew,” Asil said dismissively. “But to imagine Samuel betraying his father or this pack, which was once his own? I cannot conceive of Samuel’s doing such a thing.”

Anna knew Samuel, of course, but he had left the pack long before she’d joined. She’d met him now and again, but she didn’t know him well enough to say anything about him. But she trusted Asil’s judgment.

“She could not do this,” said Wellesley, waving his hand at Anna without looking at her. “She doesn’t know enough to have planned it. And no mate of Charles could be untrustworthy—Brother Wolf sees more clearly than most.”

“Agreed,” said Asil with a sigh. “Truly, it would have been too easy if it had been any of the three of us.”

“Whoever it is, they could teach the fae about deception,” Wellesley said. “Whoever it is has lived with Bran—and not betrayed the fact that they are a traitor. Never lied and yet betrayed the Marrok just the same.” He turned his head suddenly and whispered something she didn’t catch.

Anna started to ask him to repeat it, but Asil caught her eye and shook his head.

“I cannot conceive of such a thing,” Asil said.

“Gerry Wallace,” said Anna dryly, “betrayed Bran and all his kin and kind.” She might never have knowingly met him, but his betrayal still rang through the pack at odd moments. “Let’s not turn our enemy into someone who is superhuman.”

Asil gave her a sharp look.

“You know what I mean,” she said, harassed. “Of course we are, all of us, superhuman—but giving our enemy more power in our imaginations is not useful.”

“Still, it would be hard to keep an act like that going,” said Asil. Apparently, even though Wellesley had cleared himself, they weren’t going to let him in on the note Jonesy had left.

It would be a lot easier to keep a secret from Bran if you were one of the wildlings and weren’t living under his thumb on a daily basis.

As Asil had indicated as they drove here, Wellesley, with his ability to go unnoticed, would have been a reasonable candidate for their spy. Except now that she’d met him, she was pretty sure he didn’t have the focus.

“Sorry,” said Wellesley. “I’m pretty isolated. I’m not much help. Sorry.”

“Maybe, Anna,” suggested Asil, his attention on their host, “you and I should go warn the other people on the list.”

Anna, who’d been lost in her thoughts, glanced at Asil, then at Wellesley. The artist was shaking a little, and sweat had broken out on his forehead.

“Oh, stay,” said Wellesley, in a low, clipped tone that was nothing at all like the voice he had been using a moment ago. “This is more interesting than anything that has happened in a while.”

Anna looked at Asil, but he didn’t see her. He was watching Wellesley like a cat watches a mouse—but more wary and less hungry.

“Let us look at the newest members,” said Wellesley, sounding more like himself. Or at least, more like he’d sounded at first. He opened his hands and closed them a couple of times as he continued, “They would have had to deceive Bran the shortest length of time.”

In another person, Anna would have taken that as a threat. But it didn’t track with what they were talking about or with the rest of his body language, which had been submissive to Asil the whole of this encounter.

“It’s not Kara,” said Anna positively.

“No,” agreed Asil. Anna noticed that Asil had seen those hands, too. He paced a little as if he were thinking, but the movement in the small room left him directly between Wellesley and Anna. “She is a baby—and we know her background. She could not lie to me, let alone Bran.” He paused. “And I’m pretty sure that she didn’t know anything about Hester. It’s not like anyone talks about the wildlings other than as a general warning.”

What was Asil’s game here? To see if Wellesley could finger one of the other wildlings?

“She could have heard something,” Wellesley said, but this time it was a soft whisper, apologetic and tentative. “Children do.” He was still bent low, staring hard at the corner of the room away from both Asil and Anna.

Wellesley shook his head violently. “That’s stupid,” he growled. “Stupid. Stupid. We have seen her when she didn’t know we were watching, haven’t we? She is weak, she is prey. We should eat her. She would taste like the girl in Tennessee. Better maybe.”

Anna looked at Asil again, her eyes wide. She expected to see the same alarm or confusion that she felt. Or more probably anger—Kara was a particular favorite of Asil’s. He was angry enough, she saw, but there was compassion on the Moor’s face, too.

