Burn Bright

CHAPTER 2

It took Anna the better part of an hour to drive twenty miles.

Since she had become Charles’s mate, most of the time she felt as though she belonged here, in the wilds of Montana. Then she’d take a drive with Charles in the mountains and be forcibly reminded that she’d been raised in a city.

True, some of Chicago was a wilderness in its own right, but even in the bad areas, roads could be relied upon to be paved, wide enough to get at least one car through, and she’d been able to trust that there wouldn’t be a freaking tree growing up in the middle of the road, hidden by a sharp bend.

If she hadn’t been wearing her seat belt for that one, she might have gone through the windshield. Charles, who hadn’t been, had braced himself just before she hit the brakes, and she wondered uncharitably if he’d known about the tree.

“No,” he said, as if he could read her mind. “I just saw it the same time you did.”

“Why is there a tree in the road?” she grumbled.

“That’s one of those questions without a correct answer, right? Like when a woman asks if her pants make her look fat.” There was no amusement in his voice or eyes, but she knew he felt it all the same, and her lips curled up in response.

She edged the truck around the tree. “At least you didn’t say, ‘When a mommy tree and a daddy tree love each other very much . . .’”

Charles laughed—and she felt proud of herself, because he didn’t laugh easily.

“I haven’t been up this way in five or six years,” he admitted. “There wasn’t a tree growing here then. But it’s not a big tree, and aspen can grow three feet a year.”

“No one has been up this road—and I use the term loosely—in five years?” she said. “I thought Bran was up here last fall.”

“There’s another road,” he said. “It’s probably in a little better shape for most of the way because it’s traveled more—but this way is faster.”

“As long as we don’t hit any trees,” she said.

The tree wasn’t the only obstacle. Though the road apparently wasn’t traveled much, there were long stretches with deep ruts. There were rocks—some the size of her fist, with sharp points that might bruise a tire and cause it to go flat; some the size of a bowling ball, which could puncture the workings on the underside of the truck. In a couple of places grass and bushes had grown so thick that she could only guess where the road was. She’d slowed down so much that she thought they might make better time on foot.

“Get your wheels out of the ruts,” Charles advised her in that even voice he had that told her he’d been fighting those words for a while. “You could lose an axle if the hole in the road gets too deep.”

She knew that. She’d just forgotten.

“This isn’t a road,” she told him indignantly, with a growl she hadn’t meant to use. “It’s just wagon tracks through rocks and mud.”

But she pulled the wheel to the left, and the truck tipped a little as the wheels climbed up on the side of the track. Their bumpy ride got a lot bumpier because the bottom of the ruts were a lot smoother than the sides, but the scrape of rock on the underside of the truck happened less frequently.

The road got drier as it climbed out of a ravine, then got mushy again as it dropped over a ridge in the mountain they were, as far as Anna could tell, circumnavigating.

Charles came to alert. Reading his body language, she brought them from a crawl to a full stop before he said anything. She didn’t bother to try to pull to the side because there wasn’t a side to pull off onto; besides, they hadn’t seen another car since she’d turned off the main road.

Charles was out of the truck before she’d come to a complete stop. She turned off the engine and got out to join him.

“Hester and Jonesy don’t drive,” he said. “So why am I seeing fresh tire tracks?”

Anna looked down, and there they were—tire tracks. She should have noticed them.

She tried to redeem herself. “ATVs, right?” The odd-to-her-city-eyes vehicles were as common in the rugged country of Montana in the summer as snowmobiles were in the winter. “Four-wheelers.” Because there were older three-wheeled ATVs. “At least two of them because there are two sizes of tires.”

Charles nodded.

“Wait,” she said, waving a hand with one finger extended. “Wait. There are at least three. Because this guy”—she pointed to a set of tracks where they cut into the dirt because the four-wheeler turned—“is heavier, his bike digs in deeper in the same kind of soil. All going in the same direction.”

“Right,” he agreed, and waited.

