Burn Bright

by Patricia Briggs

  She didn’t find the kind of heartbreaking sadness that Asil had led her to expect. There were oodles of despair. But despair was not a synonym for sorrow or regret. Despair was the loss of hope.

  Please, he asked her, his voice coming, as that evil thing’s voice had, from just behind her left ear. Please help us, Namwign Bea. We are dying, healer.

  What can I do? she asked him, but he just repeated the same request, over and over again, as if he could not hear her.

  She reached out and touched his cheek, as she had in the real world. He did not react to her touch, nor did touching him change her perception of him or this place. He had, she thought, told her as much as he could; it was up to her to find out more.

  She set out to do that very thing, leaving the human seeming of Wellesley behind her. She couldn’t hear or smell his wolf, but the scent of the evil that had whispered behind her back—that was sharp in her nose. At first she tried to avoid it, but when nothing else drew her attention, she followed her senses.

  Eventually or immediately (it was frustratingly difficult to tell), she found a forest of thick green vines that were so tangled she could not go through them. When she turned, to see if she might go around them, they had encircled her.

  Trapping her.

  She swallowed down fear. Asil was in the real world, watching over her. And her ties to her mate were strong, stronger here than in the real world, as if they had more substance here. She was not alone, no matter what her fears tried to tell her.

  She reached out and touched the fibrous growth. As Wellesley himself had, the plants felt real under her touch. She couldn’t see any structure that was holding the vines up; they seemed to be holding themselves in place. Out of the corner of her eye she could see them move, but the ones directly in front of her were motionless.

  She closed her fingers around one of the vines. It was nearly as big around as her wrist. Experimentally, she gave it a tug. It gave a little and was answered by motion farther in the tangle, the sound of rustling plant matter filling the emptiness.

  She gave it a sharp jerk, calling upon her wolf to help and putting her shoulders and hips into the effort. Reluctantly, the vines shifted until she caught a glimpse of golden fur.

  She tried to reach through, to touch the fur—and impaled her hand, the one still hurting from the silver bullet that had kill Hester, upon a thorn as long as her pinkie. The vines, she saw, were covered with long, sharp thorns, though they hadn’t been a moment before.

  She growled and redoubled her efforts to pull the vines away. Her hands bled until they were slick, and she left bright trails of blood on the skin of the plants. Wherever her blood stained the vines, they loosened until she could, at last, see the sickened and enraged creature trapped within.

  The wolf, presumably Wellesley’s other half, looked plague-ridden. His coat, damaged as if by mange, revealed oozing sores where the thorns had dug in. There were places in which the wolf’s flesh had grown over the vines that trapped him so that he was part of the structure that held him prisoner.

  Rationally, she was pretty sure that she was using constructs to try to organize what she felt through the magic: her magic and Wellesley’s magic. That what she saw was more symbolic than actual. But maybe not.

  Anna was her father’s daughter, and her father believed in science and rational thinking. She’d been a werewolf for years now, and she still tended to think about it from a scientific viewpoint, as though lycanthropy were a virus.

  Faced with a wall of briar-thorned vines straight out of a Grimms’ fairy tale, she’d never had it brought home so clearly that what she was and what she did was magic. Not Arthur C. Clarke magic, where sufficient understanding could turn it into a new science that could be labeled and understood. But a “there’s another form of power in the universe” magic. Something alien, almost sentient, that ran by its own rules—or none. Real magic, something that could be studied, maybe, but would never rest in neatly explainable categories.

  With that in mind, she tried visualizing a knife, or something she could cut through the vines with. But apparently that wasn’t something her magic could do. In frustration, she called upon her wolf. But found that she couldn’t change to her wolf, not here in Wellesley’s . . . what? Imagination? Soul? Prison.

  But she managed to give her hand claws. She dug into the vines, sinking her claws into the surface of the vine.

  Querida, said Asil, are you sure you want to bleed him?

  For a bare instant she got a flash of the real world, where her real claws had sunk into Wellesley’s skin.

  Horrified, she pulled her claws out of the vines. Almost inadvertently, her gaze met the determined eyes of the trapped golden wolf. A gray, viscous substance leaked down the green exterior of the plant from the holes she had dug in it. And the substance smelled noxiously awful.

  And it whispered in her ears. It whispered terrible things, the kinds of things that sounded just like those vines smelled.

  There was magic in those vines, which she had known. But what she had not been sure of was whose magic it was. Now she knew that Asil had been very wrong—this was absolutely not a case of Wellesley’s human half and wolf half at odds because their mate had died.

  This was a curse, something done to them by someone else. The blood of the vines smelled horribly familiar—Anna knew what blood magic smelled like. In Asil’s story, there had been a mention of a black witch. She could now inform him that the rumor was true. There had definitely been a black witch involved, someone powerful enough to set a binding spell on a werewolf that lasted . . . however long this had lasted.

  She didn’t know how to help him.

  She could soothe the wolf spirit of any werewolf. She’d learned to send them to sleep, too, for a while. With her help, they had reduced the number of newly turned wolves who died because they could not control their wolf within the first year after their Change.

