Burn Bright

CHAPTER 3

Charles woke to the sound of stone banging on metal and the human snarl of his mate. Assuming, from the words she was using, that she hadn’t joined him in Heaven, he decided he wasn’t dead, though he couldn’t figure out how he’d survived.

He raised his head—and didn’t that feel all sorts of lovely. But there was no blood, so, wincing against the thought-scattering pain, he rolled upright and saw Anna hitting the door of Hester’s prison with a rock. He also saw that the man who had shot him was very dead.

He couldn’t have been out long because he could hear the helicopter, much nearer now but not yet on top of them, over Anna’s chant, “Break. Break. Break. Damn it.” She wasn’t beating on the kennel itself but the sleek, tough-looking padlock on the door.

A human wouldn’t have stood a chance at opening that lock with a rock, but Anna was a werewolf. He rose to his feet, all four of them, as the lock on the kennel door broke.

Ignoring the wobbliness that threatened to pull him back to the ground, he trotted unsteadily to Anna’s side and put himself between Hester and Anna as Anna pulled the padlock arm free of the hasp, releasing Hester.

He got a bite in his shoulder for his trouble. It wasn’t a nasty bite, but Hester’s fangs dug in, driven by anger at needing a rescue. Hester was not the kind of wolf who dropped to the ground and crawled on her belly in gratitude.

“Stop that,” Anna said, smacking Hester on the nose with enough force that the old wolf released Charles and snarled at his mate.

Anna jerked her hand back from Hester with a hiss, then shook her hand out. The silver in the padlock and the cage had left blisters on her hands. Hitting Hester had hurt her further. Seeing them, Brother Wolf growled at Hester and drove her away from his Anna with a lunge that the other wolf reacted to reflexively.

Hester growled at him this time, her eyes narrowing with rage, compounded by her involuntary reaction to his dominance.

“Charles,” Anna said. “Please. Hester—we’re trying to help you. Jonesy called us in. Let’s get under the trees, where they can’t just shoot us from the helicopter before you try to kill each other, okay?” She glanced up at the sky as the helicopter flew directly over them, low over the trees but fast. “Why are they just buzzing us instead of landing already?”

She’d missed the notice that the clearing wasn’t big enough for their chopper to land in—probably because the chunk that now held the trapped four-wheelers was filled with big trees instead of a clearing.

But she had a point. Charles had flown enough helicopters to have a pretty good idea of what kind of sitting ducks the three of them were here in the open.

But the helicopter hadn’t even paused as it flew overhead.

Hester eyed Anna. Charles saw her weighing the benefits of teaching Anna better than to slap her on the nose while her mate was distracted watching the helicopter.

Charles regained his human form before Hester could do something stupid. She yipped and jumped back. He didn’t know if it was the suddenness of his change or the fact that he was fully clothed that had startled her. Neither was something any other wolf could do because no one else was a werewolf born instead of made—and born of two people who both carried magic in their veins. Anna had once pointed out that with his heritage, he was lucky he hadn’t been born purple or with a unicorn horn; instead, he got to change in the blink of an eye and emerge clothed all the way down to his footwear.

He decided to ignore both the blood trickling from his shoulder and the fact that Hester had even thought about biting his mate. The pain in his head had subsided, the change speeding the healing with a thoroughness that told him Brother Wolf had decided to draw upon the pack.

He frowned at the clearing thoughtfully. He thought about how the helicopter had acted, searching for something or someone but flying over them as if they were not interested in their people or the werewolves. Or as if they hadn’t seen them.

“Did Jonesy put a glamour over this place?” he asked Hester. “And could Jonesy hide your cabin from them without hiding it from Anna and me this morning? Maybe make it difficult to locate from the air?”

Hester snorted and gave him an “of course, idiot” face.

“So,” Charles continued, “they can’t see us, can’t see a place to land, no matter what their instruments are telling them—if they are telling them anything,” Charles told Anna. “We’ll be okay here for a few minutes. Let me do a quick search of the bodies. I need to find out what he shot me with.”

“This,” Anna said, pulling the weapon he’d been shot with out of the hollow between the small of her back and her waistband. Up close, it looked like a cross between a gun and a Taser.

He took it—there was still a smear of blood on it.

Anna looked at him with eyes that shifted from brown to her wolf’s blue. “I killed him,” she said, her voice hoarse. “He hurt you.”

Then she wiped her hands on the legs of her jeans, and he noticed that there were bloody marks on the fabric that showed she’d done that before.

She, both woman and wolf, knew how to kill because he’d taught her. The best way he knew to protect his mate was to teach her to protect herself. Charles and Brother Wolf between them had kills numbering in the hundreds if not more . . . but Anna did not.

