Burn Bright

CHAPTER 9

“I don’t remember everything.” Wellesley closed his eyes wearily. “But you have more than earned whatever I can tell you. Asil, my old friend, if you are through being irritated with me, would you open the cupboard above the fridge and get the bottle you will find there? Then, if you will, pour all of those who wish it, but most especially me, a little? I was saving it, but I think this tale . . . I think I need a little strength to tell this tale. I would do it myself, but I would end up on the floor before I got to the fridge.”

Asil folded his arms and stayed where he was. He and Sage had both lost the ready-to-defend-myself body posture they’d had when Anna woke up.

Sage heaved a sigh, opened the cabinet, and made a sound of approval as she pulled out a wine bottle.

“Merlot,” she said. “And a very good label. Yum.” She opened a cupboard and started to close it when she saw nothing but a plastic bag with cups in it.

“No,” said Wellesley. “That is what I have.”

She looked at him. “You want to drink good wine out of disposable cups?”

He shrugged. “I tend to . . .” He paused, looked at Anna, and gave her a small smile before returning his attention to Sage. “I tended to break glass. The plastic is easier to clean up.”

She shook her head, found a corkscrew, and pulled the cork—bringing it to her nose. She breathed in—and a warm, fruity smell wafted through the room even as far as Anna’s love seat.

“Very yum,” Sage said. “Charles?”

“No,” he said.

“Anna?”

Anna hesitated but shook her head. “Not just this moment.” Her stomach was unsettled. She assumed it was from the same thing that was making her head ache and her eyes burn—freeing Wellesley had taken a lot of energy.

“Asil?”

Asil shook his head.

“That’s right,” she said, with a little bite in her tone. “You don’t participate in vice.”

Anna knew for a fact that Asil liked wine, but she didn’t think this conversation was about alcohol. It had the feel of one of those painful battles between lovers that continued past the point where either love or logic could put it right.

He tilted his head, and when he spoke, his voice was gentle and half-apologetic. “I assure you that I am a very bad Muslim. Wine is, for a werewolf, only grape juice—”

“Very expensive grape juice,” said Wellesley. “Also very good grape juice.”

“Though very expensive and good grape juice, I do not feel the need to consume it just now.”

“Okay,” Sage said casually, as if she hadn’t put more meaning into his rejection of the wine than it required. She filled two red plastic cups and brought them both to Wellesley. “You pick.”

“Did you poison one?” he asked with interest.

“You’re a werewolf,” she said dryly. “We don’t need to worry about poisons.”

“That’s not true,” Wellesley countered, taking one of the cups and sipping it with a happy sigh. “Our poisons are just different.”

“Alcohol is technically a poison,” Anna pointed out. “If a human drinks too much, it will kill them.”

Sage sipped her cup, raised her eyebrows, and nodded at Wellesley. “May all our poisons taste so good.” She tipped her cup toward Wellesley without stepping close enough to actually touch his. “To dead brain cells.”

He raised his cup. “To freedom,” he said, and as he did, his eyes flashed bright yellow.

“Now that we have that out of the way,” Sage said, “before story time, I’d like to catch up. Would someone care to explain matters to us?” She looked around and sighed. “To me? Since I have the feeling I’m the only one who doesn’t know what happened.”

“What do you know?” asked Wellesley.

“Charlie stared off into space for five minutes and left me to sort out the Viking twins and brother on my own.” She flashed a smile at the room. “But I learned a lesson in diplomacy from Charlie today. Funny how a few broken bones make even a bunch of Vikings so much more reasonable. I’ll try that if I ever have to deliver a message to them again. Maybe in another twenty years.”

“So not much,” said Asil. “But Sage also knows that you have been having trouble with your wolf—and it made you dangerous to deal with.”

“It was not my wolf that was the problem,” Wellesley told Sage. “Or at least my wolf was not the cause of the problem. I was in a battle for my soul, and the evil spirit that was trying to possess me has been, very slowly, winning.” He smiled broadly, raised his glass at Anna, and said, “Until today.”

“What you tried could have killed my mate,” said Charles softly, and everyone in the room who was not Anna stiffened. Funny how the man, even kneeling beside the couch, could cause so much fear. To her knowledge, he’d never killed anyone without just cause or the Marrok’s orders.

She leaned forward and caught a glimpse of his face.

“I think,” Anna said, touching Charles’s skin, just below his ear, so that he’d pay attention to her, “I think it was what I tried, actually. No one forced me to do anything.”

“Not true,” growled Asil sourly, “whatever you believe, chiquita. I was here, I saw him, felt him pull you into his nightmare. But I, who was supposed to keep you safe, could do nothing because I was occupied holding him so he didn’t kill you physically instead of magically.”

