“Can you—” Charles murmured to Anna without taking his eyes off the dramatis personae, “pull the truck far enough from the house that it won’t burn when we light Hester’s cabin but close enough that if anyone tries to get into it, we’ll see it?”
“Sure,” she said. Later, she thought. There will be time to tell him about the identity of the dead man later, when the pack isn’t ready to ignite along with Hester’s house.
There must have been something in her voice, though, because he gave her a sharp look. She pretended she didn’t see it and headed to the front of the truck.
The pack opened a path for her as she slowly drove away in a truck full of dead bodies, fae artifacts, and that weird, witchcrafted gun, which she had pulled out of her jeans and set on the bench seat of the truck. She tried to figure out just how far was close enough to make people think they would be spotted and too far for something from a burning house to explode and crash through the windshield. It was good to have something to focus on instead of the cold fingers of her past that were trying to unravel the core of the woman she’d become since coming to Aspen Creek, to this pack, to Charles.
In the end, she decided to pull the old truck next to Asil’s very expensive, brand-new Mercedes SUV, reasoning that no one would risk the double whammy of both Charles and Asil—and that “no one” probably included the fire they were going to set.
Once she was parked, she stayed in the cab, though. She watched Charles say something to Leah, watched the pack start moving in an organized fashion. Asil and Tag working together, their former antagonism … not so much forgotten as pushed behind them. The wolves could do that, she’d noticed. They were so much creatures of the present that as long as their human halves stayed out of the picture, quarrels that were over and done with stayed that way.
From the driver’s seat of Charles’s truck, Anna saw Tag step into the cabin with one of the long-nosed lighters more commonly used for lighting barbecues than setting house fires (she fervently hoped). A moment later, orange light flared in the window—more brilliant because the dusk was quickly fading into darkness. Tag came out of the front door as the flames licked hungrily up the old wood of the cabin.
Anna should be out there, she knew, instead of huddled in the truck where she could draw comfort from the scent of her mate without any of the inconveniences of his actual presence. He saw too much, her Charles did.
She really didn’t want to tell him she knew one of the dead.
? ? ?
BEFORE ASIL GAVE in to the impulse to make Leah pay for being right, Charles said, “We should light the cabin.” He paused, “Did anyone think to call the Forest Service?”
“I made the call before we came here,” Leah said. “I told them that the Aspen Creek volunteer fire department had decided to burn an old cabin that posed a fire hazard. They weren’t happy, but it’s on private property, and there isn’t a ban on open fires”—someone said “yet,” and she nodded at the speaker to acknowledge their accuracy “—so there wasn’t much they could do.”
That had been smart, Charles thought. And not entirely a lie: if they had a fire department in Aspen Creek, it would consist of the pack. He would just have told them he was burning a cabin on purpose.
“Good,” Charles said.
Asil added, “Even if someone from the Forest Service decides to come all the way up here, they’ll be checking on a controlled burn and not bodies.” He didn’t say “good girl,” that would have been too much. He didn’t look at Leah, but he let her hear the approval in his voice. Leah’s shoulders softened—the only sign of her pleasure at the compliment paid to her by the Moor.
That, said Brother Wolf, was diplomacy.
Asil kept talking, “Tag—you’re the only one who knew Hester well, the only one here, anyway. Do you want to be the torchbearer?”
Asil’s question sparked the pack into action. Hester and her mate were not the first bodies the pack had burned, though they generally used a proper cremation process. The place of torchbearer was usually a place of honor only—a wolf who witnessed the cremation of the body.
But wolves who died as wolves couldn’t be buried where someone might dig them up believing they were going to find a human.
Fire was good at destroying evidence. Because of that, Charles had supervised the burning of a number of houses over the years but never in the Marrok’s own territory before. Never a formal funeral—though he knew the protocols.
Asil seemed to have taken it upon himself to take charge of the burning, and Charles was content to let him work off steam by taking over the organization of the fire itself.
Charles wished the fire would do as good of a job destroying the magical artifacts he and Asil hadn’t been able to find as it would turning Hester’s body to ash.
He had, himself, never seen so many things imbued with magic in one place before. The mishmash of magics made the hair on the back of his neck stand up worse than standing in the middle of a busy airport did. The thought of that chest sitting in his truck left an itch he couldn’t scratch right between his shoulder blades. So did the note in his pocket.
Anna should be back by now.
He started to turn to look for his mate, but he was distracted by the flash of fire out of the corner of his eyes. He hadn’t expected, with Asil in charge, for them to light the cabin so quickly.
Tag, smelling of smoke and diesel and gasoline, took his place next to Charles, and Asil joined them.
“I liked her,” said Tag, without any of his usual drama.
Charles thought of the way Hester had chided him without a word from her cage, and said, “As did I. Though I did not know her well.”
As fires do sometimes, this one roared up in a sudden burst of light and sound. It seemed exactly right, a fitting tribute to a tough woman and her mate—hot and wild and powerful. Leah shouted, and the pack called back, answering both Leah and the roar of the fire. Charles threw his head back and howled—and the call of the pack changed as the other wolves replied in kind. Then they fell silent and stood witness.
Tag had said that her people burned their dead, and Charles wondered who her people had been. Hester was an ancient name. It might even have been her birth name, though old creatures tended to change their names now and then.
His da said that names had power. Names that had belonged to you for a long time had more power. Like many of Da’s sayings, it was true on different levels. Both witchcraft and fae magic could use a name in working evil magic upon someone. But the magic of names went further than that. Charles had found that his own name, Charles Cornick, the Marrok’s son, had often saved him trouble. The fear of his name caused people to give up the fight before it started.
Hester was a name like that—a name of power. She had been a legend among the wolves, hers a quieter legend than the Moor’s or the Marrok’s because she, herself, preferred it that way. But her name had served admirably to distract people from the troubled man who had been her mate.