Burn Bright

by Patricia Briggs

  She was barely a hundred feet short of Sage when she felt a shivery light in the pack bonds that told her one of their pack had been gravely injured. Who? She slowed her approach, letting Sage’s lead grow again, as she searched through the ties that bound her to her pack.

  Charles.

  How did Charles get hurt? It doesn’t feel like magic, so it isn’t an effect of whatever Sage threw in his face. Leah had been a werewolf a long time, and she knew how to read the bonds. This was a physical hurt, grave enough to mean death.

  A bear roared its triumph—from the direction of Jericho’s cave. What in the world made Charles take on a bear when we have a traitor to catch?

  She set one foot down and pivoted on it. Sage would have to wait.

  No, it would not hurt her if Charles died. She didn’t like him, and she’d never made any bones about it. He was sullen and silent, and she was more scared of him than she was of anyone, not excluding Asil.

  But if a death of another wildling would hurt her mate, the death of his son would do far worse. And though she knew Bran did not love her, knew that love had no part in their long-ago bargain, it didn’t matter. She loved her coldhearted, flawed bastard of a husband and mate with all of her selfish heart. If she could save Charles, she would.

  And wouldn’t Charles just hate that. She smiled widely as she ran, sweeping up Asil and Juste in her wake with a gesture of her hand.

  * * *

  • • •

  CRUMPLED AGAINST A tree, Anna looked up at Wellesley with tears in her eyes. “He’s hurt,” she said, too frantic to wonder if Wellesley would even know who she was talking about. “He’s hurt. Nothing can kill it. Only a holy man or fire—and Charles has neither.”

  Instead of answering her, Wellesley gathered the five-gallon can and found the lighter where it had landed when she fell. Anna scrambled belatedly to her feet, feeling dizzy and light-headed, though the pain had dimmed a little. She couldn’t tell if it was because Charles had tightened down their bond or because he was losing consciousness.

  But pain meant he was still alive, and if he was still alive, there was no time to stand around. Save mourning for when it was too late to do anything.

  “Get me there,” said Wellesley. “I can help.”

  And that’s when she actually looked at him and paid attention to what she saw.

  Sometime between when they’d left him at his home, tired but whole, and now, he had resettled his person. This man was no harmless artist. Here was the man who had survived slavery of the worst sort, who survived a curse for nearly a century and emerged sane. Such a man could command armies—or a slightly battered Anna who had a skinwalker to kill.

  Despite the pain that drifted to her through the mating bond, Anna allowed herself a little hope. She took off again, trying to build her speed back up to where it had been. She didn’t quite succeed—she’d twisted her ankle pretty good, and even with the increased healing her werewolf gained her, it hurt. Wellesley caught her elbow twice when she would have stumbled.

  Eventually, though it was probably only a couple of minutes, the pain faded, and she resumed her breakneck pace. They passed Jericho’s cabin. Charles was still alive—even if their bond was so quiet it scared her.

  * * *

  • • •

  SHOTS RANG OUT. Anna hesitated—who was shooting? Charles didn’t have a gun with him. Shaking off her surprise, Anna ran to the trail where she’d left him, but the fight had gone downhill and into the trees.

  She and Wellesley scrambled down until they could see over a second, even steeper drop-off to the battle royal below.

  Charles was crumpled in a heap, and Leah, Asil, and Juste were fanned out between him and the bear. Leah had a gun in one hand and a wicked-looking knife in the other. Asil had a bladed weapon somewhere between a knife and a short sword in length—it was dripping blood.

  Juste threw a fist-sized rock at the bear’s head. A major-league pitcher couldn’t compete with a werewolf for speed or force. The bear tried to get out of the way, but the rock hit it in the head with a crack that knocked it off its feet.

  Anna would have plunged down the hill, but Wellesley caught her arm.

  “Wait,” he told her, his eyes on the bear. “I need you to stand guard. She will try to stop me when she notices what I’m doing.”

