Dead Heat

by Patricia Briggs

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  He had to imagine the first reactions of a group of kids who had locked themselves in a bedroom to hide from … from something. He hoped that the older boy wasn’t armed. But the room was decorated for a young girl, not a teenage boy. If the boy had a gun, it was probably in another room.

  “Who are you?” asked the older boy’s voice hostilely.

  “I’m a werewolf like your great-grandfather,” Anna said, sounding cheerful and utterly normal, as though she hung by her arms outside windows all the time. “My husband and I were at the ranch when your father got a call that sounded … odd. He and your great-grandfather are coming in the front door. My husband is going in downstairs from the back, but he thought you might like an ally in here. I’m tougher than I look. But you’ll have to open the window first.”

  There was a clicking noise as the latch released and the window opened inward. People did things for Anna. It wasn’t like when his father ordered people, and they just did what he told them before they had a chance to think about it. People wanted to do what Anna asked them to do.

  “Thanks,” she said, swinging her legs up and over. “I was beginning to feel a little silly. My name is Anna, but I don’t know yours. Charles and I rode in the back of the truck on the way over here and I’d just met Kage, your dad, so there was no chance to get the details. You’ll have to introduce yourselves.”

  She chattered at them as if everything were normal. Charles tuned her out and dropped to a crouch as he approached a pair of French doors he intended to use to gain entry. Inside the house, Kage called his wife’s name, but there was no response.

  Charles eased the nearest door open and slid inside without wasting time.

  Anna put her back against the wall, just to the side of the door, between the human children and whatever made this room smell of fear. They were as safe as she could make them at the moment.

  “Okay,” she said. “Michael, Mackie, and Max. Tell me what happened. All we got was a few odd phone messages from your mom.” She kept an ear out. Kage was calling for his wife in a soft voice that she didn’t think the kids could hear. His wife was not answering.

  “I got home from practice,” Max said. “Mom was in the kitchen and the kids were in the family room watching TV. She seemed a little off, but I figured she was tired—she works hard.” He glanced down at Michael, who had decided that the exploits of a lost little fish on the TV were more interesting than the woman who had climbed in the window.

  Reassured that he wasn’t going to freak out his brother, Max continued in a calm voice designed, Anna thought, not to attract Michael’s attention. “She was chopping carrots on the cutting board and I reached out to take one.” He hesitated, looking at the youngest boy again. His sister patted his hand.

  “Chindi,” she said in a very small voice.

  Max nodded back at her. “Chindi.”

  “What’s chindi?” Anna asked.

  “Wild spirits, evil things, wrong things.” Max gave a nervous shrug. “It’s a Navajo word.”

  “I’m not supposed to say it,” Mackie said in a small voice. “I said it, and then Mom got angry. It’s all my fault.”

  Max huffed. “That’s just superstition. It’s not real.”

  “Ánáli Hastiin says not to say that word or the evil spirits will come get you,” she told him.

  “Ánáli Hastiin…” Max swallowed whatever he’d been going to say. “Look, pipsqueak, you didn’t cause any of this. Kage—your dad says that a lot of what Ánáli Hastiin says is make-believe. You can ask your dad, but he’ll tell you the same thing. You did not cause anything bad to happen.”

  “You promise?” she asked distrustfully.

  “Promise.” He raised his hand, trapped his pinkie with his thumb, and left three fingers straight in the air. Anna thought it might be the Boy Scout sign, but it could be the sign of the flying spaghetti monster for all she knew. She’d never been a Boy Scout or any other kind of scout.

  Mackie evidently knew what it was because she heaved a big sigh. “Okay.”

  “So your mother was chopping carrots?” Anna asked Max.

  “And I reached out to grab a carrot out of the bag and she—” He swallowed and looked very young. He mimed someone holding a knife and bringing it down with speed and force. “She meant to get me, but she changed the direction at the last moment. She”—he made sure Michael was still occupied, but he spelled it out anyway in the manner of older brothers with too-young-to-be-literate siblings the world over—“s-t-a-b-b-e-d her own hand and screamed at me to get the kids and lock us in a room and not open the door until Dad came home. Not to let her in under any circumstance.”