“Wellesley,” said Asil, with cool command in his voice. “You will not speak of my little friend in that way. I don’t like it.”

Wellesley growled, and Asil growled back. The artist glanced over his shoulder with wolf-yellow eyes. He was taller and more muscled than the Moor, but he backed down as soon as his eyes met Asil’s. He dropped to one knee, almost like a man proposing, his face turned again to the far corner of the room, though his body still faced Asil.

In a soft voice, he said, “It might be that someone spoke in front of her. That she told someone she shouldn’t.”

In her head, Anna heard again the voice of Wellesley’s monster saying “like the girl in Tennessee,” and wondered what Wellesley had done.

“It isn’t Kara,” Asil said again.

“If it were Kara, you could give her to me,” said Wellesley in a singsong voice.

“You go too far,” warned Asil, his lip beginning to curl.

Anna decided that if someone didn’t step in, there would be trouble. And there was no one else but her. She couldn’t risk soothing them with her Omega abilities—there was too great a chance that it would be more effective on Asil than Wellesley. Then she’d really be up a creek without a paddle.

She decided to try to distract them with words instead. Or even just Asil. There was something really wrong with Wellesley.

She had visions of Jack Nicholson in The Shining in her head. Leah had said that she had given them the most broken of the wildlings, and Asil said he’d picked the worst one first. Asil had told her Wellesley’s condition most closely resembled schizophrenia. She’d known a girl in college who coped with schizophrenia, but that girl had never been creepy.

She hadn’t been a werewolf, either, but still . . .

She didn’t know how to distract Wellesley, but Asil was easy.

“Kara talks to Asil,” she said firmly, as if she weren’t stepping figuratively between two angry werewolves. “She talks to Leah and a little to me. But with the rest of the wolves, she is really wary—and I don’t think she talks to any of the kids at school. Bran keeps getting letters from her teachers: ‘Kara is hardworking and intelligent. I am concerned that she has no friends among her peers. She doesn’t participate in group work or in any outside sports activities’—and variations of that. Leah makes her write a letter every week to her parents, most of which are four sentences long because Bran imposed that rule after her first letter was ‘Dear Dad, I’m alive. Kara.’”

Sometime during her monologue, Asil pulled himself together. More or less, Anna thought.

“It’s not Kara,” said Asil definitively—and then he put some power in his voice, and said, “Stand down, Wellesley. Leave Kara alone.” He paused. “And I better not catch your scent anywhere near her or where she has been.”

Wellesley abruptly sat on the floor, turning until his back was toward them. He nodded, showing he was paying attention to the conversation.

“Okay,” he agreed, his voice a lot more normal than his posture. Almost conversationally, he asked, “What about Sherwood? He would know about the wildlings—he was one for a while. He would know about Bran’s absence because he is in Adam’s pack now.”

“Sherwood Post?” said Asil. “No.”

Wellesley looked at Asil then, an exasperated look over his shoulder. “Well, it has got to be someone. And Sherwood is next newest after Kara and Anna.”

For a wildling, Wellesley seemed to be pretty well versed on who was who in the pack. No wonder Asil had put him at the top of their suspect pool.

The artist’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully at Asil. “You did know him before the witches got to him and took his leg and his memory. Who was he?”

Asil frowned, then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. It is highly unlikely that he’ll remember who he once was. No matter what Bran thinks. But the core of him is the same: he was the champion of underdogs. He would never facilitate an attack on someone vulnerable. No. It is not Sherwood. Besides, he only knew that Bran was gone while they were out rescuing Mercy. As far as I know, no one who is not pack knows Bran is still gone.”

This conversation was pretty weird even by werewolf standards. She wished she’d grabbed Asil and left when he had suggested it. The echo of “that girl in Tennessee” kept the hair on the back of her neck up and her wolf restless.

“It has to be someone,” said Wellesley. Then he paused. “Maybe not. What about some sort of electronic spyware? It could be something planted in the Marrok’s house—or even on a person who didn’t know about it. I’ve read about things that people swallow, and they listen to everything.” The artist had his face pointed back toward the corner of the room, so he didn’t see Asil’s thoughtful look. “Maybe I read about it,” Wellesley muttered. “Or maybe someone did that to me. I forget. Stupid.”