  She pulled her eyes off Charles and turned them to Wellesley and demanded in a voice she barely recognized as her own, “Are you a holy man?”

  “Are you asking if I can end this creature? I am the last descendant of the holiest family in my clan. The earth speaks to me. Can I end this creature?” His smile was fierce. “I don’t know, but I have dreamed of trying for a very, very long time.”

  Wellesley pulled out a cloth folded into a pouch that smelled of garlic, chili, lemon, and some unfamiliar things. He crouched and gathered old leaves, dried grass, and a few sticks. He quickly cleared a space of anything burnable and used the fuel he’d gathered to build the makings of a miniature fire, dumping the spice mixture on top of that.

  Below them, Leah put three rounds into the bear—and Juste hit it with another rock. Of the two bullets or rock—the rock seemed to do the more damage. But it was light-footed Asil who made the killing stroke—leaping on top of the wounded bear and sliding his blade between its shoulder blades and through its spine.

  Wellesley knelt on the ground and, though Anna had brought him five gallons of gasoline and a barbecue lighter, he lit the fire by holding his hand over it and murmuring a word that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. He closed his eyes and began to sing—more of a chant, really—in a liquid language she’d never heard before.

  She looked around for something to help her defend him—and ended up piling stones of an appropriate size. Juste’s rocks were proving effective—and she knew how to throw a baseball.

  It was too bad, she thought ruefully, that she wasn’t witchborn. The gun would probably be a much better weapon than—

  “You have something that belongs to the skinwalker,” said Wellesley—chanting the words in the same rhythm he’d been using so that she almost missed that he was talking to her.

  “I have this,” she told him, and pulled the gun out of the back of her waistband.

  He didn’t open his eyes, just inclined his head. “Please place it in the fire,” he asked.

  Anna eyed the fire. The gun was made mostly of metal—and Wellesley’s fire wasn’t that hot. But she didn’t argue with him, just slid it cautiously into the fire.

  She kept an eye on the fight.

  The bear had collapsed after Asil’s blow. Asil had continued forward, driven by his own momentum to take five or six strides away from the bear. He turned to regard the fallen beast. Leah and Juste closed in on it warily.

  Charles stirred, then staggered to his feet. The sensation of his pain made her gasp. He looked up to where Anna and Wellesley were, and she could feel his consternation.

  Anna, he told her, and she could feel his despair, run, my love. This thing cannot be killed.

  I found a holy man, she told him a bit smugly despite her worry. He’s a little broken, I think. But he believes he can do this. If not, I have gasoline and a lighter.

  Behind him, the beast’s form blurred, shrank, and a little girl, no more than six or seven, rose to her hands and knees where the bear had just been. She wore a ragged dress of unbleached cotton, and her dark hair was matted. She looked around her with wide eyes, and her mouth trembled.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she said, scrambling away, her eyes on Asil. “I ain’t done nothing to you. Don’t hurt me.”

  Sometime, somewhere, the skinwalker had killed and skinned a child. For a moment, Anna could barely breathe.

  Charles had turned at the child’s first words. Like Anna, he froze momentarily.

  Warn them, said Brother Wolf, as their pac
k mates were pulling out of battle mode. It’s not a child. Anna, warn them.

  “It’s a skinwalker,” she called out. “A shapechanger, a witch. It’s not— Watch out, Asil!”

  Flowing out of the child’s form, the bear, now unharmed, rose again, mad blue eyes sparkling in a stray bit of sunlight. He swatted at Asil, who, warned by Anna, ducked under the swat and went for the bear’s underside. But the bear had seen Wellesley. Ignoring the huge wound that Asil had made in its abdomen, which left entrails escaping, ignoring the werewolves attacking it, the bear began running up the side of the mountain toward Wellesley and Anna.

  * * *

  • • •

  SAGE DIDN’T KNOW what had distracted Leah. She had hunted with the Marrok’s mate for two decades or more and would have sworn that nothing could pull that one off a trail once she’d chosen it—but Sage wasn’t going to look gift horses in the mouth.