She frowned at him, looking at the tracks again to see what she’d missed. But no matter how intently she looked around, she didn’t see any boot marks, or convenient scraps of fabric bearing scent, empty beer cans, or cigarette butts that might hold vital clues as to who had been traveling this road before they came here.

She narrowed her eyes. What would Gibbs see? She might have a minor addiction to a certain police-procedural TV show.

“A week ago we had rain,” he told her before she could get too frustrated. “You can see there is still some mud under the trees where the sun doesn’t reach. These tracks were made after the soil dried—you can tell by the loose dirt. I expect these were made today.”

“And because you got a call today,” she said, “it’s highly probable that these tracks and the call are related.”

“That did lead me to look for reasons those tracks might be more recent,” he agreed. Tracking, he’d told her, was not just about what your senses told you; it was also about using what you knew.

He took a deep breath of air. She did, too. She smelled the pines, the firs, and a hint of cedar and hidden water. There was a cougar nearby. She glanced around, looking up in the trees, but couldn’t spot it. They were good at hiding, but sometimes their tails twitched and gave them away. Not today.

Somewhere within a mile or so, but not much nearer than that, either, there was a small group of blacktail deer. She caught the scent of the usual suspects: rabbits, various birds, and what Tag liked to call tree tigers because the squirrels were brave and made a big uproar when someone entered their territory.

None of those were what was making Charles look so intent.

“What is it?” she asked.

He looked around again. Breathed in again. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know. Something.”

“Your spidey senses are tingling,” she said.

He gave her a blank look. He had weird cultural gaps, as if there were entire decades during which he had not turned on a TV or talked to anyone. She hoped he had just not paid attention, but the “not talking to anyone” was a distinct possibility.

“Intuition,” she said. “Your subconscious knows something that you can’t put into words yet.”

“From Spider-Man,” he said in as serious a voice as he would have used if she’d been quoting from Shakespeare.

She nodded.

He took one last deep breath, then headed around to the driver’s side of the truck. “Get in. I’ll take it from here. My spidey senses,” he said, his voice a touch dry on the unfamiliar syllables, “are telling me that we should hurry after all.”

“Oh, thank the hairy little men in the moon,” she said sincerely, climbing gratefully into the passenger seat.

It wasn’t that she was afraid she’d kill them—they were werewolves; killing them in a car wreck at ten miles an hour would take some doing. It was that the old truck was something Charles loved—and every time she heard the scrape of tree branch on paint, she could see him not-wince.

But she understood why he’d preferred her snail’s pace and the damage she’d dealt to his truck—he hadn’t really wanted to get to their destination.

When there were incidents involving any of Bran’s wildlings, it usually meant that Charles had to kill one of the old wolves. She knew, better than anyone, that her mate was very tired of being his father’s executioner.

She hopped into the truck and impulsively slid over, rose up, and kissed his cheek. As she settled back and put on her seat belt, she said merely, “Remember not to drive in the ruts.”

THE LAST THING Charles thought he would do, on his way into the mountains to (probably) kill one of his da’s beloved wildlings, was laugh.

But life with Anna was like that.

Once she was safely belted in, he set out getting to Hester’s as quickly as possible. His wolf spirit’s growing unease—something separate from his dislike of killing wolves who needed to meet death—rode the back of his neck and told him that they needed to be at Hester’s now.

He navigated the track that wound around the mountain with a speed that could have been fatal (to the truck, anyway) if he didn’t have a werewolf’s reaction time and a familiarity with the area. Anna made small sounds now and then and kept a death grip on the door that made him grateful for the Detroit steel that held up under her hand.

As he’d told Anna, it had been some years since he’d been up here. Once Hester and Jonesy moved in, his da had decreed that this area was off-limits for casual runs. After that, he’d only traveled this road by necessity. But he’d been here often before that, in the truck this one had replaced nearly fifty years ago. He knew where the road turned and twisted, though he had to maneuver around a few more trees that had not been here the last time he’d traveled this way.

