“Smoke dragon,” I said.
Beauclaire had called him that. There was evidently some truth in the appellation, though I thought that “wyvern” or even “serpent” might have been more accurate. The only dragon I had seen had had four legs and wings.
I supposed that there could be more than one kind of dragon, but this creature did not carry the amount of magic that dragons were reputed to have. While I didn’t see limbs, there might have been wings in the mists of smoke that filled the space not occupied by the smoke weaver.
The coils stirred, as if the weaver had heard me name him. One of the coils nearby moved and a giant, reptilian head slid over the mounds of his body to look at me through eyes that might have been fist-sized gemstones.
The head was as tall as I was, but still it seemed small for the size of his body. It didn’t look exactly like a snake’s head, but it resembled that more than a dragon’s. The weaver’s muzzle was long and almost delicate.
He snorted and a salty, watery gel covered me.
I wiped my face off impatiently. Coyote mates of Alpha werewolves don’t care if smoke dragons cover them in snot. We certainly wouldn’t squeal.
Instead, I asked him, in what I felt was a reasonably calm tone, “Why the show?”
There is not enough magic in your world to allow me to take my true shape, the smoke weaver said, though he wasn’t really talking. There was sound, it was a voice—but it wasn’t coming from the serpent’s mouth. I must make a place where I can gather it sufficiently. This takes time.
“It is an acceptable inconvenience,” I told him, not untruthfully. I didn’t care about circles—I cared about the time. Joel, I reminded myself, against two werewolves. If Fiona, “equally dangerous” as Charles, weren’t one of them, I wouldn’t have even worried.
I am here, the smoke weaver told me, in blood and bone.
He seemed to be waiting for something, so I said, “Yes, you have thus fulfilled the first part of this bargain.”
I don’t know why I used forsoothly speech; it just seemed the right thing to do—and when I had no clue, I tended to go with my instincts.
I was still musing about language when he bit me. The strike came without warning. My reactions were fast, but I didn’t have time to even flinch. He clamped his teeth over my left shoulder and the upper part of my chest.
I made an involuntary sound, as much of surprise as hurt—and it did hurt. It felt as though someone had stabbed me with something hot. That pain burned, and when he pulled his head back, the breaks in my skin where his teeth had been had trickles of smoke coming from them.
“Mercy,” Adam said.
“He surprised me,” I said back. “I am fine.” But I could have saved my breath.
As if it had been difficult for the smoke weaver to hold on to his enormous shape, the coils dissolved into grayish smoke that covered the globe of the circle so that we could not see out nor anyone outside see in. Then the inner part of the circle cleared until nothing lay between me and the others except for a dozen yards of driveway pavement.
Adam could see for himself that I was fine—so far.
A piece of smoke dropped from over my head, darkening as it fell. It hit the ground in front of me with an audible thump. The smoke drifted away and left a man no more than four feet high. Or someone who looked vaguely like a man, anyway.
He was hairy and very ugly—as if someone had taken a rock and chipped away at it with a crowbar until they made something humanoid, and turned that into a living creature. Then, deciding they hadn’t quite managed to make him look human, they covered him with a great beard that fell to the ground. The hair on his head, about the color of cinnamon, was neatly braided and was also floor-length. But there was hair in his ears, and his eyebrows were unusually thick. There was not much room on his face for eyes and nose, and his mouth was lost under a prodigious mustache.
We stared at each other. Smoke still curled out of my burning wounds, but neither the smoke nor the pain or burning sensation increased.
Nothing happened.
I remembered the way the smoke had choked me the first time he had bitten me. That had been a worry. He had already proven he could simply kill me. But the night he’d taken Ben, Ben had told me what the weaver most wanted. Killing me was vital—but it was still secondary to finding out why he could not use Tilly’s gift to take me over.
In any case, so far, air continued to flow easily in and out of my lungs.
“You do not look like much,” the weaver said finally, his voice gravelly and rough.
“Nor do you,” I answered. “Not in this form, anyway. What are you waiting for?”
“For the smoke to do its work,” he told me, and I saw that his small beady eyes, mostly hidden under those eyebrows, looked identical to the sky-blue gemstone eyes that he had in his serpentine form.
I glanced down at my wounds and saw that the mists of smoke emerging from the breaks in my skin were thicker, as if I had smoke in my veins instead of blood. There was a viscosity to the smoke that I didn’t like. The bite continued to burn painfully.
“What are you waiting for?” asked Adam—asked me, even though he was echoing my words to the smoke weaver. This was where I had planned to call upon the power of the pack.
Cheating is an honored part of any fae bargain—but you can’t cheat by breaking your word. To test your power against mine, I’d said. I realized that I was hesitating because I was worried about breaking my word.
The pack was a part of my power. I fixed that idea in my head and believed it. It seemed like a very good idea that when dealing with fae bargains, I should be very clear in my own mind why the way I was cheating was not breaking my word.
And it was true that each member of the pack enjoyed the strength of the whole—and I was pack. With that thought in my mind, I called to the ties that bound me to the pack. Some instinct pushed me beyond that, though, and I called upon the mating bond and the bond with Stefan, though I knew that both were compromised. Damaged bonds still belonged to me.
