Burn Bright

  When she’d first come to the pack, she’d thought that Sage and Leah didn’t like each other. But she’d grown to understand that they were possibly as close to friends as two very dominant women (werewolves or not) could be. Leah actively liked Sage and usually behaved herself in front of her. Sage snipped and snarked at her and about her but ultimately had Leah’s back.

  “So why are you and I together instead of Sage and I?” Anna asked.

  “Because there is the distinct possibility that putting Charles and me in the same car together might make the universe implode,” said Asil. “I might have said that to Leah when she looked like she might make the switch.” He paused, and said slyly, “I waited until Charles could hear me, then I told her that I’d been looking forward to a whole day traveling with you.”

  Anna’s first thought was surprise that Charles hadn’t put his foot down and paired Sage and Asil together instead. Her second thought was that Asil had made that suggestive comment in front of Sage, too.

  “Aren’t you and Sage dating?” she asked.

  “Sometimes,” Asil said. “Currently, she is playing hard to get.”

  Anna took a good look at his face to see if it was okay if she asked for more details.

  “She believes I am arrogant and treat her as though she cannot take care of herself,” he clarified.

  “She’s right,” Anna said.

  “Yes.” He gave her a graceful bow of his head. “She is.” He took a deep breath and gave Anna a humorless smile that told her he was more upset about it than he let on. “I am too old to change who I am—a man a hair less arrogant would be lost to the beast that lives inside me. You cannot look at a person, and say, ‘If I could change this or that, if I could pick what I want and discard other things, I could love this one.’ Such a love is pale and weak—and doomed to failure.”

  She thought about that. “I tried to change Charles,” she said in a small voice. “I told Bran to quit sending him out on killing missions.”

  Asil sighed. “You are so sensible most of the time, I forget how young you are. That was not changing Charles; that was trying to change the world so Charles could survive. That is protecting your mate from the things he cannot protect himself from.”

  “Maybe Sage is trying to save you, too,” Anna said thoughtfully. “Saving you from death, really. If you keep trying to protect her when she doesn’t need it, she might have to shoot you.” Sage was a pretty good shot.

  Asil fell silent; he didn’t smile at her attempt at humor. After a moment, he said, “I will consider this. It will not change how I act, but perhaps it will make her argument less aggravating.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was joking. She was sort of afraid he wasn’t.

  “I can tell you a few things about Wellesley,” Asil said after they’d traveled far enough to leave the subject of Sage behind them, along with several miles of twisty dirt track. “He can use magic—and not always on purpose. He isn’t a witch—his magic is closer to Charles’s magic, I think. But it makes him especially good at pack magic. He comes on pack hunts sometimes, but no one except Bran and I know it. And probably Charles. If Wellesley doesn’t want you to notice him, he is difficult to perceive, and you’ll have trouble remembering details about him, like exactly what he looks like.”

  He paused. “I am old and powerful, so I have no such trouble. It is for this reason Bran started sending me to deal with him.”

  “So he could come on pack hunts, or go into Aspen Springs, and no one would notice?” Anna asked. Because that was what Asil was avoiding saying. “He could gather information without anyone the wiser.”

  “Yes,” Asil said. “I’ve known a few other wolves who could do this.” He paused. “I’m fairly certain that Bran can do a bit more.”

  Anna nodded solemnly. She thought there was a reason that visiting wolves sometimes seemed not to notice Bran until he drew attention to himself. Part of it was his ability to hide the force of his personality, but on several occasions, she would swear that people just didn’t notice him at all.

  “He likes to sing,” Asil said.

  “Wellesley?” she asked. They’d just been talking about Bran, but she was fairly sure that Asil wouldn’t feel impelled to tell her something everyone knew.

  Asil nodded. “He is a bass and usually slightly flat. Like Johnny Cash.”