Ignoring the bodies waiting to be searched, the weapon, and the helicopter, which was for the moment not an issue, thanks to Jonesy, he touched Anna’s cheek. With an effort, he let Anna and her wolf see inside him through their mating bond. He left himself vulnerable to his mate, so she could know that he understood what her actions had cost her.

“He hurt you,” she said, and this time her eyes were Anna brown and not wolf blue. She smiled, only a little grimly, and told him, “These men came to our territory and attacked us.” Her voice tightened, and she said, “Attacked you. I have no regrets.”

She heard the lie in her own voice and gave him a rueful smile. That was his Anna, tough to the bone.

He’d thought it was a gun when the man had pulled it. Even waking up without a bullet hole wasn’t a surety that it hadn’t been. He could sometimes heal an ordinary bullet wound pretty fast.

But this wasn’t a gun that shot bullets. He took it from her and examined it. Up close, the device looked more like a beefed-up Taser, but there was no sort of cartridge or projectile.

“Right?” said Anna. “It’s weird. I thought it might be a Taser—the way it dropped you. A kind of super-duper-charged one or something.” Because a normal Taser didn’t do much besides make a werewolf angry. “But it doesn’t look like a Taser—and there were no wires or anything hooked into you.”

He pointed it at the ground and pulled the trigger—and darn near dropped the thing as it grabbed energy from him and turned a small plant into powder. He took his finger out of the trigger and glanced at the pinprick left where something sharp had cut him to fire the magic. He rubbed it a couple of times because there was a numb spot right where the pin had gone in. He’d have worried more, but the spot was returning to normal.

The gun itself felt no more magical than it had before he pulled the trigger.

“Blood magic,” he said to Anna—and Hester, who was watching him out of careful eyes. “Witchcraft of a kind I’ve never seen nor heard of. Isn’t Da going to be very, very interested in this?”

He tucked the weapon in the small of his back, just as Anna had. The lingering pain that shivered through his joints was subsiding enough that it wouldn’t slow him if he had to move quickly. The dead plant made him wonder why he was alive and kicking—not that he was complaining about it. Maybe it had something to do with the difference in size between him and the plant. Or maybe just the amount of power it was able to draw from him—magic born on both sides of his parental heritage.

He looked at Hester. “Is Jonesy around here?”

The wolf raised her head and turned until she was back where she started. She shook her head.

That surprised him. When the helicopter had overflown them, he’d assumed Jonesy had followed them. A glamour that big was difficult to maintain from a couple of miles out . . .

I told you—dangerous, said Brother Wolf.

“He’s holding the glamour over us from your cabin?” asked Charles, just to be sure.

She shrugged and looked around as if to say “the evidence points to yes.”

Somewhere to the west, the helicopter finally found a place to land. Unless Jonesy’s magic was different than other glamours Charles had seen, the enemy would probably be able to follow whatever trace or GPS had gotten them this far despite Jonesy’s spell. Only the Gray Lords working great magic together could confuse technology until it wouldn’t work at all. He considered the reach of Jonesy’s magic. Maybe their enemy was using witchcraft instead. Though witchcraft and werewolves were uneasy bedfellows, he had evidence in the odd gun a werewolf had used on him that their enemy was willing to mix power.

Under other circumstances, Charles would have waited for the enemy to find him. But the weird blood-magic weapon pushed him into caution. He’d never even heard of such a thing before. He didn’t take on enemies without more intelligence about their capabilities.

He did a cursory search of the three dead bodies and discovered no more than that the first dead body, the one Hester presumably had killed, was human. None of them carried ID or had useful clues like insignia or easily discoverable tattoos. Their body armor and weapons (there was only the single witch-blood gun) were good but not custom-made.

It would have been nice if they could call the pack and get reinforcements, but neither he nor Anna had brought phones.

Twice since he and Anna had tangled with the government in Boston, they’d had to go out and rescue federal agents who got themselves stuck in the mountains. The first pair of agents hadn’t been his fault, he and Anna had found them wedged in a rocky outcropping on their way back from a horseback ride. Since there hadn’t been anything up that old logging road except for a few hikers and horseback riders since the 1960s, he figured they were hunting for him and Anna. They seemed suitably embarrassed when he got them out—and unsurprised by his ability to lift the front end of their truck, which confirmed his suspicions.

But after them, he’d been paying attention to his back trail. The second pair he allowed to discover why native Montanans don’t drive over broad, flat meadows high in the mountains unless it’s been below zero for a few weeks. Charles got the people out—but he imagined that the SUV might be sinking deeper in the mud even now.

After that, though, Bran had made a rule that anyone heading into the wildling territory could not carry a cell phone. People who disturbed Bran’s special wolves tended not to live to regret their mistakes. Bran preferred not to kill government agents unintentionally.

