Burn Bright

  His voice in her head broke off as the air around the thing that was Jericho rippled where the werewolf had been. And in its place was a bear far larger than the grizzlies that roamed the pack territories.

  Anna, please, Charles implored.

  You must survive to tell our da—in case he takes us, said Brother Wolf. He won’t be able to tell until it is too late.

  Charles expected to die. He expected to die and that the skinwalker would take his shape. As the skinwalker had probably been planning on doing to Anna after separating her from the others by sending them off after Sage.

  Sage had known what the skinwalker was—had known who it was. That’s what those strange-at-the-time requests had been while Jericho had been talking. Sage and the skinwalker knew each other—and Sage had been asking Jericho-who-was-not-Jericho not to betray her to them.

  They had been looking for Wellesley. Jericho-who-was-not-Jericho had called him Frank Bright—the name Wellesley had used before he’d come here. They’d gone to Hester and to Jericho because—Anna would put money on this—those were the only two wildlings whose homes Sage had been to. But sometime during the attack on Jericho, the skinwalker had seen the chance to do more than that, to become one of the Marrok’s pack.

  Anna tried to visualize what she’d seen when that stink bomb had gone off and driven Charles off the trail. Had it come from Jericho—who had been on the trail above Charles? Charles, in wolf form already, was the one most likely to catch Sage. But the distraction had also allowed the skinwalker to isolate Charles and Anna from the rest—and ultimately, Jericho had been trying to isolate Anna.

  And then there was Sage. Had she been looking for Wellesley for over twenty years? Or had her primary purpose been as a spy?

  Later, Anna told herself, she’d figure it out later. She would not allow the skinwalker to have her mate. Charles had to keep fighting while she looked for a way to kill it.

  Anna didn’t know where a holy man was to be found, but she did know that they had just burned down a cabin, and all three of the vehicles parked only a couple of miles down the trail had been at Hester’s cabin yesterday—and Asil had been in charge of the fire.

  While she’d been thinking—only a second or two, she was pretty sure—Devon had disappeared. Apparently, the Kodiak bear that had appeared in Jericho-the-wolf’s stead had convinced him when she had not.

  Anna rolled to her feet and sprinted for where they’d left the vehicles. There wouldn’t be a holy man waiting for her, but maybe someone would still have things that she could use to set a skinwalker on fire. She tried not to remember that she’d ridden in two of those vehicles and didn’t recall noticing the smell of anything volatile.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE CARS WERE all locked. Since Asil had been in charge of Hester’s pyre, his was the first car she assaulted. She could probably have broken the latch on the back hatch but wasn’t sure enough to try it. If she failed, she might just jam the stupid thing—and that would slow her down further.

  So she broke the driver’s side window with her elbow. A rock would have saved her some pain, but she was too worried about time to look around for a rock.

  “Keep him busy,” she muttered to her husband, but she didn’t send it along their bond. She didn’t want to distract him. That Kodiak had been as big as a truck and unholy quick.

  Charles was the bogeyman of the werewolves. He could take a bear, no matter how big it was. And all he had to do was hold on until she got back.

  She popped the back hatch of Asil’s Mercedes open with a button and found a barbecue lighter but nothing else. Nor was there any sign that there had ever been anything else. Knowing Asil, he probably had C-4 stashed in sealed containers along with detonators somewhere in the car. But no one but Asil would be able to find it.

  She wondered if C-4 would kill the skinwalker as well as fire would.

  “Come on, come on,” she said, frustrated at the empty vehicle. “It’s a start, but I need something bigger.”

  Not too far away, she heard the sound of a motorcycle and wondered if Sage had planned far enough ahead to have stashed a vehicle to use—or if she had just found it somewhere. Anna supposed it might be someone else, but the wildlings lived in the most remote corners of the pack territory, so it was unlikely.

