Burn Bright

CHAPTER 11

Anna bolted before her brain caught up to her feet.

Skinwalker, Brother Wolf breathed into their bond. The Diné would call him a skinwalker. Such as he can only be killed by fire or a medicine man’s magic.

And then Brother Wolf drove her to her knees with the sudden, complete memory of a smoky, dimly lit place where eight boys listened in terror as an old man told them a warning tale about a monster. And the information the old man had given those boys terrified her, too.

Devon whined. Anna turned her head to see that he was trotting back and forth, watching the battling wolves—because apparently whatever wore Jericho’s body didn’t have a problem making a quick shift to wolf.

Given what she now knew about Jericho, she should be running.

“Devon,” she said. “Devon—that’s not Jericho.” She remembered what Charles had said before he attacked. “Jericho’s wolf had yellow eyes.”

Devon froze and looked at her.

“Skinwalker,” she told him. “They kill the people whose form they want, then they steal it. They wear their whole person like a coat. It’s not Jericho, Devon. He’s dead, and the skinwalker stole his body and his memories to wear.”

Flesh and spirit, Charles’s grandfather had said. That must be why the blood bonds between the Marrok and the wildlings had not warned him and, through the Marrok, the rest of the pack. But the thought of it made her want to be sick. How much of Jericho was left? Did he understand what the skinwalker was doing? Or was he truly dead and “spirit” meant something different?

Anna, said Charles, I cannot defeat him. I have magic, but it is not the kind that my grandfather meant. He meant the magic of a holy man. Get out of here, my love. Get out of here and warn the others. Call my da and tell him he—

His voice in her head broke off as the air around the thing that was Jericho rippled where the werewolf had been. And in its place was a bear far larger than the grizzlies that roamed the pack territories.

Anna, please, Charles implored.

You must survive to tell our da—in case he takes us, said Brother Wolf. He won’t be able to tell until it is too late.

Charles expected to die. He expected to die and that the skinwalker would take his shape. As the skinwalker had probably been planning on doing to Anna after separating her from the others by sending them off after Sage.

Sage had known what the skinwalker was—had known who it was. That’s what those strange-at-the-time requests had been while Jericho had been talking. Sage and the skinwalker knew each other—and Sage had been asking Jericho-who-was-not-Jericho not to betray her to them.

They had been looking for Wellesley. Jericho-who-was-not-Jericho had called him Frank Bright—the name Wellesley had used before he’d come here. They’d gone to Hester and to Jericho because—Anna would put money on this—those were the only two wildlings whose homes Sage had been to. But sometime during the attack on Jericho, the skinwalker had seen the chance to do more than that, to become one of the Marrok’s pack.

Anna tried to visualize what she’d seen when that stink bomb had gone off and driven Charles off the trail. Had it come from Jericho—who had been on the trail above Charles? Charles, in wolf form already, was the one most likely to catch Sage. But the distraction had also allowed the skinwalker to isolate Charles and Anna from the rest—and ultimately, Jericho had been trying to isolate Anna.

And then there was Sage. Had she been looking for Wellesley for over twenty years? Or had her primary purpose been as a spy?

Later, Anna told herself, she’d figure it out later. She would not allow the skinwalker to have her mate. Charles had to keep fighting while she looked for a way to kill it.

Anna didn’t know where a holy man was to be found, but she did know that they had just burned down a cabin, and all three of the vehicles parked only a couple of miles down the trail had been at Hester’s cabin yesterday—and Asil had been in charge of the fire.

While she’d been thinking—only a second or two, she was pretty sure—Devon had disappeared. Apparently, the Kodiak bear that had appeared in Jericho-the-wolf’s stead had convinced him when she had not.

Anna rolled to her feet and sprinted for where they’d left the vehicles. There wouldn’t be a holy man waiting for her, but maybe someone would still have things that she could use to set a skinwalker on fire. She tried not to remember that she’d ridden in two of those vehicles and didn’t recall noticing the smell of anything volatile.

THE CARS WERE all locked. Since Asil had been in charge of Hester’s pyre, his was the first car she assaulted. She could probably have broken the latch on the back hatch but wasn’t sure enough to try it. If she failed, she might just jam the stupid thing—and that would slow her down further.

So she broke the driver’s side window with her elbow. A rock would have saved her some pain, but she was too worried about time to look around for a rock.