“Let’s get back to Jonesy,” Charles said when he’d finished searching the last body. “We can make a decision then whether to hole up in the cabin and call for reinforcements or just pick him up and head to Da’s house.”

THEY WERE ALMOST halfway back to Hester’s cabin when the sound of a gunshot echoed in the trees. Charles flattened himself on the ground as a second shot fired, noting that Anna and Hester had done the same without hesitation. There was something odd about the motion the two of them made, but he’d worry about that after he took care of the immediate danger.

Brother Wolf’s hearing told him where the bullet hit in the tree behind where they had been standing. Because it had scored the bark rather than hitting in the middle, Charles also had a nice line of broken bark that pointed back where the shot had come from—downwind, which was why he hadn’t scented anyone.

He divested himself of the witch-worked weapon, leaving it on the ground. Then he rolled to his feet and shifted to wolf in the same moment. The next time he changed, it would be slower, but with the adrenaline in his system, he was still plenty fast.

The shooter had climbed a tree to get the best shot at them. But that left her stuck in a tree with a werewolf coming after her. Not that it mattered. As far as Charles was concerned, as soon as she fired the first shot, she was dead. The tree swayed under his weight as he leaped from one branch to another. The unpredictable movement meant the two shots she aimed at him missed—as he’d calculated they would.

She looked startled more than frightened. She had probably thought that werewolves couldn’t climb trees. Hunters said the same thing about grizzlies—and that was wrong, too. A grizzly could climb as far up as a tree would hold him. Which was pretty much true of werewolves, and Brother Wolf might be big, but he was a lot smaller than a grizzly.

The shooter was human, and she died quickly, dropping from the tree to the ground with a crash of underbrush. From the tree, Charles saw two more people, presumably more of the team who had been pursuing them. They were taking separate paths toward the place where the woman had been shooting.

Separated by no more than thirty feet of forest, he thought. Only one of them looked up, but it was obvious from his expression that he didn’t see Charles, nearly three hundred pounds of werewolf, in the tree. Evergreens were good at breaking up solid shapes. Both of the men had a hand to their ear in a classic I-have-a-communication-device pose.

Charles dropped to the ground much more quietly than the body had fallen. Brother Wolf had identified the one who looked up as the more dangerous of the two, and this time, Charles decided it would be a good idea to take that one out first.

His familiarity with the lay of the land—even if it was half a century old—allowed him to approach his chosen target from the side and downwind. Like the two earlier in the clearing, this one was a werewolf. He was comfortable in the forest—he moved like someone who was used to combat missions.

He went down easily, though, the only sound being the crunch his spine made between Charles’s fangs.

The third in what Charles’s senses now told him had been a three-person strike team (just as the initial group had been made of three people) had found the body of the sniper. There were too many trees, and the underbrush was too thick for Charles to see him, but he could hear him speak into his communication mic.

As he slid through the woods, approaching the man from behind, Charles estimated about two minutes had passed between the time he’d heard the first shot. He took note of the information the man fed his . . . superior? Or maybe just someone on the helicopter Charles could hear. The copter was still on the ground, but, from the engine sound, it was ready to take off immediately.

“That’s the report she gave me just a few minutes ago,” the man said. He’d moved away from the dead female shooter and was running now, a path that was designed to take him in a straight line to the helicopter. Charles could have told him that he’d have trouble getting across the wide, swift-running stream that ran between him and his goal.

Not that Charles would let him make it that far.

“Two new players have joined up,” the man said, his breath even, despite the speed he was running. “One is almost certainly Charles Cornick unless you can think of some other Indian who would be up in these woods. My team is gone. Presume the other team lost. Pick me up. We are FUBAR.”

Charles could hear the helicopter lift, engines purring. Perhaps the man knew about the stream. There was a clearing (Charles was pretty sure) about a quarter of a mile from where he was tailing the man.

Unlikely that Charles could pull down the helicopter. But the man was easy prey.

He’d capture this one, Charles thought. This one was human, so not a werewolf intruding on their territory. Brother Wolf wouldn’t insist on his death. This one would be full of interesting information. He slid silently through the forest, he and Brother Wolf on a hunt.

And then the earth rumbled, and the spirits of the earth rose with a howl of anger and loss. Next to Charles, a lodgepole pine that was older than he was, maybe seventy feet tall, fell with a crack that shook the ground again.

It took a moment for Charles to realize what had happened.

Charles understood that some of his choices had just been made for him. Brother Wolf would not allow any of the attackers to live now. The meaty noise as Brother Wolf tore into the last of their enemies on the ground must also have made it through the device the man wore because the helicopter abruptly changed directions, the noise it generated growing softer and disappearing to the east.

