Burn Bright

by Patricia Briggs

  While he was killing the first man, the second raised his weapon—a gun that looked wrong somehow—with wolf-quick reactions. Charles had considered the second werewolf in his plans but had calculated that the surprise of his attack would buy him the few seconds he needed to take care of the first wolf.

  Someone had trained the surprise out of this soldier. Charles hadn’t counted on that, and that was going to get him killed.

  Brother Wolf tried jumping aside but let Charles know what he already knew, there wasn’t a werewolf on the planet fast enough to dodge a bullet. They could only hope that it wasn’t a silver bullet or something big enough to kill him anyway.

  But these men had come into this land hunting werewolves, hunting Hester. It seemed likely that whatever they carried would be able to take care of werewolves.

  There was an instant of blazing pain so big it had a sound that vibrated his bones, followed by silence.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Charles woke to the sound of stone banging on metal and the human snarl of his mate. Assuming, from the words she was using, that she hadn’t joined him in Heaven, he decided he wasn’t dead, though he couldn’t figure out how he’d survived.

  He raised his head—and didn’t that feel all sorts of lovely. But there was no blood, so, wincing against the thought-scattering pain, he rolled upright and saw Anna hitting the door of Hester’s prison with a rock. He also saw that the man who had shot him was very dead.

  He couldn’t have been out long because he could hear the helicopter, much nearer now but not yet on top of them, over Anna’s chant, “Break. Break. Break. Damn it.” She wasn’t beating on the kennel itself but the sleek, tough-looking padlock on the door.

  A human wouldn’t have stood a chance at opening that lock with a rock, but Anna was a werewolf. He rose to his feet, all four of them, as the lock on the kennel door broke.

  Ignoring the wobbliness that threatened to pull him back to the ground, he trotted unsteadily to Anna’s side and put himself between Hester and Anna as Anna pulled the padlock arm free of the hasp, releasing Hester.

  He got a bite in his shoulder for his trouble. It wasn’t a nasty bite, but Hester’s fangs dug in, driven by anger at needing a rescue. Hester was not the kind of wolf who dropped to the ground and crawled on her belly in gratitude.

  “Stop that,” Anna said, smacking Hester on the nose with enough force that the old wolf released Charles and snarled at his mate.

  Anna jerked her hand back from Hester with a hiss, then shook her hand out. The silver in the padlock and the cage had left blisters on her hands. Hitting Hester had hurt her further. Seeing them, Brother Wolf growled at Hester and drove her away from his Anna with a lunge that the other wolf reacted to reflexively.

  Hester growled at him this time, her eyes narrowing with rage, compounded by her involuntary reaction to his dominance.

  “Charles,” Anna said. “Please. Hester—we’re trying to help you. Jonesy called us in. Let’s get under the trees, where they can’t just shoot us from the helicopter before you try to kill each other, okay?” She glanced up at the sky as the helicopter flew directly over them, low over the trees but fast. “Why are they just buzzing us instead of landing already?”

  She’d missed the notice that the clearing wasn’t big enough for their chopper to land in—probably because the chunk that now held the trapped four-wheelers was filled with big trees instead of a clearing.

  But she had a point. Charles had flown enough helicopters to have a pretty good idea of what kind of sitting ducks the three of them were here in the open.

  But the helicopter hadn’t even paused as it flew overhead.

  Hester eyed Anna. Charles saw her weighing the benefits of teaching Anna better than to slap her on the nose while her mate was distracted watching the helicopter.

  Charles regained his human form before Hester could do something stupid. She yipped and jumped back. He didn’t know if it was the suddenness of his change or the fact that he was fully clothed that had startled her. Neither was something any other wolf could do because no one else was a werewolf born instead of made—and born of two people who both carried magic in their veins. Anna had once pointed out that with his heritage, he was lucky he hadn’t been born purple or with a unicorn horn; instead, he got to change in the blink of an eye and emerge clothed all the way down to his footwear.

  He decided to ignore both the blood trickling from his shoulder and the fact that Hester had even thought about biting his mate. The pain in his head had subsided, the change speeding the healing with a thoroughness that told him Brother Wolf had decided to draw upon the pack.

  He frowned at the clearing thoughtfully. He thought about how the helicopter had acted, searching for something or someone but flying over them as if they were not interested in their people or the werewolves. Or as if they hadn’t seen them.

  “Did Jonesy put a glamour over this place?” he asked Hester. “And could Jonesy hide your cabin from them without hiding it from Anna and me this morning? Maybe make it difficult to locate from the air?”

  Hester snorted and gave him an “of course, idiot” face.

  “So,” Charles continued, “they can’t see us, can’t see a place to land, no matter what their instruments are telling them—if they are telling them anything,” Charles told Anna. “We’ll be okay here for a few minutes. Let me do a quick search of the bodies. I need to find out what he shot me with.”

  “This,” Anna said, pulling the weapon he’d been shot with out of the hollow between the small of her back and her waistband. Up close, it looked like a cross between a gun and a Taser.

  He took it—there was still a smear of blood on it.

  Anna looked at him with eyes that shifted from brown to her wolf’s blue. “I killed him,” she said, her voice hoarse. “He hurt you.”