“Keep him busy,” she muttered to her husband, but she didn’t send it along their bond. She didn’t want to distract him. That Kodiak had been as big as a truck and unholy quick.

Charles was the bogeyman of the werewolves. He could take a bear, no matter how big it was. And all he had to do was hold on until she got back.

She popped the back hatch of Asil’s Mercedes open with a button and found a barbecue lighter but nothing else. Nor was there any sign that there had ever been anything else. Knowing Asil, he probably had C-4 stashed in sealed containers along with detonators somewhere in the car. But no one but Asil would be able to find it.

She wondered if C-4 would kill the skinwalker as well as fire would.

“Come on, come on,” she said, frustrated at the empty vehicle. “It’s a start, but I need something bigger.”

Not too far away, she heard the sound of a motorcycle and wondered if Sage had planned far enough ahead to have stashed a vehicle to use—or if she had just found it somewhere. Anna supposed it might be someone else, but the wildlings lived in the most remote corners of the pack territory, so it was unlikely.

She broke the window on Sage’s SUV with her left elbow since her right was still sore from Asil’s car. A quick search, during which the motorcycle appeared to be approaching closer, showed her that there was nothing in Sage’s car that would be useful. But she grabbed the witch gun and tucked it into the back of her jeans. She was pretty sure that the old shaman who talked to Charles’s grandfather would have tried a witch gun on a skinwalker if he’d had one.

The motorcycle rider must be coming here because this was remote enough that there wasn’t anywhere else. That seemed to indicate that whoever it was, it was not Sage after all. If she had a motorcycle to escape on, Sage would be riding away from here as fast as she could go.

The shell on the back of Leah’s pickup wasn’t locked. In the bed of the truck, bungee-corded to the side, was a battered, metal, five-gallon can of gasoline.

“Hallelujah,” she said. “Just keep him busy, Charles, I’m coming.”

She hopped out of Leah’s truck with the full gas can in one hand and the lighter in the other just as the motorcycle—carrying a helmetless Wellesley—roared up the track. He slid the dirt bike to a stop with all the aplomb of a motocross maven.

“What’s wrong?” Wellesley asked at the same time she asked him, “What are you doing here?”

He waved at her to get her to answer his question first.

“Charles—” She started to tell him, then realized how long that would take.

“I don’t have time for this,” she told him impatiently, and took off up the trail, carrying the mostly full five-gallon can and the lighter.

She didn’t care if she lit the whole forest on fire just so long as she saved Charles. Wellesley ran beside her. He made no effort to take the gas can from her.

“Talk while you run,” he said.

“If I can talk,” she retorted, increasing her pace, “then I’m not running fast enough.”

Apparently, he could run and talk at her fastest pace because he said, “I’m here because my wolf spirit woke me up from a sound sleep and told me that our enemy was this way. So what are you trying to burn, Anna Cornick? Why are you in such a hurry to do it?”

“Skinwalker,” panted Anna. Deciding talking might be useful after all, she slowed enough that she could manage short sentences. “I think that’s the Native American version of a black witch.”

Wellesley smiled, his eyes bright gold, and when he spoke, his voice had a rasp of wolf in it, too. “I know what a skinwalker is. There was a skinwalker at Rhea Springs. She is here.”

“It is a him,” Anna huffed.

“Doesn’t matter to her what form she takes,” said Wellesley. “Male or female.”

There was a lot of confidence in his voice. “You remembered what happened at Rhea Springs,” she said.

“I did,” he said. “I remembered—”

Pain hit her through her mating bond, sharp and sudden. She put a foot wrong and tumbled into a tree, unable to catch her balance while her mind was consumed with agony that had nothing to do with her fall.

THE THING THAT wore Jericho’s flesh had not been a werewolf for long enough to figure out how to fight in that body. It didn’t take the skinwalker long to figure that out and take on another form.

The Kodiak, the grizzly’s bigger, stronger brother, outweighed Charles five to one, and it was very nearly as quick as he was. But it wasn’t the first bear Charles had fought, not even the first Kodiak. He preferred to leave them alone if he could—even a werewolf had its limits, and a Kodiak was very close to them. But there were times, like now, when the fight could not be avoided.

Charles was more maneuverable and—Brother Wolf was certain after the first few minutes of battle—more experienced at utilizing the abilities of Brother Wolf’s form than the skinwalker was used to using the bear’s form.

Even so, the bear made the skinwalker much more formidable and less clumsy than he’d been as a wolf. This bear form was something he’d fought in before.