  He looked at Anna with great big puppy eyes and whispered, “She was bl— b-l-e-e-d-i-n-g. Her hand was stuck to the cutting board and I just left her there. Left my stupid cell phone in my backpack with my laptop and there aren’t any landlines in the house except in the kitchen. I couldn’t call anyone for help.” He looked away and blinked hard as his nose reddened.

  “How long ago?” Anna asked, to give him something else to think about.

  “Fu—” He quit speaking, wiped his face on his shoulder, and looked down at his sister. “Freaking feels like hours, but this movie is about an hour and a half long and we are only about two-thirds of the way through.”

  “The chindi who looks like my mother knocked on the door,” Mackie told Anna solemnly from the shelter of her brother’s arms. “She screamed at Max to open the door. And then she cried. And she tried to be nice—and Max turned up the movie so we didn’t listen.”

  Chindi indeed, thought Anna. It was as good an explanation of the events Max had described as any. She was a musician, not a psychologist, but she was pretty sure that mothers didn’t go crazy and stab themselves out of the blue.

  “Max is very brave,” Anna said.

  Mackie nodded. “Yes. Yes, he is. When I grow up I am going marry someone like Max and make him hunt chindi with me.” Her belief that saying that word would cause problems was allayed, evidently, by Max’s honest scout sign, because she said it without hesitation.

  Max gave a choked laugh. “You do that, squirt.” To Anna he said, “Someone let her watch Supernatural and now all she wants is to go out and fight evil magic.”

  Mackie frowned at Anna. “You said you are a werewolf. Like Ánáli Hastiin.”

  Anna nodded. “If that is your great-grandfather Hosteen, then, yes, I am.”

  “You can come hunt chindi with me,” she said with authority. “Max can’t because he’ll be an old man by then. Michael is too loud and clumsy. He gets scared and he will make mistakes. The bad things will eat him. And then what will I do without a little brother?”

  “I don’t know,” Anna said slowly, as if she were considering the invitation. “My husband doesn’t like to be left behind. But if we take him with us, the bad things will all run away and it won’t be any fun.”

  “Your husband is a werewolf, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “If he scares away our prey, he’ll have to stay home,” Mackie said.

  Anna grinned. “Right. He’d ruin our fun. But maybe it would make him feel bad not to be included.”

  “If he cries, you just have to explain it to him.” Mackie said wisely.

  “Mackie,” said Max reprovingly.

  “Max,” she said in the same tone.

  “Both of you shut up,” Michael told them, still staring at the TV. “The shark is coming.”

  Anna heard feet traveling upstairs in a rush and, just outside the door, Kage whispered his wife’s name and tried to open the door.

  All of the kids came to alert (shark or not), but no one said anything. Maybe the whisper freaked them out—urgent and stressed. They’d already had one parent scare the bejeebers out of them today; apparently they weren’t trusting the other one not to do the same.

  “No,” said Anna, unlocking the door, but staying ready just in case whatever had af
fected their mother was catching. “Not Chelsea. But all the kids are here with me and they are okay.”

  When the door opened, Kage brushed past her to drag the kids into his arms, then pulled back to check each one to make sure they were okay. There was no difference in his urgency when he grabbed Max, whose coloring suggested that he was a stepson and not Kage’s own child. Hosteen watched them, his face cool, his attention focused outside the room. He knew that this was not over.

  “There’s a fog of fae magic on the first floor of the house,” he told her. “Where’s Charles?”

  “Downstairs,” she told him. “He sent me up here to make sure nothing happened to the kids.”

  “There’s a pool of blood just outside the door,” he whispered, stepping aside so Anna could see it while the kids were preoccupied. “Chelsea’s blood. I can’t scent her through the stink of fae magic that is coating this house.”