“Not stupid,” Asil disagreed. “There is still a bill out in Congress suggesting that all werewolves should be implanted with a tracking device, but it’s stalled because they can’t come up with one that survives a shift,” said Asil.

And part of the weirdness of this whole conversation had to be the way Asil mostly ignored Wellesley’s strange actions and talked to him as if they were having a normal interchange. Well, she could do that, too, if it was useful.

“As Charles demonstrated how technology explodes during a change,” said Anna.

Asil gave her an interested look.

“When we were working with Cantrip and the FBI in Boston,” she clarified. “Charles said he didn’t think it would work, and he was happy to demonstrate.”

“Charles is witchborn,” said Wellesley dismissively. “He could blow up any technology he chose.” Then in that odd voice, the one that had spoken of killing young women, he said, “Witches are evil.”

Anna chose to continue to follow Asil’s lead and react only to the normal things Wellesley said. “If it helps anyone be less paranoid,” she said, “Charles told me that he was pretty sure that their device wouldn’t have worked even if he hadn’t helped it along. As for electronic spyware at the Marrok’s house—Charles does a sweep for them a couple times a week.”

She left the witchborn comment where it was. It was true. In this company, there was no profit in dwelling on it.

“Paranoid bastard,” said Asil, with something that sounded oddly like affection.

“He finds listening devices and cameras once in a while,” she told them. “Usually during the Changing moon in October, when we have so many strangers.”

“Werewolves bring spying devices?” asked Asil with soft interest.

Anna shook her head. “Not on purpose, we don’t think. So far it’s all been on werewolves who admit what they are to the world. The kinds of things Charles has found have been bugs on cars, clothing, or luggage.”

“Then why doesn’t the human world know about Aspen Creek?” asked Wellesley.

“They do,” Anna told him. “They don’t know about the Marrok, we don’t think. But they have known about Aspen Creek since the 1970s at least, probably earlier than that. A select group of ‘they.’ That was one of the things that drove Bran to bring the werewolves out into the open. Secrets are only useful as leverage as long as they are secrets.” That last sentence was an almost-direct quote from Bran.

“Then why doesn’t everyone know about Aspen Creek?” Wellesley asked again.

“Bran doesn’t want the tourist trade,” Asil said. “And he’s managed to convince the people who do know that it would be a bad thing to bring out into the open.”

“The monsters need somewhere to run,” Anna said.

Wellesley rose easily to his feet. “Indeed,” he agreed.

“You made a valid point, Asil,” Anna said firmly. She wasn’t sure that Wellesley’s rising to his feet was anything good. Her wolf was beginning to get agitated. Which valid point had she been talking about? She grabbed one at random, jumping back twenty minutes of conversation to do it. “I mean, when you noted that you’d have done a better job of the mess at Hester’s. If the intent was to abduct Hester.”

“Interesting,” said Asil. “What other intent could they have had?”

“They could have wanted her dead—and muddied the waters of motivation by implying that it was a bigger operation than a simple assassination,” Wellesley offered. “Or they could have wanted Jonesy dead.”

“Or they could have wanted to know where all our lone wolves, our powerful and vulnerable damaged wolves are,” said Anna slowly. They were asking about the wildlings, Jonesy’s note had said. Charles had told her that there were wolves out here that had dangerous knowledge—things other people would kill to know. “Surmising that we would have to go out and warn them.” It only made logical sense, as long as you knew enough about how the pack worked, how the wildlings worked to know that a phone call was probably not going to do the job.

“We weren’t followed,” said Asil.

“On NCIS, they use satellites and can pick out individuals in guerrilla-troop ground movements,” Anna told him.

“What is this NCIS?” asked Asil.

“They also have a mass spec that can look at a clump of mud off a shoe and tell Abby the cross street it came from with no error. And it only takes five minutes,” said Wellesley dryly. “Mass specs don’t work like that.”

Apparently, Wellesley watched TV. And knew what a mass spec was and how it worked. This conversation could not get more surreal.

Asil growled.

“It’s a TV show,” Anna told him. “About the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. It’s a mix of mystery and military thriller.”