Brother Wolf dropped the body, finished with his task. Charles stepped into his human shape and frowned down at the dead man. He had needed to save one of them. One. So he could question him and find out who was sending teams with helicopter backup into the Marrok’s territory.

But he would have to find that information elsewhere. Inside him, Brother Wolf snarled back, still raging. The earth roiled again, a lesser quake soon over. Charles took a deep breath and starting walking back.

ANNA DROPPED AS soon as Charles did. She belly-crawled to where he’d tossed the witchcrafted weapon and grabbed it. It was important both as a clue and as a weapon that someone could use against them—as evidenced not only by common sense but because Charles dumped it before he changed so that it wouldn’t go wherever his clothes went when he shifted.

A rifle sounded twice. She was fairly certain the sound came from the same place as the initial shots had. Charles had found their shooter. A moment later, she heard a thud as something heavy hit the ground with significant force. She hoped it wasn’t Charles.

But worry or not, she kept moving. Once the weapon was securely tucked back in the waistband of her jeans, she crawled to where Hester had dropped in the shelter of the underbrush, where her black coat made her virtually invisible.

“We should get deeper into the shadows,” Anna whispered, her attention on the forest around them. She could hear the soft sounds of movement approaching their position. She wasn’t as good as some of the old wolves yet, but she could tell distance and direction pretty well.

Scent should be useful, too, and she took a deep breath of blood-scented air. About that time, Anna noticed that Hester wasn’t just being still—she was still.

She grabbed the wolf by any hold she could find and pulled her deeper into the bushes, where the leaves would give them some cover from any sniper fire. Anna dragged Hester into a bed of old leaves that smelled of coyote and mulch tucked in the lee of a rock the size of a small house.

Sheltered in the overhang of the rock and the leafy branches of a strand of aspen, Anna looked for the wound that left Hester limp and unresponsive. She found it, a darker hole in the darkness of Hester’s black fur, a hole in the center of her forehead. Hester wasn’t going to walk out of this one.

The wolf’s ribs moved, air hissed out, then Hester . . . Hester’s corpse, was still. A moment later the earth rolled, dirt sifting down from the rock above. Anna gave the rock a worried look, but, like an iceberg, she was pretty sure the biggest part of it was buried underground. If that rock rolled over, it would be a sign that the end was near and nowhere was safe.

Anna crouched beneath the rock, buffeted by the earth and by the death of the wolf she’d only just met, a death she could feel sliding through Bran and into the pack bonds like the icy burn of a dental probe that left numbness behind. Not as bad as when one of the members of the Marrok’s pack itself died, but it was bad enough.

After a breathless second, the earth rolled a second time, then stilled. It was a waiting stillness. Almost, Anna thought she could see the wood as her mate sometimes did, alive with spirits, all of them watching . . . something. Waiting.

She waited, too. But when nothing more happened, Anna turned her attention back to Hester. Anna found the slug caught in a mass of blood and fur at the back of Hester’s neck. She untangled it, a small, mangled thing. It burned her hands.

If it had been lead it probably would have killed Hester anyway. Werewolves were tough but not indestructible.

Anna closed her fingers around the slug. Such a small thing to end the life of a creature who had been alive when the Mayflower set sail. Powerful . . . ugly . . . and sad.

The fingers of her other hand worked their way into black fur, caressing the wolf who would not care. Anna could hear the faint sounds as the enemies around her died, and she could not feel sorry for them. They were the ones who had brought death here.

But the lumpy weapon in the small of her back made her worry for her mate. She could still see, in her mind’s eye, the moment he fell—and only her mating bond had attested that he was still alive. Hester, old and clever, lay dead beside her. In a world where such things happened, Charles could die, too.

It was only five or six minutes after the last tremor before the leaves rustled and Charles, in human form, crawled into her refuge. Light trickled shyly through the canopy of foliage over their heads and touched his braid and the edge of his cheekbone.

This time his T-shirt was black. Usually, the shirts he wore when his magic clothed him were red. The black one meant that he’d known about Hester, Anna thought, either from the eerie knowing of her death through Bran’s bonds with the pack or from the strange waiting feeling that had followed the last earthquake.

Earthquakes weren’t as common here as they were in California, but the heart of the Rocky Mountains was a living thing, and sometimes it moved. But the rumble of the ground beneath her had felt more personal than that.

“First shot took her in the head,” Anna told him, her voice sounding abnormally calm to her own ears. “She dropped before the second shot.”

Charles’s eyes, dark and liquid, watched her carefully.

She cleared her throat. She was a werewolf, she reminded herself sternly, someone who was used to death, the proper mate of Charles Cornick, son of the Marrok. She held out the slug to Charles and pretended her hand wasn’t shaking, that her free hand wasn’t buried in the ruff of Hester’s thick, black coat, clutching the other wolf as if letting go would signal the end of something important.

