by Lora Leigh
“Arjenie.” Seri was exasperated. “You aren’t up for miles of hiking across rough country.”
“I’ve been working out with Benedict—or rather, he’s been training me. He’s very good. I’ve gone for all-day hikes up and down the mountains out there without turning my ankle.” Well, only one hike had lasted all day, and they’d taken several breaks, but that wasn’t the point. “That country is a lot rougher than this.”
“I suppose.” Seri looked dubious. “I’ll get my—”
“Clay.” Some note in Robin’s voice had everyone turning toward her.
She put up her phone. “That was Sheriff Porter. We’re needed. A little girl has gone missing. Snatched, they think. They need me to find her.”
In the end, Stephen went with Robin instead of Arjenie. So did Clay and Ambrose and Nate and Gary, whose Earth Gift was pretty weak, but he’d balance the circle. Hershey was staying here with Sheila and Carmen to protect the children. He was a powerful Fire Gifted, stronger even than Uncle Clay. And Carmen knew how to shoot.
It should be enough. It had to be enough, because Sammy and Seri were determined to go with Arjenie. She only hoped that Benedict was on the trail of the skinwalker still, because that meant the evil creature was several miles from the Delacroix home.
They did drive part of the way, taking the rutted old road Clay’s grandfather had used to carry hay to the horses he’d raised back in the thirties. It took them to the edge of Delacroix land.
“Okay,” she said when they got out. “Here’s how this will work. I’m in charge of strategy, but Josh here—you’re senior, right, Josh?—Josh is field commander. Tactics, in other words.”
Josh was about five seven, burly, with dark hair and eyes and the sweetest smile. He offered it to her now. “Does that mean you’ll do what I say?”
“If it doesn’t interfere with strategy—which right now is to get to Benedict.”
“All right. Adam, we’ll be moving slow enough for you to take roving point. Change, please.”
Good thing she’d brought the backpack again. Adam’s clothes went in it, along with one of his two guns, a shoulder holster, phone, and shoes. The other gun went to Josh, who used Adam’s ankle holster to carry it. “Two guns?’ Arjenie said, eyebrows raised at the silvery wolf who wagged his tail at her.
“Adam likes to be prepared,” Josh said.
“I told you that bullets didn’t seem to do much damage to the bear. Maybe not any damage.”
Josh nodded. “You think it’s a skinwalker.”
“A skinwalker!” Sammy looked shocked.
“We didn’t hear that part,” Seri said. “In all the commotion when you got home, we didn’t have a chance to ask questions.”
Sammy nodded. “And we have a lot of questions.”
So for the first mile or so, Arjenie told them, in detail, why she thought the bear was a skinwalker. To be fair, she outlined her aunt’s objections to this theory, ending with her suspicions about who the skinwalker might be.
“K. J. Miller?” Seri wrinkled her nose. “He’s a complete asshole, but I don’t think—”
“I don’t know, Seri,” Sammy said darkly. “Remember the cat?”
“Not the same thing at all. And if he had that kind of heavy-duty magic, why didn’t he stop the Drews when they—”
“Because he didn’t have it then. That was last year, doofus.”
“He already had the bearskin.”
“Wait a minute,” Arjenie said. “You know for a fact that he has a bearskin?”
Seri nodded. “It’s enormous. We, uh . . .”
“Snuck into his house one time.” Sammy gave his sister a frown, as if she’d objected out loud. “We’re going to have to come clean. About all of it. This is too serious.”
“Not your fault!”
“Maybe it is.” He plodded on several feet in silence, and his expression reminded her of Benedict when they first met—dark and closed and brooding. Finally he looked at Josh, who was walking a few steps behind them. “Could you . . . you’re a nice guy and all that, Josh, but I need to . . .”
Josh looked at Arjenie, eyebrows raised.
“If you think it’s safe to drop back a bit,” she told him, “I’m good with that. We’re not close to Benedict yet.” Josh would have to drop back a long way to avoid hearing whatever Sammy wanted to confess, but she chose not to mention that. Josh wouldn’t repeat anything he heard.