“A TV show,” Asil said disdainfully.

Wellesley grinned, ducked his head, and raised a hand to high-five Anna.

There was a crystalline moment when she understood that this wasn’t a good idea. Wellesley clearly had some issues. All of the werewolves had a bit of multiple personality disorder—the human half and the wolf half sometimes existed in a state of conflict. Charles and Brother Wolf were a functional demonstration of how separate the wolf spirit and the human could be. But her mate and his wolf existed in harmony.

Wellesley and his wolf were not functional at all. Getting close enough to touch him when he had spent the last half hour switching back and forth between normal and creepy was stupid.

And still, she was the mate of Charles Cornick, who was second in the Marrok’s pack. If she let that friendly gesture hang, that would be quite a statement—one she did not want to make.

She stepped around Asil and slapped Wellesley’s upraised hand with her own.

Anna was a werewolf. She had been working out with Charles virtually since he’d brought her to Montana. Her reaction time was good; she was quicker than a lot of the wolves.

And she had no time to respond as Wellesley’s hand closed over her wrist, and he plowed into her like a grizzly bear, sending them both to the floor. She hit the hard-packed dirt floor underneath his not-inconsiderable weight. He wrapped himself around her, his body shaking. Her stomach lurched with memories that she thought were long behind her.

Something hit the ground right next to her ear, startling her out of her panic. She turned to see that Asil had buried a knife . . . a sword . . . something with a beautifully crafted hilt in the dirt. The blade was only visible for about a quarter of an inch.

Asil had been going to kill to defend her, she realized. But he’d apparently understood much faster than she exactly what had happened—and more importantly, what hadn’t.

Wellesley hadn’t attacked her . . . hadn’t meant to attack her, anyway. He was trying to get as close as he could while sobbing wildly and muttering something in a language she couldn’t understand.

“Omega,” said Asil quietly. He crouched beside her, his face only a few feet away from hers. “I should have stopped you from touching him. My wife, she had better control of what she was. No one would have understood what she was, or been affected by her by a casual touch unless she wanted them to.”

“What do I do?” she whispered, partly so that she wouldn’t startle Wellesley into anything more violent. But mostly because her throat was so dry with fear and remembered horror that she couldn’t have made a louder sound if she tried.

“Stay still,” he said. “Hopefully, his reaction will ease after a few minutes.”

She looked at him. She wasn’t going to be able to lie here, with a stranger on top of her, for a few minutes.

He saw it. “If I try to pull him off,” he told her, “it’s not going to help anything.”

She nodded. She understood that Wellesley was getting some sort of relief from her, and he would react badly if someone tried to take it away from him. Asil didn’t think Wellesley was rational enough to let her go.

“Okay,” she said, trying not to sound panicked. Hoping that Charles wasn’t picking up on this. He wouldn’t if she managed to keep herself from blind terror. “Okay.”

“What can I do to help?” Asil asked.

“Talk,” she said. “Distract me.”

“How about a story?” He reached out and put a hand on Wellesley’s shoulder. “His mate died, and his wolf wanted to die with her. It happens that way sometimes. As far as I know, they’ve been at war ever since, he and his wolf. A hundred years more or less, I think. Like a split personality disorder, but your other half is a killing machine, and you can never let it take over.”

“The girl in Tennessee?” Anna murmured, fairly certain that Wellesley wasn’t attending the conversation between her and Asil. He was crying noisily, and it was a horrible thing to hear from a grown man. But it reassured her, because he didn’t sound like . . .

Anyone else.

Asil nodded to her almost-question. “After Tennessee is when Bran brought him here. Back in the 1930s, I think. He’d been a well-known artist under a different name when his wife died.” The old werewolf, whose mate had also died while he survived, made a sympathetic sound. He patted Wellesley again, and this time left his right hand on the other werewolf’s shoulder.

“He tried to keep up his life, but one day he just left. Left his pack. Left his house with everything in it. A wolf who was there, a member of his pack, told me it was eerie. As if one morning, just after breakfast was ready to eat, he decided he was done with it. No one heard of him for a while. It was the Depression, and traveling on trains was a way of life for a lot of people. There was no easy way to find him.”

