Burn Bright

by Patricia Briggs

  “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.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  The pack came by twos and threes, on four-wheelers, on motorcycles, or in various four-wheel-drive vehicles. Tag came on his backhoe.

  They retrieved the invaders’ bodies first. Those went into Charles’s truck, all six of them, while Hester’s body was removed to the cabin. By the time they’d finished with that, the whole pack was present.

  Charles put Leah in charge of figuring out how to get the four-wheelers, now grown into the forest, out, without leaving obvious signs that magic had been worked there. It was obviously the most difficult job and, to his surprise, she tackled it with enthusiasm.

  He’d flattered her, he realized, in front of the pack. And as a result, she hadn’t even resented his giving her orders. Maybe Anna was right when she said that Leah wasn’t the only reason he and his stepmother had a difficult time with each other.

  Leah grabbed a half dozen wolves and, eventually, several chain saws. It had taken a few hours, but Sage’s SUV held the cage Hester had been trapped in as well one of the four-wheelers. Leah’s truck held the other three—chopped up into parts. Even removed from the forest, the mangled vehicles were an odd sight. Desultory leakage of various fluids attested that they had been running, but all of them had freshly sawn tree bits growing through the metal.

  Charles didn’t know exactly what he was going to do with them. What he wasn’t going to do with them was stage them in his father’s backyard as art pieces—as Sage had advised.

  Tag’s suggestion of finding out who they belonged to and giving them back was a better one, though the manner Tag wanted to do it in seemed a bit complicated. And violent.

  Brother Wolf was in agreement with Tag.

  While Leah’s team took care of the four-wheelers, Charles set most of the rest of the pack clearing the area around the cabin of anything burnable. He sent the rest out to find any evidence of the invasion, anything that would hold a clue as to who these people were and what they had been about. He didn’t expect them to find much; the people he’d killed today had seemed pretty professional. Professionals don’t leave clues if they can help it.

  That’s why he was surprised when Asil came back almost immediately to report that he’d found electronic surveillance equipment up in the trees. Charles asked Asil to let the other evidence-hunting wolves know to look for more electronics. Once that was done, Charles pulled Tag off his backhoe and recruited Anna to help the two of them.

  He and Tag because they knew what they were looking at when it came to tech. Anna because she kept him balanced.

  The events of the day—the fact that Hester and Jonesy had died while under his protection—had left Brother Wolf beside himself. Most of the pack were afraid of him for one reason or another. Normally, it would not have been a problem, but now the others could sense Brother Wolf’s anger. Their increased fear enraged Brother Wolf more, creating a nasty snowball effect.

  Anna took the edge off everyone’s emotions, so he didn’t end up killing some idiot for the crime of stepping in front of Brother Wolf at the wrong time. Some idiot that he was supposed to be taking care of for his da, who had not contacted anyone about Hester’s death.

  Brother Wolf didn’t like that they hadn’t heard from Da, either.

  On the good side, as it turned out, none of the battery- or solar-powered surveillance equipment they found was functional.

  “Jonesy probably zapped them,” said Tag from twenty feet up in a lodgepole pine, where he was using a battery-powered drill to extract a camera from its perch in the tree. “He should have told Hester, but he didn’t always tell her everything. He didn’t like to worry her. Having awesome godlike power meant that nothing much worried him even if it should have.”

  “Zapped,” said Charles dryly.

  Tag made a popping sound with his mouth. He liked to sound dumb, even in front of people he knew were wise to him. “Zapped. That’s why the innards are all melty-like and the out-ards are untouched. Only way I can think of to do that is magical zapping.”

  He’d gotten the camera off the tree by that point and opened up the casing. None of the electronics was store-bought. This was equipment built from components by someone who knew what they were doing. That meant that someone, some person, had touched the insides with their hands.

  Tag brought the opened camera to his nose for a good smell, reclosed the casing to preserve the scent, then tossed it down.

  Charles caught it, then took a moment to reopen the casing and get a good smell of the ruined camera himself. Outside, it just smelled of the forest, but inside . . . the faint ozone of zapped electronics and the peppery smell of the man who’d put this one together.