The truck roared and growled and occasionally, when he found some of the mud left over from the rainstorm, howled. But he piloted it to the top of the ridge at the edge of Hester’s valley without coming afoul of anything larger than a few aspen fingerlings that gave way under the pressure of his bumper.

He paused there on the top of the ridge—a strategic move. He noted the clear-from-the-truck-cab marks that told him the four-wheelers had turned off the track here. Charles hesitated, but the path the other people had woven through the trees was too narrow for the truck. So he turned down the track to the little valley where Jonesy and Hester lived.

As they bounced down the road toward the still, small building, Charles noted absently that the windows were old-fashioned double panes that they should replace with vinyl soon. Other than that, the structure was in good shape. For all that it had been cobbled together over years, the house appeared all of a piece. There were flower boxes on either side of the door, filled with the black-eyed Susans that grew wild in the mountains around here. Those hadn’t been here when Charles had helped put in solar panels the last time he’d been up.

He stopped the truck and let it idle for a moment, unhappy with the quiet. But as soon as he turned off the engine, the front door of the house opened and Jonesy emerged.

Hester’s mate looked like a throwback to a bygone time, mostly an effect of his hand-spun clothing. His pinesap-colored hair was rough-cut to stay out of his eyes. There were a few leaves and a twig or two tangled in its ragged length.

His feet were bare and mottled with dried blood, though he walked evenly enough. Once Charles was looking for it, he noticed that there were small tears in Jonesy’s shirt. He was clean-shaven, though, with skin that looked as smooth as a woman’s. Maybe he, like Charles, didn’t have much of a beard to shave.

It was impossible to read his expression or his body language, and that made Brother Wolf unhappy. Charles hopped out of the truck and met Jonesy halfway between truck and house. He made a slight gesture with his hand, and Anna dropped a little behind him. He knew, without looking, that she was keeping a sharp eye out for trouble so he could concentrate on Jonesy.

When in the company of the dynamic woman who was the fae man’s mate, Jonesy hadn’t made much of an impression on Charles. Brother Wolf’s intent wariness made Charles think that perhaps that lack of attention had been confined to his human self.

“Charles,” Jonesy said, his unhurried voice carrying a Welsh accent stronger than Charles’s da’s, stronger than it had sounded on the phone. “Diolch. Thank you for coming.”

He smelled like the fae that he was, a scent so overpowering that Brother Wolf couldn’t make heads or tails about his state of mind—not from his scent, anyway. His body language was meek, an effect not detracted from by his slender frame.

He was everything that Brother Wolf would normally be protective of, which made Charles’s wolf’s reaction that much more strange. Brother Wolf thought they should pin this one to the ground so that he would understand that they could kill him at any time. Charles couldn’t figure out why Brother Wolf thought Jonesy was such a threat, but he wouldn’t dismiss his other self’s instincts. Even if Brother Wolf had never reacted to Jonesy this way before . . . but then Hester had always been present.

Hester kept the fae in line, agreed Brother Wolf.

“Croeso,” Charles told Hester’s fae mate. “There is no cost to our help for you this day,” he said carefully, because exchanging words of gratitude with the fae was dangerous. Having the fae owe him a favor was as dangerous as owing the fae a favor. “My word on it. This is my mate, Anna.”

Jonesy glanced up at Anna’s face, glanced away, then back, squinting his eyes as if she were too bright to look at. Then he took two quick steps that brought him within reach, and raised his hand suddenly to touch her face with fingers that trembled. Anna didn’t move.

Charles had to fight Brother Wolf to keep from knocking Jonesy to the ground.

Anna could protect herself—and, other than the speed of it, Charles could see nothing threatening in Jonesy’s action. He had enough magic in his own bloodline to feel it if the fae tried anything with power.

“Oh,” Jonesy said, wonder in his voice. “Oh, and haven’t I heard that the mate of the old one’s son was an Omega wolf? And haven’t we all been overjoyed that such a wolf ran in our woods.” The look he turned on Charles was pure hope. “Maybe she can help? Hester hasn’t been herself lately.”