When dealing with a predator larger than he, Charles liked to use the hit-and-run method of fighting. It was less effective against the bear than he liked—the bear had a thick, tough hide covered by thick, tough fur and a layer of fat beneath that. Although Charles was able to get a lot of surface cuts in, they weren’t deep enough to be anything more than annoying. But engaging the bear fully was likely to end up with Charles flattened under the bear’s greater strength. The trick to fighting bears was to tire them out.

The single hit the bear had gotten in had cracked three ribs. Charles, remembering just in time that he could draw upon the pack’s strength for healing, managed to stay maneuverable, though he didn’t heal them entirely.

Even with pack magic, the bones were likely to remain fragile for a day or two, and a little pain would remind him of that. Additionally, he didn’t want to use up all that he could draw from the pack. It had taken a lot of power to free Wellesley, and although there were some real heavy hitters in his pack, he didn’t have the experience to know what the limits were.

He learned something about the skinwalker in the opening bit of hit-and-run, too. Most of the time, Charles was fighting the bear’s intelligence and not the skinwalker’s. Most of the time, the bear fought like a bear. Which was smart on the part of the skinwalker because that bear knew how to fight.

But if he was fighting a bear, there were some things Charles could do.

He got in a second deep bite on the bear’s flank, right on top of a previous wound—and this time his fangs dug into meat. It was also a place the bear couldn’t reach him, so he held on until the bear’s flesh began to give under his fangs.

He waited until the bear started to move, just before the meat would have given way and dumped Charles on the ground. Then, digging in with all four clawed feet, Charles scrambled right over the top of the beast.

He took the opportunity to attempt to dig into the bear’s spine, just behind the ribs, where there was the least flesh protecting it. His teeth closed on bone, but when the bear rolled, he let the grip go.

Charles ran and turned to face the bear from a distance of about twenty feet. It wasn’t a safe distance—he didn’t want a safe distance. His only intention was to fight as long as possible, to give Anna time to warn everyone.

He’d done more damage than he’d thought. A chunk of bear hide the size of a hand towel had been pulled to the side, flapping like a loose horse blanket. Blood scented the air and dripped onto the ground. But when the bear moved, it was clear that, gruesome as it was, it was only a flesh wound, impressive but minor, and it wasn’t bleeding enough to weaken him.

But it hurt.

The great bear reared up and roared, its upright form nearly ten feet tall. Any creature more intelligent than a bear would have been too smart to do that with the steep slope of the mountain behind it. Charles took a running leap and hit the bear in the face with his body, sending the bear tumbling backward down the side of the mountain. The beast’s teeth opened a gash in Charles’s shoulder, but it hadn’t been expecting the move, so it was slow. It wasn’t able to get a good hold, and Charles fell free.

Charles tumbled a few paces but was back on his feet and harrying the bear as it rolled the fifty yards or so of very steep, rocky ground all the way to the bottom. When it rolled to a stop, before it could get its feet under it, Charles landed on its back and went for the spine, now showing whitely in its bed of flesh.

He closed his jaws on bone and shook as hard as he could. Beneath him, the bear tried first to get to its feet—and then just to roll over. But it had fallen awkwardly, and Charles was able to keep it from finding the leverage to do much more than wiggle. It gave a hard lurch . . . and the spine separated with a pop and a grisly crunch.

The bear’s rear quarters fell limp, and Charles bounded away from the still-dangerous front end. The bear’s blue human eyes regarded him balefully as it roared and snapped its teeth together.

Charles growled, showing the skinwalker his own fangs. He stayed back as his opponent thrashed and struggled—apparently paying no attention to anything other than reaching Charles. Charles gradually became aware of aching muscles, stiffness in his left shoulder, and the persistent ache of his ribs.

Eventually, the blood loss, made worse by the bear’s refusal to be still, won out. The giant beast gave one last heave and collapsed on the torn-up ground. It breathed four times, then the air whooshed out with a sigh, and the blue eyes glazed over.

Charles waited. He did not remember a time that his grandfather had been wrong about something. Charles was not a holy man, and so he should not have killed the skinwalker. But unarguably, the skinwalker in the bear’s form lay dead. Charles’s ears could not pick up the sound of his enemy’s heart beating. He waited until his nose told him that death had begun its work, the body had started to decompose, before he decided that his grandfather had been mistaken. Werewolves were not native to this continent; perhaps that was why his grandfather had not mentioned werewolves as a way to kill skinwalkers.