  Her car was parked next to Asil’s Mercedes, though someone—Anna, by the scent of the blood—had broken the window. Just as well, because Sage would have had to do the same thing. She took the token that hung from the leather thong around her neck and bit it again.

  The speed of the change made her grit her teeth and shudder. She didn’t make any noise, though. She didn’t know where the werewolves were and had no intention of drawing their attention if she could help it.

  Hopefully, they would be fully occupied with Grandma Daisy. Shivering and naked, Sage opened the door of her SUV and grabbed the backpack from the backseat. She pulled on the spare set of clothing she kept there.

  Dressed, spare key to her SUV in hand, she drew her first deep breath since she’d looked into Jericho’s eyes and realized what Grandma Daisy had done. She was an old creature—Sage didn’t know how old because her own grandmother had called her Grandma Daisy. Old predators knew how to be patient. But evidently, her patience had run out at last.

  Ironic that it had happened on the day that Sage had finally found their quarry. Decades of searching because the Marrok kept his wildlings secret from everyone except for his mate and his two sons. Then Asil had come to the pack—and he also had been sent to deal with the wildlings. She’d attached herself to him to see if he could be persuaded to tell tales—and because he was beautiful.

  And he was beautiful.

  She would regret Asil, she thought. Maybe once her grandmother had the pack under her control—assuming she could torture the secret of the collars from Wellesley, and Sage never underestimated her Grandma Daisy—maybe Sage would take Asil and use him for a while.

  The thought made her smile.

  She had worried when Grandma had outed her, worried that she somehow had displeased the skinwalker. But when Grandma had detonated the stink bomb in Charles’s face, Sage had understood. If Grandma Daisy could get Charles alone—if she took Charles—then she could take the whole pack, Wellesley and all.

  Grandma Daisy wouldn’t mind throwing away Sage for a chance at the pack, at the Marrok himself. Sage couldn’t blame her, really. But since the chance presented itself to not be a martyr, Sage intended to take it.

  She tossed the backpack into the rear seat and started to get into her SUV.

  A low growl stopped her.

  She grabbed the knife she kept in a sheath beside the seat and turned to face—

  She had worried it might be Asil or Charles, but the wolf who had broken through the greenery next to her car was skinny and ragged, his ribs moving harshly with the exertion of intercepting her.

  Devon. And he was alone.

  Gunshots sounded, a roar rose in the forest—Grandma Daisy’s bear. And Sage had her explanation for why the pursuit had broken off. Evidently, everyone except Devon had gone to fight the bear.

  Sage was realistic enough to know that she wasn’t a match for Bran or Charles. Still, sometimes in her dreams she plunged this very knife into their bodies and heard them scream in payment for the pain she’d had to suffer for their actions. If they had not interfered in Grandma Daisy’s plans, Sage would have simply been one of the many children who had no magic and therefore served as helpers. Grandma would not have picked Sage to be her werewolf spy. Her life would have been normal.

  The pain of the Change, the torture of being the plaything of Grandma’s picked group of rogue wolves—that was all the fault of Charles and Bran Cornick, who had robbed Grandma Daisy of her prey and hidden him away. Even using his hair and blood, they could not find him.

  Sage knew now that it was because Grandma Daisy’s own half-failed binding spell, now broken, had changed the artist beyond recognition. If Bran had not changed Frank Bright’s name, though, they could have found him by his true name. All of Sage’s suffering was the Marrok’s fault.

  She could not kill Bran or Charles. But Devon, friend of Asil and Bran’s special pet, who was weakened by his inability to eat enough to keep himself healthy? Once he had been a formidable warrior, she knew, but now?

  She smiled at the weakest and most beloved of Bran’s wildlings. She would take her revenge where she found it.

  “Hello, Hello, Devon,” she said.

  * * *

  • • •

  CHARLES FOLLOWED HIS pack mates, who were running after the bear as it charged up the side of the mountain, though if dragging its insides up the rocky slope didn’t slow it down, he wasn’t sure what he could do about it.