Under her fingertips, Charles’s muscles tightened.

Anna glared at Asil. “So not helping,” she told him. “Okay, so I got yanked into Wellesley’s nightmare—”

“Soul,” said Wellesley.

“That isn’t quite right, either,” Anna said. “Charles?”

There was a little silence, then Charles deliberately relaxed against her, wrapping one of his hands around her knee, which he squeezed. I’m onto you, that squeeze said.

“Vision,” said Charles, “or the Dreamtime, maybe.”

“It was a nightmarish vision, at any rate,” said Anna. “But once I was there, I could have left at any time. As long as I was willing to leave Wellesley’s wolf spirit bound in that witchcraft construct.” She couldn’t imagine doing that—not if she had a chance of freeing him. “But it was Wellesley’s own magic that turned the key, I think. You called it a spirit—was it a living thing that imprisoned your wolf?”

Wellesley nodded. “Magic is a living thing.”

Charles agreed with that assessment because he said, “You saw it as a plant, and that was fairly accurate, I think. Living, but not reasoning except in the most basic of drives.”

Wellesley took a sip of his wine, then tipped his cup to Asil. “I think it lasted so long because my own magic fed the spell. It was growing stronger, and I was growing weaker. I thought it was my wolf I was fighting, too, until Anna saw it with me. For me.”

“Cursed,” said Sage thoughtfully. “You were cursed, and Anna and Charles broke it? With a little help from the Marrok, our leader, who is absent?”

“In a nutshell,” said Anna.

Sage hummed, rubbed the rim of her glass with one of her well-tended nails. “There were rumors of a witch at Rhea Springs.”

“Yes,” Wellesley said heavily. “There was a witch. Or two.” He set his cup on the table and pushed it a little distance from him. “I don’t remember a lot more than before.” He glanced at Charles. “Do you still want this story?” When Charles nodded, Wellesley said, “I suppose it began with Chloe . . . with my wife’s death.”

Charles, who had settled down enough to take a seat on the floor beside the love seat, resting against Anna’s legs, raised a hand to stop Wellesley. He pursed his lips, and said, “You should begin this story where your wolf tells you to begin it.”

Wellesley reached out, took a gulp of his wine, and set the cup rather firmly on the table. “Where my wolf tells me . . .” He blew air out like a startled horse. “He tells me to begin with my Change. That has nothing to do with Rhea Springs.”

Charles grunted. Then he made an amused sound. “Maybe, maybe not. That first story is why, when given the choice, I brought you to my da instead of killing you for the murders of those young women.”

Wellesley blinked at Charles in evident dismay. “Hmm. I thought . . . Hmm. I guess I wasn’t thinking all too clearly then, anyway. I don’t tell that story. Only to your father—who told it to you, I suppose.”

“Before he sent me to Rhea Springs,” said Charles. “Because he knew what I would do with it. If your wolf tells you to start there, please, begin at the beginning.”

Wellesley looked at his cup, at his hands, around the room as if looking for something else to talk about. At last, his gaze settled on Anna. He sighed.

“All right. I was born somewhere in Africa. Probably near the western coast because that’s where most of the slaves came from. I suppose if I traveled back there, I might find it again, given a year or two to wander. But my village was destroyed, my parents killed by slavers, so there has never been any reason for me to return. I was around eleven or twelve at that time, preparing for my manhood ceremony, but still a boy.”

He closed his mouth, shook his head, then said, “I was taken, and none of the next five or six years are relevant to anyone except for me. I choose not to talk about them.”

He let that statement stand, glancing at Charles as if expecting an objection.

When no one said—or did—anything in response, he nodded. “So. In Barbados, I was bought by a man looking for, how did he put it? A strong subject. He bought six or seven of us, about the same age, and took us to an island in the Caribbean. It was not a large island, and he owned it all.”

He looked at Anna. “I never learned the name his own people would have called him, and I will not call him Master.”

“You could call him Moreau,” suggested Charles.

Wellesley gave him a quick, tight smile. “No. In the book, Moreau was a scientist, a doctor. The man who owned me was no mad scientist. He was simply evil, his soul destroyed by his own actions.

“But in the end, he is not important to the tale, this man who was not my master,” he said. “What is important is that man was raised, as many people in his class and station were, by servants and slaves. His nurse was an evil woman, a woman of power. She escaped hanging by fleeing aboard a ship headed to Barbados as a bondswoman.” Wellesley closed his mouth and shook his head slightly, as if the mere words had conjured up too much emotion to allow him to continue.

