She stepped to the side of the big tree, where she was hidden from the sight of people outside the yard, and began stripping her clothes off. “This will take a while,” she warned them.
“What are you doing?” Katie said as Anna kicked off her shoes.
“I’m a werewolf,” Anna told her. “I’m changing into my wolf. The wolf’s nose is better and less easily confused.”
The moon was almost full, so her change should have been easy. Pain, as her body rearranged itself, was now an old friend. It slid over her head with hot hands that dug in and cracked her jaw so forcibly that the pain of the rest of her body seemed gentle by comparison—until her shoulders slipped out of their sockets at the same time.
On a moon night, with the pack gathered together, pack magic shielded the sounds the changing wolves made in their pain, and the moon could sometimes change pain to ecstasy. But alone and in the full Arizona sun, Anna was obligated to make no noise that might attract attention. She was good at not attracting attention.
Some changes were better than others, regardless of the moon’s phases, but this was much, much worse than any shift she’d done this near the moon’s call. Before pain drove her to the single determination of silence, Anna belatedly recognized the wariness her wolf felt that drove her to speed the change. The wolf could not adequately defend herself while caught between forms. Anna had chosen to change in front of a virtual stranger and a fae she could not see and knew nothing about. A fae who could be the very creature they were hunting.
Anna trusted Leslie to have her back. But the wolf was more judicious in her trusts and Leslie was not pack, nor anyone they were long acquainted with. So speed was necessary and pain was a small cost to pay for safety.
When it was over, Anna lay winded and shaky, which wasn’t exactly a safe thing, either. She rolled to her feet and shook off the last of the muscle twitches. She couldn’t tell how long it had taken. Pain made time subjective.
She stretched, sliding her claws out until they dug into the soil. Satisfied that her body was working, she turned her head to look at the two women who stood carefully not looking at her.
“Are you all right?” Leslie asked when Anna moved around so she could look the FBI agent in the face. “That looked … that sounded like it hurt. We could hear your bones break.”
Anna sneezed and let her tail wag. Katie looked at Anna, and then quickly away again. Her hand over her mouth. “It’s not … it wasn’t…” Her voice stuttered to a stop—and then she made a break for her house.
Anna sighed. Yes. Werewolves are monsters and the change isn’t pretty. Unfair to ask the mundanes to deal with it. She’d had no choice.
“Can you find the fae?” Leslie asked. “I assume the deal is still in effect. If you find him and we can’t communicate, I’ll go back in the house and drag Ms. Jamison back out.”
Yes. Finish this business, thought Anna.
She checked out the big tree first, though it was too obvious. It smelled of fae magic, no question. But to her wolf nose, the whole yard smelled of fae.
She trotted the circumference of the yard and played a little hot and cold with herself to make sure she was right that the fae was somewhere near that big orange tree. The scent of the fae, who did not smell like Chelsea’s house or the day care, faded as soon as she got to the house end of the swimming pool. She quartered the yard around the pool and ended up back by the orange tree.
Not the butterfly bush, not the granite rock that was decorated with small pots of herbs where the sides of the boulder made natural shelves. Not the handful of tea rose bushes. Not the yuccas—which did indeed show signs of being dug up and replaced. Everything smelled of the fae, but not enough. Anna backed away and looked carefully for something she had missed.
Where? she asked herself, asked her wolf spirit. Where is he?
The wolf focused on one of the lemon trees, the smallest and scruffiest of them. Like the yuccas, it looked as though it was suffering from rough handling.
She closed in on it, shut her eyes, and let her nose lead her across the stone walkway and onto the gravel that covered the earth around the plants. Her ears picked up the sound of a door opening in the house, a car pulling up on the street, and Leslie’s heartbeat twenty feet away. Her nose followed the elusive trail until fae was all she could smell.
She opened her eyes—and fear, visceral and unexpected, turned her joints to water and closed her throat so she could neither breathe nor make a sound. Justin stood before her, the werewolf who had Changed her and then made her life a living hell.
And all she could think was, You’re dead. You’re dead. I saw you die.
The text message from Anna was simple. It said: Don’t worry. I need my wolf nose to find a fae. As Charles finished reading, he felt his mate’s shift begin.
She knew him. She was worried that he’d come looking for her if she transformed to wolf, so she was reassuring him that she wasn’t in harm’s way. If she hadn’t added the last bit, he’d have let her text message reassure him.
She was looking for a fae on her own? When the fae they were looking for was powerful and sophisticated enough to create a child from a bundle of sticks? Not without him, she wasn’t.
“Pull over,” he told Marsden, interrupting whatever the agent had been saying about the next place they were headed, had been headed.
“Excuse me?”
Impatient, Charles caught the other man’s eye and said, low-voiced, “Pull over.”
The car swerved out of traffic and came to a halt with a jerk.
“What the freak, man?” said Marsden, staring at his hands as though he couldn’t believe what had happened. That he’d just obeyed orders.
Humans weren’t used to following the hierarchy of the pack, but it still worked on them. At least it worked on them when Charles was giving the orders. It wasn’t magic. But there was a reason Charles was usually the most dominant in his world that was filled with dominant wolves. Even humans had that primitive brain that drill sergeants around the world tapped into, the part of the brain concerned with survival. That part heard an order and just obeyed.
Charles got out and rounded the front of the car rapidly, so the spell of his order didn’t have a chance to fade. He opened the driver’s-side door and said, “Time for me to drive.” When that didn’t move Marsden, he met his eyes again and said, “Get out of the car, Agent Marsden. I’m driving.”
“Jim?” Leeds said.
