They must have found the mother lode of fae magic. Anna glanced at the pack and saw that same realization on the faces around her: excitement, greed, and—on the smartest of them—worry. Only an idiot would get excited about having something the lords of Faery might want.
Charles hopped up on the truck bed and redistributed the dead men again so there was room for the cedar chest. He set the wrapped sword down on the bed and hopped back out. Anna shut the tailgate, and he and Asil rolled the tarp back and secured it.
Charles looked up. “I need not tell you how dangerous the cargo in the back of the truck is,” he said to the pack at large. “Neither Asil nor I know exactly what we found here. We’re taking it back and putting it in my da’s safe room, where it will stay until he gets back. The Marrok will dispose of it as he sees fit.”
After he spoke, he slowly panned his gaze over the gathering, meeting the eyes of each pack member until they looked away.
Silence hung powerfully in the air as the pack waited for Charles to say something else. But apparently, he’d said all he felt necessary, because he held his peace.
Asil frowned at him, cleared his throat, and said, in a clear, cold voice that was missing his usual accent, “We do not need to remind any of you what would happen if the Gray Lords discovered that we found fae artifacts in Hester’s home. We lost two of our own here, and if I read the signs aright—and I always read the signs aright—we are about to find ourselves engaged in war with an unknown enemy. We do not need to add a battle with the Gray Lords on top of it.”
From the back of the crowd, Tag growled, “What he means is, shut our mouths or someone will come pay a visit.”
He bristled—and Anna was pretty sure that it was Asil’s implied threat that Tag was bristling at. Charles, she thought, hadn’t been wrong in his assessment that he’d said enough.
This was the kind of spark that caused wolves to fight within their packs—and could leave them with more bodies. Anna’s job was to prevent fights. On the other hand, she was her father’s daughter, and any civil-rights lawyer in the country would be on Tag’s side of this.
“No,” Leah said clearly. It felt as though everyone was holding their breaths. Even Tag paused, his mouth partially open—doubtless to say something that would increase the ugly energy in the clearing.
Into the silence, Leah said, with soft promise, “Asil will not be paying anyone any visits on this matter.”
Okay, thought Anna. Give the woman points for courage—if not for brains—in directly giving Asil such a shutdown. Especially since Anna knew, the pack knew, that Leah was scared spitless of the Moor.
“I won’t allow it,” Leah continued—not looking at Asil. “It isn’t necessary. No one here will make a move that would harm our pack. We all know the dangers of letting word of what Charles found in that cabin escape before Bran chooses. There is no need for threats. In protecting the pack, protecting what is ours, we are one. Asil was merely warning us of the danger—but I am certain”—she raised an eyebrow and looked at Asil, in that moment as cool and controlled as the Moor had been—“I am certain that he would not issue a threat, especially as it is not necessary.”
There was a long, pregnant pause.
Then Asil bowed formally to her. “As you say,” he said silkily.
Leah was lucky, Anna thought, that Asil’s anger was a cold thing, so he heard Leah’s argument and agreed with it. Only a fool would think that any of Bran’s pack would betray them, and Asil was no fool. He had just been too long an Alpha before coming here, and his ruling style differed a great deal from Bran’s.
And still there was tension in the air. Leah wasn’t the only wolf afraid of Asil. Because the pack might be filled with all the crazies Bran didn’t trust with any other Alpha, but it wasn’t filled with stupid people with death wishes—those ended up with the wildlings. Even Tag was afraid of Asil—if he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have reacted to Asil’s threat so hotly.
“Can you—” Charles murmured to Anna without taking his eyes off the dramatis personae, “pull the truck far enough from the house that it won’t burn when we light Hester’s cabin but close enough that if anyone tries to get into it, we’ll see it?”
“Sure,” she said. Later, she thought. There will be time to tell him about the identity of the dead man later, when the pack isn’t ready to ignite along with Hester’s house.
There must have been something in her voice, though, because he gave her a sharp look. She pretended she didn’t see it and headed to the front of the truck.
The pack opened a path for her as she slowly drove away in a truck full of dead bodies, fae artifacts, and that weird, witchcrafted gun, which she had pulled out of her jeans and set on the bench seat of the truck. She tried to figure out just how far was close enough to make people think they would be spotted and too far for something from a burning house to explode and crash through the windshield. It was good to have something to focus on instead of the cold fingers of her past that were trying to unravel the core of the woman she’d become since coming to Aspen Creek, to this pack, to Charles.
In the end, she decided to pull the old truck next to Asil’s very expensive, brand-new Mercedes SUV, reasoning that no one would risk the double whammy of both Charles and Asil—and that “no one” probably included the fire they were going to set.
Once she was parked, she stayed in the cab, though. She watched Charles say something to Leah, watched the pack start moving in an organized fashion. Asil and Tag working together, their former antagonism . . . not so much forgotten as pushed behind them. The wolves could do that, she’d noticed. They were so much creatures of the present that as long as their human halves stayed out of the picture, quarrels that were over and done with stayed that way.
