Burn Bright

by Patricia Briggs

  Asil growled.

  “It’s a TV show,” Anna told him. “About the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. It’s a mix of mystery and military thriller.”

  “A TV show,” Asil said disdainfully.

  Wellesley grinned, ducked his head, and raised a hand to high-five Anna.

  There was a crystalline moment when she understood that this wasn’t a good idea. Wellesley clearly had some issues. All of the werewolves had a bit of multiple personality disorder—the human half and the wolf half sometimes existed in a state of conflict. Charles and Brother Wolf were a functional demonstration of how separate the wolf spirit and the human could be. But her mate and his wolf existed in harmony.

  Wellesley and his wolf were not functional at all. Getting close enough to touch him when he had spent the last half hour switching back and forth between normal and creepy was stupid.

  And still, she was the mate of Charles Cornick, who was second in the Marrok’s pack. If she let that friendly gesture hang, that would be quite a statement—one she did not want to make.

  She stepped around Asil and slapped Wellesley’s upraised hand with her own.

  Anna was a werewolf. She had been working out with Charles virtually since he’d brought her to Montana. Her reaction time was good; she was quicker than a lot of the wolves.

  And she had no time to respond as Wellesley’s hand closed over her wrist, and he plowed into her like a grizzly bear, sending them both to the floor. She hit the hard-packed dirt floor underneath his not-inconsiderable weight. He wrapped himself around her, his body shaking. Her stomach lurched with memories that she thought were long behind her.

  Something hit the ground right next to her ear, startling her out of her panic. She turned to see that Asil had buried a knife . . . a sword . . . something with a beautifully crafted hilt in the dirt. The blade was only visible for about a quarter of an inch.

  Asil had been going to kill to defend her, she realized. But he’d apparently understood much faster than she exactly what had happened—and more importantly, what hadn’t.

  Wellesley hadn’t attacked her . . . hadn’t meant to attack her, anyway. He was trying to get as close as he could while sobbing wildly and muttering something in a language she couldn’t understand.

  “Omega,” said Asil quietly. He crouched beside her, his face only a few feet away from hers. “I should have stopped you from touching him. My wife, she had better control of what she was. No one would have understood what she was, or been affected by her by a casual touch unless she wanted them to.”

  “What do I do?” she whispered, partly so that she wouldn’t startle Wellesley into anything more violent. But mostly because her throat was so dry with fear and remembered horror that she couldn’t have made a louder sound if she tried.

  “Stay still,” he said. “Hopefully, his reaction will ease after a few minutes.”

  She looked at him. She wasn’t going to be able to lie here, with a stranger on top of her, for a few minutes.

  He saw it. “If I try to pull him off,” he told her, “it’s not going to help anything.”

  She nodded. She understood that Wellesley was getting some sort of relief from her, and he would react badly if someone tried to take it away from him. Asil didn’t think Wellesley was rational enough to let her go.

  “Okay,” she said, trying not to sound panicked. Hoping that Charles wasn’t picking up on this. He wouldn’t if she managed to keep herself from blind terror. “Okay.”

  “What can I do to help?” Asil asked.

  “Talk,” she said. “Distract me.”

  “How about a story?” He reached out and put a hand on Wellesley’s shoulder. “His mate died, and his wolf wanted to die with her. It happens that way sometimes. As far as I know, they’ve been at war ever since, he and his wolf. A hundred years more or less, I think. Like a split personality disorder, but your other half is a killing machine, and you can never let it take over.”

  “The girl in Tennessee?” Anna murmured, fairly certain that Wellesley wasn’t attending the conversation between her and Asil. He was crying noisily, and it was a horrible thing to hear from a grown man. But it reassured her, because he didn’t sound like . . .

  Anyone else.

  Asil nodded to her almost-question. “After Tennessee is when Bran brought him here. Back in the 1930s, I think. He’d been a well-known artist under a different name when his wife died.” The old werewolf, whose mate had also died while he survived, made a sympathetic sound. He patted Wellesley again, and this time left his right hand on the other werewolf’s shoulder.