“Witch,” said Asil darkly into the pause, as if he could not help himself. “She was an Irish witch. It is true that she escaped hanging for the death of a child in her care, but I suspect that she was more frightened of the witches who were pursuing her for what she stole from them.”

“Who told you my story?” said Wellesley suspiciously.

“You did,” Asil told him. “This part at least. One night after a full moon, shortly after I arrived here.”

Wellesley stared at him, then looked down, frowning. At last he nodded. “Yes. Yes. I am sorry. My memory is tangled. I think I remember. You told me of your mate’s death. I told you . . . parts of this story.”

“You were talking of the nursemaid,” Sage said, her body leaning forward on the kitchen chair where she sat. She had a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the table.

Anna wondered what elements of Wellesley’s story had tangled with Sage’s own to make her engage so strongly with it. Sage wasn’t old-old. Older than she looked, maybe, but not old enough to have experienced institutionalized slavery. Maybe it was the witches. Witches tended to send the hairs on the back of Anna’s neck up, too.

“Yes,” agreed Wellesley. “The nursemaid was a witch. No one paid attention to such women. They were to keep quiet and do the work of raising the children. The children who were the future of the family. Someone, you would think, should have understood just how much power that gave them.” He shook his head with sorrowful incredulity. “This man’s nursemaid was a witch, Irish, yes, because her accent was still strong. But how she came to the Caribbean and why—this was all based on rumors in the slave pens. Who knows how much of it was true?” He sent a frowning look toward Asil.

“The Irish witch part was,” said Asil when it seemed that Wellesley had quit speaking. “Sometime since I first heard your story, I realized that I knew another part of it. I knew the witches who were hunting that one. She stole a small book of family spells from one of the nastier witch clans in Northern Europe, the kind of spellbook witches kill for. As I know what that witch did—and I know the rumors of that family’s powers—it was not difficult to connect the two stories.”

“You knew the witches whose spells she used?” asked Wellesley in a dangerous voice.

Asil smiled, showing white teeth. “We were not friends, Wellesley.”

“Asil doesn’t like witches,” said Anna firmly, and the tension in the air died down a notch.

“That bloodline has died out,” said Asil. “Not entirely by my efforts.”

“Well and so,” said Wellesley. “Well and so. It seems that this will be informative for all of us. This Irish witch was sold as a bondswoman to my . . . to the man’s parents when he was eight or nine. She was given the raising of him. Rumor was that his parents were the first people he and his mentor tortured and killed—but I suspect not. The slaves were easier prey, and predators usually begin with easier prey.”

“Not always,” said Sage into the silence that followed. “But usually.”

“No one cared about the slaves, not even the other slaves,” Wellesley said abruptly. Then he stopped and gulped down the wine until it was gone. He shook his head. “That’s not for this tale, either. This witch could make collars that forced the person wearing one to obedience. She had to torture a lot of people to death for the power to create each one.” There was horror in his eyes, but his voice was steady.

Wellesley, thought Anna, had witnessed the making of those collars. She occasionally had nightmares about her encounters with witches. So did Charles.

Wellesley continued speaking quietly. “I understand at first she tried to use them on all the slaves but found that it took power to control the collars, too. She could use no more than six of them at a time or they became less effective.” He grimaced. “The power in them had to be renewed twice a year.

“It was a matter of great disappointment to her that instead of an island of willing slaves, who would torture themselves for her pleasure, she had to make do with ‘special’ slaves who enforced her will on the rest of the people on the island. If one of the collared slaves died or was killed, she replaced him with another. All the time that I knew her, she was trying to find a way to make the collars more permanent, to make them power themselves.”

He had to quit talking again. Sage reached out a hand to him—wolves tended to touch each other a lot when they were under stress. But Wellesley wrapped his arms around himself and shook his head. He rocked a little in the chair, and his eyes glittered with shades of gold.

“And then they found themselves a werewolf,” Charles said when the silence stretched too long.

Wellesley nodded, but he still didn’t speak. Maybe he couldn’t.

After a moment, Charles went on. “Probably he was himself a victim. He came to the island because there were stories of a woman who knew magic, who knew how to remove curses.”

“Be careful of those,” said Asil in a low voice. “The only people who can remove curses can put them on, too.”

Wellesley looked at Anna. “Not always,” he said in an intense voice. “There are healers in the world as well as killers.”

“That was mostly Charles and Bran,” Anna said, embarrassed at receiving such a look. “They had the power. I was just a conduit, I think.”

“As I said,” agreed Asil. “It takes someone who can deliver a curse to break a curse.” He and Charles exchanged a look of acknowledgment.

