Burn Bright

by Patricia Briggs

  “And yet,” said Charles, whose silent prayer had been for both the dead, “Hester loved him.”

  Asil shrugged. “It is impossible to account for the taste of women.” But his eyes were sober.

  The first thing they looked at was the sword. It was obviously old and well used and of fae making—the blade was something other than steel. Charles had felt nothing from it when he picked it up earlier. He picked it up again, paying attention—and still felt nothing.

  “It is magic,” Charles told Asil. “But I can’t sense it.”

  He handed it to Asil, who raised his eyebrows. He took it in a two-handed grip and brought it up and around in a quick practice swing.

  “Remarkable,” Asil said, dropping his left hand away and making a second, more complex swing with just one hand. “A great weapon,” he pronounced when he had finished. “I am sure it has killed almost as many as I have.” He didn’t say, “I, too, am a great weapon,” though Charles had no trouble hearing it.

  Asil looked at the blade closely, then let it drop to a less ready position. “It doesn’t feel magical to me in any way,” he said. “But it most certainly is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How did you?” Asil countered.

  “The blade isn’t steel. It is some sort of silver alloy.” Charles knew silver. “Or an alloy with silver in it—a metallurgist would tell you the silver content was not high. The fae like to use silver in their magical weapons. It holds the power better than other metals.”

  “A metallurgist would have to despoil this blade to tell anything,” Asil said distastefully. “But that is an interesting answer. I expected that you might have made that assumption because Jonesy used it to kill himself. Such a one would never die by an ordinary blade. But there is a more sure way to know that this blade is A Blade.”

  Charles could hear the capitals in Asil’s voice.

  Asil turned the blade to the light and moved it until Charles could see three runes set into the blade, all three of them together no larger than a thumbprint.

  “This is the mark of the Dark Smith of Drontheim,” said Asil, indicating the runes without touching the blade. “That one did not bother with magicless blades.”

  Charles looked around the room and sighed. “We’re going to have to come back after we burn this place and look for anything that emerges unscathed.” Maybe his da would be back by then.

  “Probably,” Asil agreed. “But do not despair, this is difficult magic, even for the fae. I do not believe that there are a dozen such objects of power here.”

  An hour later, Asil was not so sanguine.

  “At least we know it isn’t the Gray Lords we’re facing,” Charles said, holding a broken, decorative hair clip he’d found in Hester’s dresser drawer.

  “How so?” Asil was emptying out a blanket chest so they could use it to store what they were finding.

  “If the fae had any idea of what a hoarder Jonesy was, they wouldn’t have bothered with cameras. They’d have broken down the walls and taken everything as soon as they knew it was here.”

  There were amulets, cups, gems, knives, a spear, four arrows from three different regions, three rugs—two simple rag rugs and a small Persian rug. There was a bone bowl and a handful of coin-like items.

  Most of the items held fae magic, or fae-like magic. But the bone bowl was witchcrafted and stank of blood magic as soon as Charles touched it. There was an arrowhead that looked neolithic to Charles—and something slept within it. Brother Wolf warned him not to wake it up, whatever it was, because it smelled bad.

  There were powerful items, but most of them, as far as Charles could tell, were just junk that happened to contain a spark of something. A bronze knife burned clear and bright with magic, like an artesian well. There was a blue-and-purple pottery jar that made him want to wash his hands after he touched it.

  A lot of the magically charged things they found were broken pieces of larger items. Sometimes Charles could tell what it was part of—like the bowl of a clay pipe or the tongue of a buckle. Jonesy, he thought, was not very picky about what he collected. “Hoarded” was probably the right word for it.

  The search took Asil and Charles too long to keep what they were doing a secret. If there was any doubt, it was dispelled when Leah opened the door, and said, “Everyone knows what you are doing in there—I didn’t tell them, Tag did. Is there any way you can hurry this up?”

  Charles hadn’t told Tag what they were doing, but he couldn’t remember where Tag had been when he approached Asil. Tag, for all of his orange hair and size, could avoid being noticed if he wanted to.

  “No,” Asil said shortly. “We will be done when we are finished.”

  Asil liked Leah considerably less than he liked Charles—and he only tolerated Charles for Anna’s sake.

  On their third search of the basement, Charles noticed an oddity in the soil on the bed—a straight line where there shouldn’t be one. With a grimace, he freed a folded piece of paper from Jonesy’s remains—a page ripped from a book.

  “What do you have?” Asil asked from the other side of the bed.

  “A page from The Silmarillion,” Charles said, opening it. Across the typeset letters of Christopher Tolkien’s foreword, someone had written in a jerky hand without punctuation:

  Hester Hester says they were asking about the wildlings there is a traitor and it is one of us Hester Hester

  Hester’s name, repeated on either end of the message, was written in noticeably smoother strokes of the pen than the rest of it.

  Of course there was a traitor, Charles thought. How would anyone know about Hester’s isolated cabin if there wasn’t a traitor?

  “Well,” said Asil, who had approached so he could read over Charles’s shoulder. “He could have been more helpful. Is the traitor one of the wildlings? One of the fae? One of the pack? At least we know they were looking for one of the wildlings.” He paused. “Or all of the wildlings.”

