The darkness bothered Bran not at all as he followed Tag's directions to the place he and Charles had thought would be the best starting point. He passed Asil's Subaru and hesitated-if Asil had been going after Charles, he'd have known the fastest way there.
But Charles would be headed back to his car if something had gone wrong. So Bran kept driving.
Other things he might do ran through his head. There were witches in the pay of the wolves. Not his pack-he didn't deal with black witches, and most white witches weren't powerful enough to be useful. But there were witches available to him.
If he had a two-hundred-year-old witch capable of holding and torturing a werewolf for two days-he had no intention of advertising the fact and encouraging other witches to imitate this one. Especially since she, like Bran's mother, might have gotten her ability through some kind of binding to a werewolf.
No. Best keep the witches out of it.
He could call Charles back.
That was a harder thing. Telepathy was how his mother had gotten her nasty little chains upon him in the first place. She was why he could no longer read the thoughts of others.
After he'd killed the witch who was his mother, the backlash had taken that talent from him-one of the many blessings of her death. Slowly he'd regained the ability to talk mind to mind, but never to listen in.
The only reason his mother had been able to catch him through his talent was that it was one she shared. A rare thing, even among witch born. He'd be surprised if there was another witch with that ability in North America. But he was still too cowardly to try until he knew for certain that his son was free of Asil's witch.
Of all the magic users in this old world, Bran despised and feared witches above everything. Probably because, had matters been different, he would have been one himself.
He turned off the highway and drove up Silver Butte. Tracks of a wider-than-normal vehicle preceded him. Charles had followed the plans that far, anyway.
Getting Charles's truck up the path the Vee had taken was a little tricky, driving all his other worries out of his mind. He was starting to think he should have parked beside Asil's car when he drove around a blind curve and almost hit the Vee, which was nose to bark with a tree.
He stopped with no more than six inches between Charles's truck and the Vee. He shut off the engine and parked the truck right there because the trees were too thick to go around, and he didn't trust that smooth white snow not to hide a ditch.
There had been no safe place to turn around anywhere in the last quarter of a mile; he wondered if he was going to have to drive the whole trek backward on the way out. He smiled sourly to himself; that wouldn't matter so much if they didn't make it out.
Asil had had time to meet up with Charles. Asil knew about witches. Surely his son and the Moor could handle anything they found. If Charles stuck to his route, Bran hoped to find the lot of them before nightfall and get them out of there.
He left the key in the ignition. No one was likely to come up here and steal the truck-and if anyone did...well, he could deal with Charles.
He hadn't bothered to wear a coat since he intended to go wolf anyway. He stripped in the warm cab, steeled himself, and jumped out of the truck before completing the change. Opening car doors while in wolf form was possible-but usually it left some damage behind. And despite his son's frequent mutterings about how much he hated cars, Charles was fond of his truck.
Bran settled into a steady lope, something that he could maintain all day. It had been a long time since he'd run in these mountains. They had never been a favorite hunting ground, though he couldn't put a finger on why not. Charles maintained that the Cabinets didn't welcome intruders, and he supposed that was as good an explanation as any.
Following Charles's intended route backward seemed to be the best manner to begin. Their whole loop wasn't more than thirty miles, and he could run the whole thing and be back to the cars just after nightfall.
Except for the small porch with old green paint peeling off, the cabin hadn't changed substantially since the last time Charles had seen it, maybe fifty years earlier. It wasn't much to look at, a small log cabin like a hundred other such places in the wilds of Montana, most of them built during the Depression by CCC crews.
The logs were grayed by years of sun, rain, and snow. A battered four-wheeler with new cat tracks sat unobtrusively between the back of the cabin and the forest that crowded in behind.
Charles stopped Anna about thirty yards downwind, where the trees still hid them adequately. As soon as he stopped her, Walter flattened himself on the ground at her feet, just as if he were her devoted pet dog...who weighed about the same as the average black bear and was capable of considerably more destruction.
Walter's devotion was so obviously nonsexual that Charles couldn't find it in himself to object. He kept remembering Walter's impassioned, "I think I could sleep." He knew about being haunted by memories of death and murder. If she managed to give Walter some peace, he was welcome to it.
Charles stared fiercely at the cabin and wished he wasn't frightened. It had been a long time since he'd been afraid like this. He was used to being worried about Samuel, his father, and, more recently, Anna, but not about himself. The memory of how Asil's witch had held him obedient to her as if she were his Alpha cut through his self-confidence with a large dollop of reality.
