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.
He closed his jaws on bone and shook as hard as he could. Beneath him, the bear tried first to get to its feet—and then just to roll over. But it had fallen awkwardly, and Charles was able to keep it from finding the leverage to do much more than wiggle. It gave a hard lurch … and the spine separated with a pop and a grisly crunch.
The bear’s rear quarters fell limp, and Charles bounded away from the still-dangerous front end. The bear’s blue human eyes regarded him balefully as it roared and snapped its teeth together.
Charles growled, showing the skinwalker his own fangs. He stayed back as his opponent thrashed and struggled—apparently paying no attention to anything other than reaching Charles. Charles gradually became aware of aching muscles, stiffness in his left shoulder, and the persistent ache of his ribs.
Eventually, the blood loss, made worse by the bear’s refusal to be still, won out. The giant beast gave one last heave and collapsed on the torn-up ground. It breathed four times, then the air whooshed out with a sigh, and the blue eyes glazed over.
Charles waited. He did not remember a time that his grandfather had been wrong about something. Charles was not a holy man, and so he should not have killed the skinwalker. But unarguably, the skinwalker in the bear’s form lay dead. Charles’s ears could not pick up the sound of his enemy’s heart beating. He waited until his nose told him that death had begun its work, the body had started to decompose, before he decided that his grandfather had been mistaken. Werewolves were not native to this continent, perhaps that was why his grandfather had not mentioned werewolves as a way to kill skinwalkers.
Charles looked for Devon. He’d have thought that the wildling would have joined in the fight—on Jericho’s side. Jericho was Devon’s friend, and Charles and Devon were only acquaintances. But Devon was nowhere to be seen, his scent just a hint on the wind.
Whatever Anna had told Devon when she wasted time that she should have used to get away had been effective.
Now that he had scared her to death, he supposed, he’d better let her know that—
Fifteen hundred pounds of Kodiak hit him like a bulldozer. His shoulder crunched against a tree, and screaming agony flared throughout his body. Somehow, the skinwalker’s magic had concealed the sound of movement, the rebirth of the bear, and the feel of blood magic at work, so the bear had taken Charles completely by surprise.
In his head, a quavering old man’s voice said, My grandson, why do you always have to learn the hard way?
? ? ?
LEAH RAN, FOCUSED on her goal. She was taller than Asil and Juste both, and she outpaced them.
She was a skilled hunter, and she learned from others’ mistakes. She did not allow herself to get close enough to Sage to fall victim to one of her witchy tricks as Charles had. But she kept Sage in sight.
She had the advantage on this ground, she thought. With her mate, she had traveled every foot of their territory, stayed up late at night discussing the topography, its strengths and weaknesses. She knew, for instance, that Sage was trying to take them on a roundabout route to the cars. Sage was hoping that they would let her get far enough ahead that she could take one of them and escape.
Never had Leah so resented the protocol that forbade cell phones. It would be nice to alert the pack, so that they could set up roadblocks on all of the ways that Sage could take her wussy SUV out of these mountains. Maybe even get someone up here in time to disable Sage’s car. But the nearest phone was at Jericho’s cabin, and that was too far to do them any good.
Leah was pretty sure that Sage didn’t have the knowledge to start one of the cars without a key—thank heavens that Charles had left his old truck at home. Even Leah could hotwire a truck from that era in about ten seconds flat.
She had a gun, concealed in a shoulder holster, but didn’t bother to take it out. She was a decent shot, but at this pace she would be unlikely to hit Sage. Besides, killing Sage with a gun would be so much less satisfying than killing her with her knife.
She jumped a tree, tucking her feet up so as not to catch a toe. Sage was keeping to rough ground where she could because Leah was faster, even on two feet, than Sage was on four.
Some of that was because Leah ran in her human form every day. Some of it was that Leah was built like a runner. But most of it was that, as the Marrok’s mate, second in the pack, she could draw on the strength of the pack to aid her muscles.
She kept Sage’s wolf in sight, though the light and dark golden brown coat was better even than Leah’s own tawnier fur at blending in the light and shadow of the forest they ran through. After a couple of miles, Juste and Asil were some distance behind them, and she was just settling into stride. But that was all right.
She could take Sage.
Her mate told her that her attitudes were stuck in the nineteenth century. She knew that Bran worried that her lack of confidence when facing down a male opponent would get her hurt someday. But she had him for that—and there wasn’t a female werewolf on the planet she was afraid of.
They were nearly back where they had started—a trick of the trail Sage had been taking. That meant they were about two miles from the cars.