  A hunt, said Brother Wolf with grim satisfaction. Hester has given us a hunt.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE END, most of their finds fit in the blanket chest. The sword they wrapped in one of the discarded blankets. There was no disguising what it was, really, but at least no one would have details. Magical swords tended to have histories and be identifiable to someone with enough motivation. This way, all an observer would see would be him and Asil with random stuff—no details to attract someone (or something) out there looking for the silver shoe buckle of Asmodeus or some such nonsense.

  Charles refolded the paper and stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans. They had agreed that it would be best not to talk to anyone except Anna about that note. If there was a traitor, the less said to anyone about it the better.

  Charles was reasonably certain that Asil was incapable of betraying his da. It helped that Asil had vowed his loyalty to the Marrok and Bran (as if they were two different people) as soon as he had read the note through.

  Asil closed the lid of the blanket chest and turned the latch so it wouldn’t fall open when they carried it out. “You know we did not find everything.”

  “I do,” agreed Charles. “I also believe we have found everything we are going to.”

  Asil smiled. “I do not miss being Alpha,” he said. “Especially at times like these I do not mind that you are more dominant in this pack than I. It means that I am not responsible for that which we have found—and more importantly, that which we have not found.”

  Brother Wolf did not find Asil funny.

  “Good for you,” Charles said.

  Asil’s smile broadened, though he did not show his teeth. “Jonesy was a hoarder of the sort who make appearances on TV reality shows. Who knows how long he had been collecting? You and I will be out here as soon as the fire burns itself out—assuming Bran isn’t back, and pr
obably even if he is. And we will still not find everything. And there is this, too. Jonesy, whoever he was when the world was young, could make the earth listen to his desires. If I had this ability, I would hide the prizes of my collection deep in the earth. You need to be very careful, or what you’ll have is a bunch of treasure-hunting fae invading the mountain, digging for treasure.”

  He didn’t, Charles thought, have to sound so happy about it.

  CHAPTER

  5

  The flat area of the valley resembled a parking lot, but one filled with an unusually high percentage of trucks and SUVs—even for Montana. The three tractors and the backhoe completed the picture.

  Maybe, Anna thought, approaching Charles’s truck (and though they’d been married for a while now, it was still Charles’s truck), a parking lot of a feed store.

  Her orders were to bring the truck as close to the front door of the cabin as she could so that Asil and Charles could load it with whatever they found in the cabin. Either there was a lot of it, or it had been difficult to secure, because it had taken them a long time to finish.

  The truck had been pulled close to a trail to reduce the distance the bodies had to be carried. She almost just hopped in and drove, but as she stepped into the cab, she noticed that whoever had thrown the bodies into Charles’s truck hadn’t shut the tailgate. Even though they had gone to a great deal of trouble to secure the concealing tarp down. Fat lot of good that would have done to hide the load, with a leg sticking out the back.

  Anna had to partially unhook the tarp in order to get at the macabre cargo and move the bodies around until she could close the tailgate.

  Dear Dad. She composed a mental letter as she unhooked bungee cords. Life in Montana is pretty interesting. Killed a man today—it was justified. Really. But just in case, you should talk to your buddies and see if there’s a good criminal attorney in Missoula or Kalispell who wouldn’t mind representing a werewolf.

  She considered whether or not she should explain exactly what she was up to just now—moving dead bodies around so she could shut the tailgate—to her father, even in an imaginary letter. She decided that there were some things he did not need to know.

  She pulled the tarp aside—and a horribly familiar scent caught her off guard. She stopped everything and took a deep breath, knowing she must be mistaken. And for a moment after that, she couldn’t breathe at all. Once she could breathe again, she unhooked the tarp a little more so she could get a good look at the faces of the dead.

  “Hello, hello,” said Sage—and Anna jumped.

  It said something about Anna’s state that she hadn’t even noticed Sage approaching.

  “What did you do to your hand?” Sage asked in a much more serious voice before Anna could say anything to her greeting.

  Anna looked down blankly at the bright purple vet wrap that wound around her right hand. Charles had utilized the time between when he’d used Jonesy’s phone to call for help and when help started arriving, about fifteen minutes later (some members of the pack lived almost as remotely as the wildlings), to do a little first aid.

  “They shot Hester with a silver bullet,” she managed to get out reasonably smoothly. “I held on to it too long when I recovered it. It’s fine.”

  “I got sent over to see what was taking you so long,” Sage said briskly, sensing, with her usual perceptiveness, Anna’s volatile emotional state and that Anna would rather not expound upon it. Sage was very good at knowing exactly what to say and when to leave things alone. “Her royal highness is getting restless.” Though Sage got along with Leah just fine, it didn’t spare Leah (or anyone else for that matter) from Sage’s pointed comments. “I think she just wants to know what Charles and Asil have found, like all the rest of us.”

  Sage’s voice was beautiful. Born in the Deep South, it flowed out like honey on a sore throat, soothing and sweet. The rest of Sage was beautiful, too. She was tall, though not as tall as Leah, and slender as a runway model. Sage was funny, sharp, and warm at the same time, a combination that let her get away with saying things that a lot of people were thinking—and not getting in trouble for it.