Wellesley grunted. He took up the story, but his voice was rapid and his sentences jerky. His account skipped around ungracefully.

“That part all happened before I came to the island. They frequently went to Barbados and bought slaves at the market there—including me. They herded all of us into a shed and turned the werewolf loose on us. Mostly the wolf just killed the people they threw in with him. Of my group, I was the only survivor. After my Change, it took another four or five years before they had six werewolves at their bidding, including the original wolf.

“We were, all of us, bound by the evil thing that the witch collared us with. We had no free will, no thoughts that were not put in our heads by the witch and her leman.”

Anna met Charles’s eyes, because she knew another wolf who had been forced to do the will of a witch.

Yes, said Brother Wolf. The Marrok’s story is different in many ways, but Wellesley’s origin reflects the creation of our father in the dawn of time. It is one of the reasons our father asked Wellesley not to speak of his origin. We do not want witches to know it is possible.

At the same time that Brother Wolf was speaking to her, Charles said, “Recently, I have learned that Bonarata, the vampire who rules Europe, had a collar he used to control a werewolf, though it was specific, I believe, to werewolves. It was also old. And it has failed—and he has no witch who can replace it.”

Wellesley growled and stiffened in his seat.

“Such things are never completely forgotten,” said Asil. “It is the way of the world.”

“If Bonarata cannot find a witch to make him a new one, then there is not a witch left in Europe, at least, with that ability,” Charles observed.

“Or maybe those witches are not willing to work for the vampire king,” Sage speculated.

But Asil shook his head. “No witch in Europe could say no to Bonarata. He is extremely persuasive, and it has been a very long time since the witches were powerful enough that they could do battle with such a one as he.”

“What happened, Wellesley?” asked Anna. “How did you get free?” Because obviously he had—and she wanted him to finish this story because the memories hurt him.

“She worked her magic only on those of us of pure African blood,” Wellesley said. “Holding the witchborn is more difficult than a normal person, just as holding a werewolf is more difficult. She knew that the native peoples in the Caribbean had their own version of witchborn, though nothing as powerful as the European witches—or so she believed. Myself, I am not convinced. Most of the slaves on that island carried native blood, so they bought ‘pure African’ slaves to turn into collared wolves. She believed there were no mageborn people among those of us born in Africa.”

Charles snorted.

Wellesley nodded. “Ridiculous. All peoples have those born who can feel the pulse of the world. My father came from a family known for producing powerful healers. It is magic that is as different from witchcraft as wood is from steel. Subtle and powerful, perhaps, but also slow. My family’s magic brought good harvests, rain in season, and kept the wild predators from the village. Influencing natural tendencies toward beneficial results. It was not helpful in keeping the slavers away.”

He paused, as if waiting for questions, but when no one said anything, he continued, “I will tell you the next part as a village storyteller would, because that is how I think of it. Because it makes the most sense that way.”

He took a breath, and when he began again, his voice was rich with drama instead of jerky and painful.

“One day, in the late fall, without warning, came a storm the likes of which I had never seen before,” he said. “The winds came, powerful spirits of the air. They battered the island for hours upon hours until the buildings became no more than piles of toothpicks, picked up and scattered together in a puzzle not even the gods could sort out. The rains came, too, so much rain that the waters in the river and in the lake welled up. The secret hope rose within me that the island might sink beneath the sea forever, that the great sea would drown the evil.”

He paused for dramatic effect.

“But it was only a very small hope, buried deep where I kept the few thoughts that were my own, because I was her creature then. And it seemed that hope was doomed because the witch drove away the spirits of the winds and the spirits of the rain, so that the big house and all the ground around it remained safe from them.”

He lifted his cup, found it dry, and set it down. Without a word, Asil filled the cup with the rest of the wine in the bottle and handed it over.

Wellesley took a sip and continued, “The eye of the storm came in the middle of the night. The winds calmed and the rain turned into a drizzle. It was at that time that the greater spirit of the hurricane came to me. Larger and more powerful than the wind or rain spirits, he was close enough to this world that he could speak with me.

“‘Brother,’ he said, ‘why do you serve such a wicked one when you have in you the blood of earth magic? Of a priestess lineage that is a thousand years long?’”

Wellesley shook his head and held out his hands palm up and brought them slowly down. “It was as if the rains washed away clouds, and the wind blew away fog. My mind was my own for the first time since the witch had placed her collar around my neck.

“‘Spirit,’ I told him, ‘it is not of my will, but by this evil thing born of foul death and ugliness that I wear. This is a strange working I cannot fight.’