  She broke the window on Sage’s SUV with her left elbow since her right was still sore from Asil’s car. A quick search, during which the motorcycle appeared to be approaching closer, showed her that there was nothing in Sage’s car that would be useful. But she grabbed the witch gun and tucked it into the back of her jeans. She was pretty sure that the old shaman who talked to Charles’s grandfather would have tried a witch gun on a skinwalker if he’d had one.

  The motorcycle rider must be coming here because this was remote enough that there wasn’t anywhere else. That seemed to indicate that whoever it was, it was not Sage after all. If she had a motorcycle to escape on, Sage would be riding away from here as fast as she could go.

  The shell on the back of Leah’s pickup wasn’t locked. In the bed of the truck, bungee-corded to the side, was a battered, metal, five-gallon can of gasoline.

  “Hallelujah,” she said. “Just keep him busy, Charles, I’m coming.”

  She hopped out of Leah’s truck with the full gas can in one hand and the lighter in the other just as the motorcycle—carrying a helmetless Wellesley—roared up the track. He slid the dirt bike to a stop with all the aplomb of a motocross maven.

  “What’s wrong?” Wellesley asked at the same time she asked him, “What are you doing here?”

  He waved at her to get her to answer his question first.

  “Charles—” She started to tell him, then realized how long that would take.

  “I don’t have time for this,” she told him impatiently, and took off up the trail, carrying the mostly full five-gallon can and the lighter.

  She didn’t care if she lit the whole forest on fire just so long as she saved Charles. Wellesley ran beside her. He made no effort to take the gas can from her.

  “Talk while you run,” he said.

  “If I can talk,” she retorted, increasing her pace, “then I’m not running fast enough.”

  Apparently, he could run and talk at her fastest pace because he said, “I’m here because my wolf spirit woke me up from a sound sleep and told me that our enemy was this way. So what are you trying to burn, Anna Cornick? Why are you in such a hurry to do it?”

  “Skinwalker,” panted Anna. Deciding talking might be useful after all, she slowed enough that she could manage short sentences. “I think that’s the Native American version of a black witch.”

  Wellesley smiled, his eyes bright gold, and when he spoke, his voice had a rasp of wolf in it, too. “I know what a skinwalker is. There was a skinwalker at Rhea Springs. She is here.”

  “It is a him,” Anna huffed.

  “Doesn’t matter to her what form she takes,” said Wellesley. “Male or female.”

  There was a lot of confidence in his voice. “You remembered what happened at Rhea Springs,” she said.

  “I did,” he said. “I remembered—”

  Pain hit her through her mating bond, sharp and sudden. She put a foot wrong and tumbled into a tree, unable to catch her balance while her mind was consumed with agony that had nothing to do with her fall.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE THING THAT wore Jericho’s flesh had not been a werewolf for long enough to figure out how to fight in that body. It didn’t take the skinwalker long to figure that out and take on another form.

  The Kodiak, the grizzly’s bigger, stronger brother, outweighed Charles five to one, and it was very nearly as quick as he was. But it wasn’t the first bear Charles had fought, not even the first Kodiak. He preferred to leave them alone if he could—even a werewolf had its
limits, and a Kodiak was very close to them. But there were times, like now, when the fight could not be avoided.

  Charles was more maneuverable and—Brother Wolf was certain after the first few minutes of battle—more experienced at utilizing the abilities of Brother Wolf’s form than the skinwalker was used to using the bear’s form.

  Even so, the bear made the skinwalker much more formidable and less clumsy than he’d been as a wolf. This bear form was something he’d fought in before.

  When dealing with a predator larger than he, Charles liked to use the hit-and-run method of fighting. It was less effective against the bear than he liked—the bear had a thick, tough hide covered by thick, tough fur and a layer of fat beneath that. Although Charles was able to get a lot of surface cuts in, they weren’t deep enough to be anything more than annoying. But engaging the bear fully was likely to end up with Charles flattened under the bear’s greater strength. The trick to fighting bears was to tire them out.

