by Lib Starling
“He won’t kill me! Don’t say that!”
“It’s not his doing—it’s Scarlett’s. But he’ll kill you all the same!”
She jerked, trying to free her arm from Darien’s grasp, but he continued to pull her farther away from the tangling wolves.
“Roxy,” Darien shouted, “stay back! You have to be careful!”
Beyond the commotion of the wolves’ fight, Roxy caught sight of Scarlett’s face. Her smile was mocking, grimly satisfied. She reached for something at her neck, and in the brief glimmer of another blocked spell, Roxy saw the glint of a thin, golden chain. She had seen it before. And in that moment, she knew just how she could stop Scarlett and Chase both.
Amid the flares of the witches’ spells, Roxy caught first one white flash, then another, as the brothers of Alpha House shifted. She didn’t know whether it was the sight of Chase and Alexander locked in combat, or some other, more obscure motive that inspired them to take to their totemic forms. But as she felt the thumps of their shifting deep within her chest, she was gripped by the giddiness of inspiration.
She stopped pulling at Darien’s restraint so suddenly that he staggered. Roxy ducked behind him. “Cover me,” she said, as she shed her winter coat and pulled her sweater over her head.
It was the work of a moment to shift into her fox form. She pulled her small, limber body free of the tangle of her jeans and bra, and shuddered at the strange, prickling density of the air. She hadn’t noticed, in her human form, how each gesture the witches made seemed to grab and compress and swing the world around them. Each ball of fire they threw, every club of air they swung made its presence known to the little red fox. Now that magic was being wielded so openly in her presence, she felt it clearly. It was as obvious and inescapable as scent or sound, or the vibrations that traveled through her whiskers.
She looked up at Darien, licking her lips.
“Roxy, what are you doing?” he cried.
For answer, she scrabbled her forepaws in the snow, growling in her high-pitched whine, expressing her readiness. Then, before Darien could reach down and catch her, she whirled and sprinted toward that burning flush of magic—straight for Scarlett’s circle.
Roxy suspected that, distracted as Scarlett was by Katrina’s attacks, she wouldn’t notice a creature as small as a fox. She hoped she was correct. The two wolves, still tearing at each other’s fur and filling the night with their snarls, were another matter. She assumed that their already-keen senses were further sharpened by the fury of the fight, and as she flew past them, coming so close that Chase’s growls rose to a squeal of pain, she could only hope that Alexander was strong enough to keep the gray wolf at bay. The strange, rapid gelling and loosening of the air pushed and pulled her as she ran, rocking her on unsteady paws as the spells wove and collided and burst above her head. She felt a great swell of energy directly in her path, and dodged to the side half a second before a fireball appeared there, flaming bright, then fizzling to nothing in an instant.
By the time Roxy crossed the boundary of Scarlett’s circle, she was panting and trembling from more than just the exertion of her sprint. But her anxiety mounted the moment she was in the witch’s ring. It was as if she had stepped inside a cell of absolute blackness. Although she could see in the starlight, and could sense with ease the vibration of Scarlett’s feet as she stepped this way and that, shifting her weight to throw an arc of fire or dodging a blow from Katrina, still Roxy felt an unidentifiable, suffocating blackness pressing all around her. The ground seemed to twist under her paws, and she had the dizzy sensation that she was standing upside-down, walking on a snowy, sage-covered hillside that had somehow become a ceiling—and yet she knew she was still oriented as before, still tied firmly to the earth. She quivered as she dodged Scarlett’s feet, and felt the earth roll and heave beneath her, though all her senses insisted that the ground remained still.
She recalled what some of the other shifters had said, muttering darkly as they’d assembled on the hillside—that Scarlett had tapped into the black side of the Powers, where everything was chaotic and twisted. Was that what Roxy felt now? The twist of chaos, the turning of reality to some dark, fearful end?
She shook her head. Concentrate. Don’t let her twisting and trickery fool you!
Somehow, she had to get up to Scarlett’s neck, without being seen first. There was a tall, flat-sided boulder nearby, back in the shadows behind the roiling, chaotic space where Scarlett made her stand. Roxy eyed it carefully. Perhaps she could scramble to the top, and then… But no. It was too far from the dark witch to make the leap.