Jonesy might not be a wolf, but there was no question that he felt something from Anna. Charles reviewed all he’d ever heard about Jonesy—which wasn’t much. Jonesy was . . . different, even for a fae. Slow, Charles had heard, but watching him now, he could tell that wasn’t it. More that he interacted with the world a little askew from how most people did.

Anna smiled at Jonesy and let him touch her. But her eyes were wary. Maybe she was picking up some of Brother Wolf’s wariness—or maybe she sensed something herself. But that heartfelt plea for his mate’s safety . . . that was something Charles and Brother Wolf understood.

“She saved me,” Charles told Jonesy. “I don’t know what she might do for Hester. Da thinks she might be of some help.”

Jonesy frowned. “I don’t know if Hester needs saving . . .”

Charles stepped forward a little to put himself in a better position to protect Anna if he needed to. “What happened? Why did you call me?”

Jonesy blinked a couple of times and let his hand fall away from Anna as he turned his now-vague attention to Charles. “Did I call you? I called the Marrok, I thought.”

“I answered the phone,” Charles reminded him.

Jonesy frowned. Cleared his throat, and said, “You are Charles. Yes. That’s right. I remember. Why did I call you?”

He shivered, as if a wind that Charles couldn’t feel blew across his shoulders. He bowed his head, closed his eyes, and said, clearly, in a crisp British accent, “She’s my caretaker, you know. Hester is.”

“I didn’t know,” said Anna, putting a hand on Charles’s arm to ask him to leave the interrogation to her. “What happened to Hester, Jonesy?”

Jonesy’s eyes snapped open, and he reached for both of Anna’s hands.

Dangerous, said Brother Wolf. He could hurt her even if he doesn’t mean to.

Charles tensed but managed not to move when Anna linked her fingers around Jonesy’s hands. The touch seemed to steady Hester’s mate. Charles could see alertness and intelligence stir in the other man’s eyes.

Dangerous, said Brother Wolf, but quietly, as if he didn’t want to attract Jonesy’s attention.

Dangerous, whispered the spirits in the trees. Ours. Dangerous. There was a gleeful, spiteful enjoyment in the voices of the spirits who spoke to Charles—spiteful and half-afraid.

Charles would definitely have a talk with his da when Bran got back. They would have to see who else was a lot more dangerous than he’d already accounted them to be. Charles seldom underestimated people, but he damned sure should have been paying more attention to Jonesy than he had. And so should Bran have.

“What happened?” asked Anna, her voice low and sweet. She couldn’t hear the warning voices of the spirits, but she was smart about people. She’d know to tread lightly.

“We heard motors,” Jonesy said after a long pause, as though whatever lived inside him had trouble with English. “They rode all over. They couldn’t find us, not through my glamour, but they wouldn’t go away. Hester went wolf, so I followed her. In case someone needed to be able to talk.”

He hesitated. “I thought they were just kids, you know? We get them now and again—and usually Hester can frighten them off without much trouble.” Then his voice grew lighter, almost feminine, as he obviously imitated someone. “A giant wolf is scary out in the woods. If people have a good way to leave—like a motorized vehicle—they do. Failing that, we can retreat all the way to Canada without crossing a major road.” He cleared his throat, rocked back and forth a little, then bent his knees suddenly, dropping a foot or two in height with the motion. Balanced lightly on the balls of his feet, the fae looked up into Anna’s eyes. He gently pulled his hands out of hers.

In a hungry and rough voice, he said, “Hester says not to kill anyone.” His hands fell to the earth and dug into it. “That is the first rule if we are to stay here. I cannot kill anyone.”

And there it was, revealed, the predator that Brother Wolf had sensed from the time they’d gotten out of the car.

Anna held Jonesy’s gaze as carefully as she had held his hands. It was something another werewolf would never have done. Looking a stranger in the eyes was the first habit new wolves learned to break.

