All of this information I received between one breath and the next. At that point, they all realized I was there, too.
From Adam came a flash of betrayal—I had promised to keep safe. That faded as he understood that I was there because of the baby, that I could help Zack. A pause. Acceptance. He knew about protecting the weak.
I knew that he, Darryl, and Joel would do their best to keep the attention of the troll away from the van with the fragile humans trapped inside. Zack and I were to get the people to safety.
Zack was very relieved. More relieved, I thought, than was really justified. I hoped I could help. I hoped not to be just another civilian to protect.
I was nearly to the van, noting almost absently that it had been manufactured in the same era as most of the VW bugs I kept running. It had been lovingly restored to a high polish not very long ago. The front end was crunched, though whatever it had hit was gone—maybe it had been the troll himself.
Antifreeze from the van’s radiator ran down the bridge in narrowing rivulets. I could feel Zack’s presence on the left side of the van, but it was the right side that had working doors, so I decided to leave it to him to keep an eye out for the troll while I took a look inside the van.
I started around the van but stopped. I trusted Zack—but I snuck around the front of the van and looked for the troll anyway.
I found him in the Pasco-bound lane, the far side of the bridge, smashing the shiny blue Nissan into the metal rails. I caught a glimpse of a white sheet of paper on the rear window with a date written in black Sharpie. The Nissan had been someone’s new purchase. I hoped their insurance would cover trolls.
“Smashing” was maybe the wrong word to use for what the troll was doing, I decided, though metal, glass, and fiberglass were getting crumpled. “Smashing” implied that the troll was beating the car into the rails. The troll’s actions were more . . . playful than that.
He pushed the car forward, then let go as it rolled with some force into the rails. Bits of car broke off in the impact, then it rolled back into his hands. It was either in neutral, or he’d destroyed the transmission in some interesting fashion I’d never encountered before.
After a particularly hard impact, the front window shattered. The troll bounced around in excitement—the bridge moved under my feet—and then he propelled the Nissan with even more force than before. The car sped into the rail. The rail bent, and the little blue car got stuck.
Mood abruptly altered, the troll tossed back his head and let out an ear-piercing scream of rage. He grabbed the car in both hands, shoved it through the guardrail and the railing on the far side, and over the edge of the bridge. Hooting in triumph, the troll jumped up and grabbed one of the bridge cables and climbed up it so he could watch the car in the river.
I tried not to reflect on the strength it would take to force a car through both sets of rails designed to prevent just that as I took a chance while it was distracted and moved back to the front of the van with slow caution, so no sudden movement of mine would attract the troll’s attention. Then I sprinted to the passenger side of the van.
The sliding door was open and bent, so it would never slide open or shut again. From the marks, I was pretty sure that Darryl had opened it, or maybe Zack before he was wholly wolf.
Zack stood beside the open door, looked at me, then rounded the back of the van again to resume his observation of the troll. I felt him settle into a guard position on the driver’s side of the van. If the troll made a move toward us, he’d warn me and do his best to keep us safe.
The car seat was nearest the door. On the other side of it, a woman held a bottle to the baby’s mouth, keeping the baby happy and quiet. Smart woman.
“Hey,” I whispered.
She was not much older than Jesse. One of her arms was obviously broken just above the elbow, and she held it against her side.
“I’m here to help,” I told her. I was being quiet. The troll was making more noise than World War III, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t hear us.
“I can’t get my baby out,” she said. She took her cue from me and kept her voice down, but it vibrated with desperation. “The seat belt jammed, and the bottle is almost empty. When it’s gone, she’s going to start crying.”
The baby was not very old, swaddled in a pink blanket and set backward in the seat. She was still in that plastic stage where her mouth and nose looked like every other baby’s mouth and nose instead of the person she would someday become. Her eyes were wide and blue and focused on her mom as she sucked.
I took a good look at the car seat. It wasn’t one of the ones that the bucket holding the baby just popped out. I didn’t know a lot about baby seats, but it looked to me as if it were an older model, and something had jammed the latch, something with a big fang. The button was pressed in, but the catch hadn’t released.
I pulled out Tony’s knife and started working on the tough webbing of the seat belt. The knife looked good, but the blade was as dull as a bad-skin-cleanser commercial.
“When we get out of this,” I said, very quietly, “remind me to give Tony a whetstone and a book on how to use one.”
“Who is Tony?” she asked.
“The police officer whose knife I borrowed,” I told her. The stubborn belt parted at last, and I pulled the seat free. I took a step back—and that’s when I saw that the arm wasn’t the only injury the woman had. Her knee was swollen to twice its normal size.
“Can you walk on that leg?” I asked.
She bit her lip and shook her head. “But you can get Nicole out,” she said. “Get her out, and I’ll be okay. I told the werewolf that.”
The baby made a noise.
It was only a little noise, more of a squeak than a cry.
But there were a lot of creatures on the bridge with very good hearing.