Something else stirred, too, but it wasn’t unfriendly so I let that be for now. I had other things to worry about.
I did not pull magic, or even power, from my bonds with the pack: I pulled will. We, the Columbia Basin Pack, called no one our master. We lived and died by the will of our Alpha and no other.
As sometimes happened, especially when I had been spending so much time there recently, I found myself standing in the otherness without meaning to. This time, as soon as I stood in that place, the bite from the smoke weaver flared up from slow burn to hot coal and I couldn’t help but cry out at the agony of it.
Sweat beaded on my forehead and I had to work to keep my feet, balancing myself by pulling on the garlands I held fisted in my right hand—the pack bonds.
And at that moment, when my balance was fragile and the pain off the scale, I felt another’s will press down upon me with suffocating force. Unexpected force.
When I’d brought Stefan here, the weaver had not been able to follow him. One of my contingency plans, should I not be able to resist the weaver’s bite using the pack, had been to come here and see if I had other options to fight him with.
The power and unexpectedness of the attack made me stumble sideways and I knew, with absolute conviction, that falling would mean something a great deal worse than a mere scraped knee. In my spiritual place, things like falls could have symbolic consequences that had nothing to do with forces like gravity. Sometimes that was a good thing—but my instincts told me that falling while my body was filling with smoke would be a Very Bad Idea.
Knowing doom was coming and preventing it were two different things.
Fortunately, I was not all alone. Something tightened around my waist and lit my spine with a shiver of strength. I looked down and saw my mate bond. It was still red and rough and closed to me, but it w
as thicker than it had been when last I saw it. My right ankle had a creamy lace cuff, Stefan’s bond, that helped my right foot find balance when my left foot threatened to slip, despite the steadying effect of my tie to Adam.
Once I was solid on my feet, the pressure of that other mind didn’t feel so overwhelming. I took a deep breath and realized that the otherness I stood in was different.
Not that my otherness was ever exactly the same place twice, but usually it was based on a forest. Sometimes that forest was pretty weird—like diamond-encrusted trees that wept or grass that was knitting needles.
But this time, I stood in a great cave—a cave that was filling with smoke—and the smoke felt very wrong. It did not belong here—and it was boiling out of the wounds in my chest.
What is this place? asked the smoke, swirling in delight. I do like this. This has so many possibilities.
The pressure in my head lightened, the burning of the wounds fading as the smoke poured out of me and into my spiritual home. I had a feeling that wasn’t really an improvement, even though the surcease of pain was welcome.
The smoke ran down the glittery garlands of my pack bonds. As it touched them, the bonds sparked with alien magic, revealing the wolves on the other side of those bonds. They stood unmoving, like life-sized glass figures. I was all too aware that those figures were hollow—like blown glass. So fragile.
Long strands of graceful red garland wrapped precisely around Auriele and Darryl, binding them together. That red garland formed a braid as it stretched from them toward me.
Ben stood with his head bowed, leaning forward as if bracing himself against something I couldn’t perceive. His glass was not clear, and was instead the bright blue of the weaver’s serpent eyes. But his white garland, his pack bond, was solid.
Honey stood strong and resolute. Her right hand was held up and forward, extending the green-and-silver garland toward me. Her left arm was held a little behind her, and that hand held a few strands of tarnished tinsel that drifted limply in the light breeze that filled the cave.
Each and every member of our pack was caught in a single frame of their lives. Some of them, like Mary Jo and George, were in their wolf form. Joel was, surprisingly, his human self, and part of me knew that I’d been worried about him, but I couldn’t remember why just then.
All of those strands ended in my mate’s right hand. And they reappeared in his left hand, which was extended to me. His head was turned toward me. The half of his body nearest to the pack was his own, strong and true. The half of his body nearest to me was the body of the monster. His head was his own human self—his expression caught midscream. The clear glass that was his shell was spiderwebbed with fractures.
The smoke filled the cave rapidly, first covering the floor and then rising to waist height. It curled around Adam like a cat at the cream.
Ooo, it said. Pretty. And broken.
At that moment, I realized that the smoke didn’t belong to the weaver. It was familiar, though. Underhill. I had invited Stefan to my otherness, and he had come alone. But when I’d come here, filled with the power of the weaver’s bite, power that was a gift from Underhill, the power had come with me, leaving the weaver behind.
As I watched, she started to penetrate the fractures in my mate’s altered body.
I needed to stop that—but I was trapped where I was by the bonds that allowed me to keep my feet and resist that smoke. I strained helplessly, but I could not reach Adam.
And that was when that niggling presence I’d felt—that presence that was not pack, not Stefan, but bound to me anyway, by thin spidersilk that smelled of fae magic—that presence whispered in my ear.
Let me Be. I can help you, if you will only let me Be.
I chose not to answer it because taking up that new bargain felt dangerous. Instead I addressed the interloper.
“Go home, Tilly. You are not welcome here,” I said firmly.