“Not like now,” Anna said. It was hard to get the words out of her throat, but at least she didn’t have to whisper.

“Not like now,” agreed Asil. “Technology has made a lot of things easier—but also Wellesley’s case in particular made Bran decide that it was important not to lose track of any werewolf if he could help it.”

“You were in Spain during the 1930s,” Anna said. Her voice was shaky. She didn’t like sounding like that—fear was dangerous around werewolves. But even knowing that there was nothing sexual about what Wellesley was experiencing, she couldn’t help the cold sweat that trickled down her back.

Asil made an assenting sound.

“You know a lot about this for a man who was on another continent at the time.”

Asil’s smile flashed. “I know everything worth knowing,” he told her. But his face grew pensive. “I asked after I started to visit with him. I wanted to know as much as I could in hopes I could help him. I knew a little before, of course. His story was widely published at the time. I think part of what has made Bran so harsh on the wolves, now that the public knows about us, is that he is afraid that someone will remember the old story of Wellesley.”

“Tell me?” she asked.

“As you said,” Asil told her, “it was easier to be lost and wander back in those days. Lots of men without families or pasts wandered the railroad and the highways in the Depression era. Wellesley was just another one of them until he finally lost control of the wolf in a little town with a population of about four hundred people. It’s not around anymore, that little town, or maybe more people would remember this story. Wellesley is sometimes certain that there was a black witch—or something like a black witch—involved. But in the aftermath, there was only Wellesley and some bodies: a black man in a mostly white town.”

Asil patted Wellesley again, but the other werewolf didn’t appear to notice him. After a moment, Asil started talking again.

“That’s when Bran became aware of him. He sent Charles to break Wellesley out.” There was a pause, and Asil said sourly because he didn’t want to respect Charles, “I understand he broke into that jail where Wellesley was under heavy guard and left with him. But if you can get that closemouthed wolf to tell you how he did it in plain sight of two guards, leaving an empty and locked cell behind them with no one the wiser, there would be a lot of people who’d love to hear that story.”

“Can’t you ask Wellesley?” Anna asked.

Asil shook his head. “He doesn’t remember anything except bits and pieces—mostly that’s his wolf, anyway. Wellesley doesn’t have enough memories to defend himself from anything someone wants to claim about that day if someone goes digging up old newspaper records or someone’s diary about the matter.”

“You think he is innocent?”

Asil sighed. “I think that truth is complicated—and speculating on things without adequate facts is useless. You can ask your mate if you are curious. His orders were to kill or rescue, depending upon what his judgment told him was best—and here is our Wellesley, safe if not sound.”

Wellesley’s sobs had been quieting, but Anna was deliberately focusing on Asil, so she didn’t notice the difference in him soon enough.

Asil, though? Asil was on Wellesley before his sharpening teeth could do more than scrape against her collarbone. Then they were both rolling around the room while Anna scrambled to her feet. Before she could jump in and add her weight to the game, Asil had Wellesley pinned to the floor in some complex wrestling move that didn’t allow the werewolf to use his great strength to break free.

And Wellesley—or the wolf spirit that lived in Wellesley—was trying. His eyes, those brilliant gold wolf’s eyes so startling in his dark face, saw nothing but enemies. His face, changing slowly to wolf, was wild. His jaws snapped and snapped at the air as if there were some way that he could climb out of the bones of his body to get at Asil—but would be satisfied with anyone.

Asil crooned to him in Spanish as if the mad creature were a child. There was power in his voice, the werewolf magic of a very dominant wolf trying to settle Wellesley.

She could feel the other man trying to come back, but the wolf spirit was dominant, too. Asil, she thought, could have subdued the other wolf, but he was hoping that Wellesley could control it himself. A wolf this old who couldn’t control himself better than this would need to be killed.

The impulse to soothe Wellesley, to bring him the relief that her Omega nature brought to troubled wolves, was instinctive and felt desperately necessary. But she gathered herself together and thought before she gave in to that desire.