  All in all, there had been three people who had worked on the custom electronics placed around Hester’s cabin. All of them human—and one of them lay dead in Charles’s truck bed. But the other two were still at large. He’d know them by their scent when he ran into them again. Tag’s nose was pretty good; he’d know them, too. So would Anna.

  But he didn’t bother handing her this camera—she’d already gotten the scent of the three people from the other equipment they’d found. If he could count on Tag’s letting him know if he found someone different, Charles wouldn’t have to have Brother Wolf check each one out. But Tag was Tag. Tag took great pride in letting you fall if you leaned on him too much.

  “You knew them pretty well,” Anna observed to Tag in a gentle voice. “Hester and Jonesy.”

  Tag had been ready to drop down, but at Anna’s gambit, he paused, hanging from a branch, like a nearly seven-foot-tall orange-maned monkey, swinging gently. He nodded at Anna’s comment without looking at her.

  “You could say I knew them,” he said, dropping a hand to scratch at his head, his body as relaxed as if he were standing in the living room—or, Charles thought, dangling a thousand feet over an abyss. You didn’t get a permanent spot in the Marrok’s pack if you could function properly on your own.

  “Hester better than Jonesy,” Tag told Anna. “Hester and I were lovers a few centuries ago.” He paused to consider that, his body stilled—so the swinging had been on purpose. Eventually, he added, “Give or take a few centuries, I guess. She tossed me back in the sea, figuratively and literally speaking as it happens, but we stayed friendly anyway, mostly because she fished me out so I didn’t drown. Then she found Jonesy.”

  He loosed his grip with seeming carelessness that nonetheless gave him a clear drop despite the hazards of the proliferation of tree branches and small trees between him and the ground. He landed lightly on his feet for such a big man jumping from thirty
feet up, though he took a little hop like a gymnast who hadn’t quite stuck the landing.

  An accident of position had Tag meeting Charles’s eyes, just as he landed.

  Brother Wolf thought it would be interesting to pit himself against Tag. In Tag’s suddenly gold eyes, Charles saw the same desire. Tag was a little bit afraid of him, Charles knew. Other wolves might have let that fear cow them, but not Tag. Fierce joy and love of battle sparkled through the pack bond they shared. Wouldn’t it be fun? Tag’s wolf asked, and Brother Wolf agreed heartily.

  Sometimes Brother Wolf was as crazy as all the rest of the wolves in his da’s pack.

  “Another time,” Charles told Tag and Brother Wolf both. “Someday when there isn’t a job to do.”

  “Just for fun,” agreed Tag.

  Anna looked back and forth between them and rolled her eyes.

  “I guess since Hester fell for both Jonesy and me, she had a thing for dangerous men,” Tag told Anna. He grinned, but there was an edge to it that might have had something to do with the exchange with Charles, or it might have been grief. Or both. “Jonesy was all right back then,” he said. “Mostly. Mostly all right. But there was a dustup with some of his people, some of whom died who shouldn’t have. He went from being wobbly at times to full out tilt-a-whirl. Hester took care of him.”

  “I thought Hester was supposed to be wobbly, too,” said Anna. “Though she seemed pretty sharp today.”

  “Hester is . . . was as stable as me,” Tag told her. “Well, no. Better than I am.” He looked at Charles for a moment, then shook his head. He tipped his chin toward Anna. “As sane as you are.”

  “She tried hunting Da down last time he was here,” Charles said dryly. “Sane people usually don’t try that.”

  Tag gave him an agreeable look under his brow. “Hester and Bran, they went out of their way to make Hester sound crazier than she was. Especially if Jonesy was having troubles, more than usual. Make sure that no one except he or I came up here. Keep everyone wary of Hester. Like all the wildlings, they were here on sufferance, and the Marrok’s power kept the other Gray Lords from bothering Jonesy. If Bran made them leave, they would have been on their own, and that would have been disastrous. For everyone.”