And there it was, revealed, the predator that Brother Wolf had sensed from the time they’d gotten out of the car.
Anna held Jonesy’s gaze as carefully as she had held his hands. It was something another werewolf would never have done. Looking a stranger in the eyes was the first habit new wolves learned to break.
No matter how tough you are, there are other people who are tougher. Even Charles didn’t meet a stranger’s eyes unless he had a very good reason—and there wasn’t a werewolf outside of his immediate family he’d ever found who could stare him down. But Anna was an Omega wolf who could meet the eyes of any without arousing another to challenge, her gaze warm and caring, like a blaze of peace in a world of war.
Under Anna’s peculiarly effective sympathy, Jonesy’s body relaxed, and his hands stilled, though he was still bent low in a posture that would be awkward if anyone less graceful had held it.
“These people weren’t frightened off?” Anna asked.
Jonesy shook his head. “There was something about them that made Hester say they were connected to the people who’ve been flying over us.”
“Flying over you?” Anna repeated.
He nodded, a gesture that began with his head but continued to his shoulders and traveled through his body to his knees.
“Hester has been worried lately.” He turned his face, pulling away from Anna’s gaze as if it took a little effort. When he had freed himself, he met Charles’s eyes. “She says that there have been too many flying things. Spying things watching our woods.”
Maybe it was that Brother Wolf lived inside him, or that his mother had been a magic handler and his da witchborn, or just the summer sun’s illumination, but in the fae man’s eyes, Charles could see Jonesy revealed for what he was.
The outer man, who was simple and . . . sweet, and the creature that lived inside him, who was not sweet. And that something inside Jonesy was powerful, his magic a dense ball of fire imprisoned within. How much power, Charles could not fathom. A lot. The monster saw Charles looking and grinned a bloodthirsty grin, though Jonesy’s rather anxious expression didn’t change at all.
“Too many aircraft?” asked Anna, glancing at Charles. Either she was oblivious to the monster she spoke with or unfazed by him. With Anna it was a toss-up.
“Normally, there isn’t any air traffic up here,” Charles told her. He used her words, her gaze, to allow him to change the focus of his attention from Jonesy to Anna—to drop Jonesy’s eyes. Brother Wolf had no reaction to that other than relief. Jonesy and what Jonesy was would be his da’s problem as soon as Bran returned. “Too remote and the air currents are rough.”
But, like Hester, Charles was bothered that they had been getting flyovers. Mostly because if it had been someone just randomly flying over the camp, they would probably have passed over Aspen Creek, too. And Charles would have noticed if there had been an unusually high amount of air traffic over town.
There was a certain amount of drug running that tried to get through to Canada via the back roads of Montana. Sometimes that engendered a few unexpected flights over their territory. But Charles kept track of such things and hadn’t heard any chatter from his contacts at the DEA since they broke up a drug-trafficking ring out of Spokane two years ago. There were a few pot farmers, but that was legal in the state now—and no one was currently hounding them.
“Helicopters or airplanes?” he asked Jonesy.
“Flying things,” said Jonesy, sounding stressed. “I don’t know ‘helicopter’ or ‘airplane.’”
“Okay,” Anna said, and Brother Wolf wanted to roll over and bask in the wave of comfort and quiet she sent out. “That’s okay.”
He didn’t think she meant to direct it at him. Anna was still working on controlling that aspect of her Omega powers. There were times when Charles needed Brother Wolf to be alert, especially when his mate was standing so close to Jonesy.
When she got worried about someone, she tended to soothe them whether she wanted to or not. Even nonwerewolves felt the effects if they got too close to her.
Jonesy’s face lost the lines that had gathered around his eyes, and the monster inside him became less ferocious.
“How long has Hester been worried about the flying things?” Charles asked.
“A month,” Jonesy said. “Maybe a little more.”
Shortly before his father had left.
“So what happened?” Anna asked. “Where is Hester?”
