He was too slow. Even drawing on the pack’s power, he couldn’t heal broken bones three times in a row and get wonderful results. His right front leg hurt so much when he ran on it that he just tucked it up against his body and ran on the other three.
He leaped onto the flattish stretch of ground where Wellesley had set up his fire and took in the scene in a single glance.
Wellesley, eyes closed, was chanting over a fire—where it appeared that he was trying ineffectually to burn the witch gun. Whatever he was doing—the skinwalker evidently thought it was dangerous enough that it was trying to get to Wellesley through Leah, Asil, Juste—and Anna.
Leah, Asil, and Juste looked as though they were engaged in the hit-and-run technique Charles had begun with, harrying the bear and trying to distract him from his target.
Anna was pelting him with rocks—and doing a damn fine job of it. White bone showed on the bear’s head as it roared at her.
There’s not enough space, said Brother Wolf—though he knew that Charles already understood that. The rocks were a distance weapon, and the bear was closing in on Anna.
There wasn’t time for an easy change, and he didn’t have strength to change fast enough with his own power. But his da had left him in charge of the pack. Without consideration for the limits of that power this time, he pulled on the pack and pulled his human shape on between one stride and the next.
He felt the drain of it in the reluctant slowness of his muscles and the bone-deep ache in his joints. He was going to have to eat a feast and sleep a week to recover from this. If he lived another five seconds.
Still running, he used the momentum to fuel the left-handed blow as he brought Ofaeti’s damned big axe down between the bear’s ears and buried it there, up to the haft, in the bear’s skull. Sometimes, especially when they needed to, objects he was holding when he shifted from human to wolf came with him when he made the change back to human.
“Heal that,” he growled.
“Get away,” called Wellesley, scrambling to his feet. “Get away from the bear.”
Charles started to take a step back, but an unexpected and sudden weariness caught him. He stumbled, and his mate steadied him and shoved him farther back at the same time. For thirty or forty seconds, nothing more happened.
And then the gun burst into white flames—and so did the body of the bear.
Wellesley raised both arms to the sky and sang a song in some strange, twisting tongue. But it didn’t matter that Charles could not understand the language. He knew a prayer when he heard one.
CHAPTER
12
One of the most amazing things about the past few days, Anna thought, was that the whole mountainside didn’t go up in flames when the skinwalker burned. They didn’t have a fire line, they didn’t have a backhoe, and that bear went up with a ton more heat than Hester’s house had.
The bear burned to ashes in about five minutes, smelling disturbingly—given the nature of the beast—like bacon as it did so. When the fire had ended, there was only a pile of bones left on soil that looked as though a molten rock had pressed into it and left it blackened and shiny. The bones themselves weren’t blackened—they were white and clean, and they belonged to a human.
Wellesley knelt and pressed his hand on top of the skull—and the bones melted into … well, into nothing.
Anna thought of his story, of the spirit of the hurricane who had called this man its brother. She thought about what it had said about Wellesley. Something about how Wellesley carried the blood of earth magic and was descended for a thousand years from a lineage of priestesses, whatever that meant—other than being able to resist a blood-magic curse for as long as he had.
No one said anything about going after Sage. They weren’t in any shape for a pursuit—and besides, they had all heard the sound of Sage’s SUV start up and drive away.
Tiredly, quietly, thoughtfully, they took the trail down to the cars.
? ? ?
ANNA AND CHARLES stayed in their own house that night—Bran’s orders be damned. Charles looked like he’d gone forty rounds with a meat grinder. She wasn’t going to bring him into the middle of pack HQ looking like that. He wouldn’t sleep there when he was hurt, for one thing.
And she needed to get him alone.
Anna fed him frozen pizzas while she worked on something with more protein that would take longer. And she joined him in eating the pizzas and the steaks.
Anna wasn’t going to say anything, but her mouth said, “She called you Charlie.” It had bothered her—that another woman had a pet name for Anna’s mate. She hadn’t realized how much it bothered her until she said it out loud.
Charles put down his fork and nodded. “She had a bruise that covered most of her face when Da introduced us. She was terrified and half-starved—which is why the bruise was still there. I let it go—and she continued to use the name. I thought at the time that it was a prod—a check to see if we were as bad as her first pack. If we would hit her for not following the rules.”
“And now?” Anna asked.
He shook his head and started eating his steak again. “That might still have been the case. She was brutalized—no question about that. Even if she volunteered … and I don’t think a skinwalker asks for volunteers any more than any other witch who uses black magic does.”
Anna thought about that for a while. “So maybe she didn’t want to betray us.”
“Anna,” Charles said in a gentle voice, “she was here for twenty years. She could have come to my father for help at any time. She gave Hester, Jonesy, and Jericho to the skinwalker.”
“And then there was Devon,” Anna said.
They had found Devon’s body when they returned to the cars. Evidently, he’d decided to go stop her. She’d killed him as painfully as she could manage without delaying too long. The Sage that she had known would never have done that.
“There never was a Sage,” Anna told him.
He put his hand on her knee and kept eating.
He was healing as she watched him. Bruises fading, cuts mending themselves.
“It almost killed you,” she said. And she hadn’t meant to say that either. She tried to lighten the stark terror she heard in her voice with a little humor. “No more fighting bears for you.”
He set down his fork and squeezed her knee. “I killed it,” he told her. “It was dead and rotting when I turned my back. It used magic to conceal itself, or it would never have taken me by surprise.”
“No more fighting dead things,” she said, but her voice wobbled on the last word.
He reached for her—and she crawled on his lap, burrowing into his arms. He rested his chin on the top of her head.
“I will probably have gray hairs tomorrow from the moment when I saw you throwing rocks at the bear,” he told her. “No more throwing rocks at bears for you.”