He rubbed Anna's shoulder lightly. He knew she wasn't as fragile as she looked, no werewolf was that fragile. And the old soldier was a survivor; Charles took some comfort from that.
"I won't be able to help directly," Charles told her. "If I get in her line of sight, she'll have me again. With a pack Alpha, distance counts, and so does eye or body-to-body contact."
Neither Walter nor Anna was a member of his father's pack, so they had no connection to Asil. Except for Anna's wolf's bond to Charles, that left them as vulnerable as any lone wolf. But he knew it usually took witches a while to gain a hold on a lone wolf-long enough that he could offer himself up instead.
Her control of him had been instantaneous.
He hated witches. Other magic users' abilities didn't bother him so much. Druids influenced the natural world: weather, plants, and some animals. Wizards played with nonliving things. But witches used the mind and body. Anyone's mind and body. They toyed with things that were alive-or had been alive. White witches weren't so bad, though maybe that was only because most of them had less magic than he did. Black witches gained power by killing or torturing things: from flies to humans.
"All right," his Anna said, as if she'd faced witches every day of her life. "If they are here, you'll take on her wolf...and probably Asil. That should keep even you pretty busy."
The few hours of rest he'd had, a lot of food, and a slow, easy pace this morning had done much to restore Charles to himself. It gave him a chance at taking down the witch's pets.
Anna shivered a little under his hand, a combination of eagerness and nerves, he thought. She had reacted to that dream as if it had been an attack on him rather than on her, though she was the one who had stopped breathing.
Walter raised his eyes to Charles, and he saw in the other's gaze a determination to protect her by any means necessary. It bothered Brother Wolf to see that in another male's eyes, but under the circumstances, Walter was in a better position to save her than Charles was.
"I'm going to do a little recon. For this part, I'd like you to wait here, all right?"
"I'll wait," Anna said.
"Don't get impatient, this might take a while."
The cabin was backed up to the forest, with twenty feet cleared around the front and one side. It was not where he would have chosen to hide from werewolves...but then, he didn't think that she was afraid of him at all. He certainly hadn't given her any reason to fear him.
To his surprise, Walter followed him, disappearing into the shadows until the only way Charles knew the other wolf was there was from his scent. The spirits of this forest had indeed taken Walter as their own to lend him their protection. His grandfather had been able to disappear like that.
A stone's throw from the cabin, Charles became convinced it was empty. When Walter appeared a few yards ahead of him, tail wagging a slow message, he knew he was right. But he still waited until he'd circled the little structure and opened the door before he sent Walter back for Anna.
Inside, there was barely room for the narrow cot and small table that were the only furnishings, unless he wanted to count the narrow ledge of a mantelpiece above the fireplace. The cot was brand-new and still had sales tags on it. The table looked like it was older than the cabin.
The hearth showed signs of a recent fire. The dead animal on the floor in front of it advertised who was living here: witches and dead things went together. There were witches who didn't kill, but they were far less powerful than their darker sisters.
The plank floor had shiny new nails and crowbar marks where she had pried it up and nailed it back in again. When he stepped near the cot, he knew exactly why; he'd felt power circles before. Some witches used them to set guard spells to keep things they valued safe, and others used them to store power for drawing upon later. Since the cabin hadn't kept him out and he didn't feel the need to leave, he could only assume that the circle was the latter kind-which meant that there were more dead things under the floor. He took a deep breath, but the dead animal he'd already seen might account for the scent of death-and nothing was rotting. Either the animal she'd killed to draw her circle hadn't been dead long-it had frozen in the cold-or she had a spell to disguise it to keep away scavengers. Changing what the senses of others perceived was one of the major powers of the witch.
His father said that Charles might have been a witch if he'd chosen to study. Bran hadn't urged him to do so, but he also didn't discourage it, either; a witch in his pack would have given him even more power. But the subtler magics of his mother's people suited Charles, and he'd never regretted the path he'd chosen less than he did right now, standing in the middle of this poor cabin stained with evil.
The scent on the sleeping bag on the cot was fresh enough that he decided the witch had slept there the night before. The table held the remnants of a fat black candle smelling of blood more than wax, and a mortar with some ashes in the bottom-the remnants of Anna's hair, he thought. Something personal to allow her into Anna's dreams.
"What is that?" Anna said in a little voice from the doorway. He felt immediately better for her presence, as if she somehow lessened the evil that had seeped into the wood and brick.
