Burn Bright

by Patricia Briggs

  “The Irish witch part was,” said Asil when it seemed that Wellesley had quit speaking. “Sometime since I first heard your story, I realized that I knew another part of it. I knew the witches who were hunting that one. She stole a small book of family spells from one of the nastier witch clans in Northern Europe, the kind of spellbook witches kill for. As I know what that witch did—and I know the rumors of that family’s powers—it was not difficult to connect the two stories.”

  “You knew the witches whose spells she used?” asked Wellesley in a dangerous voice.

  Asil smiled, showing white teeth. “We were not friends, Wellesley.”

  “Asil doesn’t like witches,” said Anna firmly, and the tension in the air died down a notch.

  “That bloodline has died out,” said Asil. “Not entirely by my efforts.”

  “Well and so,” said Wellesley. “Well and so. It seems that this will be informative for all of us. This Irish witch was sold as a bondswoman to my . . . to the man’s parents when he was eight or nine. She was given the raising of him. Rumor was that his parents were the first people he and his mentor tortured and killed—but I suspect not. The slaves were easier prey, and predators usually begin with easier prey.”

  “Not always,” said Sage into the silence that followed. “But usually.”

  “No one cared about the slaves, not even the other slaves,” Wellesley said abruptly. Then he stopped and gulped down the wine until it was gone. He shook his head. “That’s not for this tale, either. This witch could make collars that forced the person wearing one to obedience. She had to torture a lot of people to death for the power to create each one.” There was horror in his eyes, but his voice was steady.

  Wellesley, thought Anna, had witnessed the making of those collars. She occasionally had nightmares about her encounters with witches. So did Charles.

  Wellesley continued speaking quietly. “I understand at first she tried to use them on all the slaves but found that it took power to control the collars, too. She could use no more than six of them at a time or they became less effective.” He grimaced. “The power in them had to be renewed twice a year.

  “It was a matter of great disappointment to her that instead of an island of willing slaves, who would torture themselves for her pleasure, she had to make do with ‘special’ slaves who enforced her will on the rest of the people on the island. If one of the collared slaves died or was killed, she replaced him with another. All the time that I knew her, she was trying to find a way to make the collars more permanent, to make them power themselves.”

  He had to quit talking again. Sage reached out a hand to him—wolves tended to touch each other a lot when they were under stress. But Wellesley wrapped his arms around himself and shook his head. He rocked a little in the chair, and his eyes glittered with shades of gold.

  “And then they found themselves a werewolf,” Charles said when the silence stretched too long.

  Wellesley nodded, but he still didn’t speak. Maybe he couldn’t.

  After a moment, Charles went on. “Probably he was himself a victim. He came to the island because there were stories of a woman who knew magic, who knew how to remove curses.”

  “Be careful of those,” said Asil in a low voice. “The only people who can remove curses can put them on, too.”

  Wellesley looked at Anna. “Not always,” he said in an intense voice. “There are healers in the world as well as killers.”

  “That was mostly Charles and Bran,” Anna said, embarrassed at receiving such a look. “They had the power. I was just a conduit, I think.”

  “As I said,” agreed Asil. “It takes someone who can deliver a curse to break a curse.” He and Charles exchanged a look of acknowledgment.

  Wellesley grunted. He took up the story, but his voice was rapid and his sentences jerky. His account skipped around ungracefully.

  “That part all happened before I came to the island. They frequently went to Barbados and bought slaves at the market there—including me. They herded all of us into a shed and turned the werewolf loose on us. Mostly the wolf just killed the people they threw in with him. Of my group, I was the only survivor. After my Change, it took another four or five years before they had six werewolves at their bidding, including the original wolf.

  “We were, all of us, bound by the evil thing that the witch collared us with. We had no free will, no thoughts that were not put in our heads by the witch and her leman.”

  Anna met Charles’s eyes, because she knew another wolf who had been forced to do the will of a witch.

  Yes, said Brother Wolf. The Marrok’s story is different in many ways, but Wellesley’s origin reflects the creation of our father in the dawn of time. It is one of the reasons our father asked Wellesley not to speak of his origin. We do not want witches to know it is possible.

  At the same time that Brother Wolf was speaking to her, Charles said, “Recently, I have learned that Bonarata, the vampire who rules Europe, had a collar he used to control a werewolf, though it was specific, I believe, to werewolves. It was also old. And it has failed—and he has no witch who can replace it.”

  Wellesley growled and stiffened in his seat.

  “Such things are never completely forgotten,” said Asil. “It is the way of the world.”

  “If Bonarata cannot find a witch to make him a new one, then there is not a witch left in Europe, at least, with that ability,” Charles observed.

  “Or maybe those witches are not willing to work for the vampire king,” Sage speculated.

  But Asil shook his head. “No witch in Europe could say no to Bonarata. He is extremely persuasive, and it has been a very long time since the witches were powerful enough that they could do battle with such a one as he.”