Jonesy’s face was suddenly twisted and inhuman, and the monster who lived inside the innocent said in a voice that could have come from the throat of a mountain, “WE LEFT HER. WE COULD HAVE STOPPED THEM. STOPPED ALL OF THEM, AND SHE SENT US AWAY.”
Jonesy dropped to all fours, and Charles thought that perhaps his real fae form was something with four feet. On Hester’s mate, that posture was a position of strength.
Anna was too used to living with monsters to do more than flinch at Jonesy’s volume, and even that had been very slight. The spirits that had been slowly gathering closer as Anna and Jonesy spoke vanished, frightened by the monster’s raw appearance.
Charles didn’t move, though he felt the vibrations of that voice rising from the ground beneath his feet. Jonesy was too close to Anna, and even Brother Wolf knew better than to increase Jonesy’s stress when she was vulnerable.
“Hester sent you home?” said Anna in a soft voice. “That’s rough. We need to go help her, right? You need to tell us the rest, so we can do that.”
And just as quickly as it had come, the beast left Jonesy’s face.
He nodded and rose to his feet ungracefully. When he spoke, it was a half mumble. “She said, ‘Go home, Jonesy. Go home. Call Bran. No, he’s gone. Call his number and tell whoever answers to come up here. Then you wait behind your glamour for them to come. You go, Jonesy.’”
Charles was aware, because Bran had told him, that Hester could talk to her mate when she was in wolf form. What he found most interesting was that her words—he had no doubt he’d been given what she said word for word—didn’t sound like a wolf who had gone feral after she’d killed a bunch of intruders who had invaded her territory.
“Why couldn’t she come?” asked Anna. She was still sending waves of comfort—it would take a while before she could get it under control again.
Charles had learned to deal with that. Her power made Brother Wolf rest, leaving the human part of him completely in charge. Sometimes it was wonderful. Sometimes, like when he was in the middle of a fight, it was very inconvenient. But it was no longer enough to throw him for a loop. He wondered if she was helping Jonesy’s control, wondered what would have happened if Charles had come here without his mate.
Jonesy rubbed his upper arms as if he were cold, then he took a step closer to Anna and relaxed a little. Brother Wolf didn’t like the change in proximity. Not at all.
“She was in a cage,” Jonesy said. “An iron-and-silver cage. She couldn’t break the silver, and I couldn’t break the iron. A trap. They didn’t see me.” He whispered, “She sent me home.”
Jonesy was fae, and whatever kind of fae he was, was powerful. Charles was willing to believe that if Jonesy didn’t want someone to see him, they wouldn’t be able to. He also believed he could have stopped a bunch of people who caged Hester.
“Where?” asked Charles.
Jonesy pointed to the far side of the valley. “There. Up on the mountain. About two miles from here as the crow flies.” He turned to look up into Charles’s face, his own bearing an expression of sorrow. “She said I was to wait here because under no circumstances could I be captured.”
He looked at them, and said in a whisper, “I could destroy them, you see. But to do it I would have to break my word.”
Dangerous, said Brother Wolf, again.
“We made a bargain, she and I. A bargain with your father. A home here in return for
never using my power for harm.”
So Bran did know what Jonesy was. Charles was going to have a talk with his da about that.
Jonesy dropped his head. “I cannot help you. I cannot go back with you. If they have harmed her”—he looked up, and the monster was back in his eyes—“I would kill everything in my path of vengeance. There would be none who was safe from me.”
Anna, brave Anna, reached out and touched Jonesy’s face. “She is not dead now,” she said. It was a statement, but her tone made it a question.
Jonesy shook his head. “I would know. And they have not taken her from our forest. Not yet.”
“Okay, then,” she told him. “We will stand as your proxy. If it is within our power, we will bring her out safe. If it is not, we will cause them to regret what they have tried here.”