  But if she sent this wolf to sleep, no matter how much he needed the rest—and she could tell that he was as exhausted as his human counterpart, if not more so—he would lose the fight against the thorns.

  This was witchcraft, and she knew nothing about how to break a cage wrought by witchcraft. But she knew someone who knew more than she did—and who had his own kind of magic.

  Charles, she thought, reaching for him without letting go of the carnivorous vines. Charles, I need you.

  CHAPTER

  8

  “She put us together just to be annoying,” Sage told Charles, sounding not in the least annoyed.

  They had taken her SUV because she refused to drive his truck. Her SUV was pretty upscale for the rough roads—she was a Realtor, selling high-priced Montana dreams to very rich people who wanted to get away from the city. When he’d told her that the road was too rough for her overly civilized SUV, she’d laughed and told him she’d rather replace her vehicle than put those scratches on his beloved truck.

  He’d rather she not scratch his truck up, either. If she was planning on doing that, then taking her car made good sense.

  “Leah?” asked Charles, though he knew quite well which “she” Sage was talking about.

  She nodded. She gave him a glance out of the corner of her eye. “Why didn’t you put a stop to it? Everyone knows that she can’t order you around. No one would have been surprised—not even Leah, I don’t think. So why did you let her do it?”

  Charles eyed Sage, evaluating what answer to give.

  Like his stepmother, she liked to wear nice clothes. Part of the reason for that was her job, and part of it was she wore them like armor. She didn’t wear soft things, colors and fabrics to make her look sweet. The clothes she wore gave her visual power. Here, they declared to the world, is a strong woman.

  To him, they said something a little different. Here, they said, is a woman who needs armor, a shield to hide behind. Here is a woman
who is afraid but puts her chin up and whistles in the dark.

  He remembered what she’d looked like when Bran had brought her here, the look in her eyes the same as Anna’s eyes when they’d first met.

  “Leah is my father’s mate,” he told Sage. “As long as she does nothing that will harm the pack, it is not my place to object.”

  Sage raised an eyebrow at him in disbelief before returning her attention to the road. Sage didn’t look at him with fear in her eyes anymore. He liked her. She was smart, funny, and wise. Someone he could trust to have his back.

  He relaxed into the too-cushiony seat and gave her all of his truth instead of bits and pieces as he might have another of his pack mates.

  “Though Asil and I are not friends, he likes Anna. He will give his life to make her safe. She likes him, too, and is comfortable in his company.”

  “You left your mate with Asil because she likes him?” Sage asked archly. “Charlie, I’d never have thought it of you.”

  She was the only one who ever got to call him that. Because the first time she’d said it, she’d been bruised and scared. When his father had introduced him to her, she’d raised her face to look him in the eyes, terror making her shake. Then she’d said, with hopeless defiance, “Hello, hello, Charlie.”

  He took a better hold on the door as she turned her tame car off the road as he directed. The track they traveled on had tall grass that brushed the underside of her car. He half expected that they were going to be running back on four feet.

  “I left my mate with Asil because neither of them is capable of betraying a trust,” Charles told her. “And, as much as she dislikes me, no one could ever say that Leah works against the pack’s best interest. As long as that is true, I will follow her as I follow my father.”

  Sage laughed when he said that. “Yes. We’ve all heard the battleground of your obedience to Bran.” She laughed harder. “Or Leah. The funniest part of that statement, though, is that you actually believe it.”

  It was the truth, he thought, a little indignantly. But he seldom argued with people other than his da or Anna, so he let it go. She’d slowed down, so he released his hold on her car and folded his arms impassively. He stood by his word: he’d follow Leah exactly as well as he followed his da.

  She glanced at him. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s another question, then. Why did you bring that thing along?”

  “That thing” was the witch gun.

  “Some of the wildlings we are going to visit have interesting backgrounds,” he told her. “All of them are old. I want to know if any of them have heard of something like this.”

  She pulled into a flat meadow and stopped in front of a ranch-style house that would have looked more appropriate on a city street than in the middle of the woods. His home was a ranch-style, too. But in this setting, the little gray house looked like a house cat in a tiger’s den.

  He knew these wildlings well enough to have put the probability of their being his traitor pretty low. Long-term deception wasn’t so much beyond them as beneath them. Cowardly.

  He got out of the car, and as soon as he did so, he felt eyes on the back of his neck. He let Brother Wolf do the work of finding their watchers.

  Long-term deception was cowardly, but ambushing your allies was just fine.

  “Behind us,” Sage said, having walked around the front of the car—and then returned to his side.

  She wasn’t afraid, not exactly. She smelled of stress, worry even. She probably should have been afraid. She was also wrong.

  They weren’t behind them—though that was an interesting ploy. He wondered if they actually were able to use the pack magic to manipulate the wind, as Bran could, or if it was a trick of the geography that they’d learned to take advantage of. With wildlings—especially with these wildlings—it could be either one.

  “We bring a word and a warning,” Charles said, without raising his voice. “Hester and Jonesy are dead at the enemy’s hands. An enemy that included a helicopter and teams with werewolves willing to attack the Marrok’s wolves. They hit Hester’s place with the intention of taking her captive. They had her caged. When we freed her, they killed her on purpose.”