“‘Why, then, do you not take it off?’ he said.

“I tried then to do that very thing. Before this time, I could not even conceive of such an action. But alas, my hands could not break it, though I tried with all my strength.

“I cried out in despair, ‘It is impossible for me. I am born of a grand heritage, it is true. Some of that power and grace lives inside this body, but great is the corruption that binds me. Too great for a man such as I to break or remove.’

“The spirit of the hurricane looked upon that which I wore around my neck, and said, ‘Brother, truly this is evil. I can hear the cries of the tortured souls whose substance was used herein. It is greater than even I might destroy.’

“And truly my heart knew despair then. If the spirit of the greatest storm that I had ever seen could not prevail over the witch’s power, then I would serve her until the end of my days or hers.

“The spirit of the hurricane, seeing my sorrow, took pity upon me then. He said, ‘Come out to my mother, who is far mightier than I. Surely, she can defeat the dark magic in your binding. I will ask it of her, but you should know that she does not always do as I ask. She may decide that to rid the world of such evil, your life is also forfeit.’

“In the end, what choice had I? I would rather be dead than to wear the witch’s collar to the end of my life. So I followed him, and he led me past locked doors and my sleeping comrades. No one heard us, and no doors could stand in our way. He led me to the edge of the island. The beaches were all gone, as were any of the gentle slopes, buried under the fury of the storm. If there was an easy way to the ocean, the spirit chose not to take me there. We stood, at last, at the top of a cliff.

“‘My brother,’ said the spirit, ‘if you would be free of this evil, you must jump.’”

Wellesley drank again. There was a trickle of sweat on his face. It sounded like a fairy tale, this story. But Anna, who’d seen Charles interact with the spirits of the forest, believed him. If she had had any doubts, the ring of honesty in his voice would have disabused her of them.

“I knew,” said Wellesley heavily, “that I could no longer swim as I had as a child, that the magic of the wolf does not protect us from water. And had I been as good a swimmer as any mermaid’s child, it would have done me no good leaping off a cliff that high. But I commanded my own actions and thoughts for the first time in a very long time, so I jumped, and the spirit jumped with me. I can still hear his laughter in my ears when a storm rises here in the mountains.

“‘Mother,’ he called as we fell, ‘I have found a prisoner of wickedness. A child of nature who should be unbound. Will you free him?’

“And, in answer, the salt water reached up and engulfed me.”

Wellesley paused again.

“I thought I was dead,” he said at last. “I thought I was dead, and I welcomed it. But I awoke on a beach littered with the detritus of the storm. The sun was high in a clear sky, and my skin was covered with salt.”

He smiled, a wolfish smile, and his voice roughened and the irises of his eyes brightened.

“The witch came down to the beach soon thereafter. ‘I have found you at last,’ she said in triumph. ‘All of the other wolves are dead. I was worried that we would not be able to make more of you. Come, let us show my love that the fates have not yet turned against us.’ And she turned around and started walking back to the big house.

“I had never changed except under the moon. But the ocean and the moon speak to each other as lovers do, and I have no doubt that it was the sea who gave me power and strength. I have never, before or since, taken wolf form as quickly as I did then. One moment I was human and the next a wolf. I killed the witch while she was still planning how to find more slaves to Change and control. The only regret I have is that it was quick and painless—I was too worried about her power to give her the death she deserved.

“Then I went to the big house and killed the man who had given her free rein. I found every one of those collars, and I threw them into the sea where She could do with them as it pleased her. I hope that She freed the tormented souls who gave their pain and their lives for the witch’s spell.”

He took a deep, shuddering breath. Then, in a perfectly normal voice, he said, “There were only a few of us left alive on the island—and all of them were afraid of me, for which I have never blamed them. Eventually, a ship came to see how we had weathered the storm. Upon discovering that we were alone, they claimed us all. But without a witch to hold me, I soon left them, and slavery, behind me.

“Bran asked that this tale not be told lightly, which I have never done—” He paused and looked at Asil. “Except the once. These are Bran’s reasons, and they are good ones: First, the manner and matter of the collar’s making must lie with the dead if it can be made to do so. Second, which is adjunct to the first, that a witch can control a person’s mind and body is something that should not be known if those of us who are not wholly human want to live shoulder to shoulder with the humans in peace. And finally, there is this, my own reason. This is the story of my making, a private thing. I do not wish that it be a matter of common knowledge.”

Anna thought of the way the wolves had all watched her last night as she came in from the truck where the body of one of the people who had abused her rested. She understood exactly why he didn’t want people talking about it.