Charles looked for Devon. He’d have thought that the wildling would have joined in the fight—on Jericho’s side. Jericho was Devon’s friend, and Charles and Devon were only acquaintances. But Devon was nowhere to be seen, his scent just a hint on the wind.

Whatever Anna had told Devon when she wasted time that she should have used to get away had been effective.

Now that he had scared her to death, he supposed, he’d better let her know that—

Fifteen hundred pounds of Kodiak hit him like a bulldozer. His shoulder crunched against a tree, and screaming agony flared throughout his body. Somehow, the skinwalker’s magic had concealed the sound of movement, the rebirth of the bear, and the feel of blood magic at work, so the bear had taken Charles completely by surprise.

In his head, a quavering old man’s voice said, My grandson, why do you always have to learn the hard way?

LEAH RAN, FOCUSED on her goal. She was taller than Asil and Juste both, and she outpaced them.

She was a skilled hunter, and she learned from others’ mistakes. She did not allow herself to get close enough to Sage to fall victim to one of her witchy tricks as Charles had. But she kept Sage in sight.

She had the advantage on this ground, she thought. With her mate, she had traveled every foot of their territory, stayed up late at night discussing the topography, its strengths and weaknesses. She knew, for instance, that Sage was trying to take them on a roundabout route to the cars. Sage was hoping that they would let her get far enough ahead that she could take one of them and escape.

Never had Leah so resented the protocol that forbade cell phones. It would be nice to alert the pack, so that they could set up roadblocks on all of the ways that Sage could take her wussy SUV out of these mountains. Maybe even get someone up here in time to disable Sage’s car. But the nearest phone was at Jericho’s cabin, and that was too far to do them any good.

Leah was pretty sure that Sage didn’t have the knowledge to start one of the cars without a key—thank heavens that Charles had left his old truck at home. Even Leah could hot-wire a truck from that era in about ten seconds flat.

She had a gun, concealed in a shoulder holster, but didn’t bother to take it out. She was a decent shot, but at this pace she would be unlikely to hit Sage. Besides, killing Sage with a gun would be so much less satisfying than killing her with her knife.

She jumped a tree, tucking her feet up so as not to catch a toe. Sage was keeping to rough ground where she could because Leah was faster, even on two feet, than Sage was on four.

Some of that was because Leah ran in her human form every day. Some of it was that Leah was built like a runner. But most of it was that, as the Marrok’s mate, second in the pack, she could draw on the strength of the pack to aid her muscles.

She kept Sage’s wolf in sight, though the light and dark golden brown coat was better even than Leah’s own tawnier fur at blending in the light and shadow of the forest they ran through. After a couple of miles, Juste and Asil were some distance behind them, and she was just settling into her stride. But that was all right.

She could take Sage.

Her mate told her that her attitudes were stuck in the nineteenth century. She knew that Bran worried that her lack of confidence when facing down a male opponent would get her hurt someday. But she had him for that—and there wasn’t a female werewolf on the planet she was afraid of.

They were nearly back where they had started—a trick of the trail Sage had been taking. That meant they were about two miles from the cars.

Sage tossed a look over her shoulder, and Leah could see the consternation wash over her when she saw Leah. She’d really thought she could outrun Leah. She wasn’t the first person to underestimate Leah. Most of them were dead.

Her mate was the only person who truly saw her. He might not like her—Leah knew that, and it didn’t bother her. Much. But Bran Cornick appreciated her skills and her strengths, and he respected her. He didn’t truly respect many people. She would make do with that.

She increased her speed, narrowing the distance between them. Even Bran would be surprised that it was she, and not his son, who killed their traitor.

She was barely a hundred feet short of Sage when she felt a shivery light in the pack bonds that told her one of their pack had been gravely injured. Who? She slowed her approach, letting Sage’s lead grow again, as she searched through the ties that bound her to her pack.

Charles.

How did Charles get hurt? It doesn’t feel like magic, so it isn’t an effect of whatever Sage threw in his face. Leah had been a werewolf a long time, and she knew how to read the bonds. This was a physical hurt, grave enough to mean death.

A bear roared its triumph—from the direction of Jericho’s cave. What in the world made Charles take on a bear when we have a traitor to catch?

She set one foot down and pivoted on it. Sage would have to wait.