No matter how tough you are, there are other people who are tougher. Even Charles didn’t meet a stranger’s eyes unless he had a very good reason—and there wasn’t a werewolf outside of his immediate family he’d ever found who could stare him down. But Anna was an Omega wolf who could meet the eyes of any without arousing another to challenge, her gaze warm and caring, like a blaze of peace in a world of war.

Under Anna’s peculiarly effective sympathy, Jonesy’s body relaxed, and his hands stilled, though he was still bent low in a posture that would be awkward if anyone less graceful had held it.

“These people weren’t frightened off?” Anna asked.

Jonesy shook his head. “There was something about them that made Hester say they were connected to the people who’ve been flying over us.”

“Flying over you?” Anna repeated.

He nodded, a gesture that began with his head but continued to his shoulders and traveled through his body to his knees.

“Hester has been worried lately.” He turned his face, pulling away from Anna’s gaze as if it took a little effort. When he had freed himself, he met Charles’s eyes. “She says that there have been too many flying things. Spying things watching our woods.”

Maybe it was that Brother Wolf lived inside him, or that his mother had been a magic handler and his da witchborn, or just the summer sun’s illumination, but in the fae man’s eyes, Charles could see Jonesy revealed for what he was.

The outer man, who was simple and . . . sweet, and the creature that lived inside him, who was not sweet. And that something inside Jonesy was powerful, his magic a dense ball of fire imprisoned within. How much power, Charles could not fathom. A lot. The monster saw Charles looking and grinned a bloodthirsty grin, though Jonesy’s rather anxious expression didn’t change at all.

“Too many aircraft?” asked Anna, glancing at Charles. Either she was oblivious to the monster she spoke with or unfazed by him. With Anna it was a toss-up.

“Normally, there isn’t any air traffic up here,” Charles told her. He used her words, her gaze, to allow him to change the focus of his attention from Jonesy to Anna—to drop Jonesy’s eyes. Brother Wolf had no reaction to that other than relief. Jonesy and what Jonesy was would be his da’s problem as soon as Bran returned. “Too remote and the air currents are rough.”

But, like Hester, Charles was bothered that they had been getting flyovers. Mostly because if it had been someone just randomly flying over the camp, they would probably have passed over Aspen Creek, too. And Charles would have noticed if there had been an unusually high amount of air traffic over town.

There was a certain amount of drug running that tried to get through to Canada via the back roads of Montana. Sometimes that engendered a few unexpected flights over their territory. But Charles kept track of such things and hadn’t heard any chatter from his contacts at the DEA since they broke up a drug-trafficking ring out of Spokane two years ago. There were a few pot farmers, but that was legal in the state now—and no one was currently hounding them.

“Helicopters or airplanes?” he asked Jonesy.

“Flying things,” said Jonesy, sounding stressed. “I don’t know ‘helicopter’ or ‘airplane.’”

“Okay,” Anna said, and Brother Wolf wanted to roll over and bask in the wave of comfort and quiet she sent out. “That’s okay.”

He didn’t think she meant to direct it at him. Anna was still working on controlling that aspect of her Omega powers. There were times when Charles needed Brother Wolf to be alert, especially when his mate was standing so close to Jonesy.

When she got worried about someone, she tended to soothe them whether she wanted to or not. Even nonwerewolves felt the effects if they got too close to her.

Jonesy’s face lost the lines that had gathered around his eyes, and the monster inside him became less ferocious.

“How long has Hester been worried about the flying things?” Charles asked.

“A month,” Jonesy said. “Maybe a little more.”

Shortly before his father had left.

“So what happened?” Anna asked. “Where is Hester?”

Jonesy’s face was suddenly twisted and inhuman, and the monster who lived inside the innocent said in a voice that could have come from the throat of a mountain, “WE LEFT HER. WE COULD HAVE STOPPED THEM. STOPPED ALL OF THEM, AND SHE SENT US AWAY.”

Jonesy dropped to all fours, and Charles thought that perhaps his real fae form was something with four feet. On Hester’s mate, that posture was a position of strength.