Jonesy nodded jerkily. He caught Anna’s hand and brought it to his lips. Charles saw the other male’s eyes and knew it was the monster who lived inside Jonesy that kissed Anna’s hand.
Charles had to fight Brother Wolf to breathe evenly.
“We should go,” he told them.
Jonesy nodded. “I’ll wait,” he told them. And Charles heard the promise in his voice. “I don’t want to disappoint her,” Jonesy said honestly.
Hester, he meant. Charles understood the need not to disappoint one’s mate.
Charles changed to Brother Wolf’s body. The truck would be useless without roads through the trees, and Brother Wolf was quicker than he was running on two legs. It hurt, but he pulled the change as fast as he could. And that meant faster than any other werewolf in the world. He twisted and expanded into Brother Wolf’s true shape in the time it took to draw a deep breath.
Not being a werewolf born, Anna changed at the same speed as most werewolves. Given that she could run at inhuman speed even on two feet, it wouldn’t be worth it for her to try.
Anna felt it necessary to put this into words anyway. “Go,” she told him. “I’ll follow. But you’ll be faster. Go ahead.”
By his rough reckoning, it had been at least an hour and a half since Jonesy had called. He wasn’t sure that the speed he had over her would matter, but he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t, either. He dug his claws into the dirt as he sprinted into the forest.
Brother Wolf chose to take the trail Jonesy had left. Charles felt it was reasonable to assume, since the trail traveled through underbrush and rocks and other woodland obstacles in an unusually straight line and followed no worn footpath, that it had been Jonesy’s quickest way home. Which meant that it would be the shortest way from Jonesy’s home to where Hester had been taken.
Brother Wolf was a little appalled that Charles had had to work out something so inherently obvious.
The direct route took him across two streams—or the same stream twice. The first crossing was narrow enough for him to jump, but the other, too wide to clear in a single leap, proved to be deep as well. Deep and swift.
That crossing slowed him.
To make up for it, he redoubled his speed—and almost ran right into the small clearing where Hester and her four-wheel-driving invaders had holed up. He managed to stop, but only by making enough noise that it attracted the attention of the trapped wolf.
The kennel that held her had been placed as far from the forest edge as possible. It was constructed of thick metal plates with small, heavily barred openings, presumably to let air in. If he had been making a kennel to hold a werewolf—that would be exactly the kind of kennel he would choose to make.
The thing had taken considerable damage, assuming that the sides of the box were supposed to be flat. All of the sides Charles could see sported bulges where something inside had hit them hard. Through the small opening facing him, gold eyes examined him without favor.
Hester in wolf form was, like Anna, pitch-black, though Anna’s eyes were ice blue. In build, Anna’s wolf was lithe and graceful. Hester was made for war—though for that much he had to rely on memory. Only a part of her face and her eyes were clearly visible, the rest of her hidden behind dented metal.
But she didn’t need anything more than her eyes to convey her cool disapproval—like a librarian catching the gaze of a child popping bubble gum. It had been a long time since anyone had given him a look like that—and he deserved it for making so much noise.
Even though they had not attracted the attention of anyone except Hester, Brother Wolf was humiliated. Charles’s chagrin was tempered with amusement and relief.
He’d been afraid he would be too late. That, with Hester captive, the men on the four-wheelers would have already left with her, despite Jonesy’s confidence that she was still there. This kind of operation depended upon speed. Assuming Hester was the target, they should have been in the next county already instead of hanging around waiting for Hester’s pack mates to show up and take this battle to a different level.
As Charles carefully moved back deeper into the shadows of the underbrush, the wind shifted a little, and he smelled gasoline. He moved a little farther to the side and saw why they hadn’t been able to leave with Hester.
The four-wheelers were trapped in the aspen trees that had somehow grown up through them while they had been parked. One of the vehicles was six or seven feet in the air.
It wasn’t just the aspens, he noted as he gave the sight a more thoughtful look. A fir tree had gotten into the act and punctured the gas tank of one of the vehicles, leaving the sharp smell of gasoline in the air.