  “Johnny Cash wasn’t flat,” Anna objected, having newly become a fan, much to the amusement of certain members of the pack. “He just sang melodies in unexpected ways—choosing other notes in the chords than the note our ear thinks the melody should probably carry.”

  “Or the songwriter intended,” said Asil.

  “It reduced the range of the songs,” Anna continued doggedly. “But made them sound like Johnny Cash songs.”

  “Yes,” agreed Asil. “But you say this as if it is a good thing.”

  “Lots and lots of people agreed with me,” she said.

  “Philistines,” Asil proclaimed grandly.

  “Charles likes Johnny Cash,” she told him. Charles had been her gateway to a lot of music she’d once dismissed as old or hokey. Before Charles, her usual listening favorites were either truly classical—preferably with lots of cello—or whatever was current on the radio. Life with Charles had opened up her musical library considerably—and she had once thought herself thoroughly educated on the subject.

  “Barbarian Philistines,” Asil corrected himself. “Johnny Cash was an uneducated, backwoods man with a deep voice. You are wasted on Charles.”

  “Cash was a national treasure,” she said, starting to feel a little hot. “He took folk music, church music, and rock, and fused them into something that spoke to a lot of people. And I’m so lucky I found Charles that I must have been blessed by leprechauns in a former life.”

  “You’ve never met a leprechaun, or you wouldn’t say that.” Asil gave her a superior smile before turning his attention to keeping the heavy SUV from sliding off the track when its right wheel hit a patch of soft dirt.

  “I don’t want the traitor to be Wellesley,” Anna told him.

  “Nor do I, chiquita.”

  After a while, during which she went over their conversation in her head, Anna asked suspiciously, “Do you like to listen to Johnny Cash?”

  “I enjoy Dolly Parton,” he said. “Now, there is a unique voice.”

  “That’s not what I asked,” Anna said. “Do you like to listen to Johnny Cash?”

  Asil sighed and gave in with such overt embarrassment that she knew it wasn’t an important issue for him—not that liking Johnny Cash was something to be embarrassed about anyway. “Only the good songs.” He glanced at her. “If you tell Charles, I’ll deny it.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Only if Charles asks me.”

  Asil’s sigh, this time, was full to dripping with dramatic sorrow. “You shall be the death of me, Anna. The very death of me.”

  And at that moment he made a sudden right-hand turn off the cliff. Anna grabbed the oh-hell handle, reminded herself that she was a werewolf and unlikely to die in most motor-vehicle accidents—especially since Asil’s Mercedes was less than a year old and came equipped with all sorts of airbags.

  But the Mercedes didn’t fall, just continued down a very steep track for twenty yards and twisted sharply to the right.

  “Looks like that erosion control Bran had put in here held for another year,” Asil said, as if he hadn’t noticed her panicked reaction. “Until five years ago, every summer Wellesley had to rebuild that road because the edge where we just turned kept rolling off down the cliff every spring.”

  “You did that on purpose,” Anna accused him.

  He grinned whitely. “Maybe. But it was fun, no?”

  She huffed at him and wouldn’t give him a grin in return no matter how much she wanted to.

  The big SUV rock
ed slowly down the rough track that ended . . . continued into a natural crack in the side of the mountain that was just big enough to swallow the Mercedes. Asil paused at the opening and blasted his horn twice. He paused for a count of five (because he counted out loud) and turned his lights on bright and continued down the track and into the heart of the mountain.

  CHAPTER

  7

  The darkness was so profound that the lights of Asil’s Mercedes barely penetrated—or else there was just nothing to see. Anna saw a flash of reflective tape, and Asil’s slow progress drew to a halt.

  When Anna started to open her door, Asil shook his head as he turned the engine off. “Wait up a moment.”

  They sat in silence for a while, the lights of the car fading to off. Anna had gotten used to being able to see in the dark, and the stygian lack of light started to make her feel claustrophobic. And other kinds of phobic, too.

  Finally, Anna couldn’t stand the silence anymore.