As soon as Josh was out of human hearing range, Sammy spoke without looking at Arjenie. “I’ve been experimenting. Not just with the spell that was supposed to use Raven energy but for the last couple years. Seri knows. She’s helped me sometimes, but it’s my deal. It’s on me if . . . if something I did opened things up and let the wrong Power into our world.”
Oh, by the Light, Lord, and Lady. Cautiously she said, “I don’t think I’m the one you need to talk to about this.”
“You’re the one I am talking to.”
That was hard to argue with.
“And you won’t bullshit me,” he added. “You’ll tell me straight out.”
“I can’t tell you anything yet. I don’t know what you’ve been doing.”
For the next mile or so, he told her.
It was, she had to admit, intriguing. He’d put a lot of thought into his experiments. Unfortunately, he’d been trying to prove the wrong thing—that the Powers were nonsentient energies—but he’d gone about it brilliantly and had achieved a couple interesting if irrelevant discoveries along the way.
At last she said, “I’m afraid I still don’t know. It’s possible that your experiments did weaken whatever barrier lies between here and what Native Americans call the other world or the spirit world. I don’t think so, but I don’t know enough to say for sure. This is outside my experience and knowledge.”
“That friend of yours—the shaman you mentioned. Would she know? Would she talk to me?”
“She’d talk to you, and she might know. She’s really good. She doesn’t use spells at all—not the way we do, anyway. It’s all spirit. Well, except for her Gift. She’s a healer, too, like you.”
“She is?” A little light seeped back into his face. He looked so terribly young and hurt and hopeful. “And she’d be straight with me? She wouldn’t sugarcoat things?”
“I doubt Nettie has ever sugarcoated anything in her life. What I don’t understand is why you did it. For two years, sneaking around to conduct your experiments—which were brilliant, but stupid, too. Why didn’t you just tell your mom and dad what you wanted to do? Aunt Robin can be a bit close-minded,” she admitted, “but you could have talked her around eventually. And with her backing, what you did would have been safe.”
Sammy exchanged one of those twin looks with Seri, who’d been unnaturally silent the whole time. She said softly, “You said it already. We have to come clean about all of it.”
He heaved a sigh. “I don’t think I want to be Wiccan. No,” he said, his voice strengthening. “I don’t think I am Wiccan. I’ve been . . . I thought the yoga would work, that it would be enough, but it wasn’t. The experiments . . . I’ve been trying to find out what I am. What my path is.”
Oh my. Oh, but it all made sense now. Sammy was mostly a gentle soul—it was usually Seri who led the twins into trouble—mischievous, yes, but without a shred of meanness. He worried about others’ feelings and would go out of his way to avoid hurting anyone . . . especially his mother.
Who would not understand. She’d try. Aunt Robin really did believe that all religions were valid paths to the Source. But deep down she thought Wicca was the best path . . . and the Delacroix had been Wiccan for centuries.
Arjenie stopped and reached for her cousin and hugged him hard. “You are very foolish,” she told him, her eyes teary, “but you have been between a rock and a hard place, haven’t you?”
“You’re not upset?”
“That you aren’t Wiccan anymore?” She blinked the dampness back and smiled. “Some o
f the people I love best in this world aren’t Wiccan. Like Benedict. He—”
Her phone picked that moment to interrupt. She huffed out a breath but released Sammy to take the phone from her jacket pocket. When she saw who it was, she was glad she had. “Nettie! I hope the surgery went okay?”
“It went long.” She sounded exhausted. “I kept having to put him back in sleep. But yes, it went well. Rule tells me you think you have a skinwalker.”
“Other people tell me that isn’t possible.”
“Oh, it’s possible,” she said grimly. “Unlikely, but possible. Tell me what you know.”
Arjenie resumed walking as she went through it all again, including a bit about how Sammy had been experimenting with blending Wiccan and Native spiritual elements.
