Burn Bright

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. “I don’t know—though Tag might. But it sounds as if she had some way of communicating with him.”

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 a photo of the dead man to both of the Chicago Alphas to see if they recognize him, too. 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?”

“Jonesy was notably unhelpful in that,” said Charles apologetically. “I suppose that ‘us’ could mean the fae, but in this context, that is unlikely bordering on ridiculous.”

“Okay,” said Anna. “How many wildlings are there? I know three, and I’ve heard of a couple more.”

Bran kept the wildlings away from the pack. Part of it was they were dangerous and needed to be isolated—and part of it was that a lot of them were very old. Very old werewolves tended to collect enemies. As far as she knew, only Bran himself, Leah, and Charles knew all of them. They weren’t kept completely isolated, and some of them sometimes joined in the hunt—but no one spoke about them when they did.

“Eighteen,” Charles said. “Now that Hester and Jonesy are dead.”

She made an involuntary noise of surprise. “That’s a lot more than I thought. But it’s still a reasonable suspect pool.” She did not want to think about its being someone she knew.

He nodded. “Asil knows—he was there when I found the note. But I don’t want to tell anyone else until we know more. Here.”

“What?”

“There’s reception here.”

She stopped the truck and uploaded the photo and an explanatory note. Her phone had a contact list that included all of the Alphas under Bran’s rule, so she didn’t have to ask Charles for the number.

“Jonesy said that they asked her about the wildlings,” Anna said, once they were moving again. “If their agent was one of the wildlings, why would they have questions about them?”

Charles grunted. It was his “I’m puzzled, too” grunt. But then he said, “The wildlings don’t all know each other. Some of them do, but a lot of them are very isolated because they want to be. Or they need to be. Most of our wildlings change their name when they come here—Hester was an exception. Collectively, I expect that there is a lot of knowledge that our wildlings have that exists nowhere else on the planet. I can think of four things, just offhand, that would start a frenzied hunt if anyone knew about them.”

“Or maybe it’s an item—like all the things you brought out of Jonesy’s house.”

Charles nodded. “Of what we found, only the sword would really attract interest by itself.” He made an unhappy noise. “There were a couple of other things, too, I guess. But even without those, the whole collection represents a fair battery of power for someone who knows how to release or use it.”

“Maybe Hester knew who or what they were looking for,” Anna said soberly. “But she can’t tell us now.”

“Yes,” said Charles, very softly. “We know they were asking for information that was important enough to step up what has previously been a long game. We know they were asking about the wildlings, and they don’t know that. We’ll find out who their agent is, then we’ll use that person to hunt them all down.”

Anna inhaled and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Okay. Yes.”

• • •

BOYD HAMILTON CALLED as they were pulling into Bran’s house. More specifically, he called Charles’s phone. Anna had texted him the photo from her phone.

Anna looked at Charles’s phone and gave an exasperated sigh. She turned off the truck and turned to the man who held her heart.

“I survived,” she told him firmly. “I don’t need to be coddled as though I’m some fragile doll. I can talk to Boyd—who never did me any harm anyway—and not dissolve into a spineless puddle.”

Charles gave her a look. If he were anyone else, she’d have been sure he had practiced those looks in the mirror: they were too effective to be naturally occurring. But he didn’t worry about things like that—he didn’t need to. Scary was easy—it was not-scary that was sometimes a problem for him.

She raised her eyebrow to show that she wasn’t impressed.

He almost smiled but caught it before it was more than a softening at the corner of his eyes.

“Maybe it’s not about you,” he told her. “Maybe it’s about a man who failed to protect you from Leo when he should have. If you want to punish him, you could answer my phone and make him tell you all about this dead man who he also did not protect you from.”

“He couldn’t do anything,” she said hotly, unable to let the attack on Boyd go on without defending him. Boyd had been the key to her getting out of Chicago, to her finding Charles. “Leo was his Alpha—and he kept everyone under his control. Boyd was not dominant enough to challenge him or disobey a direct order. Boyd protected people when he could. Without him, more bad things would have happened to people who couldn’t protect themselves.”

“You really believe that,” Charles said, as if he didn’t. “Good for you.” He sighed, his gaze focused somewhere in the darkness outside. Another car pulled into the Marrok’s driveway, pack members coming to gather with the others. That they were coming here instead of going home spoke to the unease that Hester’s death had caused.

The wolves who got out looked away from Charles’s truck with studious care.

Charles spoke after they were alone in the darkness again. “I sometimes think that you could be right. But mostly I believe that any dominant worth his hide protects those who cannot protect themselves. I expect that’s how Boyd looks at things, too.”

She, personally, had quit thinking about her first pack a long time ago. From the sound of it, she had been the only one. She used one of Charles’s grunts to express herself.

“A dominant wolf protects his own with his life, Anna,” Charles told her. “That means from everyone. If he felt Leo was too much for him, Boyd had Da’s number. He could have called it at any time.”