  “So why are we sitting here waiting?” she asked him.

  “Because if we get out before Wellesley acknowledges our presence, bad things will happen. Wellesley was once an ordnance sergeant.”

  “A what?” Anna asked.

  He snorted softly. “I keep forgetting how young you are. ‘Ordnance sergeant’ means that he blew up a lot of things with chemicals found around battlefields, farmyards, and nineteenth-century factories. He has this whole place—maybe the whole side of the mountain—wired to blow. Or so Bran told me once.”

  “Okay,” Anna said thoughtfully. “Does it worry you that Leah sent you and me here together? She’d happily see us both dead. You more than I, generally, but not at the moment.”

  “Not in the slightest,” Asil told her. “I am not destined to be blown to bits by a mad and talented artist. No artist would willingly destroy such a work of art as I am.”

  There was a clicking sound, then lights turned on around them.

  “Now we can get out,” Asil said. Which would have been more reassuring if he hadn’t murmured softly, “I think.”

  Anna hesitated, but remaining in the car was unlikely to protect her if Wellesley did decide to blow them to kingdom come, so she got out. As she closed the door, she took her time looking around.

  The entrance had been natural, but the track they’d followed in looked more like a mine shaft complete with hand-scraped timbers holding up the dirt ceiling and railroad track unmoored and piled up along the wall.

  The place where they’d stopped had been widened so it could accommodate three cars. Presently it held Asil’s Mercedes, an elderly Jeep, a motorcycle, and a snowmobile—the last two occupying one space. The ceiling directly over the parking area was ten feet high, if it was lucky, and I beams supported giant concrete blocks that (hopefully) endeavored to hold the mountain off their heads.

  A narrow and irregular opening just in front of the motorcycle drew attention to itself by being more brightly lit than anywhere else. Anna followed Asil past the motorcycle and into the opening, noticing that Asil seemed completely relaxed. If she were with anyone else, she’d have been reassured. But Asil had spent over a decade waiting for Bran to kill him—he didn’t care as much about safety as she did.

  There was a small landing just inside the opening followed by a sort of winding stairway. This wasn’t a hand-carved work of art like she’d seen at Hester’s home. This was a round, mostly vertical tunnel with dirt sides and chunks of two-by-fours stuck into the earth at irregular intervals, more like a ladder than a stairway, really.

  Climbing up proved to be interesting. Sometimes the boards worked as treads for her feet—and sometimes she had to duck the boards above her in order to climb. About twenty feet up, there were far fewer boards. She had to jump and grab the one above her, chin-up until she could throw a leg over it, then stand on it and do it all over again.

  The boards were pitted with claw marks, and it occurred to her that this would have been a much easier climb in her wolf form. She also noted that there were holes in the dirt wall where boards used to be. A thirty-foot fall was unlikely to kill her—but all the boards she could hit on the way down might just do the job.

  At the top, there was a gap with no helpful two-by-fours for a distance about twice as high as she was tall. Asil had led the way, and he made the jump easily. He stood at the edge at the top for a moment, blocking her way. Then he stepped to the side and bent, giving her an arm to grab at the top. She had a moment to visualize herself jumping high enough to make it but then having no way to move sideways at the top of the leap. A childhood of Bugs Bunny cartoons allowed her to picture it all quite clearly.

  As it was, she managed the business with about half of Asil’s grace, even with his arm. But at least she didn’t end up back at the bottom.

  The hole through which they’d emerged was centered in a small, plain room without windows, which was illuminated by a single electric bulb. The flooring was simple, packed dirt except for the rim of metal around the edge of the hole. The walls of the room were rough-finished concrete. The only door was flat metal without visible hinges or any way to open it from their side.

  “If this is what it takes to reach the people on our list,” Anna told Asil, “we’re going to be at it all night and then some.”

  “Wellesley will be the most difficult,” Asil told her. “His trouble makes him a little paranoid. I thought that we should start with him and work down to the one where the only thing we can do is put a note in a mailbox and hope he checks it sometime this month.”