  He turned, as if to get back into the SUV, and a man dropped out of a tree twenty feet in front of the car.

  He was, like Bran, the kind of person who would fade into a crowd even without using pack magic. He wasn’t tall or short, good-looking or ugly. There was nothing particularly memorable about his face at all. Except for his eyes. His eyes were white, wolf’s eyes, and they were predatory.

  “Bran’s gone,” the man said, his English very British. “Now Hester is dead because you aren’t capable, Charles Marroksson, of protecting the pack.”

  He had already known about the attack on Hester. It wasn’t surprising. These wolves had closer contact with others in the pack than most of his da’s wildlings because one of them regularly participated in pack hunts and had a few friends in the regular pack. If it weren’t for his brothers, he’d probably be out in the world, a safe-ish, sane-ish member of a normal pack.

  There were three of them, brothers all, a set of twins and their younger sibling. If the stable twin hadn’t been with them, Charles suspected Bran would have had the other two executed for reasons of public safety.

  “You think you could do better?” Charles said very softly. The wind didn’t favor him. He couldn’t tell which of the brothers he was talking to other than it was one of the twins.

  The other twin dropped down to the ground from a higher branch in a different tree. His landing was loud—louder than it needed to be to cover for their third, as yet unseen, brother.

  “We could hardly do worse,” he said. And, confident that his twin had an eye on Charles, he looked at Sage and smiled. “Hey, pretty lady. You’ll make a fine prize.”

  Despite herself, despite the years between Sage as she was now and the beaten woman she’d been when she came to them, when she said, “Try me,” her voice was tense, and she took a step closer to Charles.

  The second twin laughed, a full-throated, merry sound. “Oh, I intend to, yes. Don’t we, Geir?”

  The other twin smiled. “Yes.”

  Geir was the sanest of the three.

  Charles had no intention of believing them about which of them was which, of course, not when they were being so careful to stay downwind, where his nose couldn’t make the distinction. He took a slow step away from Sage, putting her between him and the twins.

  She stiffened at the unexpected move. She’d asked for his protection by stepping into his personal space. His movement was a denial. But he couldn’t help her perception—or worry about it too much.

  He was too busy spinning to catch hold of the axe that Ofaeti, the third of the Viking brothers, tried to stick in his back. He grabbed it by the haft, one hand on top, the other at the end, Ofaeti’s hands caught between his. The Viking wasn’t expecting it, so Charles was able to swing the big man around, off balance. Charles snapped a quick kick into his knee, which gave with a crack.

  And right then, right at that moment, Charles felt Anna call him.

  “Sage,” he said. “Get in the car and stay out of this.”

  Strictly speaking, a fight for dominance was supposed to be one-on-one. For that reason, he wanted Sage completely out of it. And maybe he’d seen that look of betrayal on her face and wanted to remove any doubt in her mind that he had kept her safety at the forefront of his decisions.

  Unlike his Anna, Sage would follow orders. He put her out of his considerations—except as a noncombatant to be protected.

  Ofaeti had released his hold on the axe when his knee broke. Charles tossed it up and caught it in a proper grip. It was a good axe, heavy and weighted for fighting rather than cutting down trees.

  The twins, Geir and Fenrir (Charles was pretty sure that wasn’t the name he wa
s born with but a name he’d earned), had sprinted forward when Ofaeti attacked, but seeing Charles with the axe in his hand and Ofaeti out of the fight (more or less), they slowed to a more cautious pace.

  Charles? If you aren’t busy, I could use some advice.

  Charles heard a soft sound behind him and, without looking, swept the flat side of the axe to his right about hip height like a backward swing of a baseball bat.

  Now, said Brother Wolf in satisfaction as behind them the ground accepted a probably-not-dead body with a hollow thump, Ofaeti is no longer a factor.

  Charles smiled in amusement—and the simple joy of battle. The Viking brothers had been fighting for longer than Charles had been alive, but they did not have Brother Wolf as a partner nor had they had Bran Cornick and Charles’s uncle Buffalo Singer as teachers.

  The twins separated, trying to make him defend both of his sides at the same time. He let them do it because it would make no difference to his game. He was only a little hampered because he’d prefer not to kill either of them. His da had put them in his hands to protect, and they had not done anything (yet) that would force his hand.

  Fenrir closed first, aiming a kick at Charles’s thigh. Charles stepped into it, and Fenrir’s kick slid up his thigh and into his hip, its force spent before it did any harm. Charles grabbed that leg under the knee and hit Fenrir in the belly with his other hand. The force of it bent the other wolf over, and Charles tucked Fenrir’s head under his free arm, then pulled them both over backward in a suplex.

  Fenrir’s fall was outside of his control, and his spine came down across the stump Charles had been aiming him at. It broke with a loud snap, and Fenrir let out a whine.

  Charles was free of Fenrir and rolling to his feet before Geir’s sword struck and missed. The second strike Charles caught on the axe.

  Charles? Anna’s voice was small. I really need your help, or I’m pretty sure that some of us aren’t going to make it out of this.