  “He tried to keep up his life, but one day he just left. Left his pack. Left his house with everything in it. A wolf who was there, a member of his pack, told me it was eerie. As if one morning, just after breakfast was ready to eat, he decided he was done with it. No one heard of him for a while. It was the Depression, and traveling on trains was a way of life for a lot of people. There was no easy way to find him.”

  “Not like now,” Anna said. It was hard to get the words out of her throat, but at least she didn’t have to whisper.

  “Not like now,” agreed Asil. “Technology has made a lot of things easier—but also Wellesley’s case in particular made Bran decide that it was important not to lose track of any werewolf if he could help it.”

  “You were in Spain during the 1930s,” Anna said. Her voice was shaky. She didn’t like sounding like that—fear was dangerous around werewolves. But even knowing that there was nothing sexual about what Wellesley was experiencing, she couldn’t help the cold sweat that trickled down her back.

  Asil made an assenting sound.

  “You know a lot about this for a man who was on another continent at the time.”

  Asil’s smile flashed. “I know everything worth knowing,” he told her. But his face grew pensive. “I asked after I started to visit with him. I wanted to know as much as I could in hopes I could help him. I knew a little before, of course. His story was widely published at the time. I think part of what has made Bran so harsh on the wolves, now that the public knows about us, is that he is afraid that someone will remember the old story of Wellesley.”

  “Tell me?” she asked.

  “As you said,” Asil told her, “it was easier to be lost and wander back in those days. Lots of men without families or pasts wandered the railroad and the highways in the Depression era. Wellesley was just another one of them until he finally lost control of the wolf in a little town with a population of about four hundred people. It’s not around anymore, that little town, or maybe more people would remember this story. Wellesley is sometimes certain that there was a black witch—or something like a black witch—involved. But in the aftermath, there was only Wellesley and some bodies: a black man in a mostly white town.”

  Asil patted Wellesley again, but the other werewolf didn’t appear to notice him. After a moment, Asil started talking again.

  “That’s when Bran became aware of him. He sent Charles to break Wellesley out.” There was a pause, and Asil said sourly because he didn’t want to respect Charles, “I understand he broke into that jail where Wellesley was under heavy guard and left with him. But if you can get that closemouthed wolf to tell you how he did it in plain sight of two guards, leaving an empty and locked cell behind them with no one the wiser, there would be a lot of people who’d love to hear that story.”

  “Can’t you ask Wellesley?” Anna asked.

  Asil shook his head. “He doesn’t remember anything except bits and pieces—mostly that’s his wolf, anyway. Wellesley doesn’t have enough memories to defend himself from anything someone wants to claim about that day if someone goes digging up old newspaper records or someone’s diary about the matter.”

  “You think he is innocent?”

  Asil sighed. “I think that truth is complicated—and speculating on things w
ithout adequate facts is useless. You can ask your mate if you are curious. His orders were to kill or rescue, depending upon what his judgment told him was best—and here is our Wellesley, safe if not sound.”

  Wellesley’s sobs had been quieting, but Anna was deliberately focusing on Asil, so she didn’t notice the difference in him soon enough.

  Asil, though? Asil was on Wellesley before his sharpening teeth could do more than scrape against her collarbone. Then they were both rolling around the room while Anna scrambled to her feet. Before she could jump in and add her weight to the game, Asil had Wellesley pinned to the floor in some complex wrestling move that didn’t allow the werewolf to use his great strength to break free.

  And Wellesley—or the wolf spirit that lived in Wellesley—was trying. His eyes, those brilliant gold wolf’s eyes so startling in his dark face, saw nothing but enemies. His face, changing slowly to wolf, was wild. His jaws snapped and snapped at the air as if there were some way that he could climb out of the bones of his body to get at Asil—but would be satisfied with anyone.