Anna was too used to living with monsters to do more than flinch at Jonesy’s volume, and even that had been very slight. The spirits that had been slowly gathering closer as Anna and Jonesy spoke vanished, frightened by the monster’s raw appearance.

Charles didn’t move, though he felt the vibrations of that voice rising from the ground beneath his feet. Jonesy was too close to Anna, and even Brother Wolf knew better than to increase Jonesy’s stress when she was vulnerable.

“Hester sent you home?” said Anna in a soft voice. “That’s rough. We need to go help her, right? You need to tell us the rest, so we can do that.”

And just as quickly as it had come, the beast left Jonesy’s face.

He nodded and rose to his feet ungracefully. When he spoke, it was a half mumble. “She said, ‘Go home, Jonesy. Go home. Call Bran. No, he’s gone. Call his number and tell whoever answers to come up here. Then you wait behind your glamour for them to come. You go, Jonesy.’”

Charles was aware, because Bran had told him, that Hester could talk to her mate when she was in wolf form. What he found most interesting was that her words—he had no doubt he’d been given what she said word for word—didn’t sound like a wolf who had gone feral after she’d killed a bunch of intruders who had invaded her territory.

“Why couldn’t she come?” asked Anna. She was still sending waves of comfort—it would take a while before she could get it under control again.

Charles had learned to deal with that. Her power made Brother Wolf rest, leaving the human part of him completely in charge. Sometimes it was wonderful. Sometimes, like when he was in the middle of a fight, it was very inconvenient. But it was no longer enough to throw him for a loop. He wondered if she was helping Jonesy’s control, wondered what would have happened if Charles had come here without his mate.

Jonesy rubbed his upper arms as if he were cold, then he took a step closer to Anna and relaxed a little. Brother Wolf didn’t like the change in proximity. Not at all.

“She was in a cage,” Jonesy said. “An iron-and-silver cage. She couldn’t break the silver, and I couldn’t break the iron. A trap. They didn’t see me.” He whispered, “She sent me home.”

Jonesy was fae, and whatever kind of fae he was, was powerful. Charles was willing to believe that if Jonesy didn’t want someone to see him, they wouldn’t be able to. He also believed he could have stopped a bunch of people who caged Hester.

“Where?” asked Charles.

Jonesy pointed to the far side of the valley. “There. Up on the mountain. About two miles from here as the crow flies.” He turned to look up into Charles’s face, his own bearing an expression of sorrow. “She said I was to wait here because under no circumstances could I be captured.”

He looked at them, and said in a whisper, “I could destroy them, you see. But to do it I would have to break my word.”

Dangerous, said Brother Wolf, again.

“We made a bargain, she and I. A bargain with your father. A home here in return for never using my power for harm.”

So Bran did know what Jonesy was. Charles was going to have a talk with his da about that.

Jonesy dropped his head. “I cannot help you. I cannot go back with you. If they have harmed her”—he looked up, and the monster was back in his eyes—“I would kill everything in my path of vengeance. There would be none who was safe from me.”

Anna, brave Anna, reached out and touched Jonesy’s face. “She is not dead now,” she said. It was a statement, but her tone made it a question.

Jonesy shook his head. “I would know. And they have not taken her from our forest. Not yet.”

“Okay, then,” she told him. “We will stand as your proxy. If it is within our power, we will bring her out safe. If it is not, we will cause them to regret what they have tried here.”

Jonesy nodded jerkily. He caught Anna’s hand and brought it to his lips. Charles saw the other male’s eyes and knew it was the monster who lived inside Jonesy that kissed Anna’s hand.

Charles had to fight Brother Wolf to breathe evenly.

“We should go,” he told them.

Jonesy nodded. “I’ll wait,” he told them. And Charles heard the promise in his voice. “I don’t want to disappoint her,” Jonesy said honestly.

Hester, he meant. Charles understood the need not to disappoint one’s mate.

Charles changed to Brother Wolf’s body. The truck would be useless without roads through the trees, and Brother Wolf was quicker than he was running on two legs. It hurt, but he pulled the change as fast as he could. And that meant faster than any other werewolf in the world. He twisted and expanded into Brother Wolf’s true shape in the time it took to draw a deep breath.