Someday he'd tell her that, just to see the bewildered disbelief in her eyes; he was beginning to know her well enough to predict her reaction. It gave him some satisfaction.
He followed her gaze to the eviscerated and skinned body laid out in front of the fireplace. "Raccoon, I think. At least that's what it smells like." It also smelled of pain and had left claw marks on the floor, probably after it had been nailed down. He saw no reason to tell Anna it probably hadn't been dead when the witch mutilated it.
"What was she trying to do?" She stayed in the doorway, and Walter settled in behind her. Neither of them made any attempt to come inside.
He shrugged. "I have no idea. Maybe it was to power the spell she worked on you last night. A dark witch gains power from others' pain and suffering."
Anna looked sick. "There are worse monsters to be than a werewolf, aren't there?"
"Yes," he agreed. "Not all witches use things like this, but it's hard to be a good witch."
There was a scrying bowl, still filled with water, on the floor next to the raccoon. The interior temperature of the cabin wasn't much warmer than outside; if it had been there long, it would have been ice. They hadn't missed the witch by much.
He didn't want to, but he touched the dead animal to see how long ago she'd worked her misery on it. Its flesh was still...
It moved weakly, and he had his knife out and its neck severed as quickly as he could manage, nauseated by the knowledge that it had still been alive. Nothing should have been able to live through the torture it had undergone. He gave a more thoughtful look to the floorboards. Maybe the reason there was no smell of rot was because what she had down there, anchoring her power circle, wasn't dead, either.
Walter growled, and Charles echoed the sentiment.
"She left it alive," Anna whispered.
"Yes. And likely she'll know we killed it." Charles cleaned his knife on the sleeping bag, then put it back in its sheath.
"So what do we do now?"
"Burn the cabin," Charles said. "Most of witchcraft is potions and spells. Burning her place of power will cripple her a bit." And release whatever poor thing or things she had trapped underneath the cabin, too. He wasn't going to tell Anna about that unless he had to.
Anna found a half-full five-gallon can of gasoline tied onto the four-wheeler, and Charles doused the cot and then the bonfire he'd built in the middle of the floor with the witch's firewood. He sent Anna and Walter away from the building before lighting the tinder with a match. The gasoline burned his nose as the fire flared hotly to life. He waited until he was sure it was hot enough to burn the cabin before he left.
He trotted toward Anna and Walter, who'd stopped some distance away. When he reached them, he caught Anna's hand and tugged her farther, urged on by the itch between his shoulder blades. Which was why they were fifty yards away when the cabin exploded, knocking them all to the ground.
Anna raised her face out of the snow and spat some dirt out of her mouth. "What happened? Did she have some dynamite or something?"
Charles rolled over and sat up, fighting not to show how much falling with a chest wound had hurt. "I don't know. But magic and fire have an odd, synergistic effect sometimes. " He looked at where the cabin had been and whistled soundlessly. There was almost nothing left of it, just a few rows of stone on the ground where the base of the fireplace had been. Pieces of four-wheeler and cabin were scattered almost to their feet, and the trees nearest the cabin had been splintered like toothpicks.
"Wow," Anna said. "Are you all right, Walter?"
The wolf came to his feet and shook himself, looking into Anna's face with adoring eyes.
"She knew we'd be hunting her," said Charles. "She tried to hide this from us. I didn't smell any trace of her when Walter and I circled the cabin. Did you, Walter?"
The big wolf had not.
"So what do we do?"
"Despite all our fears, I think it's time to call my father." He smiled at Anna. "We're not too far from the car, and he knows something's wrong anyway. He woke me up last night-that's how I knew you were in trouble. He's not stupid, and he knows a few other witches we can call upon."
Bran had been running for several hours or so when he heard them.
"I told you he was most likely to send Tag if Charles needed help," said Asil. "I told you he wouldn't be such a fool as to come himself."
Bran planted all four feet and slid to a stop. Asil hadn't spoken loudly, but he'd known Bran would hear him. Which meant it was already too late to escape.
Witches could hide in plain sight if they had some sort of hold on you. And Asil was clearly not speaking to Charles, so he belonged to the witch. And he belonged to Bran. That was enough of a connection for hide-me spells to work on Bran.
He turned to face Asil and found him standing on a boulder the size of a small elephant. Next to Asil, a smallish woman bundled against the cold held on to Asil as if she thought the wind might blow her off the rock.
"Why he'd think that Tag would do any better than I, I don't know," continued Asil coolly. There was hell in his eyes, but the rest of his face and his body language matched the voice.