The wolves had been letting the troll entertain himself—but the blue car, by now surely sunk under the river, wasn’t interesting anymore. The pack hunting song told me that the little noise of something helpless . . . of a helpless human baby . . . had attracted the troll’s attention. There was a thump, and the van rocked a little when the troll landed back onto the bridge from his perch among the cables.
I could feel the troll’s regard, but he couldn’t see me. I rocked the baby seat a little, and the baby settled. We all were very still—until the troll started banging on another car.
I had to get them both out, and I couldn’t carry the mother. But we had wheels. The radiator fluid I’d seen told me that it was unlikely we could get the engine going, but we were on a downhill slope, and both Zack and I could push. All I had to do was get the van moving.
I put the baby, car seat and all, back next to her mother, who put the mostly empty bottle back in the baby’s mouth. She, the baby, smiled, kicked both feet, and resumed sucking. That made a noise, too, a small, whistly-sucky noise that made the troll grunt in satisfaction. I don’t know if it was my instincts, the pack hunting sense, or the sudden lack of smashing sounds, but, with the hairs on the back of my neck, I felt the troll start toward us at a slow hunter’s pace.
The fae are attracted to children. Someone, I think it was Bran, told me that children held power because they were in the process of becoming something. In that promise there was magic—and it was like catnip to the fae.
In the past, some of the fae craved children as pets, leaving something in their place because magic required balance—and that I’d learned from Ariana’s book. Some of the fae simply ate them. A baby . . . a baby was on the cusp of becoming.
The troll’s near-silent approach was filled with an intensity, a lust I could scent. And then the pack hunting song exploded with information.
Adam leaped over the barrier, and Joel bolted from around the car he’d been hiding behind, but Darryl, who’d been a few steps closer, reached the troll first. He struck at the si
de of the troll’s knee with the narrow pry-bar end of the tire iron. The troll slapped the iron away—and knocked Darryl over in the process. Either the touch of iron or the force Darryl had swung it with hurt the troll, who stopped to shake his hand. That gave Darryl a second chance for attack. He took a running leap onto the troll and, without slowing down, climbed up its side, making it all the way to the troll’s shoulders. Zack stayed where he was, between the van and the troll, the last barrier. I could feel his determination to slow the creature down so that I could get the human and her child to safety.
Recalled to my task, I scrambled to the front seat, taking a quick glance out the window while I did.
The troll was still on the opposite side of the barrier, so I couldn’t see Adam or Joel, but I had a good clear view of the troll reaching behind himself. His shoulder joint was built differently from any ape or monkey I’d seen because he had no trouble reaching behind his neck and grabbing Darryl in both hands and throwing him off, over the railing.
When Darryl disappeared from the pack hunting song, I told myself fiercely that it was only that he was too far away. Werewolves don’t swim, but there were a lot of boats down there. A lot of boats. And some of them knew that the werewolves were trying to help.
His abrupt absence hurt, and I couldn’t see past the hurt to tell if he was just gone from the hunting song or if he’d disappeared from the pack as well. Zack broke away from the van, running to help the other two keep the troll away.
Darryl doesn’t have to be dead, I told myself fiercely as my butt hit the front seat of the van. His sudden disappearance from my awareness was traumatic, and I couldn’t reach the subtler pack sense. Couldn’t tell if the wave of loss I felt was only from the hunt, or if it was his death echoing through me. I put my foot on the clutch.
“It won’t start,” the woman behind me said. “My sister, she tried and tried. I told her to get out, that I was right behind her, and she ran. She figured it out, but by then the police had her.”
“Shh. It’s okay.”
I tried to put it into neutral, but the linkage was stuck. It would still roll with the clutch in—but I’d have to push the van and hold the clutch at the same time. I tried to open the door—and it wouldn’t open. I remembered the huge crease that something had put down the driver’s side of the van.
All the werewolves were fighting for their lives—but the hunting song touched them all, I couldn’t block it. They knew I was in trouble, and one of them came to help. Two wolves against the troll weren’t enough. But Adam was the heart of the song, its director if not its dictator, and he directed Joel to come help me. He picked Joel because Joel could best protect me if he and Zack failed to hold the troll back.
Out loud because he was ignoring me otherwise, I said, “No, Adam. I’ll figure out something.”
Joel came anyway. I could see him in the rearview mirror. Joel looked a little different every time he took on the tibicena form. It was the subject of much discussion in the pack. Zack said he thought it might be because the tibicena is a creature of the volcano, and lava doesn’t have a hardened shape. That was my favorite explanation.
This time, fully formed and mostly solid, he looked a little like a foo lion, his muzzle broad and almost catlike, with a mane of dreadlocks that crackled and hissed as they moved, breaking the outer black shell and displaying liquid-orange-glowing lava that cooled rapidly to black again as some other part broke open. The effect was a shimmering, flashing, black-and-orange fringe about six inches long.
His body had thickened and his legs lengthened, front more than the rear, so his back had a German-shepherd slant. His tail lashed back and forth, more like a cat’s than a dog’s, and the end of his tail was covered with the same lava-light-enhanced dreads that his neck wore.