Tilly’s voice was much louder than that other, secret whisper. The sound echoed in the hollow cave when she asked, How can I be unwelcome when you brought me here yourself?
“Not willingly or knowingly,” I said firmly. “Go home.”
You can’t make me go, she said, and the smoke near Adam became nearly solid and formed Underhill’s human avatar. Here, her hair was not dirty and her clothes were not tattered. She turned to Adam’s form and bent to the ground, picking up a rock from the cavern floor.
I held out my left hand, which was empty, as if I had known from the beginning that I would need it for something other than holding the ties to my beloveds. And I understood who and what that small secret voice was, and why what I was about to do was dangerous. Maybe I should have thought it over, but Underhill had a rock and my mate was already a little broken.
I said, “Come.”
And in my hand a familiar weight settled, so light for the power it represented in this place where love and hatred meant more than earthly forces like gravity or magic. I pointed Lugh’s walking stick toward the smoke assaulting Adam’s battered form. Light traced through the runes on the old gray wood and lingered on the silver on the blunt ends of the walking stick.
Find your way home, the walking stick told Underhill as lightning arced into the center of her chest. Its voice was still a whisper, but somehow it rang through the air as definite as and bigger somehow than the lightning that preceded it.
Momentarily, almost as if altered by a stray breeze, Tilly’s face softened, then formed a grimace of rage. But as I stepped forward, able at last to move, pointing the walking stick toward her as if I were an extra on a Harry Potter film with an unusually big wand, her body became smoke. Then the smoke retreated, first folding in upon itself and then disappearing altogether.
As the smoke vanished, the glass figures vanished, too. The cave gave way to open air. Between one instant and the next, I stood in the dark heart of a small grove of oak trees. I could feel the ties, but I could not, in this moment, see them. I was alone, except for the walking stick, which was very pleased with itself.
“Mercy.” Adam’s voice recalled me to the real world.
Breathing heavily, sweat pouring off me, and both hands empty, I looked down to see that the wounds on my shoulder no longer bled. I blinked a couple more times before I could orient myself.
I stood once more on an asphalt driveway. Adam stood between me and the enraged, ugly little man who was screaming in a voice that must have had some magic in it to sound so sharp and wrong.
“I’m here,” I said, because Adam’s back was to me. Only afterward did I realize that had probably been the wrong thing to say. To the perception of anyone watching, I had never gone away. “I’m fine. I’m still me.”
I flexed my fingers, still feeling the impression of the walking stick in my hand—but there was nothing there.
“Stole it! She stole it!” the weaver screamed.
For a moment I thought that he was talking about the walking stick—then I realized that he meant the power that had followed me to my other place and had not come back to him. I noticed that the smoke was entirely gone from the circle—although the circle, stretching over our heads like a giant snow globe made with darkened glass, was still in place.
Ben, Luke, and Kelly were on their feet. Kelly held the chain to Ben’s collar, but they were all staring at the little man and his very noisy rage.
There was no more pillar of rock. Only a cluster of people on their knees beside a very still body. That was something I would have to worry about later.
And the little man raged on.
“Quiet,” my mate thundered, the power of an Alpha werewolf in his voice.
And it was evidently as effective on very angry little men as it was on a restless pack of wolves. The weaver stopped his tantrum, though his whole body shook with the effort, his skin, where it showed, several shades redder than his hair.
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br /> “I have completed the second part of our bargain,” I said into the sudden silence.
“You never said you would steal it,” the weaver said in despair. “It was mine. Fair and square. I bargained for it. You can’t take it.”
“Underhill is what she is,” I told him. “She isn’t a personage, though it pleases her to pretend. Any magic, any power that is hers, remains hers even if she lent it to you. You pushed it all inside me. When all of it was in me, and you held none of it—it became hers once more. It has returned back to where it came from.”
Adam, once he had determined that the weaver was no longer a physical threat to me, stepped aside. We faced each other, the weaver and I.
“I have completed the second part of our bargain,” I said again. “You came here in your own blood and bone. You bit me and failed, once more, to hold me. Now, as agreed, I will answer one question and then give you one truth. Ask me your question, smoke weaver.”
“Why you?” he asked. “Why were you able to resist my power? And you the second person I bit after my escape? How did chance favor me so ill?”
In words it was more than one question—but it felt like they were twined together—something that would balance the truth I would have for him after I answered. For the first time, I really felt the power of a fae bargain. Because certain things became very clear to me that had not been clear until he asked his question. I didn’t gain new knowledge, but all the bits and pieces seemed to gather together. I just had not realized, until the weaver’s question, how much I actually knew.
“I was supposed to be the first person you bit,” I told him.
Underhill had driven me out of my own house, hadn’t she? Just after the weaver escaped. She could not break her bargain with the weaver, but she could cheat.
“Your power came from Underhill—was a part of Underhill,” I told him. “And so it was limited by her limitations. Had you bitten me while I was standing in Underhill’s own realm, I might be in your power now. But this is not the heart of Underhill’s power.” And where I had unwittingly taken her magic was the heart of mine.
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