"Come here, senor," the woman purred-and she facilitated their meeting by climbing down the boulder with unusual grace.
She spoke with an American accent except when she spoke pure Castilian Spanish-aristo Spanish. Part of him was interested in the fact that she'd been here long enough to pick up an American accent. His ear was too good to be fooled about which one was her native tongue-even if he hadn't known that he was hunting for a witch who had killed Asil's mate in Spain. Part of him was interested in the wolflike dexterity she'd displayed as she hopped down the boulder after Asil. No human could move that well, witch or not. But when Bran's mother had enslaved him, she could move like that, too.
He'd have been horrified, except that worse happened: he came to her call like the well-trained pet he'd once been-a long, long time ago.
"Tag," the witch purred as she walked around him. "Colin Taggart. A little on the small side...for a werewolf."
He was aware, though she was apparently not, of the tension that held Asil as he waited for her to discover how he'd misinformed her, without ever lying. "I told you he'd send Tag" was not "Look, there's Tag." Asil was trying, and Bran gave him credit for it, knowing how difficult to balance upon was the line he was treading.
From the fear radiating off of him, Asil knew what the consequences of a witch trying to make Bran a pet might be. There weren't many people left who would remember what had happened when Bran had broken free of his mother at last: Samuel, Asil...He couldn't think of a third, it had been a long time ago. Likely the witches themselves didn't know why it was forbidden to try to take a werewolf for a pet or familiar-not that most of them had the power to do it.
Bran would hold out for a while. First, the witch could make a mistake-especially if she didn't know whom she held. Second, he was afraid that this time no one would be able to kill him. It had been Samuel who brought him out of it before...and Samuel wasn't as certain of himself as he used to be.
The control the witch asserted over him had to be won by blood and flesh, and the only flesh and blood bonding he'd done was to his own pack. She must have used Asil to insert herself into his pack-but how?
While she looked him over, he searched his link to Asil for something that touched a witch. He paid very little attention to the witch as she talked at him. With the dexterity of a very long lifetime, Bran slid through Asil and found a dead woman-it could only be Asil's mate. It was an impossibility.
No one could link to a dead woman; he knew that because when Blue Jay Woman, Charles's mother, died, he'd tried to hold on to her.
But, impossibilities become possible when you added a witch into the mix.
He couldn't go exploring further; the woman was dead, and her link was through Asil-but the only way the witch's control of him made sense was if she was tied closely to Asil's dead mate. Then she could run her own magic through that link and take control of any of Bran's
He took the time to give Asil a cold look. Asil would have known that the bond to his dead mate was still in place-and he should have told Bran. He had the feeling that there were more things he should have known.
The witch had somehow kept the mating bond alive while she killed Sarai.
He hated witches.
"Colin Taggart," she purred. "You are mine now. Your will is mine."
He felt the magic she poured at him. Some of it slid off him like honey on warm toast: lingering a bit, here and there. But then it attached and solidified as she paced around him whispering the words of her spelling. It didn't hurt precisely, but it made him feel claustrophobic, and when he tried to move, he couldn't.
Panic flared, and something stirred where he had long ago buried it. He took a deep shuddering breath and tried to shut the witch out of his awareness. Panic was very, very dangerous-far more dangerous than this witch.
So he turned his attention to other things.
First, he tried to cut Asil off from the pack. If he broke the tie between him and Asil, he might stand a chance of freeing himself from the witch. He should have been able to do it, but the oddities in Asil's mate bond and the way the witch had twisted it fouled the pack magic until he wasn't certain that he could cut Asil free of anyone: Sarai, the witch, the pack, or Bran, even with a full blood-and-flesh banishment ceremony.
The beat of the witch's chant changed, and he felt her control tighten around him until he couldn't breathe...No.
He tuned the witch out entirely and set about minimizing the damage as best he could.
He constricted the connections he had to his pack until he could barely feel them. If he'd had a normal pack, he might have chanced dropping the reins entirely-but there were too many who could not stand on their own for long. Constricting them would help hide them from a witch's magic-and make it difficult for her to use them if she tried.
Through Asil she had him, but if he could help it, she wouldn't access any more of his pack. If Asil managed to keep her thinking he was Tag, she wouldn't even know where to look.
There were a few old ones whose control had become delicate; those he gave to Samuel, cutting them from him entirely. It would be a jolt to Samuel, but the wolves knew his son and wouldn't protest. Samuel could handle them for a while.