  Before Anna could decide to tell her that she knew one of the dead people, Sage rounded the end of the truck and saw Anna’s initial problem.

  “Ha,” she said. “Did the idiots who loaded the bodies forget that you’d have to shut the tailgate or risk dropping dead people all the way home?” She hopped up without a fuss and started shifting the bodies around.

  “Some people have no sense at all,” Sage said. “And I include Charles in that. Sending you, of all people, out to deal with all the dead bodies.”

  Anna found herself at a loss for words. Still reeling from . . . PTSD, she supposed, it took her a moment to realize that Sage seemed to be ascribing any oddity in her manner to all the dead bodies in the back of the truck.

  Well, she was right in that, if not for quite the reason she thought. Sage hopped out and shut the tailgate. Anna stirred herself and began reapplying bungee cords, ignoring the pain in her burnt hand.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that, honey,” Sage said. “They’ll probably just have to undo the tarp all over again when they load whatever they found in Hester’s cabin.”

  Anna let her hands drop, and Sage muttered to herself, “Leave it alone. Leave it . . .” She snorted, shook her head, and asked, “Are you all right, Anna? Is there anything I can do?”

  Anna made a helpless gesture because, while Sage had been moving bodies, Anna had decided that the first person who needed to hear that she knew one of the dead men was her mate. And because she couldn’t tell Sage she was fine. Sometimes living with werewolves sucked—like when it made little social lies impossible.

  When she didn’t answer, Sage gave her a sympathetic smile. “Sometimes it hits me, too.” She looked at the truck bed, at Hester’s cabin, then a sweeping glance that took in the pack altogether. Sage closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them, she said, “What I wouldn’t give to live an ordinary life, you know? No monsters. No dead bodies. The kind of life where I could get outraged that some guy is getting paid more than me for doing the same job. That a speeding ticket is enough to ruin my whole day.”

  Anna started to agree but then stopped and shook her head. “No. Then I wouldn’t have Charles. He’s worth all the rest.”

  “Charlie?” said Sage. She started to say something else, but she shook her head and gave Anna a rueful smile. “Charlie sure thinks the sun rises and sets on you, that’s for sure.”

  Even without telling Sage everything, the other woman had helped Anna find balance. Just having someone else there helped, someone who reminded Anna by her very presence that she wasn’t in Chicago and that there were people here she could trust to have her back.

  So Anna had recognized one of the dead men. That was no excuse to break into a cold sweat of memory. He was dead, after all, and memories couldn’t hurt her unless she chose to let them. And she was no one’s victim these days.

  Taking emotion out of the discovery, there were some interesting implications about her knowing one of the men, weren’t there? Especially given the ammunition that had killed Hester.

  “Are you okay?” Sage asked again. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Anna gave her what she hoped was a reassuring smile. She did want to talk things out but not with Sage. At least not with Sage first. “You already have, thank you. I was just having a moment—it’s been a long day. Let’s get the truck over before Leah has an aneurysm.”

  “Do you think she would?” asked Sage, with interest. “That she could?” She made a happy noise. “It probably wouldn’t kill her, but it might get her to cool her jets a little. We could wait here for a while longer, don’t you think?”

  “Leah’s a werewolf,” Anna said dryly. “I think she’ll survive a little frustration. Do you want to ride over with me?
”

  “No,” said Sage. “I’m also on my way to find Tag and ‘make sure the enfant terrible has not forgotten where he put the fuel for the fire.’” The last was said in Asil’s unmistakable accent.

  “I thought Tag was up at the cabin telling stories about Hester,” Anna said.

  Sage nodded. “So did Asil. But he wasn’t. So I’m to fetch him—” The sound of a great diesel engine engaging rumbled through the air.

  Sage threw up her hands. “What does he think he’s doing with that backhoe?” She hopped on the edge of the truck bed and balanced on it for a moment and looked, presumably, over the cars to where the backhoe had been parked. She shook her head. “I have no idea. None. That man. But I guess I’d better find out.”

  She leaped, cleared the bed of the truck, and took off running, presumably for the backhoe with Tag in it.

  * * *

  • • •

  ANNA DROVE THE truck right up to the front door of the cabin and hopped out. By the time she had the tailgate down, Asil and Charles had come out of the cabin with their discoveries.

  Between them they carried a small cedar chest, each holding on to one of the handles on either end. Impossible to see how heavy the box was—two werewolves could probably stroll around carrying a VW Bug from the bumpers and not show much strain. Balanced diagonally across the top of the chest and overhanging the sides was something—Anna was pretty sure it was the sword Jonesy had killed himself with—wrapped in a blanket.

  They gently set the box down on the tailgate. Sage had rearranged the bodies so there would be some room, but neither she nor Anna had envisioned an entire cedar chest. Charles and Asil unhooked the tarp the rest of the way and rolled it back, working together as a silent team, one on either side of the truck. They were so apparently unconcerned with all the attention they were getting that Anna knew they were very conscious of the eyes on them.