  “What happened, Wellesley?” asked Anna. “How did you get free?” Because obviously he had—and she wanted him to finish this story because the memories hurt him.

  “She worked her magic only on those of us of pure African blood,” Wellesley said. “Holding the witchborn is more difficult than a normal person, just as holding a werewolf is more difficult. She knew that the native peoples in the Caribbean had their own version of witchborn, though nothing as powerful as the European witches—or so she believed. Myself, I am not convinced. Most of the slaves on that island carried native blood, so they bought ‘pure African’ slaves to turn into collared wolves. She believed there were no mageborn people among those of us born in Africa.”

  Charles snorted.

  Wellesley nodded. “Ridiculous. All peoples have those born who can feel the pulse of the world. My father came from a family known for producing powerful healers. It is magic that is as different from witchcraft as wood is from steel. Subtle and powerful, perhaps, but also slow. My family’s magic brought good harvests, rain in season, and kept the wild predators from the village. Influencing natural tendencies toward beneficial results. It was not helpful in keeping the slavers away.”

  He paused, as if waiting for questions, but when no one said anything, he continued, “I will tell you the next part as a village storyteller would, because that is how I think of it. Because it makes the most sense that way.”

  He took a breath, and when he began again, his voice was rich with drama instead of jerky and painful.

  “One day, in the late fall, without warning, came a storm the likes of which I had never seen before,” he said. “The winds came, powerful spirits of the air. They battered the island for hours upon hours until the buildings became no more than piles of toothpicks, picked up and scattered together in a puzzle not even the gods could sort out. The rains came, too, so much rain that the waters in the river and in the lake welled up. The secret hope rose within me that the island might sink beneath the sea forever, that the great sea would drown the evil.”

  He paused for dramatic effect.

  “But it was only a very sma
ll hope, buried deep where I kept the few thoughts that were my own, because I was her creature then. And it seemed that hope was doomed because the witch drove away the spirits of the winds and the spirits of the rain, so that the big house and all the ground around it remained safe from them.”

  He lifted his cup, found it dry, and set it down. Without a word, Asil filled the cup with the rest of the wine in the bottle and handed it over.

  Wellesley took a sip and continued, “The eye of the storm came in the middle of the night. The winds calmed and the rain turned into a drizzle. It was at that time that the greater spirit of the hurricane came to me. Larger and more powerful than the wind or rain spirits, he was close enough to this world that he could speak with me.

  “‘Brother,’ he said, ‘why do you serve such a wicked one when you have in you the blood of earth magic? Of a priestess lineage that is a thousand years long?’”

  Wellesley shook his head and held out his hands palm up and brought them slowly down. “It was as if the rains washed away clouds, and the wind blew away fog. My mind was my own for the first time since the witch had placed her collar around my neck.

  “‘Spirit,’ I told him, ‘it is not of my will, but by this evil thing born of foul death and ugliness that I wear. This is a strange working I cannot fight.’

  “‘Why, then, do you not take it off?’ he said.

  “I tried then to do that very thing. Before this time, I could not even conceive of such an action. But alas, my hands could not break it, though I tried with all my strength.

  “I cried out in despair, ‘It is impossible for me. I am born of a grand heritage, it is true. Some of that power and grace lives inside this body, but great is the corruption that binds me. Too great for a man such as I to break or remove.’

  “The spirit of the hurricane looked upon that which I wore around my neck, and said, ‘Brother, truly this is evil. I can hear the cries of the tortured souls whose substance was used herein. It is greater than even I might destroy.’

  “And truly my heart knew despair then. If the spirit of the greatest storm that I had ever seen could not prevail over the witch’s power, then I would serve her until the end of my days or hers.

  “The spirit of the hurricane, seeing my sorrow, took pity upon me then. He said, ‘Come out to my mother, who is far mightier than I. Surely, she can defeat the dark magic in your binding. I will ask it of her, but you should know that she does not always do as I ask. She may decide that to rid the world of such evil, your life is also forfeit.’

  “In the end, what choice had I? I would rather be dead than to wear the witch’s collar to the end of my life. So I followed him, and he led me past locked doors and my sleeping comrades. No one heard us, and no doors could stand in our way. He led me to the edge of the island. The beaches were all gone, as were any of the gentle slopes, buried under the fury of the storm. If there was an easy way to the ocean, the spirit chose not to take me there. We stood, at last, at the top of a cliff.

  “‘My brother,’ said the spirit, ‘if you would be free of this evil, you must jump.’”

  Wellesley drank again. There was a trickle of sweat on his face. It sounded like a fairy tale, this story. But Anna, who’d seen Charles interact with the spirits of the forest, believed him. If she had had any doubts, the ring of honesty in his voice would have disabused her of them.

  “I knew,” said Wellesley heavily, “that I could no longer swim as I had as a child, that the magic of the wolf does not protect us from water. And had I been as good a swimmer as any mermaid’s child, it would have done me no good leaping off a cliff that high. But I commanded my own actions and thoughts for the first time in a very long time, so I jumped, and the spirit jumped with me. I can still hear his laughter in my ears when a storm rises here in the mountains.