No, it would not hurt her if Charles died. She didn’t like him, and she’d never made any bones about it. He was sullen and silent, and she was more scared of him than she was of anyone, not excluding Asil.

But if a death of another wildling would hurt her mate, the death of his son would do far worse. And though she knew Bran did not love her, knew that love had no part in their long-ago bargain, it didn’t matter. She loved her coldhearted, flawed bastard of a husband and mate with all of her selfish heart. If she could save Charles, she would.

And wouldn’t Charles just hate that. She smiled widely as she ran, sweeping up Asil and Juste in her wake with a gesture of her hand.

CRUMPLED AGAINST A tree, Anna looked up at Wellesley with tears in her eyes. “He’s hurt,” she said, too frantic to wonder if Wellesley would even know who she was talking about. “He’s hurt. Nothing can kill it. Only a holy man or fire—and Charles has neither.”

Instead of answering her, Wellesley gathered the five-gallon can and found the lighter where it had landed when she fell. Anna scrambled belatedly to her feet, feeling dizzy and light-headed, though the pain had dimmed a little. She couldn’t tell if it was because Charles had tightened down their bond or because he was losing consciousness.

But pain meant he was still alive, and if he was still alive, there was no time to stand around. Save mourning for when it was too late to do anything.

“Get me there,” said Wellesley. “I can help.”

And that’s when she actually looked at him and paid attention to what she saw.

Sometime between when they’d left him at his home, tired but whole, and now, he had resettled his person. This man was no harmless artist. Here was the man who had survived slavery of the worst sort, who survived a curse for nearly a century and emerged sane. Such a man could command armies—or a slightly battered Anna who had a skinwalker to kill.

Despite the pain that drifted to her through the mating bond, Anna allowed herself a little hope. She took off again, trying to build her speed back up to where it had been. She didn’t quite succeed—she’d twisted her ankle pretty good, and even with the increased healing her werewolf gained her, it hurt. Wellesley caught her elbow twice when she would have stumbled.

Eventually, though it was probably only a couple of minutes, the pain faded, and she resumed her breakneck pace. They passed Jericho’s cabin. Charles was still alive—even if their bond was so quiet it scared her.

SHOTS RANG OUT. Anna hesitated—who was shooting? Charles didn’t have a gun with him. Shaking off her surprise, Anna ran to the trail where she’d left him, but the fight had gone downhill and into the trees.

She and Wellesley scrambled down until they could see over a second, even steeper drop-off to the battle royal below.

Charles was crumpled in a heap, and Leah, Asil, and Juste were fanned out between him and the bear. Leah had a gun in one hand and a wicked-looking knife in the other. Asil had a bladed weapon somewhere between a knife and a short sword in length—it was dripping blood.

Juste threw a fist-sized rock at the bear’s head. A major-league pitcher couldn’t compete with a werewolf for speed or force. The bear tried to get out of the way, but the rock hit it in the head with a crack that knocked it off its feet.

Anna would have plunged down the hill, but Wellesley caught her arm.

“Wait,” he told her, his eyes on the bear. “I need you to stand guard. She will try to stop me when she notices what I’m doing.”

She pulled her eyes off Charles and turned them to Wellesley and demanded in a voice she barely recognized as her own, “Are you a holy man?”

“Are you asking if I can end this creature? I am the last descendant of the holiest family in my clan. The earth speaks to me. Can I end this creature?” His smile was fierce. “I don’t know, but I have dreamed of trying for a very, very long time.”

Wellesley pulled out a cloth folded into a pouch that smelled of garlic, chili, lemon, and some unfamiliar things. He crouched and gathered old leaves, dried grass, and a few sticks. He quickly cleared a space of anything burnable and used the fuel he’d gathered to build the makings of a miniature fire, dumping the spice mixture on top of that.

Below them, Leah put three rounds into the bear—and Juste hit it with another rock. Of the two bullets or rock—the rock seemed to do the more damage. But it was light-footed Asil who made the killing stroke—leaping on top of the wounded bear and sliding his blade between its shoulder blades and through its spine.

Wellesley knelt on the ground and, though Anna had brought him five gallons of gasoline and a barbecue lighter, he lit the fire by holding his hand over it and murmuring a word that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. He closed his eyes and began to sing—more of a chant, really—in a liquid language she’d never heard before.

She looked around for something to help her defend him—and ended up piling stones of an appropriate size. Juste’s rocks were proving effective—and she knew how to throw a baseball.