  Then she wiped her hands on the legs of her jeans, and he noticed that there were bloody marks on the fabric that showed she’d done that before.

  She, both woman and wolf, knew how to kill because he’d taught her. The best way he knew to protect his mate was to teach her to protect herself. Charles and Brother Wolf between them had kills numbering in the hundreds if not more . . . but Anna did not.

  Ignoring the bodies waiting to be searched, the weapon, and the helicopter, which was for the moment not an issue, thanks to Jonesy, he touched Anna’s cheek. With an effort, he let Anna and her wolf see inside him through their mating bond. He left himself vulnerable to his mate, so she could know that he understood what her actions had cost her.

  “He hurt you,” she said, and this time her eyes were Anna brown and not wolf blue. She smiled, only a little grimly, and told him, “These men came to our territory and attacked us.” Her voice tightened, and she said, “Attacked you. I have no regrets.”

  She heard the lie in her own voice and gave him a rueful smile. That was his Anna, tough to the bone.

  He’d thought it was a gun when the man had pulled it. Even waking up without a bullet hole wasn’t a surety that it hadn’t been. He could sometimes heal an ordinary bullet wound pretty fast.

  But this wasn’t a gun that shot bullets. He took it from her and examined it. Up close, the device looked more like a beefed-up Taser, but there was no sort of cartridge or projectile.

  “Right?” said Anna. “It’s weird. I thought it might be a Taser—the way it dropped you. A kind of super-duper-charged one or something.” Because a normal Taser didn’t do much besides make a werewolf angry. “But it doesn’t look like a Taser—and there were no wires or anything hooked into you.”

  He pointed it at the ground and pulled the trigger—and darn near dropped the thing as it grabbed energy from him and turned a small plant into powder. He took his finger out of the trigger and glanced at the pinprick left where something sharp had cut him to fire the magic. He rubbed it a couple of times because
there was a numb spot right where the pin had gone in. He’d have worried more, but the spot was returning to normal.

  The gun itself felt no more magical than it had before he pulled the trigger.

  “Blood magic,” he said to Anna—and Hester, who was watching him out of careful eyes. “Witchcraft of a kind I’ve never seen nor heard of. Isn’t Da going to be very, very interested in this?”

  He tucked the weapon in the small of his back, just as Anna had. The lingering pain that shivered through his joints was subsiding enough that it wouldn’t slow him if he had to move quickly. The dead plant made him wonder why he was alive and kicking—not that he was complaining about it. Maybe it had something to do with the difference in size between him and the plant. Or maybe just the amount of power it was able to draw from him—magic born on both sides of his parental heritage.

  He looked at Hester. “Is Jonesy around here?”

  The wolf raised her head and turned until she was back where she started. She shook her head.

  That surprised him. When the helicopter had overflown them, he’d assumed Jonesy had followed them. A glamour that big was difficult to maintain from a couple of miles out . . .

  I told you—dangerous, said Brother Wolf.

  “He’s holding the glamour over us from your cabin?” asked Charles, just to be sure.

  She shrugged and looked around as if to say “the evidence points to yes.”

  Somewhere to the west, the helicopter finally found a place to land. Unless Jonesy’s magic was different than other glamours Charles had seen, the enemy would probably be able to follow whatever trace or GPS had gotten them this far despite Jonesy’s spell. Only the Gray Lords working great magic together could confuse technology until it wouldn’t work at all. He considered the reach of Jonesy’s magic. Maybe their enemy was using witchcraft instead. Though witchcraft and werewolves were uneasy bedfellows, he had evidence in the odd gun a werewolf had used on him that their enemy was willing to mix power.

  Under other circumstances, Charles would have waited for the enemy to find him. But the weird blood-magic weapon pushed him into caution. He’d never even heard of such a thing before. He didn’t take on enemies without more intelligence about their capabilities.

  He did a cursory search of the three dead bodies and discovered no more than that the first dead body, the one Hester presumably had killed, was human. None of them carried ID or had useful clues like insignia or easily discoverable tattoos. Their body armor and weapons (there was only the single witch-blood gun) were good but not custom-made.

  It would have been nice if they could call the pack and get reinforcements, but neither he nor Anna had brought phones.

  Twice since he and Anna had tangled with the government in Boston, they’d had to go out and rescue federal agents who got themselves stuck in the mountains. The first pair of agents hadn’t been his fault, he and Anna had found them wedged in a rocky outcropping on their way back from a horseback ride. Since there hadn’t been anything up that old logging road except for a few hikers and horseback riders since the 1960s, he figured they were hunting for him and Anna. They seemed suitably embarrassed when he got them out—and unsurprised by his ability to lift the front end of their truck, which confirmed his suspicions.

  But after them, he’d been paying attention to his back trail. The second pair he allowed to discover why native Montanans don’t drive over broad, flat meadows high in the mountains unless it’s been below zero for a few weeks. Charles got the people out—but he imagined that the SUV might be sinking deeper in the mud even now.

  After that, though, Bran had made a rule that anyone heading into the wildling territory could not carry a cell phone. People who disturbed Bran’s special wolves tended not to live to regret their mistakes. Bran preferred not to kill government agents unintentionally.