“You said ‘manner and matter,’” said Sage thoughtfully. If she was as affected by his story as she’d looked in the beginning, she was hiding it better now. “Does that mean that you know how to make the collars?”

Wellesley’s eyes grew cold, then lightened to icy gold. “It is something that does not concern you.”

She put her hand up. “I only ask because if someone thinks you know how to make them, you have a target on your back the size of Texas.”

Anna remembered Charles saying that there were wildlings here who knew secrets that people would kill for. If Wellesley was the only one who knew how to make those collars . . . he’d be hunted by every black witch on the planet.

Wellesley didn’t seem worried about it. His shoulders relaxed as he told Sage, “We all of us werewolves have a target on our back. It’s not a matter of if but when someone pulls the trigger.”

“Cheerful thought,” drawled Asil. “But let us put that one aside—since there is nothing we can do about it that we are not already doing. What does that have to do with Rhea Springs?”

Wellesley shrugged. “I don’t know. Charles said to begin where my wolf told me to—and that’s where my wolf told me to begin.”

Charles was watching Wellesley with a thoughtful expression.

Wellesley shrugged. “As I told you, I really don’t remember a lot more about Rhea Springs than I did before Anna broke the curse. Not much at all, really. I remember going there—and I remember your spiriting me out of that jail. But I still don’t remember much in between, just bits and pieces.” He bowed his head. “I remember the witch’s face but nothing else about her.”

Charles said, “Maybe you should—”

The phone rang.

Wellesley rose from the table and glanced at Charles—who shrugged. He put in an earpiece and hit a button on the phone.

“Hello?” Wellesley said, and listened a moment.

He’d found a way to have a private conversation in a room full of werewolves, Anna thought, delighted. She’d have to find out what he used.

He hit another button, and asked as he lifted the handset, “Could you repeat that, please?”

Leah’s voice, breathless and hoarse, replied, “I asked, are Asil and Anna there?”

Asil took the phone from Wellesley. “We are here.”

“I’m calling from Jericho’s phone,” she said. “We’ve got bodies here but no Jericho. You should come.”

“Charles and Sage are here, too. Do you want us all?”

She made an exasperated sound. “What did you do? Decide to get together for a party? Never mind. Yes. Everyone should come and help me search for Jericho. We don’t want him running around loose—or in someone else’s hands, for that matter.”

She left them in a fit of dial tone.

“Are you up for this?” asked Charles.

It took Anna a minute to realize he was asking her.

She put her feet on the floor and stood up. “I’m okay,” she said. “I won’t be up to a Wild Hunt, but I’ll be fine.”

Wellesley said, “I need to eat and rest.”

Asil gave him a frown. “You weren’t invited, my friend. I’m very glad that your wolf has evidently been freed from a witch’s curse—but that’s a long way from being safe and dependable.”

Wellesley laughed, but his eyes were wary. “I suppose it is.”

“I could stay with him to make sure he’s okay,” offered Sage. She gave the artist a brilliant smile. “I’ve been a fan for a long time. I’d love to commission something if you are willing.”

Wellesley shook his head. “I’d rather be alone if you don’t mind. I have a lot to absorb. A little rest and a lot of food will see me right as rain. As far as a painting is concerned—I’ll get back to you on that. Most of my paintings were done to stave off madness. I don’t know what I’ll want to paint now.”

“Leave him,” said Charles.

“Come on, children,” said Asil. “You are dawdling.”

WITHOUT DISCUSSION, CHARLES climbed into the driver’s seat of Sage’s SUV, setting the Viking’s axe in the back. He nodded to Anna to get into the passenger side. Evidently, the keys were in the SUV because it started right up. Sage didn’t look happy about her car being co-opted—or maybe just about being left to ride with Asil. But when Anna started to get out, Sage waved her hand and gave her a quick grin.

There was no room to turn around, which didn’t seem to bother Charles a bit. He gunned the engine and backed up the twisty, scary, narrow track up the cliffside at about thirty miles per hour.

Anna choked back a laugh, made sure her seat belt was tight, and closed her eyes. “I hope Sage has good insurance,” she said.

“I don’t like this situation at all,” Charles said instead of responding to her banter—unless he had flashed her that quick grin of his. Had she missed it by being a coward?

The SUV took a sharp turn and reversed directions. She opened her eyes, and they were back on the safer track, headed down it at what would have been a crazy speed if anyone else were driving.

“Which situation?” she asked. “Wellesley’s unexpected curse? Missing werewolf? Or bodies at the missing werewolf’s house?”