It was too bad, she thought ruefully, that she wasn’t witchborn. The gun would probably be a much better weapon than—

“You have something that belongs to the skinwalker,” said Wellesley—chanting the words in the same rhythm he’d been using so that she almost missed that he was talking to her.

“I have this,” she told him, and pulled the gun out of the back of her waistband.

He didn’t open his eyes, just inclined his head. “Please place it in the fire,” he asked.

Anna eyed the fire. The gun was made mostly of metal—and Wellesley’s fire wasn’t that hot. But she didn’t argue with him, just slid it cautiously into the fire.

She kept an eye on the fight.

The bear had collapsed after Asil’s blow. Asil had continued forward, driven by his own momentum to take five or six strides away from the bear. He turned to regard the fallen beast. Leah and Juste closed in on it warily.

Charles stirred, then staggered to his feet. The sensation of his pain made her gasp. He looked up to where Anna and Wellesley were, and she could feel his consternation.

Anna, he told her, and she could feel his despair, run, my love. This thing cannot be killed.

I found a holy man, she told him a bit smugly despite her worry. He’s a little broken, I think. But he believes he can do this. If not, I have gasoline and a lighter.

Behind him, the beast’s form blurred, shrank, and a little girl, no more than six or seven, rose to her hands and knees where the bear had just been. She wore a ragged dress of unbleached cotton, and her dark hair was matted. She looked around her with wide eyes, and her mouth trembled.

“Don’t hurt me,” she said, scrambling away, her eyes on Asil. “I ain’t done nothing to you. Don’t hurt me.”

Sometime, somewhere, the skinwalker had killed and skinned a child. For a moment, Anna could barely breathe.

Charles had turned at the child’s first words. Like Anna, he froze momentarily.

Warn them, said Brother Wolf, as their pack mates were pulling out of battle mode. It’s not a child. Anna, warn them.

“It’s a skinwalker,” she called out. “A shapechanger, a witch. It’s not— Watch out, Asil!”

Flowing out of the child’s form, the bear, now unharmed, rose again, mad blue eyes sparkling in a stray bit of sunlight. He swatted at Asil, who, warned by Anna, ducked under the swat and went for the bear’s underside. But the bear had seen Wellesley. Ignoring the huge wound that Asil had made in its abdomen, which left entrails escaping, ignoring the werewolves attacking it, the bear began running up the side of the mountain toward Wellesley and Anna.

SAGE DIDN’T KNOW what had distracted Leah. She had hunted with the Marrok’s mate for two decades or more and would have sworn that nothing could pull that one off a trail once she’d chosen it—but Sage wasn’t going to look gift horses in the mouth.

Her car was parked next to Asil’s Mercedes, though someone—Anna, by the scent of the blood—had broken the window. Just as well, because Sage would have had to do the same thing. She took the token that hung from the leather thong around her neck and bit it again.

The speed of the change made her grit her teeth and shudder. She didn’t make any noise, though. She didn’t know where the werewolves were and had no intention of drawing their attention if she could help it.

Hopefully, they would be fully occupied with Grandma Daisy. Shivering and naked, Sage opened the door of her SUV and grabbed the backpack from the backseat. She pulled on the spare set of clothing she kept there.

Dressed, spare key to her SUV in hand, she drew her first deep breath since she’d looked into Jericho’s eyes and realized what Grandma Daisy had done. She was an old creature—Sage didn’t know how old because her own grandmother had called her Grandma Daisy. Old predators knew how to be patient. But evidently, her patience had run out at last.

Ironic that it had happened on the day that Sage had finally found their quarry. Decades of searching because the Marrok kept his wildlings secret from everyone except for his mate and his two sons. Then Asil had come to the pack—and he also had been sent to deal with the wildlings. She’d attached herself to him to see if he could be persuaded to tell tales—and because he was beautiful.

And he was beautiful.

She would regret Asil, she thought. Maybe once her grandmother had the pack under her control—assuming she could torture the secret of the collars from Wellesley, and Sage never underestimated her Grandma Daisy—maybe Sage would take Asil and use him for a while.

The thought made her smile.

She had worried when Grandma had outed her, worried that she somehow had displeased the skinwalker. But when Grandma had detonated the stink bomb in Charles’s face, Sage had understood. If Grandma Daisy could get Charles alone—if she took Charles—then she could take the whole pack, Wellesley and all.