He usually kept his awareness of the other part of the world, the spirit world, as closed as he could. He couldn’t afford to wander around distracted. If something wanted his attention, it could nudge him—and if there was something bad around, Brother Wolf could sense it.
Seeing the unnatural actions of the trees caused Charles to instinctively open his senses. The land was shivering with joyous anxiety, like a dog whose master has just come home. Power ruffled the hair along his back, and Brother Wolf forgot his humiliation and came to alert, though they both knew that the one who had innervated the land, who had caused the trees to put on a hundred years of growth in minutes, was waiting for them back in Hester’s cabin.
Jonesy.
The amount of power that would have been required to shape trees with that kind of speed was staggering.
Dangerous, Brother Wolf reminded him, over his irritation for the urgency Charles had fed him that had made them lose face in front of Hester.
Once he’d accepted the quivering, excited eagerness of the forest, other things came into focus. Beneath the stench of gasoline, Charles could smell meat and blood and the beginning of rot. Someone had died here. He closed down his mother’s gift because it was too distracting.
Instead, he relied only on himself and Brother Wolf and reevaluated the clearing. As he and Anna had seen earlier, there were three four-wheelers. Assuming one of them had been carrying the heavy cage that now contained Hester, each of the vehicles had had only one person on it.
That meant that the two men in biking leathers—standing as far from the cage as they could get—were the only ones between Hester and safety. Brother Wolf slunk lower toward the ground and carefully began moving around the clearing with the intention of closing in and taking them by surprise. Still flinching under Hester’s reproof, Brother Wolf was utterly silent.
“You should call again,” said the bigger of the two men.
They spoke in hushed whispers, as if they thought someone might be listening. Charles thought of the trees growing through their four-wheelers, and Brother Wolf smiled. That would give a person pause, wouldn’t it? To be stuck in the middle of a wilderness with someone who could do that would be pretty terrifying. If he were one of them, he’d be wondering what else a person like that could do.
“Helicopter is coming,” responded the other man in a soothing voice. “But this clearing isn’t big enough now, and our second-choice
landing zone is too far for us to carry the wolf all the way. Extraction team is coming to help.”
“I heard all that, too,” said the big man—he sounded thoroughly spooked. “But Boss will be crazy mad that we only have the one and not both. Wanted both. This one and her fairy mate. Maybe Boss’ll just leave us up here for the Marrok to take.”
“Edison, just be cool,” said the other man, his voice calm and authoritative. “We got the female that’s wanted. Not our fault that the male was more powerful than we were told. Information wasn’t our task. Someone else’s head will roll for that.”
And the wind shifted directions just enough to slide past them, bringing their scent right to Charles. Brother Wolf pricked his ears in rage. These were werewolves.
Werewolves attacking Bran’s people in Bran’s territory.
In the distance, Charles heard the distinctive thrum-thrum of a helicopter. He was out of time.
If they had been humans, he would have handled them differently. But there was only one answer for werewolf intruders.
Even so, it was hard.
He and Brother Wolf were built to make the submissive wolves safe, that was their purpose in this life, and the big man was clearly a submissive wolf.
Under any other circumstances, he would have killed the dominant and given a submissive wolf the benefit of the doubt. A submissive wolf might feel he had no choice but to follow the orders he was given. But this one had become involved in a raid in the Marrok’s territory. For that there could be no forgiveness.
Tactically, he should have taken the other, more dominant and thus more dangerous, wolf first. But Brother Wolf would have none of it. They could not save the submissive wolf, but they could kill him as quickly and cleanly as possible—would see to it that he never had a chance to be afraid.
Silently he stalked them, using pack magic and his mother’s magic and his own skill. When he launched himself out of the trees and landed on the big man, that one’s muscles didn’t have a chance to tighten before Charles’s fangs tore through tendon and into bone that cracked beneath the pressure of his jaws.