  “‘Mother,’ he called as we fell, ‘I have found a prisoner of wickedness. A child of nature who should be unbound. Will you free him?’

  “And, in answer, the salt water reached up and engulfed me.”

  Wellesley paused again.

  “I thought I was dead,” he said at last. “I thought I was dead, and I welcomed it. But I awoke on a beach littered with the detritus of the storm. The sun was high in a clear sky, and my skin was covered with salt.”

  He smiled, a wolfish smile, and his voice roughened and the irises of his eyes brightened.

  “The witch came down to the beach soon thereafter. ‘I have found you at last,’ she said in triumph. ‘All of the other wolves are dead. I was worried that we would not be able to make more of you. Come, let us show my love that the fates have not yet turned against us.’ And she turned around and started walking back to the big house.

  “I had never changed except under the moon. But the ocean and the moon speak to each other as lovers do, and I have no doubt that it was the sea who gave me power and strength. I have never, before or since, taken wolf form as quickly as I did then. One moment I was human and the next a wolf. I killed the witch while she was still planning how to find more slaves to Change and control. The only regret I have is that it was quick and painless—I was too worried about her power to give her the death she deserved.

  “Then I went to the big house and killed the man who had given her free rein. I found every one of those collars, and I threw them into the sea where She could do with them as it pleased her. I hope that She freed the tormented souls who gave their pain and their lives for the witch’s spell.”

  He took a deep, shuddering breath. Then, in a perfectly normal voice, he said, “There were only a few of us left alive on the island—and all of them were afraid of me, for which I have never blamed them. Eventually, a ship came to see how we had weathered the storm. Upon discovering that we were alone, they claimed us all. But without a witch to hold me, I soon left them, and slavery, behind me.

  “Bran asked that this tale not be told lightly, which I have never done—” He paused and looked at Asil. “Except the once. These are Bran’s reasons, and they are good ones: First, the manner and matter of the collar’s making must lie with the dead if it can be made to do so. Second, which is adjunct to the first, that a witch can control a person’s mind and body is something that should not be known if those of us who are not wholly human want to live shoulder to shoulder with the humans in peace. And finally, there is this, my own reason. This is the story of my making, a private thing. I do not wish that it be a matter of common knowledge.”

  Anna thought of the way the wolves had all watched her last night as she came in from the truck where the body of one of the people who had abused her rested. She understood exactly why he didn’t want people talking about it.

  “You said ‘manner and matter,’” said Sage thoughtfully. If she was as affected by his story as she’d looked in the beginning, she was hiding it better now. “Does that mean that you know how to make the collars?”

  Wellesley’s eyes grew cold, then lightened to icy gold. “It is something that does not concern you.”

  She put her hand up. “I only ask because if someone thinks you know how to make them, you have a target on your back the size of Texas.”

  Anna remembered Charles saying that there were wildlings here who knew secrets that people would kill for. If Wellesley was the only one who knew how to make those collars . . . he’d be hunted by every black witch on the planet.

  Wellesley didn’t seem worried about it. His shoulders relaxed as he told Sage, “We all of us werewolves have a target on our back. It’s not a matter of if but when someone pulls the trigger.”

  “Cheerful thought,” drawled Asil. “But let us put that one aside—since there is nothing we can do about it that we are not already doing. What does that have to do with Rhea Springs?”

  Wellesley shrugged. “I don’t know. Charles said to begin where my wolf told me to—and that’s where my wolf told me to begin.”

  C
harles was watching Wellesley with a thoughtful expression.

  Wellesley shrugged. “As I told you, I really don’t remember a lot more about Rhea Springs than I did before Anna broke the curse. Not much at all, really. I remember going there—and I remember your spiriting me out of that jail. But I still don’t remember much in between, just bits and pieces.” He bowed his head. “I remember the witch’s face but nothing else about her.”

  Charles said, “Maybe you should—”

  The phone rang.

  Wellesley rose from the table and glanced at Charles—who shrugged. He put in an earpiece and hit a button on the phone.

  “Hello?” Wellesley said, and listened a moment.

  He’d found a way to have a private conversation in a room full of werewolves, Anna thought, delighted. She’d have to find out what he used.

  He hit another button, and asked as he lifted the handset, “Could you repeat that, please?”

  Leah’s voice, breathless and hoarse, replied, “I asked, are Asil and Anna there?”

  Asil took the phone from Wellesley. “We are here.”

  “I’m calling from Jericho’s phone,” she said. “We’ve got bodies here but no Jericho. You should come.”

  “Charles and Sage are here, too. Do you want us all?”

  She made an exasperated sound. “What did you do? Decide to get together for a party? Never mind. Yes. Everyone should come and help me search for Jericho. We don’t want him running around loose—or in someone else’s hands, for that matter.”

  She left them in a fit of dial tone.