I’ll have to jump straight up from the ground, Roxy thought, even as the earth heaved and spun beneath her. Jump, and hope for the best.
She gathered herself over her sleek haunches, and with a spring so forceful that it wrenched an involuntary growl from her throat, she leaped high into the night air. She sailed through a thick, oily cloud of darkness-that-wasn’t—a darkness she could feel, pressing all around her with heavy hands, but which did not block the stars, the sickle moon, or the two wolves battling from her sight.
Despite the weird upturning of reality and the ground that swayed and buckled, Roxy timed her jump well. She hit Scarlett’s right shoulder with dead-eye precision, and the briefest flash of hope flared in her chest. But her furry paws could find no purchase on the slick, synthetic material of Scarlett’s winter coat. She flailed, scratching and scrambling, while the fabric hissed uselessly beneath her claws.
Scarlett gasped and gave a hard jerk of surprise. The movement knocked Roxy off her aim, and the tumbled sideways—into the hanging hood of Scarlett’s coat. It caught and held her body like a hammock, and for a brief moment, Roxy lay there, stunned, surrounded by the cosmetic, chemical scent of Scarlett, which she recalled vividly from their roommate days. Her only clear, grateful thought was that she hadn’t fallen back to the twisted earth inside Scarlett’s circle. She shivered and panted, too stunned to move.
Then she felt a hand brush her back as Scarlett swung an arm, trying to knock Roxy out of the hood. Another fireball of a spell exploded nearby, searing Roxy’s eyes with its fierce, red light.
Now! Roxy thought. Twisting carefully to bring her legs beneath her, she reared up out of the hood and buried her muzzle in Scarlett’s tumble of long, brown hair. She rooted blindly, until at last her whiskers found the slithering, metallic thinness of the stay’s chain. Roxy seized it in her teeth, grabbing a bit of Scarlett’s skin as she did so. The witch gave a shout of pain, but Roxy didn’t hesitate. She clamped her jaws tightly around the chain and leaped from Scarlett’s hood.
The chain grated painfully against her teeth as gravity yanked her violently down. The fox’s weight held for a moment against the chain—Scarlett gave a scream of rage and pain as a mouthful of hair tore from her scalp, too—and then the links of the chain parted, and Roxy plummeted back down into the circle. As she fell, something golden and round tumbled through the air beside her, winking in the moon’s pale light.
Roxy landed in a heap at Scarlett’s heels. Chase’s stay medallion bounced off the hard-packed snow and flipped in the air like a tossed coin; Roxy launched herself toward it, snatching it from the air before Scarlett could turn to search for it.
Roxy dodged out of the circle, shivering in relief as Scarlett’s strange, chaotic blackness fell away. Darien gestured frantically, waving her back to safety. Roxy headed for her friend, but the medallion seemed to warm on her tongue, filling her with an insistent pressure. It called to Chase, and Roxy felt compelled to return the stay to its rightful owner. She veered away from Darien and made directly for the terrible, thrashing tangle of gray limbs and white, of twisting, muscular bodies and the showers of ice that flew up from beneath their paws as they charged and spun in their lethal dance.
Darien shouted for her, and over the noise of the wolves’ battle, Scarlett’s shriek of pain turned into a high, frantic command. “Chase! Stop her! Chase, listen to me!”
As Roxy slunk closer to the battling wolves, weaving and sliding to avoid their trampling feet, she heard Katrina’s wordless shout of alarm. The blonde witch, it seemed, noted Roxy’s dangerous proximity. Her voice cleaved the air, rising above the booming snarls that went on, savage and unending, over Roxy’s head. “Alexander! Enough!”
The white wolf twisted away, agilely evading the gray’s clashing jaws. He retreated to Katrina’s side. The fog of his heaving breath hung like a veil in the air.
Chase, still boiling with his hateful, animalistic energy, reeled beneath the moon. He turned his dark, glaring eyes on Roxy. Everyone on the ridge fell silent, holding a collective breath. Blood and slaver dripped from Chase’s teeth, and his head snaked low to the ground as he closed on Roxy with a threatening growl. In the sudden silence, the low, eerie sound seemed to shake the midnight air, trembling along every hair of Roxy’s red pelt.