  “List?” said a gravelly bass as the door opened.

  Asil was right. His voice did sound like Johnny Cash’s, if Johnny had been born in the Carribbean instead of Arkansas.

  He was a black man of about average height, with a barrel-chested build and thick, stubby fingers. For a werewolf, his face was weathered and his mouth soft.

  He looked like he should make candy for a living, or stuffed toys, or some other blameless occupation. He didn’t look like an artist, and he didn’t look like someone who could harm a fly. But as much as she loved his art, he was still one of Bran’s wildlings—he was plenty dangerous.

  Asil said, “List of wildlings we are visiting today.”

  Wellesley was looking at Asil’s knees, but he abruptly shook his head—a decidedly canid movement that involved his shoulders. His nostrils flared, and he inhaled noisily twice. He jerked his head, rocking back on his heels, then looked at Anna with widened eyes.

  Almost immediately, he ducked his head so his gaze hit somewhere near Asil’s boots. She got the impression that he wanted to look anywhere but at her.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’ve forgotten my manners. I don’t usually get guests. Would you like to come into my house and have some . . . oh, tea, I suppose. I also have a little cocoa and some orange juice.”

  He stood back from the door and opened it a little wider in invitation, though he was still staring mostly anywhere except for Anna. It was the mostly that was disconcerting—because when he was looking at her, his gaze was yellow and desperate.

  Anna could see that the living space beyond the door was the opposite of the tight little room they were in. There was lots of light, polished woods, and open spaces. She couldn’t see any paintings within the narrow visual window that the door gave her, but she smelled oil paint and turpentine.

  “Not necessary,” said Asil politely. He didn’t exactly step between her and Wellesley but near enough for everyone to understand that he considered Wellesley a threat to guard Anna from. “Wellesley, we’re here to bring a warning.” He told Wellesley about the attack on Hester and Jonesy.

  As soon as Asil told him Hester and her mate were both dead, Wellesley jerked the door to his house closed—as if to protect it from damage from the words Asil was speaking. The artist leaned against the closed door and heard Asil out, a hand to his mouth, his eyes closed
, and his whole body twitching.

  Anna hoped that there was some way to open the door from this side that she wasn’t seeing. Maybe he had another entrance?

  When Asil was finished, Wellesley waited in the silence for a while. When his body was finally still, he said, in a hushed voice, “We are betrayed.”

  “Yes,” Asil said simply.

  Anna blinked at him a moment. And then at Wellesley. It had taken Jonesy’s note for Anna to come to that conclusion. Maybe she was stupid, and everyone else would have seen it without the note.

  “It was not I,” Wellesley stated clearly. He raised his head and stared into Asil’s eyes. “I told no one by any means that Bran was gone. I have never to my knowledge spoken to a living soul other than Bran about Hester or Jonesy—though I knew them both quite well at one time.”

  He dropped his eyes away from the more dominant wolf as soon as he’d finished speaking.

  Anna’s ability to suss out lies was much better than it had been when she was human, but she wasn’t like Charles, who could feel them almost before they were spoken. If she didn’t know that Charles could lie to Bran . . . she’d have seen Wellesley’s declaration in front of Asil as proof positive that he had not betrayed them. It complicated matters that Wellesley’s reactions had been so all over the place in the few minutes since they’d arrived. His words felt like the truth, but she’d let Asil make that determination.

  Asil bowed his head at the other male, accepting his statement. And that simply, Wellesley was clear. Anna felt a wave of relief—which was ridiculous. She didn’t know the man, just loved his work.

  She wondered if they could just have all of the wildlings deny their culpability. It would make their job a lot easier. She was pretty sure that Bran could make them do that, but she wasn’t sure that Charles could. Kill them, yes. Force them to answer insulting questions? Maybe not. If Charles couldn’t, then she and Asil stood no chance.