Burn Bright

by Patricia Briggs

  * * *

  • • •

  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.