Not being a werewolf born, Anna changed at the same speed as most werewolves. Given that she could run at inhuman speed even on two feet, it wouldn’t be worth it for her to try.

Anna felt it necessary to put this into words anyway. “Go,” she told him. “I’ll follow. But you’ll be faster. Go ahead.”

By his rough reckoning, it had been at least an hour and a half since Jonesy had called. He wasn’t sure that the speed he had over her would matter, but he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t, either. He dug his claws into the dirt as he sprinted into the forest.

Brother Wolf chose to take the trail Jonesy had left. Charles felt it was reasonable to assume, since the trail traveled through underbrush and rocks and other woodland obstacles in an unusually straight line and followed no worn footpath, that it had been Jonesy’s quickest way home. Which meant that it would be the shortest way from Jonesy’s home to where Hester had been taken.

Brother Wolf was a little appalled that Charles had had to work out something so inherently obvious.

The direct route took him across two streams—or the same stream twice. The first crossing was narrow enough for him to jump, but the other, too wide to clear in a single leap, proved to be deep as well. Deep and swift.

That crossing slowed him.

To make up for it, he redoubled his speed—and almost ran right into the small clearing where Hester and her four-wheel-driving invaders had holed up. He managed to stop, but only by making enough noise that it attracted the attention of the trapped wolf.

The kennel that held her had been placed as far from the forest edge as possible. It was constructed of thick metal plates with small, heavily barred openings, presumably to let air in. If he had been making a kennel to hold a werewolf—that would be exactly the kind of kennel he would choose to make.

The thing had taken considerable damage, assuming that the sides of the box were supposed to be flat. All of the sides Charles could see sported bulges where something inside had hit them hard. Through the small opening facing him, gold eyes examined him without favor.

Hester in wolf form was, like Anna, pitch-black, though Anna’s eyes were ice blue. In build, Anna’s wolf was lithe and graceful. Hester was made for war—though for that much he had to rely on memory. Only a part of her face and her eyes were clearly visible, the rest of her hidden behind dented metal.

But she didn’t need anything more than her eyes to convey her cool disapproval—like a librarian catching the gaze of a child popping bubble gum. It had been a long time since anyone had given him a look like that—and he deserved it for making so much noise.

Even though they had not attracted the attention of anyone except Hester, Brother Wolf was humiliated. Charles’s chagrin was tempered with amusement and relief.

He’d been afraid he would be too late. That, with Hester captive, the men on the four-wheelers would have already left with her, despite Jonesy’s confidence that she was still there. This kind of operation depended upon speed. Assuming Hester was the target, they should have been in the next county already instead of hanging around waiting for Hester’s pack mates to show up and take this battle to a different level.

As Charles carefully moved back deeper into the shadows of the underbrush, the wind shifted a little, and he smelled gasoline. He moved a little farther to the side and saw why they hadn’t been able to leave with Hester.

The four-wheelers were trapped in the aspen trees that had somehow grown up through them while they had been parked. One of the vehicles was six or seven feet in the air.

It wasn’t just the aspens, he noted as he gave the sight a more thoughtful look. A fir tree had gotten into the act and punctured the gas tank of one of the vehicles, leaving the sharp smell of gasoline in the air.

He usually kept his awareness of the other part of the world, the spirit world, as closed as he could. He couldn’t afford to wander around distracted. If something wanted his attention, it could nudge him—and if there was something bad around, Brother Wolf could sense it.

Seeing the unnatural actions of the trees caused Charles to instinctively open his senses. The land was shivering with joyous anxiety, like a dog whose master has just come home. Power ruffled the hair along his back, and Brother Wolf forgot his humiliation and came to alert, though they both knew that the one who had innervated the land, who had caused the trees to put on a hundred years of growth in minutes, was waiting for them back in Hester’s cabin.

Jonesy.