  “Let’s get back to Jonesy,” Charles said when he’d finished searching the last body. “We can make a decision then whether to hole up in the cabin and call for reinforcements or just pick him up and head to Da’s house.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY WERE ALMOST halfway back to Hester’s cabin when the sound of a gunshot echoed in the trees. Charles flattened himself on the ground as a second shot fired, noting that Anna and Hester had done the same without hesitation. There was something odd about the motion the two of them made, but he’d worry about that after he took care of the immediate danger.

  Brother Wolf’s hearing told him where the bullet hit in the tree behind where they had been standing. Because it had scored the bark rather than hitting in the middle, Charles also had a nice line of broken bark that pointed back where the shot had come from—downwind, which was why he hadn’t scented anyone.

  He divested himself of the witch-worked weapon, leaving it on the ground. Then he rolled to his feet and shifted to wolf in the same moment. The next time he changed, it would be slower, but with the adrenaline in his system, he was still plenty fast.

  The shooter had climbed a tree to get the best shot at them. But that left her stuck in a tree with a werewolf coming after her. Not that it mattered. As far as Charles was concerned, as soon as she fired the first shot, she was dead. The tree swayed under his weight as he leaped from one branch to another. The unpredictable movement meant the two shots she aimed at him missed—as he’d calculated they would.

  She looked startled more than frightened. She had probably thought that werewolves couldn’t climb trees. Hunters said the same thing about grizzlies—and that was wrong, too. A grizzly could climb as far up as a tree would hold him. Which was pretty much true of werewolves, and Brother Wolf might be big, but he was a lot smaller than a grizzly.

  The shooter was human, and she died quickly, dropping from the tree to the ground with a crash of underbrush. From the tree, Charles saw two more people, presumably more of the team who had been pursuing them. They were taking separate paths toward the place where the woman had been shooting.

  Separated by no more than thirty feet of forest, he thought. Only one of them looked up, but it was obvious from his expression that he didn’t see Charles, nearly three hundred pounds of werewolf, in the tree. Evergreens were good at breaking up solid shapes. Both of the men had a hand to their ear in a classic I-have-a-communication-device pose.

  Charles dropped to the ground much more quietly than the body had fallen. Brother Wolf had identified the one who looked up as the more dangerous of the two, and this time, Charles decided it would be a good idea to take that one out first.

  His familiarity with the lay of the land—even if it was half a century old—allowed him to approach his chosen target from the side and downwind. Like the two earlier in the clearing, this one was a werewolf. He was comfortable in the forest—he moved like someone who was used to combat missions.

  He went down easily, though, the only sound being the crunch his spine made between Charles’s fangs.

  The third in what Charles’s senses now told him had been a three-person strike team (just as the initial group had been made of three people) had found the body of the sniper. There were too many trees, and the underbrush was too thick for Charles to see him, but he could hear him speak into his communication mic.

  As he slid through the woods, approaching the man from behind, Charles estimated about two minutes had passed between the time he’d heard the first shot. He took note of the information the man fed his . . . superior? Or maybe just someone on the helicopter Charles could hear. The copter was still on the ground, but, from the engine sound, it was ready to take off immediately.

  “That’s the report she gave me just a few minutes ago,” the man said. He’d moved away from the dead female shooter and was running now, a path that was designed to take him in a straight line to the helicopter. Charles could have told him that he’d have trouble getting across the wide, swift-running stream that ran between him
and his goal.

  Not that Charles would let him make it that far.

  “Two new players have joined up,” the man said, his breath even, despite the speed he was running. “One is almost certainly Charles Cornick unless you can think of some other Indian who would be up in these woods. My team is gone. Presume the other team lost. Pick me up. We are FUBAR.”

  Charles could hear the helicopter lift, engines purring. Perhaps the man knew about the stream. There was a clearing (Charles was pretty sure) about a quarter of a mile from where he was tailing the man.

  Unlikely that Charles could pull down the helicopter. But the man was easy prey.

  He’d capture this one, Charles thought. This one was human, so not a werewolf intruding on their territory. Brother Wolf wouldn’t insist on his death. This one would be full of interesting information. He slid silently through the forest, he and Brother Wolf on a hunt.

  And then the earth rumbled, and the spirits of the earth rose with a howl of anger and loss. Next to Charles, a lodgepole pine that was older than he was, maybe seventy feet tall, fell with a crack that shook the ground again.

  It took a moment for Charles to realize what had happened.

  Charles understood that some of his choices had just been made for him. Brother Wolf would not allow any of the attackers to live now. The meaty noise as Brother Wolf tore into the last of their enemies on the ground must also have made it through the device the man wore because the helicopter abruptly changed directions, the noise it generated growing softer and disappearing to the east.

  Brother Wolf dropped the body, finished with his task. Charles stepped into his human shape and frowned down at the dead man. He had needed to save one of them. One. So he could question him and find out who was sending teams with helicopter backup into the Marrok’s territory.

  But he would have to find that information elsewhere. Inside him, Brother Wolf snarled back, still raging. The earth roiled again, a lesser quake soon over. Charles took a deep breath and starting walking back.