Her voice was steady when she spoke. “This is what killed her—it looks weird to me. Not like the bullets we shoot.”

She forgot to warn him that it was silver. He hissed and dropped the slug, then he took his focus off her face and dropped it to her hand.

Her skin was blistered, she noticed, following his gaze, but that had happened when she opened the cage door for Hester. Now, though, the palm of her hand was blackened and crusted, oozing a clear fluid. She hadn’t noticed the pain of it until she saw the burns.

She would heal. She turned her palm away from Charles’s gaze and hid her hand in Hester’s fur.

“I picked up the witch gun,” she told him. “Before I noticed that Hester was in trouble.”

He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath, and she shuddered from the sadness that he felt, emotion that bled over through their mating bond. Marrok’s son, death-bringer, bogeyman of the werewolves was Charles Cornick—but he was no monster. He mourned Hester’s passing, too.

He murmured something in Welsh, his father’s native tongue, then translated for her. “Heaven keep us from the fate we deserve.” When he opened his eyes, they were dry.

He touched her face with his naked hand, and she could breathe again. “Are you hurt?”

Yes. Hurt by thinking he was dead, if only for a moment, when the witchcrafted gun dropped him. Hurt by killing a stranger. Hurt by having Hester die without a chance to defend herself.

But that wasn’t what he was asking. She didn’t think that was what he was asking.

“No one shot me,” she told him because that was the truth. “Just Hester. What about you?”

He shook his head. “Not a new scratch.” He gave her a searching glance, then ripped off the bottom of his shirt and wrapped it around his hand. Skin protected, he picked up the malformed slug he’d dropped into the leaf-litter mulch that covered the ground.

Silver didn’t mushroom like lead; it was too hard. Silver bullets, then, were not as deadly to werewolves as legend would have it. The wounds they made were more like the wounds from arrows than from lead bullets: a neat and tidy hole. Werewolves mostly healed human slowly from such wounds—but as long as the hole wasn’t in the wrong place, they survived.

Right between the eyes was the wrong place. Especially when the bullet inexplicably behaved more like a lead bullet than a silver one.

“That’s silver,” she told Charles. “So why did it mushroom?”

It hadn’t really mushroomed, exactly. Instead, it had opened up like a flower with sharp-edged petals. But she figured he’d understand what she was asking.

He frowned at it. “Winchester had a bullet they called a Black Talon that deformed like this.” He looked at her. “About the time you were born. It looked scary but wasn’t any more lethal than a standard hollow-point round. Less lethal, actually. But scary-looking sells to a certain segment of the gun market.” He gave her a rueful look. “When the bullet was famously used by a serial killer, Winchester decided they didn’t need that kind of notoriety and took it off the market.”

He glanced at Hester, and ghosts moved in his eyes. “Someone figured out how to use that design to make a silver bullet that expands. I remember something about . . .”

He closed his eyes for a moment.

One of problems people whose age was in the three digits had was that they had a lot of memories to sort through. She’d noticed that sometimes important items didn’t shake out until later.

Anna wasn’t hampered by the weight of too many years. “Remember the vampire in Spokane, the one Mercy dealt with a while back? Didn’t he make specialty ammunition intended for the supernatural communities? Did his company produce something like that?” She’d remembered the reference to the bullet from the nineties that had been discontinued because a serial killer had made it famous.

Charles opened his eyes and smiled at her. “Yes. That’s what I was looking for. You are useful to have around.”

“Back atcha,” she told him. “And there was some connection between that vampire and Gerry Wallace—the one who paid Leo to make werewolves.” She thought she got the name of her first Alpha out in a steady voice, but every muscle in Charles’s body stiffened, and he growled.

“Leo’s dead,” she told him firmly. “But the moneyman, the guy with the money and some kind of political clout who seems to be lurking in the background . . .”

Charles nodded. “Because Gerry didn’t have that kind of money—or those kinds of connections. Gerry used those poor wolves Leo made to try to find drugs that work on us. That part was all Gerry. But the person who knew that Leo had been trying to keep his mate alive by changing beautiful men—and you—and killing the pack members who objected, the person who knew Leo would be willing to supply the wolves with a little blackmail and money—that person we didn’t find. He’s a ghost—assuming he’s all the same person. I get a whiff of him now and then. He was involved in that group of ex-Cantrip people who attacked the Columbia Basin Pack. He might have been a part of the Boston business we ran into last fall.”

He tossed the bullet in the air and caught it, his eyes a pale gold. And then he whispered thoughtfully, “And here he is again, what did you call him? The moneyman.”

Anna looked down at the wolf they had both been trying not to think about too much. Or that she had been trying not to think about too much even as her hands tried to comfort Hester and herself.