From the driver’s seat of Charles’s truck, Anna saw Tag step into the cabin with one of the long-nosed lighters more commonly used for lighting barbecues than setting house fires (she fervently hoped). A moment later, orange light flared in the window—more brilliant because the dusk was quickly fading into darkness. Tag came out of the front door as the flames licked hungrily up the old wood of the cabin.
Anna should be out there, she knew, instead of huddled in the truck where she could draw comfort from the scent of her mate without any of the inconveniences of his actual presence. He saw too much, her Charles did.
She really didn’t want to tell him she knew one of the dead.
* * *
• • •
BEFORE ASIL GAVE in to the impulse to make Leah pay for being right, Charles said, “We should light the cabin.” He paused. “Did anyone think to call the Forest Service?”
“I made the call before we came here,” Leah said. “I told them that the Aspen Creek volunteer fire department had decided to burn an old cabin that posed a fire hazard. They weren’t happy, but it’s on private property, and there isn’t a ban on open fires”—someone said “yet,” and she nodded at the speaker to acknowledge their accuracy— “so there wasn’t much they could do.”
That had been smart, Charles thought. And not entirely a lie: if they had a fire department in Aspen Creek, it would consist of the pack. He would just have told them he was burning a cabin on purpose.
“Good,” Charles said.
Asil added, “Even if someone from the Forest Service decides to come all the way up here, they’ll be checking on a controlled burn and not bodies.” He didn’t say “good girl”; that would have been too much. He didn’t look at Leah, but he let her hear the approval in his voice. Leah’s shoulders softened—the only sign of her pleasure at the compliment paid to her by the Moor.
That, said Brother Wolf, was diplomacy.
Asil kept talking, “Tag—you’re the only one who knew Hester well, the only one here, anyway. Do you want to be the torchbearer?”
Asil’s question sparked the pack into action. Hester and her
mate were not the first bodies the pack had burned, though they generally used a proper cremation process. The place of torchbearer was usually a place of honor only—a wolf who witnessed the cremation of the body.
But wolves who died as wolves couldn’t be buried where someone might dig them up believing they were going to find a human.
Fire was good at destroying evidence. Because of that, Charles had supervised the burning of a number of houses over the years but never in the Marrok’s own territory before. Never a formal funeral—though he knew the protocols.
Asil seemed to have taken it upon himself to take charge of the burning, and Charles was content to let him work off steam by taking over the organization of the fire itself.
Charles wished the fire would do as good of a job destroying the magical artifacts he and Asil hadn’t been able to find as it would turning Hester’s body to ash.
He had himself never seen so many things imbued with magic in one place before. The mishmash of magics made the hair on the back of his neck stand up worse than waiting in the middle of a busy airport did. The thought of that chest sitting in his truck left an itch he couldn’t scratch right between his shoulder blades. So did the note in his pocket.
Anna should be back by now.
He started to turn to look for his mate, but he was distracted by the flash of fire out of the corner of his eyes. He hadn’t expected, with Asil in charge, for them to light the cabin so quickly.
Tag, smelling of smoke and diesel and gasoline, took his place next to Charles, and Asil joined them.
“I liked her,” said Tag, without any of his usual drama.
Charles thought of the way Hester had chided him without a word from her cage, and said, “As did I. Though I did not know her well.”
As fires do sometimes, this one roared up in a sudden burst of light and sound. It seemed exactly right, a fitting tribute to a tough woman and her mate—hot and wild and powerful. Leah shouted, and the pack called back, answering both Leah and the roar of the fire. Charles threw his head back and howled—and the call of the pack changed as the other wolves replied in kind. Then they fell silent and stood witness.
Tag had said that her people burned their dead, and Charles wondered who her people had been. Hester was an ancient name. It might even have been her birth name, though old creatures tended to change their names now and then.
His da said that names had power. Names that had belonged to you for a long time had more power. Like many of Da’s sayings, it was true on different levels. Both witchcraft and fae magic could use a name in working evil magic upon someone. But the magic of names went further than that. Charles had found that his own name, Charles Cornick, the Marrok’s son, had often saved him trouble. The fear of his name caused people to give up the fight before it started.
Hester was a name like that—a name of power. She had been a legend among the wolves, hers a quieter legend than the Moor’s or the Marrok’s because she herself preferred it that way. But her name had served admirably to distract people from the troubled man who had been her mate.
Charles hoped that Jonesy had enjoyed the peace that she had bought him with her name.
“Godspeed, Hester,” Charles whispered. “Sweet dreams, Jonesy. Good journey.”
On the tail end of his last word, there was a cracking noise inside the cabin and the fire leaped upward, and Charles felt the increase in heat on his face and his skin roughened with the breath of . . . something.
Correlation not being causation, it hadn’t been Charles’s wish that had caused the sudden flare-up. Asil met his gaze (briefly) and shrugged. That explosion had been something they’d missed in their search. Fae magic was elemental magic, based in aspects of earth, air, fire, or water, and those same elements could have unpredictable effects on fae artifacts. He did not except the fire to destroy everything they hadn’t found. He only hoped they hadn’t missed something that was going to kill everyone in the clearing.