  The single hit the bear had gotten in had cracked three ribs. Charles, remembering just in time that he could draw upon the pack’s strength for healing, managed to stay maneuverable, though he didn’t heal them entirely.

  Even with pack magic, the bones were likely to remain fragile for a day or two, and a little pain would remind him of that. Additionally, he didn’t want to use up all that he could draw from the pack. It had taken a lot of power to free Wellesley, and although there were some real heavy hitters in his pack, he didn’t have the experience to know what the limits were.

  He learned something about the skinwalker in the opening bit of hit-and-run, too. Most of the time, Charles was fighting the bear’s intelligence and not the skinwalker’s. Most of the time, the bear fought like a bear. Which was smart on the part of the skinwalker because that bear knew how to fight.

  But if he was fighting a bear, there were some things Charles could do.

  He got in a second deep bite on the bear’s flank, right on top of a previous wound—and this time his fangs dug into meat. It was also a place the bear couldn’t reach him, so he held on until the bear’s flesh began to give under his fangs.

  He waited until the bear started to move, just before the meat would have given way and dumped Charles on the ground. Then, digging in with all four clawed feet, Charles scrambled right over the top of the beast.

  He took the opportunity to attempt to dig into the bear’s spine, just behind the ribs, where there was the least flesh protecting it. His teeth closed on bone, but when the bear rolled, he let the grip go.

  Charles ran and turned to face the bear from a distance of about twenty feet. It wasn’t a safe distance—he didn’t want a safe distance. His only intention was to fight as long as possible, to give Anna time to warn everyone.

  He’d done more damage than he’d thought. A chunk of bear hide the size of a hand towel had been pulled to the side, flapping like a loose horse blanket. Blood scented the air and dripped onto the ground. But when the bear moved, it was clear that, gruesome as it was, it was only a flesh wound, impressive but minor, and it wasn’t bleeding enough to weaken him.

  But it hurt.

  The great bear reared up and roared, its upright form nearly ten feet tall. Any creature more intelligent than a bear would have been too smart to do that with the steep slope of the mountain behind it. Charles took a running leap and hit the bear in the face with his body, sending the bear tumbling backward down the side of the mountain. The beast’s teeth opened a gash in Charles’s shoulder, but it hadn’t been expecting the move, so it was slow. It wasn’t able to get a good hold, and Charles fell free.

  Charles tumbled a few paces but was back on his feet and harrying the bear as it rolled the fifty yards or so of very steep, rocky ground all the way to the bottom. When it rolled to a stop, before it could get its feet under it, Charles landed on its back and went for the spine, now showing whitely in its bed of flesh.

  He closed his jaws on bone and shook as hard as he could. Beneath him, the bear tried first to get to its feet—and then just to roll over. But it had fallen awkwardly, and Charles was able to keep it from finding the leverage to do much more than wiggle. It gave a hard lurch . . . and the spine separated with a pop and a grisly crunch.

  The bear’s rear quarters fell limp, and Charles bounded away from the still-dangerous front end. The bear’s blue human eyes regarded him balefully as it roared and snapped its teeth together.

  Charles growled, showing the skinwalker his own fangs. He stayed back as his opponent thrashed and struggled—apparently paying no attention to anything other than reaching Charles. Charles gradually became aware of aching muscles, stiffness in his left shoulder, and the persistent ache of his ribs.

  Eventually, the blood loss, made worse by the bear’s refusal to be still, won out. The giant beast gave one last heave and collapsed on the torn-up ground. It breathed four times, then the air whooshed out with a sigh, and the blue eyes glazed over.

  Charles waited. He did not remember a time that his grandfather had been wrong about something. Charles was not a holy man, and so he should not have killed the skinwalker. But unarguably, the skinwalker in the bear’s form lay dead. Charles’s ears could not pick up the sound of his enemy’s heart beating. He waited until his nose told him that death had begun its work, the body had started to decompose, before he decided that his grandfather had been mistaken. Werewolves were not native to this continent; perhaps that was why his grandfather had not mentioned werewolves as a way to kill skinwalkers.