The amount of power that would have been required to shape trees with that kind of speed was staggering.

Dangerous, Brother Wolf reminded him, over his irritation for the urgency Charles had fed him that had made them lose face in front of Hester.

Once he’d accepted the quivering, excited eagerness of the forest, other things came into focus. Beneath the stench of gasoline, Charles could smell meat and blood and the beginning of rot. Someone had died here. He closed down his mother’s gift because it was too distracting.

Instead, he relied only on himself and Brother Wolf and reevaluated the clearing. As he and Anna had seen earlier, there were three four-wheelers. Assuming one of them had been carrying the heavy cage that now contained Hester, each of the vehicles had had only one person on it.

That meant that the two men in biking leathers—standing as far from the cage as they could get—were the only ones between Hester and safety. Brother Wolf slunk lower toward the ground and carefully began moving around the clearing with the intention of closing in and taking them by surprise. Still flinching under Hester’s reproof, Brother Wolf was utterly silent.

“You should call again,” said the bigger of the two men.

They spoke in hushed whispers, as if they thought someone might be listening. Charles thought of the trees growing through their four-wheelers, and Brother Wolf smiled. That would give a person pause, wouldn’t it? To be stuck in the middle of a wilderness with someone who could do that would be pretty terrifying. If he were one of them, he’d be wondering what else a person like that could do.

“Helicopter is coming,” responded the other man in a soothing voice. “But this clearing isn’t big enough now, and our second-choice landing zone is too far for us to carry the wolf all the way. Extraction team is coming to help.”

“I heard all that, too,” said the big man—he sounded thoroughly spooked. “But Boss will be crazy mad that we only have the one and not both. Wanted both. This one and her fairy mate. Maybe Boss’ll just leave us up here for the Marrok to take.”

“Edison, just be cool,” said the other man, his voice calm and authoritative. “We got the female that’s wanted. Not our fault that the male was more powerful than we were told. Information wasn’t our task. Someone else’s head will roll for that.”

And the wind shifted directions just enough to slide past them, bringing their scent right to Charles. Brother Wolf pricked his ears in rage. These were werewolves.

Werewolves attacking Bran’s people in Bran’s territory.

In the distance, Charles heard the distinctive thrum-thrum of a helicopter. He was out of time.

If they had been humans, he would have handled them differently. But there was only one answer for werewolf intruders.

Even so, it was hard.

He and Brother Wolf were built to make the submissive wolves safe, that was their purpose in this life, and the big man was clearly a submissive wolf.

Under any other circumstances, he would have killed the dominant and given a submissive wolf the benefit of the doubt. A submissive wolf might feel he had no choice but to follow the orders he was given. But this one had become involved in a raid in the Marrok’s territory. For that there could be no forgiveness.

Tactically, he should have taken the other, more dominant and thus more dangerous, wolf first. But Brother Wolf would have none of it. They could not save the submissive wolf, but they could kill him as quickly and cleanly as possible—would see to it that he never had a chance to be afraid.

Silently he stalked them, using pack magic and his mother’s magic and his own skill. When he launched himself out of the trees and landed on the big man, that one’s muscles didn’t have a chance to tighten before Charles’s fangs tore through tendon and into bone that cracked beneath the pressure of his jaws.

While he was killing the first man, the second raised his weapon—a gun that looked wrong somehow—with wolf-quick reactions. Charles had considered the second werewolf in his plans but had calculated that the surprise of his attack would buy him the few seconds he needed to take care of the first wolf.

Someone had trained the surprise out of this soldier. Charles hadn’t counted on that, and that was going to get him killed.

Brother Wolf tried jumping aside but let Charles know what he already knew, there wasn’t a werewolf on the planet fast enough to dodge a bullet. They could only hope that it wasn’t a silver bullet or something big enough to kill him anyway.

But these men had come into this land hunting werewolves, hunting Hester. It seemed likely that whatever they carried would be able to take care of werewolves.

There was an instant of blazing pain so big it had a sound that vibrated his bones, followed by silence.