Charles sensed Anna approach just about the time that he was ready to go look for her. Anna set her cheek against Charles’s arm. “I think the fire was a good send-off for them both.”
Yes, agreed Brother Wolf. But Charles thought it was more a statement of support for Anna than any real opinion about what they should do with the bodies of their fallen. Once someone was dead, Brother Wolf was usually pretty unsentimental about the remains.
Anna gave him a little smile of agreement. She knew Brother Wolf, too.
Her face beneath the smile was pale, the small muscles of her jaw tense.
“What’s wrong?” Charles asked—because it was obvious to him, once he paid attention, that something was.
She tucked her arm in his and led him away from the others. Then, in a very quiet, not-to-be-overheard voice, she said, “I know one of the dead men in the back of the truck.” She let go of him and stepped back—and he didn’t think she knew she did it. Her voice shook a little, and she spoke faster. “I don’t know his name, but I saw him at Leo’s. We should get a photo of him to the Chicago Alphas as soon as we get somewhere with cell reception.”
Leo had been the Alpha who had ruled his Anna’s first pack. Charles had killed him for his crimes. Anna’s expression meant he didn’t have to ask her if the dead man had been one of those who’d abused her at Leo’s behest.
Charles didn’t reach out to touch Anna, not when she had just stepped away from him—and not when there were such ghosts in her eyes. He couldn’t say anything for fear that the thing he would say would be the wrong thing. She didn’t need his rage. He waited for her to do something that would tell him what she needed from him.
After a moment, she let out her breath and shook her head. She stepped into him and twined her right arm around his left, gripping his arm hard briefly before her whole body softened against him.
He took that moment to glance around, but no one was watching them—and if they’d overheard what Anna had said, they were being circumspect. Anna was being quiet—but they were surrounded by werewolves. It was unlikely that they had been entirely unobserved or unheard.
Anna stared at the fire, though he didn’t think she was really seeing it. But after a while, she said, “Fire is a powerful thing. It cleanses as it destroys—and it brings light to darkness.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“I think I understand why some cultures burn their dead,” she said. “It feels like a celebration, doesn’t it? The final conflagration.” She paused. “Burn bright, Hester. Drive away the shadows, Jonesy. Sleep with the heroes and the saints.”
With the cabin and all the other things burning, the scent of burning flesh was very faint. Charles rested his chin on the top of her head and reflected that it was for the best that, as young as she was, she probably couldn’t distinguish the scent of the fire devouring Hester’s body from the scent of the rest of the burning things.
He’d have burned Anna’s past for her if he could have—but memories are not so easily set alight as a cabin.
* * *
• • •
ANNA AND CHARLES left after most of the others. There were still flames, so five of the wolves stayed—and would stay until the last ember was out.
Charles got into the passenger seat, but before Anna started the car, he put a hand on her arm.
“Wait,” he said, then pulled a folded paper out of his pocket. “Asil and I found this in the bedroom while we were looking for things that might blow up the mountain if they caught fire.”
She spread it on the seat, but it was too dark to read. Before she could turn on the cab light, Charles illuminated the page with the much dimmer light of his cell phone. Kara had brought both of their cell phones with her. Hiding Hester’s home was no longer a directive; if they couldn’t find a blazing house fire, the feds were welcome to track their phones. It would be a long time before anyone lived near this clearing again.
>
She read it and absorbed the implications. Hadn’t she just been thinking that there was no way any member of the pack would betray the others? It looked like maybe she’d been wrong.
“Traitor,” she said slowly. “Do you know how we have been betrayed?”
“For a start,” Charles said, “someone told our enemy where Hester lived. And probably the timing of the attack means that they knew Da was not here. I’ve been thinking about other things, too, since I found this note. Maybe Gerry Wallace didn’t go out looking for someone to finance his weirdly complex assassination plot against Da. Maybe someone recruited him. Last winter, someone fed a lot of information about Adam’s pack to the rogue Cantrip agents.”
“Right,” said Anna after a moment. “Jonesy left this for you?”
Charles nodded. “It looks like it. After Hester died.”
“She could talk to him, mind to mind, the way Brother Wolf and I do?” Anna asked.
Charles shrugged. “Yes. Though not exactly—I don’t know if Hester’s wolf could speak like Brother Wolf does.”
Anna nodded slowly. “She told him some of it before they managed to kill her. He tried to tell us what she’d want us to know.”
She started the truck up, and he turned off the light.
Still thinking about the implications, she said, “Can you keep an eye out on the phone reception? I want to send that photo of the dead man to both the Chicago Alphas. Maybe they can give us a name.”
“All right,” he agreed.
They drove awhile in silence. The track was not made better by being negotiated at night. “Hester knew,” said Anna. “She knew who it was—or they thought she knew. That’s why they killed her. So she couldn’t tell us.”
“That’s what I think,” agreed Charles.
“Is it someone in the pack?” Anna’s stomach was tight at the thought. These were her family as much as her birth family had been. Some of them might be difficult or horrifying—but they were still family. “Or is it one of the wildlings?”