She was in control when she reached out with her power to do what she could. She wouldn’t have tried it if it had been Charles holding Wellesley, but it was Asil, who had been mated to an Omega wolf. He’d had a long time to learn how to guard himself, to stay alert, no matter what his wolf felt from her.

She took a deep breath, centering herself, and crouched, staying on her feet in case she had to move fast. She put her hand on Wellesley’s cheek with enough pressure that he’d have trouble turning his head to bite her.

The trapped wolf shuddered at her touch.

Asil turned his croon to English, speaking to her in the same voice he was using for Wellesley. “Be careful what you do, Anna. Your abilities allow you to bring a wolf terrific relief—but it comes at a cost. When you pull away, he has to take up the burden of controlling the beast again—and that requires a lot more courage and fortitude than doing it in the first place.”

“I know,” she said simply. “I’m not likely to forget the disaster of Bran’s experiments with me. But my read on this is that we don’t have a choice.”

Asil closed his eyes, opened them again, and nodded. “If you can’t fix him, I will send him to a final rest, where this burden will no longer trouble him.”

“Will you be all right when I soothe him?” she asked, half expecting him to take offense, but she had recognized that he had been speaking of himself, too, not just Wellesley, when he warned her of the possible results of her meddling.

Asil smiled grimly. “I do not want to kill this one, who has fought so hard for such a long time. One who creates such beauty as he does is worthy of anything we can do to help him.”

It wasn’t a yes. But she thought she might have a fix for that.

She’d been practicing using what she was ever since she came to Aspen Creek. It was sometimes hard to find victims . . . subjects. As Asil said, most of the wolves didn’t object to the initial effect—it was afterward that made it difficult. Kara was her most consistent volunteer.

Before she learned to handle it better, what her Omega aura did was flood an area with a wave of peace that sent the beast spirit of unprepared werewolves into sleep. She and the only other Omega she knew about had consulted over the Internet (because he lived in Italy) and pulled in Asil, who knew more about Omegas than either of them did. They had been working on other ways to utilize their effect without dropping their friends in their tracks. One of the things they had come up with was something that was more . . . invitation than hammer.

She closed her eyes and visualized a quiet little hollow under an old tree next to a fast-running creek that was a favorite spot of hers. The sound of the creek rushing by, the smell of growing things, the peace of the place took hold of her heart.

For a long time, this method had only worked with Charles because she could use their mating bond as a conduit. She’d gotten practiced enough that she could use the pack bonds as well, and lately she’d been experimenting using only touch. Unexpectedly, that had proved more powerful—or at least differently powerful—than using the mate or pack bonds.

With skin contact, Anna gained an insight she had never received with her mating bond or the pack bonds: empathy. Or empathy of a sort, anyway. It wasn’t so much that she felt the other wolf’s emotions; what she got was a sort of pressure reading. She could gauge how much emotion they were holding. She’d learned to work with that, to soften the full force of whatever they were feeling, then back away.

It worked better with some wolves than others, of course. She couldn’t get a read, most times, on Bran or Asil, let alone affect the amount of emotion they were feeling. Kara was her best subject. Between them they had fine-tuned the effect so Anna could help Kara just take the edge off—or coax Kara’s inner wolf into a willing sound sleep without affecting any of the wolves nearby. Or at least allowing the nearby wolves to resist the rest she offered them. She planned on trying that now, so that she was less likely to affect Asil.

She didn’t know if her touch would allow her to influence Wellesley’s wolf at all. But if not, she always had her big hammer to whomp him to sleep with. The whomp would hit Asil, too, though.

“I’m going to try asking him to let his wolf sleep—like I do with Kara. I don’t know if this will affect you,” she told Asil. “I’ve never tried it when someone else was touching my experimental subject.”

He laughed, just a little, as if he were not wrestling with another werewolf. “I am prepared, mija. Do what you need to.”

She used her touch on Wellesley’s cheek to extend her invitation of peace. He reached for it immediately—and then yanked her out of her forest glade into Hell.

There was a moment when she could have broken free, then that moment was gone, and Wellesley was in charge. Sort of.

Pain swamped her, pain and weariness so deep that it felt bottomless, and it hurt to breathe. She was lost in Wellesley’s emotions for a long, horrible, endless time.

