Burn Bright

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 and 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.