“Why are we taking time now?” she asked. “I mean, you don’t usually talk while there are things to do.”

Things like bringing Hester’s body back to her mate.

“I’m giving him time,” Charles said. “Jonesy.”

“He knows she’s gone,” Anna said.

It hadn’t been a question, but he nodded anyway. “The earthquakes. Those were him, I think. We should wait here a little longer. Old creatures are unpredictable when they are grieving.”

Anna nodded and untangled her hands from Hester’s fur. “Why did they kill Hester?”

Her voice sounded too small, but she couldn’t help it. Hester wasn’t the first dead person, dead werewolf, she’d been around. Anna had killed another person today. Shouldn’t she be getting over death by now? She was a werewolf, right? She didn’t get to be shaken by the deaths of near strangers.

She cleared her throat and tried to sound . . . unshaken. Or at least less shaken. “They tried so hard to take her away with them. Why not wait to see if they could capture her later?”

The question he answered wasn’t the one she had voiced. “It is all right to mourn Hester. She is worth the weight of your sorrow.”

“I didn’t know her,” Anna said. “How can I be so sad when I didn’t know her? I mean, why mourn her and not that guy I killed? I didn’t know her any better than I knew him.”

Charles raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you mourning him, too?” he asked perceptively. But he didn’t wait for her to answer his question.

He looked at Hester, and said, “I don’t know why they killed her. I don’t know why they came here or what they wanted. But they were looking for her—for a female werewolf. Maybe because she was female, maybe because she was Hester—and maybe because she and Jonesy were up here isolated. They knew too much, our enemy. They knew that Jonesy is fae, though they didn’t have any idea how powerful he is. My da has been worried about the threat Hester and Jonesy represented—maybe he should have been a little worried about how vulnerable they were. If Jonesy hadn’t called us, it would have been months before someone came up to check on them.”

“We need to know if this was an isolated incident, if it was aimed at Hester and Jonesy only. Or if someone—the moneyman, maybe—is targeting werewolves living in isolation,” Anna said, grateful for something to focus on besides the dead werewolf, the man she’d killed, and Jonesy, whose mate was dead.

“Yes,” Charles told her gravely. “All of that.” He frowned. “I could have captured the last one. He was human. But Brother Wolf—” He looked at Hester’s body and shook his head. “Brother Wolf thought that it was better to make sure they were all dead.”

He raised his chin and looked around them, his head tilted a little as if he could hear something she did not.

“I think we can go now.” Charles rose to his knees and hefted Hester’s body until he had her in a fireman’s carry. He backed out of the underbrush and stood as soon as he could. He waited until Anna was beside him, then started back toward the cabin.

Her mate had grace in the steep terrain, never faltering as he stepped over downed timber or around rocks. He didn’t slip, didn’t make an unintentional noise, while carrying the huge old wolf.

Anna had been raised in suburban Chicago. The closest she’d gotten to mountains were the hills in Wisconsin, where she’d gone to a few summer camps in middle school. In wolf form, she was almost competent. But her human toes liked to stick themselves under tree roots and thunk into rocks, especially when she couldn’t see because stupid tears kept welling up whenever she let her eyes linger on the dead werewolf.

“Should we be worried about Jonesy?” asked Anna. “As we approach the cabin, I mean?”

Charles hesitated, then said, “We should always worry about anyone as old and worn as Jonesy.”

Any other day, Anna would have pursued that not-answer. But she was feeling as though she’d been knocked off her feet and couldn’t quite find her balance, so she let it pass.

But he clarified his answer anyway. “You should probably stick close. As much for me as for you. Leah was right, bringing you was a good idea. It seemed to help Jonesy.”

“How is that?” she asked his back. “I noticed it, too. Usually, I only have that kind of an effect on werewolves.”

“No,” Charles said. “I would have said that you affect werewolves most strongly. But watching Jonesy with you—you affected him as much as you affect any werewolf. It might be because he’s the mate of a wolf. Or some of the fae are shapechangers . . .”

Anna looked ahead to see what had distracted him. They had just topped a rise, and the trees had thinned, so she could see the valley with Hester and Jonesy’s cabin.

The happy sunflower-looking flowers that had been only in the flower boxes had now popped up all over the valley, not densely, like the poppies in The Wizard of Oz, but in small patches here and there. Maybe she just hadn’t noticed them.

“Are those flowers new?” she asked.

“Yes.”

They were pretty, gathered together like natural bouquets, not elegant enough to be beautiful but sort of homey and lovely. Warm and welcoming. They shouldn’t have caused the dread in her stomach.

The little cabin was quiet. No soft-spoken fae came out to greet them. Charles walked right past the cabin without slowing. He just took Hester to the back of the truck and waited, without saying anything.