  He was too slow. Even drawing on the pack’s power, he couldn’t heal broken bones three times in a row and get wonderful results. His right front leg hurt so much when he ran on it that he just tucked it up against his body and ran on the other three.

  He leaped onto the flattish stretch of ground where Wellesley had set up his fire and took in the scene in a single glance.

  Wellesley, eyes closed, was chanting over a fire—where it appeared that he was trying ineffectually to burn the witch gun. Whatever he was doing, the skinwalker evidently thought it was dangerous enough that it was trying to get to Wellesley through Leah, Asil, Juste—and Anna.

  Leah, Asil, and Juste looked as though they were engaged in the hit-and-run technique Charles had begun with, harrying the bear and trying to distract him from his target.

  Anna was pelting him with rocks—and doing a damn fine job of it. White bone showed on the bear’s head as it roared at her.

  There’s not enough space, said Brother Wolf—though he knew that Charles already understood that. The rocks were a distance weapon, and the bear was closing in on Anna.

  There wasn’t time for an easy change, and he didn’t have strength to change fast enough with his own power. But his da had left him in charge of the pack. Without consideration for the limits of that power this time, he pulled on the pack and donned his human shape between one stride and the next.

  He felt the drain of it in the reluctant slowness of his muscles and the bone-deep ache in his joints. He was going to have to eat a feast and sleep a week to recover from this. If he lived another five seconds.

  Still running, he used the momentum to fuel the left-handed blow as he brought Ofaeti’s damned big axe down between the bear’s ears and buried it there, up to the haft, in the bear’s skull. Sometimes, especially when they needed to, objects he was holding when he shifted from human to wolf came with him when he made the change back to human.

  “Heal that,” he growled.

  “Get away,” called Wellesley, scrambling to his feet. “Get away from the bear.”

  Charles started to take a step back, but an unexpected and sudden weariness caught him. He stumbled, and his mate steadied him and shoved him farther back at the same time. For thirty or forty seconds, nothing more happened.

  And then the gun burst into white flames—and so did the body of the bear.

  Wellesley raised both arms to the sky and sang a song in some strange, twisting tongue. But it didn’t matter that Charles could not understand th
e language. He knew a prayer when he heard one.

  CHAPTER

  12

  One of the most amazing things about the past few days, Anna thought, was that the whole mountainside didn’t go up in flames when the skinwalker burned. They didn’t have a fire line, they didn’t have a backhoe, and that bear went up with a ton more heat than Hester’s house had.

  The bear burned to ashes in about five minutes, smelling disturbingly—given the nature of the beast—like bacon as it did so. When the fire had ended, there was only a pile of bones left on soil that looked as though a molten rock had pressed into it and left it blackened and shiny. The bones themselves weren’t blackened—they were white and clean, and they belonged to a human.

  Wellesley knelt and pressed his hand on top of the skull—and the bones melted into . . . well, into nothing.

  Anna thought of his story, of the spirit of the hurricane who had called this man its brother. She thought about what it had said about Wellesley. Something about how Wellesley carried the blood of earth magic and was descended for a thousand years from a lineage of priestesses, whatever that meant—other than being able to resist a blood-magic curse for as long as he had.

  No one said anything about going after Sage. They weren’t in any shape for a pursuit—and besides, they had all heard the sound of Sage’s SUV starting up and driving away.

  Tiredly, quietly, thoughtfully, they took the trail down to the cars.

  * * *

  • • •

  ANNA AND CHARLES stayed in their own house that night—Bran’s orders be damned. Charles looked like he’d gone forty rounds with a meat grinder. She wasn’t going to bring him into the middle of pack HQ looking like that. He wouldn’t sleep there when he was hurt, for one thing.

  And she needed to get him alone.

  Anna fed him frozen pizzas while she worked on something with more protein that would take longer. And she joined him in eating the pizzas and the steaks.