Burn Bright

Wellesley shook his head violently. “That’s stupid,” he growled. “Stupid. Stupid. We have seen her when she didn’t know we were watching, haven’t we? She is weak, she is prey. We should eat her. She would taste like the girl in Tennessee. Better maybe.”

Anna looked at Asil again, her eyes wide. She expected to see the same alarm or confusion that she felt. Or more probably anger—Kara was a particular favorite of Asil’s. He was angry enough, she saw, but there was compassion on the Moor’s face, too.

“Wellesley,” said Asil, with cool command in his voice. “You will not speak of my little friend in that way. I don’t like it.”

Wellesley growled, and Asil growled back. The artist glanced over his shoulder with wolf-yellow eyes. He was taller and more muscled than the Moor, but he backed down as soon as his eyes met Asil’s. He dropped to one knee, almost like a man proposing, his face turned again to the far corner of the room, though his body still faced Asil.

In a soft voice, he said, “It might be that someone spoke in front of her. That she told someone she shouldn’t.”

In her head, Anna heard again the voice of Wellesley’s monster saying “like the girl in Tennessee,” and wondered what Wellesley had done.

“It isn’t Kara,” Asil said again.

“If it were Kara, you could give her to me,” said Wellesley in a singsong voice.

“You go too far,” warned Asil, his lip beginning to curl.

Anna decided that if someone didn’t step in, there would be trouble. And there was no one else but her. She couldn’t risk soothing them with her Omega abilities—there was too great a chance that it would be more effective on Asil than Wellesley. Then she’d really be up a creek without a paddle.

She decided to try to distract them with words instead. Or even just Asil. There was something really wrong with Wellesley.

She had visions of Jack Nicholson in The Shining in her head. Leah had said that she had given them the most broken of the wildlings, and Asil said he’d picked the worst one first. Asil had told her Wellesley’s condition most closely resembled schizophrenia. She’d known a girl in college who coped with schizophrenia, but that girl had never been creepy.

She hadn’t been a werewolf either, but still …

She didn’t know how to distract Wellesley, but Asil was easy.

“Kara talks to Asil,” she said firmly, as if she weren’t stepping figuratively between two angry werewolves. “She talks to Leah and a little to me. But with the rest of the wolves, she is really wary—and I don’t think she talks to any of the kids at school. Bran keeps getting letters from her teachers: ‘Kara is hardworking and intelligent. I am concerned that she has no friends among her peers. She doesn’t participate in group work or in any outside sports activities’—and variations of that. Leah makes her write a letter every week to her parents, most of which are four sentences long because Bran imposed that rule after her first letter was ‘Dear Dad, I’m alive. Kara.’”

Sometime during her monologue, Asil pulled himself together. More or less, Anna thought.

“It’s not Kara,” said Asil definitively—and then he put some power in his voice, and said, “Stand down, Wellesley. Leave Kara alone.” He paused. “And I better not catch your scent anywhere near her or where she has been.”

Wellesley abruptly sat on the floor, turning until his back was toward them. He nodded, showing he was paying attention to the conversation.

“Okay,” he agreed, his voice a lot more normal than his posture. Almost conversationally, he asked, “What about Sherwood? He would know about the wildlings—he was one for a while. He would know about Bran’s absence because he is in Adam’s pack now.”

“Sherwood Post?” said Asil. “No.”

Wellesley looked at Asil then, an exasperated look over his shoulder. “Well, it has got to be someone. And Sherwood is next newest after Kara and Anna.”

For a wildling, Wellesley seemed to be pretty well versed on who was who in the pack. No wonder Asil had put him at the top of their suspect pool.

The artist’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully at Asil. “You did know him before the witches got to him and took his leg and his memory. Who was he?”

Asil frowned, then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. It is highly unlikely that he’ll remember who he once was. No matter what Bran thinks. But the core of him is the same: he was the champion of underdogs. He would never facilitate an attack on someone vulnerable. No. It is not Sherwood. Besides, he only knew that Bran was gone while they were out rescuing Mercy. As far as I know, no one who is not pack knows Bran is still gone.”

This conversation was pretty weird even by werewolf standards. She wished she’d grabbed Asil and left when he had suggested it. The echo of “that girl in Tennessee” kept the hair on the back of her neck up and her wolf restless.

“It has to be someone,” said Wellesley. Then he paused. “Maybe not. What about some sort of electronic spyware? It could be something planted in the Marrok’s house—or even on a person who didn’t know about it. I’ve read about things that people swallow, and they listen to everything.” The artist had his face pointed back toward the corner of the room, so he didn’t see Asil’s thoughtful look. “Maybe I read about it,” Wellesley muttered. “Or maybe someone did that to me. I forget. Stupid.”

“Not stupid,” Asil disagreed. “There is still a bill out in Congress suggesting that all werewolves should be implanted with a tracking device, but it’s stalled because they can’t come up with one that survives a shift,” said Asil.

And part of the weirdness of this whole conversation had to be the way Asil mostly ignored Wellesley’s strange actions and talked to him as if they were having a normal interchange. Well, she could do that, too, if it was useful.

“As Charles demonstrated how technology explodes during a change,” said Anna.

Asil gave her an interested look.

“When we were working with CANTRIP and the FBI in Boston,” she clarified. “Charles said he didn’t think it would work, and he was happy to demonstrate.”

“Charles is witchborn,” said Wellesley dismissively. “He could blow up any technology he chose.” Then in that odd voice, the one that had spoken of killing young women, he said, “Witches are evil.”

Anna chose to continue to follow Asil’s lead and react only to the normal things Wellesley said. “If it helps anyone be less paranoid,” she said, “Charles told me that he was pretty sure that their device wouldn’t have worked even if he hadn’t helped it along. As for electronic spyware at the Marrok’s house—Charles does a sweep for them a couple times a week.”

She left the witchborn comment where it was. It was true. In this company, there was no profit in dwelling on it.

“Paranoid bastard,” said Asil, with something that sounded oddly like affection.

“He finds listening devices and cameras once in a while,” she told them. “Usually during the Changing moon in October, when we have so many strangers.”

“Werewolves bring spying devices?” asked Asil with soft interest.

Anna shook her head. “Not on purpose, we don’t think. So far it’s all been on werewolves who admit what they are to the world. The kinds of things Charles has found have been bugs on cars, clothing, or luggage.”

“Then why doesn’t the human world know about Aspen Creek?” asked Wellesley.

“They do,” Anna told him. “They don’t know about the Marrok, we don’t think. But they have known about Aspen Creek since the 1970s at least, probably earlier than that. A select group of ‘they.’ That was one of the things that drove Bran to bring the werewolves out into the open. Secrets are only useful as leverage as long as they are secrets.” That last sentence was an almost-direct quote from Bran.

“Then why doesn’t everyone know about Aspen Creek?” Wellesley asked, again.

“Bran doesn’t want the tourist trade,” Asil said. “And he’s managed to convince the people who do know that it would be a bad thing to bring out into the open.”