  “Charles will find her,” she said. “He—” She couldn’t complete the thought as her wolf surged forward with the urgency of the message Charles sent her through their mating bond. She knew that her usually brown eyes were pale, icy blue when she looked at Kage and said, “Choose.”

  Kage looked up from his children. “What?”

  She gave him the only words she had. “Choose. Choose now.”

  Charles inhaled blood and magic. Blood he’d been half expecting, at least until he found the children all apparently safe. So the blood was not surprising. It was the fae magic he felt carelessly caressing his skin that changed the game.

  There weren’t supposed to be fae out and about. They had, with great fanfare, locked themselves away on their reservations, declaring themselves free of the laws of the United States. For the last several months they’d made no appearances outside the reservations that he was aware of.

  But he knew magic, knew the feel of fae magic. Brother Wolf rose and abruptly colors dimmed a little, and the shadows revealed their secrets to his eyes.

  There was no one in the room he entered. It was a typical family room with a big-screen TV on one wall and bookshelves filled with trophies, photos, books, and games on the other. But the blood was fresh and nearby. He angled his head to see if he could pick up where the scent was coming from without making a large movement that would be more likely to attract attention if something was waiting for him.

  Upstairs the TV was still blaring. If there weren’t so much noise his ears would be of more use. But the noise would make it more difficult for any enemy to hear him, too.

  The floor creaked somewhere in the house. He thought it was to his left, but it was difficult to tell. He moved quickly to that side of the room, staying low, pausing next to the wall. He didn’t trust walls—he’d broken through a few too many in search of prey himself. Sheetrock and two-by-fours didn’t stop a werewolf, and a lot of fae were just as strong. But as a visual barrier, a wall worked okay.

  He put his head cautiously around the corner. It was the laundry room. There was blood all over the floor here, some of it splattered, and then drag marks that slid around the appliances and out of sight. He paced cautiously forward, past the washer and dryer—and found himself staring into the eyes of a wild-eyed woman who was crouched in the bathroom hidden on the far side of the room. He froze where he was.

  She was sitting on the floor, legs crisscrossed, with a damn big knife in her hand, and that hand was shaking as though she had palsy. The motion could have been caused by blood loss, shock, or both.

  Long bloody slices, some deep and others shallow, decorated both of her arms and her legs through what had been a very nice pair of slacks. She bared her teeth at him.

  “The children must bleed,” she gritted out, and the knife shook in her right hand. “Bleed out the bad—” She dug the knife into her thigh and he winced. But she didn’t push it deep, just slid it along her leg parallel to the other wounds that bled there. “Something in my head wants me to kill my children,” she said in a hurried whisper, very different from the voice she’d started speaking with. “You have to stop me.”

  Brother Wolf snarled at this enemy he could not fight with tooth or claw; fae magic surrounded the woman. Charles needed to figure out how to help Kage’s wife. The magic clinging to her meant he was better equipped to do it than anyone else here. Not that it wouldn’t have been helpful to have a witch or someone else to back him up—his da would have been useful.

  “Chelsea Sani,” he said with a push of his own magic, trying to give her something to cling to.

  It wasn’t enough.

  She paused and rocked forward, falling until she was on her hands and knees, and she started to crawl. Not toward him, he didn’t think. He wasn’t her target.

  “There are bad children here … little boys who steal food, little girls who don’t play well with others, little boys who…” She dropped all the way to the ground then, and writhed as she groaned.

  “Chelsea,” Brother Wolf demanded, pulling on his pack, on his da’s power. Icy with the cold of winter, the power came to his asking and hit the woman with his call.

  She stopped making noise, stopped moving except for the heaving of her ribs. Then she rolled her head until she could see him. She met his eyes, opened her mouth and shut it. She sliced open her hand, leaving the knife in the wound. “Blood makes it easier to fight. Who are you?”

  “I’m Charles. A friend of Joseph’s. Can you tell me what happened?”