Marsden unbuckled and got out, too slowly to suit Charles, but it was done. Charles sat down and belted in. While Marsden got into the passenger seat, Charles played with the tablet mounted in the dash of the car until it gave him a map to look at. He hadn’t used this particular version of a tablet before, but there was nothing related to a computer that didn’t eventually spill its secrets to him.
Charles knew Phoenix of twenty years ago, but the new city and its suburbs were much changed. Anna’s pain echoed in his head, shivering shreds that were worse than usual. He felt her wolf’s anxiety, but Anna was okay.
That knowledge gave him the patience to wait until Marsden was beside him, buckled in. Then he hit the gas, crossed four lanes of traffic, and slid sideways through the police emergency road that connected one side of the expressway to the other. There was a car in the nearest lane and the Cantrip agent’s car was undertorqued compared to his truck.
The siren control bar had a switch helpfully marked LIGHTS NO SIREN. He tripped it, crossed the highway in front of the oncoming car, and then pulled into the next lane over, ignoring the sounds his passengers made.
He put his foot down and wished the car had more power on the top end. He drove it a little slower than flat-out because he might need that extra speed to get them out of trouble. Every few minutes he glanced at the map on the tablet. He didn’t know where Anna was, but he could feel her and he headed that direction as quickly as he could.
“I thought you said you couldn’t drive,” said Marsden tightly.
In the backseat, Leeds was chanting fervently, “Not gonna die today, not today, Lord. Not gonna die today, not today, Lord.”
Charles passed a four-car mobile roadblock by squeezing the car down the left-hand shoulder, which wasn’t quite wide enough, and he had to muscle it pretty good to keep the soft sand from pulling them into the ditch. Leeds’s half prayer sped up and got pretty loud until the car was traveling with all four wheels on the blacktop again.
“I prefer not to,” Charles answered Marsden as he switched lanes over and back. “But it is better if I drive when my wolf is on the hunt.” And then he quit talking, quit listening, and drove while his Anna completed her change, and her pain left him clearheaded.
She didn’t need him. She was a werewolf and he’d spent the whole of their time together making sure she could take care of herself. She was tough and smart. She didn’t need him to deal with a fae.
But he was coming anyway.
The Cantrip agents did pretty well, he thought, given that they were used to human reaction times and he was not human. The biggest limitation on their speed and the path he took was the car. He skidded it pretty good as they came off the expressway and onto the city streets because its suspension was for crap. He had to drop speed a bit, but not much as they rocketed through red lights and crosswalks with kids and little old ladies.
Leeds fell silent and Marsden closed his eyes with one hand on the oh-crap handle and the other braced on the dashboard. The quiet in the car was good. It allowed his ears to pick up the first hint of rubber slipping on pavement, even before he could feel it. That gave him a little more reaction time, so he sped up a bit.
Even with the map, he circled her location twice before he found a road that led to the house where the orange car was parked. He pulled in behind and took a deep breath, opening the car door, and that was when Anna’s panic nearly dropped him to his knees.
He’d never been more grateful for his ability to shed his human skin for wolf in moments, in a breath, instead of the long drawn-out process his father and the other wolves had to go through. It hurt, it hurt, but Anna was frightened and that made the other of no concern at all.
On four paws, he bolted through the plate-glass window; the glass cut deeply, but he ignored the damage. He healed as he ran through the stone house, over a silly little fountain, and out the closed patio doors, shedding water, blood, and glass as he ran.
The graceful black wolf who was his mate crouched, hindquarters and tail tucked, at the far side of the yard. She was better at controlling her responses in human form. The only time he’d ever seen her look scared was when she ran on four paws.
Whatever she saw, and he didn’t see anything in front of her where her attention was focused, it really scared her. His Anna had the heart of a lion.
Whatever it was that frightened her, he needed to kill it and lay it at her feet. A gift of love, he thought whimsically as Brother Wolf calculated where the invisible and presumably fae creature had to be, based on Anna’s body language and position.
Charles hit it hard. Brother Wolf had found their target. As it fell with him upon it, he dug in wherever he could. Two things happened when his fangs sank into flesh that tasted of bark, sap, and lemons. First, he could see the fae. Second, Anna’s fear dissipated, and that quick dispersal felt like a spell breaking.
This is not our villain. There was no doubt in her thoughts. He has been here a long time. He might know something about the fae we are hunting. Who better than another fae who is at large in the same vicinity? He has promised to answer our questions. If you kill him, we’ll never know. Charles, you cannot kill him. Not before we find Amethyst.
Anna wasn’t hurt. But Brother Wolf wanted the fae to die; leaving your enemies alive was not smart. Any fae who frightened Anna was his enemy. Fear was a power the fae used to protect themselves, to freeze their prey, to kill. He knew that, understood that, if Anna did not. It was a weapon, and this one had used it against Anna.
Please, Anna said, breathing a little calmness to him. Not enough to influence him; he didn’t think she had done it on purpose. Maybe she was trying to calm herself down and the effect had sifted through their bond.
But wherever she had aimed, it succeeded in allowing him to think. Anna wasn’t hurt. Anna wasn’t hurt, ergo he did not need to kill this fae. And, given that it had not hurt her, if he killed it, it would be because he wanted to. To kill when it was not a matter of defense or law was murder.
Woodland fae are too tough to kill easily, anyway, Brother Wolf grumbled at Anna.
Charles extracted his fangs and stepped back, letting the growl dwelling in his chest ring in the open air.
The wounded fae was definitely one of the tree folk but not a particularly dangerous one, not if he’d been too frightened to fight back when Charles had attacked him. His skin was more like tree bark and he had no flesh to soften the rawboned look. Yellow and red eyes, one each, blinked up at Charles in fearful horror.