  Asil crooned to him in Spanish as if the mad creature were a child. There was power in his voice, the werewolf magic of a very dominant wolf trying to settle Wellesley.

  She could feel the other man trying to come back, but the wolf spirit was dominant, too. Asil, she thought, could have subdued the other wolf, but he was hoping that Wellesley could control it himself. A wolf this old who couldn’t control himself better than this would need to be killed.

  The impulse to soothe Wellesley, to bring him the relief that her Omega nature brought to troubled wolves, was instinctive and felt desperately necessary. But she gathered herself together and thought before she gave in to that desire.

  She was in control when she reached out with her power to do what she could. She wouldn’t have tried it if it had been Charles holding Wellesley, but it was Asil, who had been mated to an Omega wolf. He’d had a long time to learn how to guard himself, to stay alert, no matter what his wolf felt from her.

  She took a deep breath, centering herself, and crouched, staying on her feet in case she had to move fast. She put her hand on Wellesley’s cheek with enough pressure that he’d have trouble turning his head to bite her.

  The trapped wolf shuddered at her touch.

  Asil turned his croon to English, speaking to her in the same voice he was using for Wellesley. “Be careful what you do, Anna. Your abilities allow you to bring a wolf terrific relief—but it comes at a cost. When you pull away, he has to take up the burden of controlling the beast again—and that requires a lot more courage and fortitude than doing it in the first place.”

  “I know,” she said simply. “I’m not likely to forget the disaster of Bran’s experiments with me. But my read on this is that we don’t have a choice.”

  Asil closed his eyes, opened them again, and nodded. “If you can’t fix him, I will send him to a final rest, where this burden will no longer trouble him.”

  “Will you be all right when I soothe him?” she asked, half expecting him to take offense, but she had recognized that he had been speaking of himself, too, not just Wellesley, when he warned her of the possible results of her meddling.

  Asil smiled grimly. “I do not want to kill this one, who has fought so hard for such a long time. One who creates such beauty as he does is worthy of anything we can do to help him.”

  It wasn’t a yes. But she thought she might have a fix for that.

  She’d been practicing using what she was ever since she came to Aspen Creek. It was sometimes hard to find victims . . . subjects. As Asil said, most of the wolves didn’t object to the initial effect—it was afterward that made it difficult. Kara was her most consistent volunteer.

  Before she learned to handle it better, what her Omega aura did was flood an area with a wave of peace that sent the beast spirit of unprepared werewolves into sleep. She and the only other Omega she knew about had consulted over the Internet (because he lived in Italy) and pulled in Asil, who knew more about Omegas than either of them did. They had been working on other ways to utilize their effect without dropping their friends in their tracks. One of the things they had come up with was something that was more . . . invitation than hammer.

  She closed her eyes and visualized a quiet little hollow under an old tree next to a fast-running creek that was a favorite spot of hers. The sound of the creek rushing by, the smell of growing things, the peace of the place took hold of her heart.

  For a long time, this method had only worked with Charles because she could use their mating bond as a conduit. She’d gotten practiced enough that she could use the pack bonds as well, and lately she’d been experimenting using only touch. Unexpectedly, that had proved more powerful—or at least differently powerful—than using the mate or pack bonds.

  With skin contact, Anna gained an insight she had never received with her mating bond or the pack bonds: empathy. Or empathy of a sort, anyway. It wasn’t so much that she felt the other wolf’s emotions; what she got was a sort of pressure reading. She could gauge how much emotion they were holding. She’d learned to work with that, to soften the full force of whatever they were feeling, then back away.

  It worked better with some wolves than others, of course. She couldn’t get a read, most times, on Bran or Asil, let alone affect the amount of emotion they were feeling. Kara was her best subject. Between them they had fine-tuned the effect so Anna could help Kara just take the edge off—or coax Kara’s inner wolf into a willing sound sleep without affecting any of the wolves nearby. Or at least allowing the nearby wolves to resist the rest she offered them. She planned on trying that now, so that she was less likely to affect Asil.