She dropped the tailgate, expecting him to lay Hester’s body down, then push it in the rest of the way. Instead, he hopped into the bed himself, then set the body of the wolf down as if she could still be hurt if he didn’t take care.

Anna wrapped her arms around her midriff, watching him. “He’s dead, too,” Anna said in a low voice. That’s why they had waited. That’s why he hadn’t really worried about Jonesy when they were bringing his dead mate back to him.

Charles jumped out of the truck and landed lightly beside her. When he spoke, his voice was heavy. “Probably.”

And she remembered that his father had left Hester and her mate in Charles’s capable hands. Their lives had been his to protect, and Charles took his responsibilities very seriously.

He walked them unhurriedly back to the cabin. She noticed he didn’t step on any of the flowers, so she took care not to as well.

The door was unlocked.

The interior of the cabin was tidy and cozy. A couple of rocking chairs near the fireplace, bookcases stacked with worn books, some of them leather-bound antiques, others modern. There was a small loom with the beginnings of cloth woven only a few inches long, a pale sea-foam green.

She could smell them here—Hester and Jonesy—but the only sounds were the ones she and Charles made. The house felt empty, as if no one had lived here in a very, very long time. No breathing, no heartbeat, none of the small, shuffly noises that come with movement and living. That lack didn’t keep her from feeling like she was violating the private space of someone she didn’t know.

The main floor was all one room, but there was a loft over half of it. Charles climbed the rungs on the wall that gave access to the loft, but when his head cleared the ledge and he could look over, he just shook his head and dropped to the ground without bothering to use the rungs on the way down.

“Here,” said Anna. She whispered because it seemed appropriate—as if she were in a library or private garden, where noise might disturb someone else.

Here was a trapdoor in the corner of the room farthest from the door, next to the bathroom door. It was closed, but not in an attempt to hide it.

Charles passed a hand slowly over it, close, but not touching. Looking, Anna thought, for a trap, magic or otherwise. Once he’d finished, he opened the door and used an eyehook on the wall to hold it open.

A narrow, winding stairway dropped into the darkness below. All of the rungs and stringers were carved with fantastical beasts, the stringer was pine, and the rungs were a similar light wood with a different grain. It was a work of art.

It was not so dark that Anna’s wolf couldn’t see as she followed Charles into the basement. As with the main floor, there was only a single room in the basement, dominated by a large bed in the corner. She heard the sound of a match striking.

There was an oil lamp sitting on a small bookcase next to the stairway. Lighting it seemed to be a complicated matter, but Charles had no trouble. She supposed that he’d lit a lot of oil lamps before electricity became common.

The lamp was brighter than she expected, and, when Charles held it high, it shed enough light to illuminate the whole room.

The bed had no head- or footboard. The bedspread was a handmade quilt, an old-style crazy quilt, the kind the pioneers used to make when every scrap of fabric had been precious, so every bit had been put to use.

On one side of the bed was a swath of deep-black soil of the sort that would make Asil, the pack’s rose-obsessed gardener, hum with pleasure. She could smell as much as see that mixed into the soil were some still-green leaves and flower remnants.

Lying askew and half-buried in the soil on the bed and into the mattress below was a sword.

The sword was no pretty movie prop. It was made for killing things rather than impressing an audience. The blade, short, broad, and leaf-shaped, was nearly black, and so was the cross guard, maybe from age—but it looked as though it might have been charred in a very hot fire.

The grip looked like leather, old and cracking, like some long-abandoned relic. On the very end of the pommel, a rough gemstone the size of a walnut gleamed, a thing of beauty that contrasted with the grim fierceness of the rest of the weapon. It could have been sapphire, blue topaz, or some other deep-blue stone.

Charles set the lamp down and pulled the sword free of soil and mattress in a careful movement, shedding all of the particulate matter back onto the quilt. When he had it free, he laid it back down, parallel to the dirt but a handspan apart, careful to touch only the leather of the grip. There was a solemnness to his action that confirmed her suspicion.

“Jonesy?” she said. Upon death, the bodies of some of the fae, especially the very old fae, did unexpected things—like become earth and plant matter.

Charles nodded.

“You knew he would do this?” she asked. “That’s why we waited?” She didn’t know how she felt about that.

Charles met her gaze. “No. Yes. Maybe. I think I expected that he would destroy this mountain and possibly much more than that—especially if he had an audience. I wanted to give him time to make a different decision, to keep his word to Hester, that he would not harm anyone.”

CHARLES CALLED HIS da’s house from the house phone and organized a cleanup crew. He’d been lucky that Sage had answered: she was all business; there was none of the political maneuvering that Leah was prone to.

Because he was talking to Sage, he could watch his mate through the largish picture window in the main room of the cabin. Anna was leaning up against the truck staring at Jonesy’s parting gift of flowers—or the flowers that the earth had given Jonesy as a parting gift.