“Anna? Chiquita? Talk to me.” Asil’s quiet voice grounded her, reminded her that there was a reality besides Wellesley’s pain and brought her back out to where she could have dropped the connection between herself and the other wolf again.

He had let her go.

She took a breath, but she didn’t take her hand off Wellesley.

“I’m all right,” she told Asil. “But this is a little strange. Bear with me—and do not let him up.”

She put her other hand on Wellesley’s face, drew in another deep breath, and let him suck her back into his prison. She didn’t pull away from his pain, and in accepting it, she discovered that she could separate herself a bit—and she understood what had happened.

Wellesley had invited her in. And his invitation had power. His power wasn’t like Bran’s; nor was it witchcraft . . . not quite. But it wasn’t not witchcraft, either. Asil said that Wellesley had magic more akin to Charles’s—and the magic Charles usually used belonged to his mother, a healer and a shaman’s daughter. The power felt more like Charles’s than like Bran’s. But it was not the same as her mate’s.

The space—it wasn’t quite a place—that she found herself in was dark and felt hollow to her ears, as if it were somehow enclosed. But she didn’t know how far to trust her perceptions.

When all else fails, the memory of Charles’s voice rang in her ears, follow your instincts. Werewolves have pretty good instincts.

This felt like the kind of place where instincts would be more useful than intellect.

She moved through the darkness and came upon Wellesley. It wasn’t as if she found him where he had always been. One moment he was not anywhere, and the next he came into being, quite near. Near enough that she took a step backward, becoming aware in that moment that she could step, that she had something that felt like a physical body.

She could perceive Wellesley, the man, quite clearly. But she could also feel the struggle he was carrying on, feel his great weariness and his pain, as if those things were part of what she was seeing, just as easily as she could perceive his outer form.

He fought so hard, and he had been fighting a very, very long time. Nearly a century of battle had worn him down to his essentials. She could see places where he was worn thin, his body fading to gray in patches.

That’s where you can see me, something whispered in her ear. There, in those bare spots.

And that wasn’t scary. Not at all.

But she followed her instincts and didn’t look behind her, though the hairs on the back of her neck were raised as if they were her wolf’s hackles. Whatever was back there smelled evil, rank, and rotting. In a place like this, sometimes noticing things too hard gave them more reality. And that wasn’t instincts talking, it was something Charles had taught her.

She concentrated on Wellesley. What was he fighting? Because she couldn’t perceive his wolf at all. That thing that had whispered in her ear, that wasn’t a wolf. She knew that as instinctively as she saw his fight—though he wasn’t moving at all.

If he wasn’t fighting his wolf spirit, despite Asil’s story, maybe he was fighting for his wolf. That felt right. As soon as she accepted that idea, her connection to Wellesley increased appreciatively until she could feel the echoes of his emotions. It was a terribly intimate connection to have with someone who was basically a stranger—someone not her mate.

She didn’t find the kind of heartbreaking sadness that Asil had led her to expect. There were oodles of despair. But despair was not a synonym for sorrow or regret. Despair was the loss of hope.

Please, he asked her, his voice coming, as that evil thing’s voice had, from just behind her left ear. Please help us, Namwign Bea. We are dying, healer.

What can I do? she asked him, but he just repeated the same request, over and over again, as if he could not hear her.

She reached out and touched his cheek, as she had in the real world. He did not react to her touch, nor did touching him change her perception of him or this place. He had, she thought, told her as much as he could; it was up to her to find out more.

She set out to do that very thing, leaving the human seeming of Wellesley behind her. She couldn’t hear or smell his wolf, but the scent of the evil that had whispered behind her back—that was sharp in her nose. At first she tried to avoid it, but when nothing else drew her attention, she followed her senses.

Eventually or immediately (it was frustratingly difficult to tell), she found a forest of thick green vines that were so tangled she could not go through them. When she turned, to see if she might go around them, they had encircled her.

Trapping her.

She swallowed down fear. Asil was in the real world, watching over her. And her ties to her mate were strong, stronger here than in the real world, as if they had more substance here. She was not alone, no matter what her fears tried to tell her.