Chase stalked toward her—one slow, deliberate step, then another.
Chase, please! she said to him. It’s me—Roxy. It’s me!
He made no response, except to continue his deadly advance.
You’re free from Scarlett now, she told him. She can’t control you anymore. You don’t want to hurt me. I know you don’t. You love me, Chase—and I love you.
“Attack her!” Scarlett’s shout dripped with vitriol, with months of built-up envy and the bitterness of thwarted desire. “Bite her, tear her! Kill her!”
The pitch of the gray wolf’s growl rose, and his long, sharp teeth chattered together with eagerness.
Roxy tried again. You’re only keyed up from the fight with Alexander. Stop and think. Take control! This isn’t what you want!
Chase made an emphatic lunge, his jaws snapping, and Roxy heard Katrina and Darien gasp. But she didn’t move—didn’t flinch. The ivory-white teeth clicked in front of her face; a spray of bloody spittle fell upon her fur. Chase’s breath was hot and hateful against her cheek. But she did not move.
Slowly, carefully, she lowered her muzzle and dropped the medallion on the snow. Then, step by step, the fox backed away.
Some of the tension eased from the gray wolf’s body—some. His lips were still raised in a violent grin, his teeth still flashing in the starlight. But his dark stare turned down into the snow-shadows at his feet, and some of the hatred vanished from his eyes. A ring of melting snow spread from the gold medallion, widening and sending up wisps of steam as the stay heated in the presence of its true owner.
Scarlett raised one last, futile scream to the night sky. “Destroy her, Chase! Do as I say!”
Chase glanced up at Roxy, and his eyes widened in surprise. The snarl fell away from his muzzle.
I don’t feel anything, he said, wondering. No pain—and you’re so near.
With a yip of joy, the fox bounded forward, twisting and dancing around the gray wolf’s paws. When the wolf bent to lick Roxy’s face, covering her in grateful, half-unbelieving caresses, Scarlett’s wail of impotent rage filled the air.
.7.
T he gray wolf danced and spun with joy, carried away by the heady miracle of his freedom. Not a single twinge of pain afflicted his body, save for the wounds he’d received in his battle with Alexander. Compared to the agony that had formerly ripped through his very being at Roxy’s nearness, the cuts and slashes in his hide were superficial—entirely bearable—no worse than a stubbed toe or a nick from a razor. The fox leaped and rolled about him, expressing her bliss more eloquently than human words could have done, and Chase was transported by a happiness so complete that for a moment, he forgot that he and Roxy capered squarely in the middle of a dire war between two witches.
He was his own self again—entirely, through and through. And the best part of himself—his passion for the fox-shifter—was free to fly like a bird on the wing. For a few precious heartbeats, that was all that mattered to him.
But all too soon, Scarlett’s cry of dismay died away, and the deadly electrical charge began to build again in the roiling sky overhead. It raised the hairs of Chase’s coat and sent a prickle of foreboding up his long, shaggy back.
Roxy stopped her frolicking. What is that?
Lightning, Chase answered grimly.
I was afraid you’d say that. She shuddered. The space inside her circle—it’s all twisted and… wrong. I felt it when I jumped for your stay.
That must be the darkness Katrina spoke of.
Whatever it is, it’s terrible and wild. I don’t think she can control it anymore, Chase—not without your totem to amplify her power.
The gray wolf braced himself on stiff forelegs, hackling against the eerie sensation of the gathering lightning. Briefly, he considered shifting back to his human form, so that he could pick up his stay from the ground more easily. Now that it was back in his possession, he wanted to clench it in his fist and never let it go. But he would be naked to the elements, and his human body was not as swift or powerful as his wolf totem.
And Scarlett had to be distracted—stopped—before she tried to wield that lightning again. Her last strike had gone dangerously awry. Without Chase’s power to aid her, there was no telling what disaster might be brewing in the clouds overhead. The power of the storm could be enough to end all their lives. Wind whipped the ridge-top with a hard, sharp lash, and the black mass of the storm cell towered and spun, reaching up into the starlit sky, a tower of menace. Over the screaming of the wind, Chase could hear Scarlett muttering the first words of a new spell.
He gave a hoarse bark as he said to Roxy, Grab my stay. Get it out of here—go back to Darien, and get away from the storm!