She couldn’t find it in herself to be as concerned about the bodies as she would have been before Hester was killed. They could have been random hikers who had gotten way, way, way off the beaten path and run into a crazy werewolf. But she was making the assumption that they were the enemy because cooler heads than hers were considering other possibilities.

“What are they trying to accomplish?” Charles said. “It’s bad to have an enemy with the kinds of resources these people apparently have—but it is infinitely worse to have crazy people as enemies.”

“Evidently,” Anna said, “you also consider it a certainty that the bodies that Leah found belonged to our enemy and not Canadian hikers who have been wandering around the mountains lost for a few months.”

He started to say something, then closed his mouth. He gave her an assessing look. “Why Canadian?”

She held up a finger. “Local hikers would figure out that downhill and south mean safety, uphill and north just gets worse. Downhill and south would take them away from our territory.” She held up a second finger. “Casual hikers would have fallen down and died before they ever reached anywhere near here—I don’t know exactly where Jericho lives because I’ve never heard his name before, but I’m assuming it’s in this general direction.”

“And lost Canadian hikers are the only ones who could get here by going downhill and south,” he said. He grinned at her. “It’s not quite true, we run hikers out of our territory all the time, and there’s a lot of federal land between us and Canada.”

“And,” Anna said, holding up a third finger, “Canadian hikers would be too polite to end up as bodies. Thus the bodies must not belong to random hikers.”

He gave a shout of laughter. “I love you. I came to the same conclusion by a different path. I’m pretty sure the bodies at Jericho’s belong to the same group who went after Hester and Jonesy.”

She looked at him. “How did you get there?”

“There are no such things as coincidences. The last time one of our wildlings interacted with a normal human was six months ago. Now we have two in two days.”

“Leah didn’t say how old the bodies were,” Anna commented. “When was the last time someone heard from Jericho?”

He shrugged. “Da has kept me busy with other things. I haven’t talked to any of the wildlings since last winter.”

The Marrok used Charles, Asil, and a couple other of the older wolves to check on the wildlings once a month or so as soon as the snow flew, saving a few of them to visit himself. Not that the wildlings couldn’t take care of themselves, most of them—it was what they would do to take care of themselves that worried Bran.

“Why do you think going after Jericho makes no sense?” Anna asked. “They went after Hester. What makes him different?”

“They have werewolves, so they don’t just need genetic samples.” A deer stepped onto the road, and he braked, slewing the big rig sideways in an effort to miss the doe. He stopped about three feet from the deer, who had frozen.

“Go on, little sister,” he told her. “There is no one hungry today.”

Released from whatever instinct had caused her to plant her feet and remain still, she bounced up the hill and into the trees.

Anna looked behind them, but there was no sign of Asil and Sage.

“There are several ways to get there from Wellesley’s,” said Charles as he put his foot down on the gas again. “I expect Asil hopes to beat us there.”

The race is on, thought Anna, but she didn’t say it. It was either a guy thing or a dominant-werewolf thing. Either way, Charles and Asil would enjoy the challenge.

“So why does Hester make more sense than Jericho?” she asked.

“Jericho is an atomic bomb waiting to go off. Questioning Jericho makes no sense at all.”

“I’m not familiar with him,” Anna said. “But if he was on Leah’s list—didn’t she have the safer wolves?”

“Jericho was on Sage’s and my list,” Charles said. “One of the dangerous ones. I don’t know what Leah is doing there.”

“If they are recruiting,” said Anna thoughtfully, “they are being stupid about who they are choosing.”

“Lethally so,” agreed Charles.

“The only thing that makes sense from our end is that they want to cause chaos while Bran is away. But even that doesn’t quite work,” she said. “Because then all the surveillance equipment at Hester’s is a lot of risk and money for an end that is easier to reach different ways. If they have a helicopter, they could just drop something nasty on your father’s house from the air. More effect and less risk.”

“They want something,” Charles agreed.

“Maybe Jericho will know what they wanted,” she said.

Charles made a noise.

“That wasn’t a hopeful grunt,” she said.

“Jericho can barely communicate on a good day,” Charles told her. “If there are bodies around, it isn’t a good day.”

“We don’t have enough information to make sense of what they want,” said Anna.

Charles nodded. “I don’t like being in this position. Reacting and not acting. We can’t get to an offensive position until we know more.”

“Speaking of knowing more,” Anna said. “What exactly happened at Rhea Springs? Asil gave me what he knew—but there wasn’t much of it.” She tapped her fingers on the witch gun lying on the seat between them. “Witches seem to be cropping up all over the place.”

Charles pursed his lips. “They do, don’t they? There is no reason that Rhea Springs has anything to do with our current situation, though.”