  He edged closer, calling upon gifts given to him by both his da’s and his mother’s blood. His skin warmed and tingled uncomfortably, but he could see the spells that encompassed her. Where fresh blood flowed onto the steel of the knife, the magic was drawn more tightly, never quite touching the cold iron. It pooled uneasily around the open wound, thinning around the rest of her body.

  Witchborn, he thought, for her blood to have that kind of power. But not trained, or she’d have broken the geas.

  She gasped, and a tremor shook her body as though she were freezing to death. “Werewolf. Charles? You are Joseph’s werewolf?” she half asked, half demanded.

  “Yes. I’m here to help you.”

  She laughed breathlessly. “Too late for that. Too late for me. I sent them to a room with a door they could lock against me, but they need to get out. You go take my babies away somewhere safe.” There was a command in her voice that he found himself shaking off with an effort. Brother Wolf found that very interesting.

  “They are safe,” he assured her.

  Her eyes widened, fae magic flared, and he realized, too late, he’d made a mistake.

  Some of the fae are quick, and whatever magic had done to her, it gave her better-than-human speed. But Charles had been edging toward her, and that gave Brother Wolf time to move even faster and catch the hand that held the knife just before she shoved it up under her jaw.

  It had been a two-part geas, then, forcing her to kill her children, and when that was done—or if that wasn’t possible—to kill herself. Her death would make it more difficult to find the fae who had done this to her.

  She fought him, fought to control the knife with strength that was not her own, and he finally drove the blade into the floor, through the linoleum tile and into the wooden floorboards below. He sank it deep so he didn’t have to break her arm.

  Sobbing, she tried to pull the knife out, but suddenly, between one breath and the next, the scent of fae disappeared and she collapsed, her breathing thready.

  “Safe?” Chelsea Sani whispered. “Tell me again.”

  “They are safe,” he told her, and her body went limp, as if she’d used the last of her strength. And he knew what had broken the geas.

  He took a good look at the blood on the floor, the way her last wound was not bleeding as it should. Her heartbeat was irregular. She’d lost too much blood—and was losing more through every cut she’d made in her own body in the effort to keep her kids safe from the magic driving her. It had been an incredible feat of willpower and quick thinking for a woman who was o
nly human. But it had come at a cost.

  She was dying. Even if they were at a hospital, it would be unlikely that they could save her in this condition. She was dying, and that satisfied the geas.

  We could Change her, Brother Wolf told Charles. She knows how to fight.

  It would be skirting his da’s law. He didn’t have his da’s approval, but desperate times were a gray area, judged case by case. As his da’s right-hand man, he had more leeway than other wolves. He’d had nothing to do with the incident that brought Chelsea to this end; his actions would be seen as impartial. Brother Wolf’s clear judgment would weigh in his da’s sight, if not anyone else’s. All he needed was her consent.

  Charles knelt beside her. “You are dying. Do you understand? I can Change you if you wish it.”

  She said something, too faint for even his ears to hear.

  It must be now, said Brother Wolf. And we must be in wolf skin.

  She couldn’t give permission, but there was someone here who could. Brother Wolf’s shape came over him—the wolf had dictated the change. It was so simple, the change from man to wolf, this close to the full moon’s call when he had not walked on four feet for days. As the wolf shape became his, Charles sent his will to his mate.

  Tell him to choose for his wife. Do I let her die—or do I Change her?

  CHAPTER

  3

  The hallway behind Brother Wolf filled with people, some he knew, some he didn’t. But Anna was there; she was the one he needed.

  He stared at her, and she turned to the human who was the dying woman’s mate.

  “Your wife is dying,” she said. “Charles says she is strong-willed and courageous. He is willing to Change her—but she is not in any condition to make that choice.”

  “No,” snarled Hosteen suddenly. “Not her. It’s not supposed to be her. If Charles won’t Change my son, he doesn’t get to decide to Change her instead. Not her.”