  Charles looked for Devon. He’d have thought that the wildling would have joined in the fight—on Jericho’s side. Jericho was Devon’s friend, and Charles and Devon were only acquaintances. But Devon was nowhere to be seen, his scent just a hint on the wind.

  Whatever Anna had told Devon when she wasted time that she should have used to get away had been effective.

  Now that he had scared her to death, he supposed, he’d better let her know that—

  Fifteen hundred pounds of Kodiak hit him like a bulldozer. His shoulder crunched against a tree, and screaming agony flared throughout his body. Somehow, the skinwalker’s magic had concealed the sound of movement, the rebirth of the bear, and the feel of blood magic at work, so the bear had taken Charles completely by surprise.

  In his head, a quavering old man’s voice said, My grandson, why do you always have to learn the hard way?

  * * *

  • • •

  LEAH RAN, FOCUSED on her goal. She was taller than Asil and Juste both, and she outpaced them.

  She was a skilled hunter, and she learned from others’ mistakes. She did not allow herself to get close enough to Sage to fall victim to one of her witchy tricks as Charles had. But she kept Sage in sight.

  She had the advantage on this ground, she thought. With her mate, she had traveled every foot of their territory, stayed up late at night discussing the topography, its strengths and weaknesses. She knew, for instance, that Sage was trying to take them on a roundabout route to the cars. Sage was hoping that they would let her get far enough ahead that she could take one of them and escape.

  Never had Leah so resented the protocol that forbade cell phones. It would be nice to alert the pack, so that they could set up roadblocks on all of the ways that Sage could take her wussy SUV out of these mountains. Maybe even get someone up here in time to disable Sage’s car. But the nearest phone was at Jericho’s cabin, and that was too far to do them any good.

  Leah was pretty sure that Sage didn’t have the knowledge to start one of the cars without a key—thank heavens that Charles had left his old truck at home. Even Leah could hot-wire a truck from that era in about ten seconds flat.

  She had a gun, concealed in a shoulder holster, but didn’t bother to take it out. She was a decent shot, but at this pace she would be unlikely to hit Sage. Besides, killing Sage with a gun would be so much less satisfying than killing
her with her knife.

  She jumped a tree, tucking her feet up so as not to catch a toe. Sage was keeping to rough ground where she could because Leah was faster, even on two feet, than Sage was on four.

  Some of that was because Leah ran in her human form every day. Some of it was that Leah was built like a runner. But most of it was that, as the Marrok’s mate, second in the pack, she could draw on the strength of the pack to aid her muscles.

  She kept Sage’s wolf in sight, though the light and dark golden brown coat was better even than Leah’s own tawnier fur at blending in the light and shadow of the forest they ran through. After a couple of miles, Juste and Asil were some distance behind them, and she was just settling into her stride. But that was all right.

  She could take Sage.

  Her mate told her that her attitudes were stuck in the nineteenth century. She knew that Bran worried that her lack of confidence when facing down a male opponent would get her hurt someday. But she had him for that—and there wasn’t a female werewolf on the planet she was afraid of.

  They were nearly back where they had started—a trick of the trail Sage had been taking. That meant they were about two miles from the cars.

  Sage tossed a look over her shoulder, and Leah could see the consternation wash over her when she saw Leah. She’d really thought she could outrun Leah. She wasn’t the first person to underestimate Leah. Most of them were dead.

  Her mate was the only person who truly saw her. He might not like her—Leah knew that, and it didn’t bother her. Much. But Bran Cornick appreciated her skills and her strengths, and he respected her. He didn’t truly respect many people. She would make do with that.

  She increased her speed, narrowing the distance between them. Even Bran would be surprised that it was she, and not his son, who killed their traitor.