But you—
Do it! Trust me, Roxy. Be quick!
I only just got you back. I don’t want to lose you again.
The snow beside Chase crackled and skittered as Alexander bounded to his side. The two wolves exchanged brief, ready nods. Moments before, they’d fought as deadly enemies. But now they must work together, as trusting as blood brothers, if they were to have any hope of bringing Scarlett down before her bolts fell from the sky.
“Wait!” Katrina shouted to Alexander. “The storm—hold back!”
Yes, Roxy pleaded at their feet. Wait, please! Don’t—
Scarlett’s hateful screech swept across the ridge as brutally as the wind. “This is all your fault, Roxy! If you hadn’t come to Jackson Hole, none of this would have happened!”
Chase rumbled a threatening growl, but Scarlett went on: “You have everything, you fat, worthless—”
The fox snarled in defiance, and charged toward Scarlett with her teeth bared.
Chase cried out to her from the depths of his frantic heart. Roxy!
The terrible, swirling pressure of the electricity overhead seemed to gather itself all at once, as if it were squeezed in a sudden fist, and Chase knew that Scarlett’s chaotic blow was about to fall. He braced himself to spring, to leap in front of the running fox, to take the witch’s strike with his own body and spare Roxy from that fate. But in the same moment that he leaped, a blur of white shot like an arrow beside him, and Alexander’s hard, lean body knocked Chase aside.
The lightning fell with a crack. The sound stabbed deep into his ears and left pain, and a high-pitched ringing, behind. The blue-white flash of the bolt blinded him, and he blinked and rubbed at his eyes with one trembling paw.
The first sound he heard, over the strange, mechanical whine that rang in the vaults of his skull, was Katrina screaming. Her cry of fear went on and on, and Chase realized it came from close by. He blinked again and again, shaking his head, and the flaring yellow after-image of the lightning bolt slowly faded from his vision, revealing Katrina’s bent form and weeping face as she knelt in the snow, rocking and sobbing over the white wolf. Alexander lay stretched on his side, motionless, the ice-blue eyes closed.
Chase shook his head again in disbelief. Alexander—no! But as he looked around helplessly—at Scarlett laughing with cruel victory in the confines of her circle; at the flash
of red fur that was Roxy bolting for cover—his keen, lupine eyes caught the smallest flicker of movement in the shadows near Scarlett’s feet.
Chase squinted, and strained to sort the clamor of scents that hung on the air. Over the cloying odor of singed fur and the sharp tang of ozone, he picked up Brooke’s familiar smell. Then, as the remnants of the lightning bolt’s glow faded further, he made out her crouched form between the dark boulders near Scarlett’s circle. Brook held a little whisk of sagebrush twigs in her hand, and she was busily erasing as much of the magical ring as she could reach from her hiding place.
Chase tensed. He knew little of witches’ ways, but he had noted the importance Katrina placed on her carefully drawn circles. Any time she needed to wield large quantities of the Power, or weave particularly intricate or demanding spells, she always made a circle first, and defended its border with care. And Roxy said that when she was inside the circle, she felt Scarlett’s magic going awry. If her circle is broken, will her magic fail? Perhaps without Chase’s stay, and without a fully defined ring to contain the Power she drew on, Scarlett would be weak enough…
Now is my chance, he thought. Perhaps my only chance.
Chase curled his lips in a silent snarl and launched himself toward the witch. Scarlett’s dark eyes widened in shock, but she seemed to stare right through Chase as he charged. In some dim corner of his spirit, he was faintly aware of a trickling sensation, increasing by the moment to a rapid draining-away. Of what? He embraced the sensation as he flew over the hard-packed snow. Whatever flowed away from him—out of him—felt faintly oily, somehow rancid. He realized with a clutch of nausea that it was Scarlett’s power he was feeling, the remnant of her insidious influence, the stain of her touch upon his soul. So slowly had she worked her spells over him, he hadn’t even felt her touch until now. But it was vanishing by the moment, clearing from his consciousness, lifting like a fog in the morning.
It’s draining out of her circle, Chase realized, only two leaps away from Scarlett’s ring. She feels it, too. And she knows why it’s vanishing…