He put his shoulder against the van, and the battered metal smoked and . . . we both felt it when Adam staggered under a blow that shattered his shoulder. Zack was there with Adam, but we all knew, the hunt sense knew, that he was not the partner that Joel was. We felt his frantic efforts to distract the troll from Adam, who had fallen.
Joel heaved, and the van started rolling—and Joel ran back to the battle. The van moved sluggishly around the SUV, but when I got the wheel straight, it traveled better.
By the time we reached the bottom of the bridge, we had achieved a pace that made weaving through the dead vehicles interesting because I had to keep the nose of the van pointed downhill. I passed the last car, the red Buick, and I lost the song of the hunt. The loss was unbearable, leaving me raw—and frantic, because the loss fried some circuit in my brain. I could feel the pack bond, feel the mating bond between Adam and me—but it told me nothing other than that Adam and the pack were there.
I stayed the course until the van coasted past the police barricade—which they had moved so I could get the van through. As soon as I stopped the van, police and EMTs swarmed around it.
The woman and her baby as safe as I could get them, I abandoned them to run back up the bridge. What I expected to do to something the werewolves weren’t able to stop, I didn’t know. I only knew that Adam was hurt, and I wasn’t there to make him safe.
3
As I ran, this time unworried about attracting the troll’s attention, my view was blocked by cars and the cement divider, so the fae monster was the only one I could see. I pulled my Sig out of its concealed-carry holster in the small of my back. The Sig Sauer had been a birthday present from my mother. It was a .40, larger caliber than the 9mm I used to carry. I still practiced with the 9mm and the .44 revolver, but the .40 was a subcompact, and it was easier to conceal. It was still small enough caliber that I could fire it and not fatigue until I’d emptied four or five magazines. With the .45, I got five shots before my aim got wobbly. I wished I’d been carrying the .45, though from what the police had said, the gun was unlikely to be useful. But I didn’t have a rocket launcher handy.
The troll picked up a Miata in both hands. The shiny green of the car was the same tint as the troll but much darker. Miatas are small, but they still weigh more than two thousand pounds. That troll brought it up over his head and held it there for a second or two.
Then he brought it down and smashed it on the ground I couldn’t see, my vision blocked by the cars and the center barricade, though the crash of metal and glass told me when it hit. The troll staggered suddenly. I growled under my breath in frustration because I couldn’t tell what had happened. Whatever had caused the troll to stagger hadn’t made him lose his grip on the little car, now much more compact. He cried out and smashed the Miata down again, faster than before—like a housewife smashing a spider with her shoe.
Joel howled, and this time it was the real thing, full-throated and powerful, with the magic of the volcano that had birthed the tibicena. I stumbled, falling down on one hand and knees; my other hand still held the gun. My heart pounded in my ears as the resultant wave of fear crashed through me. Even though I knew it was only magic, it was hard for me to stand up and move toward him when fear slid through me and told me to run. But Adam was hurt—I couldn’t run away when Adam was ahead of me.
The troll, who was not familiar with the effect of the tibicena’s cry, had a much stronger reaction. He dropped the car and bolted, batting a truck that stood in his way so hard that it tipped over. For the first two strides, he was in a blind panic—and then his eyes met mine.
I stopped moving, hoping that he’d stay on his side of the road, that the panic caused by the tibicena would keep him going. I hoped very hard because my biggest magic superpower was changing into a coyote who would have even less of a chance against a troll than I did in human form. I’d come to help because I couldn’t stay on the sidelines with Adam wounded, but I was under no illusions that I was a match for the troll.
Though I was past the place where the pack hunting song had kicked in on my first trip, it had not returned. Maybe there were too fe
w of the pack members still whole enough for a hunt. I didn’t know, couldn’t tell because the pack bonds told me nothing. I felt very alone, standing in the middle of the road with the troll’s intent gaze locked onto me.
He bounded over the cement barrier like a dinosaur-sized track star, leaving dents in the pavement where he landed. But Adam jumped the barrier just behind him. He was battered and bloody, running on three legs, and even a werewolf looked small next to the troll. But the front leg Adam had tucked up didn’t seem to slow him in the slightest, and Adam brought with him an indomitable determination that made the apparent inequality between the troll and the wounded werewolf meaningless. If I died today or a hundred years from now, I would keep the image of him hunting down that troll in my heart.
They both, troll and wolf, covered the quarter of a mile in a time that would have won an Olympic sprint, but for some reason it seemed to take hours as I stood waiting.
I suppose I could have turned and tried to outrun the troll; I might even have managed it. But I was horribly aware of the humans behind me who had no defense against a fae like the troll. Maybe it would continue to follow me as I ran past them—assuming I did manage to outrun it.
But what if it stopped and attacked the humans instead? I knew some of those police officers. If they saw it chasing me, they would shoot at it. If they hurt it, it would go after them. And then there were all those people stuck in traffic. Easy targets.
I was not going to lead it off the bridge, where I might gain my life at someone else’s expense. I didn’t know why I’d decided it was my job to keep them safe, but, like Zack standing between the van and the troll, I’d accepted it and would do my best.
Fire Touched Page 5