“That’s not good. Magically, Wicca is based on sidhe magic, and—”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I’m sorry, but it is. Your distant ancestors learned spellcraft from the sidhe back when they came here more often, so while your magic has evolved, it is derived from sidhe spellcraft, which is not native to our realm. Native Powers are just that—native to our realm. They do not care for the sidhe or for sidhe magic. While many pagan practices can be incorporated into Wiccan spells, the Native Powers cannot.”
Arjenie swallowed. “Do you think Sammy woke something up? Or weakened the whatever that lies between our world and theirs?”
“They’re of our world, Arjenie. They . . . never mind. This isn’t the time. It’s possible Sammy had something to do with your skinwalker. It’s more likely, I think, that the Turning did. The power winds blew in many an odd creature. They could have woken one who’d been asleep. You say your cousin called Coyote? And he came?”
“Yes, though Sammy thought he was calling Raven. Or the essence of Raven—I told you how he had that wrong. You think there is a skinwalker?”
“Yes. A skinwalker can’t be killed with weapons when he’s wearing his skin. It has to be hand to hand—or claw to claw, since you’ve got lupi to go against it.”
“It’s a bear! At least a thousand pounds of bear! Three wolves can’t go against a Kodiak bear.”
“You’ve got Coyote, too. Not that he can act directly, but . . .” She fell silent a moment, then muttered, “If Cullen was there he could see it. But he couldn’t sneak up, so . . .”
“I don’t understand.”
“Talking to myself. Bad habit. Benedict and the others will need help. A skinwalker has one real weakness: the clasp that fastens his skin. Remove it and he’s back to human. You’ll need to sneak up on the bear and cut off the clasp.”
Arjenie’s heart gave one hard jolt and her mouth went dry. She was not terribly brave. “I . . . okay.”
“The problem is, you can’t see the clasp when he’s wearing the skin. I could make it visible, but I’m not there. Let me talk to your cousin.”
“Now?”
“I can’t teach you the chant. It would have no power in your mouth. He says he’s not Wiccan, and Coyote answered his call, so he must be right.”
“Sammy,” she said, holding out her phone, “Nettie Two Horses wants to talk to you.”
Hesitantly, as if she’d offered him a snake, he took the phone. “This is Sammy.”
Seri moved closer. “What’s going on?”
“Nettie thinks it’s a skinwalker. She’s going to teach Sammy a chant to . . .” Arjenie kept moving but stopped talking. Paying attention to another sense.
“What?”
“Benedict’s moving awfully fast all of a sudden. And it seems like . . .” She walked several feet and checked again. “He’s headed for Delacroix land. We need to cut left, through the woods, and I think . . . I don’t know why, but I think we need to hurry.”
The house was a tidy frame cottage. Flowers had bloomed in its gardens last summer; those beds were trimmed and mulched now. There was a swing set out back. A bicycle and a tricycle waited for their owners on the front porch.
Inside, Sheriff Porter stood by the window in a small living room crowded with people—four Delacroix men and one woman who was Delacroix by marriage. Another woman, one with soft brown hair and terrified eyes, said frantically, “Nothing? You can’t get anything?”
“I’m sorry,” Robin repeated, feeling helpless. “It feels like something is blocking me. That’s never happened before, so I don’t know if . . .” Foulness washed through her. Her eyes went blind as the land spoke to her in its own language, one far removed from words. “Clay,” she whispered.
He was already there, slipping an arm around her waist. “What is it?”
“It’s on our land. It crossed onto our land. Arjenie was right. And it . . .” She swallowed. “I’m blocked. I can’t touch it. And it has the little girl.”
They must have walked five miles—two and a half out, two and a half back, though at an angle. They wouldn’t be entering Delacroix land at the same place they’d left it, but coming in closer to the house. She hoped she’d triangulated correctly. The mate sense was certain, but the terrain made them veer this way and that.
Sammy had finally given her back her phone. He was murmuring to himself, repeating words she didn’t know. Navajo wasn’t one of her languages. “Nettie Two Horses wants me to go see her,” he’d told Arjenie quietly when he ended the call. “When this is all over, she wants me to go to her. Do you think . . . could she mean to teach me?”