“Maybe not,” Anna said. “But Wellesley certainly has knowledge that someone might be looking for. If Wellesley is the wildling our enemy questioned Hester about, then maybe Rhea Springs has more to do with our situation than we think.”

Charles nodded. “Wellesley didn’t remember anything when I got there,” he told her. “Most of what I know comes from the newspapers. Rhea Springs was a small town of about a hundred people in 1930, three hundred if you counted the people who lived in the general area. A hotel and a hot spring with reputed healing powers was the major source of economy. I don’t remember exactly what year it was, but the Alpha of the Tennessee pack sent us some newspaper articles about a naked black man found with the bodies of some white people. The details varied from article to article—one said four young women. Another claimed it was fifteen children. The naked black man, our informant told us, was a werewolf and gave us a name that wasn’t Wellesley. Da knew the werewolf in question, told me his story, and sent me out on the next train.”

Charles quit speaking for a while. Anna waited, content to watch his big hands steadying the SUV as it bounced and slithered on the rough road. She loved his hands, broad-palmed and long-fingered. They were adept on the steering wheel, the fretboard of his guitar, or her skin.

“News didn’t get to us up here in Montana with anything like swiftness. By the time I got to the town where he was being held—a slightly larger town some miles from Rhea Springs—his trial was already over. Considering the era, the place, the color of his skin, Wellesley’s fate was determined no matter what his defense. I’d known before I got on the train what the result would be. Capital punishment was the electric chair. I don’t know that electricity has ever killed one of us—but I doubt it would make him very happy. Leaving him to the authorities just wasn’t possible. My orders were to kill or rescue him, depending upon what he told me.”

He fell silent again.

“What did he tell you?” she asked.

“That he didn’t remember anything. He wasn’t in good shape—his wolf . . .” He paused. “. . . what I thought was his wolf, anyway, would break in and babble some crazy stuff. A witch. Witchcraft. I didn’t smell the witchcraft on him—and I’d like to know how they did that. That had to be a major working to hold his wolf this long, and I didn’t catch the scent of witches anywhere.”

“Did you check the crime scene?” Anna asked.

He shook his head. “I knew his story. I thought he was talking about earlier. A stray Indian wasn’t much better off than a black man in that time and place, so I didn’t do a lot of wandering about. In the end . . .” His voice trailed off, then he shook his head. “In the end, I figured that Da could keep him safe with the other wildlings if he never recovered.”

“His story was so close to what happened to your da,” Anna said softly. “You couldn’t bear to kill him—innocent or guilty.”

“And once I realized that,” Charles said, “I didn’t bother investigating it further. I got him out of there and on a train to Montana.” He glanced at Anna and smiled. “No, I didn’t buy tickets. We rode freight to Billings, then took horses the rest of the way.”

“I think,” she said slowly, going over what Wellesley had said—and what he hadn’t—in her head, “that he believed you broke him out of jail because he was innocent.”

“I know,” Charles said. “I wish I could go back and investigate for him. I don’t even know, really, who the victims were. At the time, I didn’t care. Maybe he’ll remember more when he rests up.”

“You didn’t want to find out that he’d killed fifteen children,” said Anna. “Because that would mean you’d have had to kill him.”

“Yes,” agreed Charles soberly.

“That briar curse is interesting,” she said. “More interesting as you think about it. Asil said there was supposed to be a witch in the vicinity. I wonder if the dead people were all witches.”

“I wonder if they were all the victims of a witch,” Charles said, “including Wellesley. I wonder if I let a witch free because I didn’t investigate further—and how many more people she killed before she died.”

“Oh,” Anna said, understanding how Charles operated. He was responsible for the world, her husband. She couldn’t change how he felt. She put her hand on his leg. “I hadn’t thought of it like that. I understand. Maybe you should do a little research on Rhea Springs? A place where the hot springs were supposed to be magically healing sounds like somewhere a witch might have set up shop, do you think?”

“Black witches seldom do healing,” he said dryly.

“Black witches have to start out somewhere, don’t they?” she asked.

The next mile or so was traveled in thoughtful silence.

“Not a lot of information left on Rhea Springs, I imagine,” Charles said. “And any human still alive who once lived in that place would have been a young child.”

“Still,” Anna said, “maybe one of the wolves from that neck of the woods will remember something.”

“Maybe,” he said. And from Charles that was as good as a declaration that he’d pursue the matter. He sounded as though the thought made him feel better.

She only hoped that he didn’t find out that there had been a witch and that she had killed fifteen children. Witches had the same life span as any other human, though—with very few exceptions. The witch who cursed Wellesley, no matter what she’d done, was beyond justice now.