She had been hurt—and he wasn’t talking about the wounds she’d taken from the silver or the ones she hadn’t taken from the flying bullets. His mate had been hurt, and, for all his best efforts, he had not been able to stop it.

If she had never become the victim of the Chicago pack’s desperation, who would she be?

Would she have found someone else? A boy her age? Sweet and strong, full of hope—unfouled by centuries of killing? Could she have made a home with some other man? Had a dog, a couple of cats, and 2.3 children?

The only thing that he knew for sure was that Anna wouldn’t have been crying over a pair of dead werewolves, one whom she’d tried to save and the other whom she had killed herself.

Brother Wolf huffed at Charles’s self-indulgence. And maybe she’d have been crying over the death of someone else she couldn’t save. Grief is not the sole purview of werewolves.

Even more indignantly, Brother Wolf continued, Maybe she’d have found a serial killer to marry, maybe she’d have married a gentle soul like herself and always wondered why she was so bored. But she didn’t. She found us. She didn’t need to find anyone else.

Charles felt Brother Wolf stir restlessly inside him until he found some surety amidst Charles’s guilt.

She would have found us even if she had never met Leo or Justin. There was no doubt in Brother Wolf. She has always been ours. She will always be ours.

“Charlie?”

Sage’s voice was a tentative question where she’d been all business before. The change brought his attention back to their conversation.

“Yes?”

“Have you heard from Bran? I mean, we all felt her die through him. Leah thought he’d call the house to see what happened, but he hasn’t. She tried his cell, but it went right to voice mail. I know he’s supposed to be out of the country, but his phone is a satellite phone. It should work wherever he is.”

Charles frowned. “Both of us left our cell phones at home. They’re in the office—you can check to see if he called.”

“We know, we did. And there’s been nothing. We were hoping that maybe he’d gotten in touch the other way.”

If something had happened to his phone, Bran could talk to his pack mind to mind. He couldn’t hear them in return, but it was still a handy thing.

“No.” And wasn’t that odd? And unlike Bran. Almost as unlike Bran as taking a vacation in Africa.

Sage squeaked, then Tag’s soft voice said, “What are you doing with Hester’s body and Jonesy’s . . . leftovers? He was the sort who wouldn’t leave a body.”

Charles paused. He’d been going to bring Hester back for cremation and burial—the same as for any pack member who had no other family to make decisions for her. Tag sounded like he knew Hester and Jonesy a lot better than Charles did, better enough to know what would happen to Jonesy’s body.

“What do you think we should do?” he asked, because Tag wouldn’t have voiced the question without having an opinion.

“Hester’s people burned their dead with their homes and possessions—freeing their spirits from the mortal world.” Tag was enough of a Celt to make that sound poetic and stubborn enough that he would insist on it now that Charles had asked him his opinion.

Charles shouldn’t have asked.

“It’s high summer,” he told Tag. “The cabin is in the middle of the forest. If we start a fire here, we’ll have the whole forest up in smoke.”

Tag made a negative sound. “All due respect,” he said, “but that cabin had a firebreak all around it. I recleared it this spring myself. We had rain last week, so the underbrush is damp. If we light it at night, we can keep an eye out for stray sparks.”

Tag had been Bran’s contact with Hester and Jonesy, Charles realized. Bran liked to do that. Give the wildlings some contact in the pack other than himself in the hopes of helping the wildling to remain stable. Usually, that other person was Charles, Leah, or Asil. If not one of them, he should have at least picked a wolf more stable than Tag, who was nearly a wildling himself . . . but if the two wolves had known each other from an earlier time, it would make some sense.

Outside, Anna pulled the emergency blanket out of the truck and climbed into the truck bed. She shook the blanket out, then, with a graceful flick of her wrists, flipped it to cover Hester.

“She was old,” Tag was saying. “And tough. She survived things that would make your red fur turn gray—and she did it with style. On her own terms. She deserves what we can do for her.”

“I agree,” Charles said. “Tell Sage I’ve changed my mind. We’ll still gather all the pack up here to check things out—but it will be a funeral, too. We’ll need food and drink. Fuel enough to burn the house to the ground.”

“Gasoline and diesel?” Tag asked as Anna came into Hester’s living room.

“Ask Asil,” said Charles.

“Asil?” Tag said doubtfully. “He’s old. Older’n me. What’s he know about setting a house on fire?”

Sage said something that Charles couldn’t quite catch.

“Oh, okay,” said Tag. “That’s all right, then. I’ll make sure Asil knows he’s in charge of the fire. No worries. We’ll organize this end of it.”

Sage took the phone back. “Don’t worry,” she said dryly. “Leah and I will organize this end of it.”