“That thing” was the witch gun.
“Some of the wildlings we are going to visit have interesting backgrounds,” he told her. “All of them are old. I want to know if any of them have heard of something like this.”
She pulled into a flat meadow and stopped in front of a ranch-style house that would have looked more appropriate on a city street than in the middle of the woods. His home was a ranch-style, too. But in this setting, the little gray house looked like a house cat in a tiger’s den.
He knew these wildlings well enough to have put the probability of their being his traitor pretty low. Long-term deception wasn’t so much beyond them as beneath them. Cowardly.
He got out of the car, and as soon as he did so, he felt eyes on the back of his neck. He let Brother Wolf do the work of finding their watchers.
Long-term deception was cowardly, but ambushing your allies was just fine.
“Behind us,” Sage said, having walked around the front of the car—and then returned to his side.
She wasn’t afraid, not exactly. She smelled of stress, worry even. She probably should have been afraid. She was also wrong.
They weren’t behind them—though that was an interesting ploy. He wondered if they actually were able to use the pack magic to manipulate the wind, as Bran could, or if it was a trick of the geography that they’d learned to take advantage of. With wildlings—especially with these wildlings—it could be either one.
“We bring a word and a warning,” Charles said, without raising his voice. “Hester and Jonesy are dead at the enemy’s hands. An enemy that included a helicopter and teams with werewolves willing to attack the Marrok’s wolves. They hit Hester’s place with the intention of taking her captive. They had her caged. When we freed her, they killed her on purpose.”
He turned, as if to get back into the SUV, and a man dropped out of a tree twenty feet in front of the car.
He was, like Bran, the kind of person who would fade into a crowd even without using pack magic. He wasn’t tall or short, good-looking or ugly. There was nothing particularly memorable about his face at all. Except for his eyes. His eyes were white, wolf’s eyes, and they were predatory.
“Bran’s gone,” the man said, his English very British. “Now Hester is dead because you aren’t capable, Charles Marroksson, of protecting the pack.”
He had already known about the attack on Hester. It wasn’t surprising. These wolves had closer contact with others in the pack than most of his da’s wildlings because one of them regularly participated in pack hunts and had a few friends in the regular pack. If it weren’t for his brothers, he’d probably be out in the world, a safe-ish, sane-ish member of a normal pack.
There were three of them, brothers all, a set of twins and their younger sibling. If the stable twin hadn’t been with them, Charles suspected Bran would have had the other two executed for reasons of public safety.
“You think you could do better?” Charles said very softly. The wind didn’t favor him. He couldn’t tell which of the brothers he was talking to other than it was one of the twins.
The other twin dropped down to the ground from a higher branch in a different tree. His landing was loud—louder than it needed to be to cover for their third, as yet unseen, brother.
“We could hardly do worse,” he said. And, confident that his twin had an eye on Charles, he looked at Sage and smiled. “Hey, pretty lady. You’ll make a fine prize.”
Despite herself, despite the years between Sage as she was now and the beaten woman she’d been when she came to them, when she said, “Try me,” her voice was tense, and she took a step closer to Charles.
The second twin laughed, a full-throated, merry sound. “Oh, I intend to, yes. Don’t we, Geir?”
The other twin smiled. “Yes.”
Geir was the sanest of the three.
Charles had no intention of believing them about which of them was which, of course, not when they were being so careful to stay downwind, where his nose couldn’t make the distinction. He took a slow step away from Sage, putting her between him and the twins.
She stiffened at the unexpected move. She’d asked for his protection by stepping into his personal space. His movement was a denial. But he couldn’t help her perception—or worry about it too much.
He was too busy spinning to catch hold of the axe that Ofaeti, the third of the Viking brothers, tried to stick in his back. He grabbed it by the haft, one hand on top, the other at the end, Ofaeti’s hands caught between his. The Viking wasn’t expecting it, so Charles was able to swing the big man around, off balance. Charles snapped a quick kick into his knee, which gave with a crack.
And right then, right at that moment, Charles felt Anna call him.
“Sage,” he said. “Get in the car and stay out of this.”
Strictly speaking, a fight for dominance was supposed to be one-on-one. For that reason, he wanted Sage completely out of it. And maybe he’d seen that look of betrayal on her face and wanted to remove any doubt in her mind that he had kept her safety at the forefront of his decisions.
Unlike his Anna, Sage would follow orders. He put her out of his considerations—except as a noncombatant to be protected.
Ofaeti had released his hold on the axe when his knee broke. Charles tossed it up and caught it in a proper grip. It was a good axe, heavy and weighted for fighting rather than cutting down trees.
The twins, Geir and Fenrir (Charles was pretty sure that wasn’t the name he was born with but a name he’d earned), had sprinted forward when Ofaeti attacked, but seeing Charles with the axe in his hand and Ofaeti out of the fight (more or less), they slowed to a more cautious pace.
Charles? If you aren’t busy, I could use some advice.
Charles heard a soft sound behind him and without looking, swept the flat side of the axe to his right about hip height like a backward swing of a baseball bat.
Now, said Brother Wolf in satisfaction as behind them the ground accepted a probably-not-dead body with a hollow thump, Ofaeti is no longer a factor.
Charles smiled in amusement—and the simple joy of battle. The Viking brothers had been fighting for longer than Charles had been alive, but they did not have Brother Wolf as a partner nor had they had Bran Cornick and Charles’s uncle, Buffalo Singer, as teachers.