Grandma Daisy wouldn’t mind throwing away Sage for a chance at the pack, at the Marrok himself. Sage couldn’t blame her, really. But since the chance presented itself to not be a martyr, Sage intended to take it.

She tossed the backpack into the rear seat and started to get into her SUV.

A low growl stopped her.

She grabbed the knife she kept in a sheath beside the seat and turned to face—

She had worried it might be Asil or Charles, but the wolf who had broken through the greenery next to her car was skinny and ragged, his ribs moving harshly with the exertion of intercepting her.

Devon. And he was alone.

Gunshots sounded, a roar rose in the forest—Grandma Daisy’s bear. And Sage had her explanation for why the pursuit had broken off. Evidently, everyone except Devon had gone to fight the bear.

Sage was realistic enough to know that she wasn’t a match for Bran or Charles. Still, sometimes in her dreams she plunged this very knife into their bodies and heard them scream in payment for the pain she’d had to suffer for their actions. If they had not interfered in Grandma Daisy’s plans, Sage would have simply been one of the many children who had no magic and therefore served as helpers. Grandma would not have picked Sage to be her werewolf spy. Her life would have been normal.

The pain of the Change, the torture of being the plaything of Grandma’s picked group of rogue wolves—that was all the fault of Charles and Bran Cornick, who had robbed Grandma Daisy of her prey and hidden him away. Even using his hair and blood, they could not find him.

Sage knew now that it was because Grandma Daisy’s own half-failed binding spell, now broken, had changed the artist beyond recognition. If Bran had not changed Frank Bright’s name, though, they could have found him by his true name. All of Sage’s suffering was the Marrok’s fault.

She could not kill Bran or Charles. But Devon, friend of Asil and Bran’s special pet, who was weakened by his inability to eat enough to keep himself healthy? Once he had been a formidable warrior, she knew, but now?

She smiled at the weakest and most beloved of Bran’s wildlings. She would take her revenge where she found it.

“Hello, Hello, Devon,” she said.

CHARLES FOLLOWED HIS pack mates, who were running after the bear as it charged up the side of the mountain, though if dragging its insides up the rocky slope didn’t slow it down, he wasn’t sure what he could do about it.

He was too slow. Even drawing on the pack’s power, he couldn’t heal broken bones three times in a row and get wonderful results. His right front leg hurt so much when he ran on it that he just tucked it up against his body and ran on the other three.

He leaped onto the flattish stretch of ground where Wellesley had set up his fire and took in the scene in a single glance.

Wellesley, eyes closed, was chanting over a fire—where it appeared that he was trying ineffectually to burn the witch gun. Whatever he was doing, the skinwalker evidently thought it was dangerous enough that it was trying to get to Wellesley through Leah, Asil, Juste—and Anna.

Leah, Asil, and Juste looked as though they were engaged in the hit-and-run technique Charles had begun with, harrying the bear and trying to distract him from his target.

Anna was pelting him with rocks—and doing a damn fine job of it. White bone showed on the bear’s head as it roared at her.

There’s not enough space, said Brother Wolf—though he knew that Charles already understood that. The rocks were a distance weapon, and the bear was closing in on Anna.

There wasn’t time for an easy change, and he didn’t have strength to change fast enough with his own power. But his da had left him in charge of the pack. Without consideration for the limits of that power this time, he pulled on the pack and donned his human shape between one stride and the next.

He felt the drain of it in the reluctant slowness of his muscles and the bone-deep ache in his joints. He was going to have to eat a feast and sleep a week to recover from this. If he lived another five seconds.

Still running, he used the momentum to fuel the left-handed blow as he brought Ofaeti’s damned big axe down between the bear’s ears and buried it there, up to the haft, in the bear’s skull. Sometimes, especially when they needed to, objects he was holding when he shifted from human to wolf came with him when he made the change back to human.

“Heal that,” he growled.

“Get away,” called Wellesley, scrambling to his feet. “Get away from the bear.”

Charles started to take a step back, but an unexpected and sudden weariness caught him. He stumbled, and his mate steadied him and shoved him farther back at the same time. For thirty or forty seconds, nothing more happened.

And then the gun burst into white flames—and so did the body of the bear.

Wellesley raised both arms to the sky and sang a song in some strange, twisting tongue. But it didn’t matter that Charles could not understand the language. He knew a prayer when he heard one.