She reached out and touched the fibrous growth. As Wellesley himself had, the plants felt real under her touch. She couldn’t see any structure that was holding the vines up; they seemed to be holding themselves in place. Out of the corner of her eye she could see them move, but the ones directly in front of her were motionless.

She closed her fingers around one of the vines. It was nearly as big around as her wrist. Experimentally, she gave it a tug. It gave a little and was answered by motion farther in the tangle, the sound of rustling plant matter filling the emptiness.

She gave it a sharp jerk, calling upon her wolf to help and putting her shoulders and hips into the effort. Reluctantly, the vines shifted until she caught a glimpse of golden fur.

She tried to reach through, to touch the fur—and impaled her hand, the one still hurting from the silver bullet that had kill Hester, upon a thorn as long as her pinkie. The vines, she saw, were covered with long, sharp thorns, though they hadn’t been a moment before.

She growled and redoubled her efforts to pull the vines away. Her hands bled until they were slick, and she left bright trails of blood on the skin of the plants. Wherever her blood stained the vines, they loosened until she could, at last, see the sickened and enraged creature trapped within.

The wolf, presumably Wellesley’s other half, looked plague-ridden. His coat, damaged as if by mange, revealed oozing sores where the thorns had dug in. There were places in which the wolf’s flesh had grown over the vines that trapped him so that he was part of the structure that held him prisoner.

Rationally, she was pretty sure that she was using constructs to try to organize what she felt through the magic: her magic and Wellesley’s magic. That what she saw was more symbolic than actual. But maybe not.

Anna was her father’s daughter, and her father believed in science and rational thinking. She’d been a werewolf for years now, and she still tended to think about it from a scientific viewpoint, as though lycanthropy were a virus.

Faced with a wall of briar-thorned vines straight out of a Grimms’ fairy tale, she’d never had it brought home so clearly that what she was and what she did was magic. Not Arthur C. Clarke magic, where sufficient understanding could turn it into a new science that could be labeled and understood. But a “there’s another form of power in the universe” magic. Something alien, almost sentient, that ran by its own rules—or none. Real magic, something that could be studied, maybe, but would never rest in neatly explainable categories.

With that in mind, she tried visualizing a knife, or something she could cut through the vines with. But apparently that wasn’t something her magic could do. In frustration, she called upon her wolf. But found that she couldn’t change to her wolf, not here in Wellesley’s . . . what? Imagination? Soul? Prison.

But she managed to give her hand claws. She dug into the vines, sinking her claws into the surface of the vine.

Querida, said Asil, are you sure you want to bleed him?

For a bare instant she got a flash of the real world, where her real claws had sunk into Wellesley’s skin.

Horrified, she pulled her claws out of the vines. Almost inadvertently, her gaze met the determined eyes of the trapped golden wolf. A gray, viscous substance leaked down the green exterior of the plant from the holes she had dug in it. And the substance smelled noxiously awful.

And it whispered in her ears. It whispered terrible things, the kinds of things that sounded just like those vines smelled.

There was magic in those vines, which she had known. But what she had not been sure of was whose magic it was. Now she knew that Asil had been very wrong—this was absolutely not a case of Wellesley’s human half and wolf half at odds because their mate had died.

This was a curse, something done to them by someone else. The blood of the vines smelled horribly familiar—Anna knew what blood magic smelled like. In Asil’s story, there had been a mention of a black witch. She could now inform him that the rumor was true. There had definitely been a black witch involved, someone powerful enough to set a binding spell on a werewolf that lasted . . . however long this had lasted.

She didn’t know how to help him.

She could soothe the wolf spirit of any werewolf. She’d learned to send them to sleep, too, for a while. With her help, they had reduced the number of newly turned wolves who died because they could not control their wolf within the first year after their Change.

But if she sent this wolf to sleep, no matter how much he needed the rest—and she could tell that he was as exhausted as his human counterpart, if not more so—he would lose the fight against the thorns.

This was witchcraft, and she knew nothing about how to break a cage wrought by witchcraft. But she knew someone who knew more than she did—and who had his own kind of magic.

Charles, she thought, reaching for him without letting go of the carnivorous vines. Charles, I need you.