  She didn’t know if her touch would allow her to influence Wellesley’s wolf at all. But if not, she always had her big hammer to whomp him to sleep with. The whomp would hit Asil, too, though.

  “I’m going to try asking him to let his wolf sleep—like I do with Kara. I don’t know if this will affect you,” she told Asil. “I’ve never tried it when someone else was touching my experimental subject.”

  He laughed, just a little, as if he were not wrestling with another werewolf. “I am prepared, mija. Do what you need to.”

  She used her touch on Wellesley’s cheek to extend her invitation of peace. He reached for it immediately—and then yanked her out of her forest glade into Hell.

  There was a moment when she could have broken free, then that moment was gone, and Wellesley was in charge. Sort of.

  Pain swamped her, pain and weariness so deep that it felt bottomless, and it hurt to breathe. She was lost in Wellesley’s emotions for a long, horrible, endless time.

  “Anna? Chiquita? Talk to me.” Asil’s quiet voice grounded her, reminded her that there was a reality besides Wellesley’s pain and brought her back out to where she could have dropped the connection between herself and the other wolf again.

  He had let her go.

  She took a breath, but she didn’t take her hand off Wellesley.

  “I’m all right,” she told Asil. “But this is a little strange. Bear with me—and do not let him up.”

  She put her other hand on Wellesley’s face, drew in another deep breath, and let him suck her back into his prison. She didn’t pull away from his pain, and in accepting it, she discovered that she could separate herself a bit—and she understood what had happened.

  Wellesley had invited her in. And his invitation had power. His power wasn’t like Bran’s; nor was it witchcraft . . . not quite. But it wasn’t not witchcraft, either. Asil said that Wellesley had magic more akin to Charles’s—and the magic Charles usually used belonged to his mother, a healer and a shaman’s daughter. The power felt more like Charles’s than like Bran’s. But it was not the same as her mate’s.

  The space—it wasn’t quite a place—that she found herself in was dark and felt hollow to her ears, as if it wer
e somehow enclosed. But she didn’t know how far to trust her perceptions.

  When all else fails, the memory of Charles’s voice rang in her ears, follow your instincts. Werewolves have pretty good instincts.

  This felt like the kind of place where instincts would be more useful than intellect.

  She moved through the darkness and came upon Wellesley. It wasn’t as if she found him where he had always been. One moment he was not anywhere, and the next he came into being, quite near. Near enough that she took a step backward, becoming aware in that moment that she could step, that she had something that felt like a physical body.

  She could perceive Wellesley, the man, quite clearly. But she could also feel the struggle he was carrying on, feel his great weariness and his pain, as if those things were part of what she was seeing, just as easily as she could perceive his outer form.

  He fought so hard, and he had been fighting a very, very long time. Nearly a century of battle had worn him down to his essentials. She could see places where he was worn thin, his body fading to gray in patches.

  That’s where you can see me, something whispered in her ear. There, in those bare spots.

  And that wasn’t scary. Not at all.

  But she followed her instincts and didn’t look behind her, though the hairs on the back of her neck were raised as if they were her wolf’s hackles. Whatever was back there smelled evil, rank, and rotting. In a place like this, sometimes noticing things too hard gave them more reality. And that wasn’t instincts talking, it was something Charles had taught her.

  She concentrated on Wellesley. What was he fighting? Because she couldn’t perceive his wolf at all. That thing that had whispered in her ear, that wasn’t a wolf. She knew that as instinctively as she saw his fight—though he wasn’t moving at all.

  If he wasn’t fighting his wolf spirit, despite Asil’s story, maybe he was fighting for his wolf. That felt right. As soon as she accepted that idea, her connection to Wellesley increased appreciatively until she could feel the echoes of his emotions. It was a terribly intimate connection to have with someone who was basically a stranger—someone not her mate.