The hope in his face was so raw. “Did she say so?”
He’d shaken his head. “Only that I was a young idiot, and I was to come to her.”
That sounded like Nettie. “Then you’d better come to California with me.”
Five miles wasn’t so much, Arjenie told herself. She had no business being tired already. At least all the walking kept her warm, except for her face, which was freezing. Had she already acclimatized to San Diego, or was it really as far below freezing as it felt? The snow kept drifting down....
Her phone vibrated against her hip. It had occurred to her when Sammy gave it back to her that she didn’t want it singing Christmas carols if they happened to be near the bear, so she’d set it to vibrate. She took it out. “It’s Aunt Robin. Hello?”
Four minutes later she returned the phone to her pocket. “Sammy, what kind of shape are you in?”
“What?” He turned a puzzled face her way.
“Can you run four or five miles?”
“I suppose. But you can’t. You’re doing great, but running—”
“I know.” Not in the snowy dark. Sometimes dignity had to be set aside. “Josh? Time for Plan B.”
Benedict lay on his stomach. Over three hundred yards away, and so well out of sight if not hearing, a man chanted in a voice so low he picked up only the sound of it, not the words. Snow still drifted down slowly, some of it caught by the branches of the oak he lay beneath. His haunch and leg throbbed along with his heartbeat. His breath frosted the air.
The little terrier huddled against him. Settle down.
He hadn’t moved, hadn’t so much as twitched.
You’re twitching plenty inside.
I won’t let him kill that child.
The terrier huffed out a breath. Benedict could see it in the cold air. She sleeps. She isn’t hurt. I’ve promised to let you know in time to commit suicide by bear if he finishes his preparations before they get here.
We’re too far away.
If we go any closer, he’ll detect us, revert to bear, kill you and Havoc, then finish his chant and kill the girl. He’s not finished. Wait.
He knew how to wait. He hated it, but he knew how to do it.
Havoc/Coyote shivered and tried to get closer.
Can’t you use some of your magic to keep poor Havoc warm?
It takes a lot of power to watch him without him noticing me.
How close to the end of the chant is he?
I told you, the chant isn’t a set length.
First the skinwalker would chant and dance to ready his mind, C
oyote had said. Then he would chant and dance to gather power. Has he started gathering power?
A pause. Yes. How close is she now?
Benedict checked his mate sense for the dozenth time since they began this hellish vigil. Four or five miles.
She’s not very fast.
He growled.
All right, all right. I know her old injury won’t let her run over rough ground covered by snow in the dark, but . . . what?
She’s coming faster now. Benedict paused, checked again. It made no sense, but . . . A lot faster.
Chapter Twelve
Twenty minutes later, Benedict decided the waiting was over. She’s almost here. I’m going to her.
In your other form. You need to tell her about him.
I don’t intend to hop to her. And if he Changed here, he’d be reduced to hopping. The wound on his right haunch would translate to his upper thigh. I’ll Change when I see her. It was a lot of Changes in one day—a day when he’d covered twenty miles or so after being wounded. But that couldn’t be helped. You . . . Havoc won’t be too cold?
The little terrier snorted. I’m going with you. Moving will warm us.
The two-hundred-pound black wolf and the fifteen-pound, mostly white terrier set off together, one of them on three legs, the other’s four legs working hard to keep up.
A single low hill separated them. Benedict crested it and saw Arjenie, Josh, Sammy . . . some distance away, Seri struggled to keep up, and while he didn’t see Adam, the wind carried his scent. And in spite of everything, he grinned in the way wolves and dogs do.
His mate had found a way to move quickly. She rode piggyback on Josh—who could have left the human Sammy behind, even with his burden. Arjenie didn’t weight much. That he hadn’t meant . . . what?
Benedict headed down the hill to her.
“Benedict,” she whispered as he drew close. “Oh, it’s so good to . . . Your leg! You’re hurt. I knew you were, but—how bad is it? Oh, you can’t answer. Josh, put me down, I need to get down—”