He didn't know if a witch who so obviously had some of the attributes of a werewolf would know enough about wolves to untangle what he did, but he would make it as difficult as he could. At the very least he would slow her down.
But the real reason for his urgency was so that when...if he went mad, he wouldn't take the whole pack with him immediately. Someone-Charles was his best hope, though Asil might manage it-would have a chance to kill him.
He finished his work before the witch finished hers. It had been centuries since he was so alone in his own head. Under different circumstances, he might almost have enjoyed it.
He didn't fight the witch when she snapped her fingers and told him to heel. He walked at her left side while Asil, in human form, escorted her from the right.
Somehow he didn't think that she perceived the shadow-creature that almost paced beside Asil. He wouldn't have noticed himself if he hadn't seen the snow dent ever so slightly under wolf paws he couldn't see-but he could smell her and the magic on her.
Guardians, they once called such things. A charismatic name for such abominations, he'd always thought. He had been pleased when he'd heard that the family with that spell had at last been eliminated. Obviously his information hadn't been completely accurate. Even at the peak of their power, though, he'd never heard of them making a guardian from a werewolf.
Bran looked at Asil, but he couldn't tell if the Moor knew part of his mate accompanied them-as if she'd been called into being so often she almost had a presence outside of her creator's call. Guardians, he recalled, were destroyed every seven years to prevent just such an occurrence. Sarai's wolf had been around for two hundred years-he wondered how much autonomy she had.
"Tell me, Asil," the witch commanded, her arm tucked into the Moor's as if he were some long-ago gentleman and she a lady strolling through a ballroom rather than two-foot-deep snow. "How did you feel when Sarai chose to protect me rather than stay true to you?"
There was truth in her words; she believed that Sarai had made a choice. From the hesitation in Asil's steady footfall, he heard it, too.
"Was that what she did?" he asked.
"She loved me better than she loved you," the witch said. "I am her little butterfly, and she takes care of me."
Asil was silent for a moment, then he said, "I don't think you've been anyone's Mariposa for a long time."
The witch stopped and switched abruptly to Spanish. "Liar. Liar. You don't know anything. She loved me. Me! She stayed with me when you went off on your journeys. She only sent me away because of you."
"She loved you," he agreed. "Once. Now she is no more. She cannot love anyone."
Looking out of the corner of his eye at the faint paw prints that were set into the snow so close to Asil's hip, Bran wasn't so sure.
"You were always stupid," the witch said. "You made her send me away. She would have kept me home where I belonged."
"You were a witch, and you had no control of your powers, " Asil said. "You needed to be trained."
"You didn't send me to be trained," she shouted, tears glistening in her eyes as she jerked her arm free and backed away. "You sent me to prison. And you knew. I read the letters you wrote to her. You knew what kind of training that witch provided. Linnea wasn't a teacher, she was a prison guard."
Asil looked down at the witch, blank-faced. "It was send you to Linnea or kill you. Linnea had a reputation for rehabilitation. "
"Rehabilitation? I did nothing wrong!" She stamped her foot as if she were still a child rather than a witch fully a hundred years older than she should have ever been.
"Nothing?" Asil's tone was cool. "You tried to poison Sarai, twice. Villagers inexplicably lost pets. And you tried to pretend you were Sarai and came to my bed. I think Sarai would have forgiven you everything except that."
The witch screamed, a wordless, almost inhuman scream of rage-and in the distance there was an explosion.
The witch froze in her tracks, then bowed her head, grabbing her temples. Bran felt her control loosen. In that moment he attacked. Not physically. She still had control of his body.
He used the bonds as she had, throwing his rage through the link to Asil and to Sarai and beyond. If he'd had five minutes, or maybe even three, he'd have broken free. He did something to the link she held to Sarai, but it wasn't enough.
The witch recovered too soon-but he cost her. She pushed him out of the link and spelled the bindings to prevent him doing it again. When it was over he was still her wolf-but she had blood trickling out of her nose.
"You told me this was a lesser wolf," she spat, and if she hadn't been so hurt, Bran thought she might have killed Asil then and there. "And I believed you-just as I believed you were sending me away for my own good. I should know better. He is smarter than that. When you failed, you and that other wolf-Bran would send only the best. You lie and lie as if it were the truth."
"You don't want to believe me," Asil said. "But you can taste truth-your link to Sarai is strong enough. You were a danger to yourself and us. We did it for your own good. It was that or kill you."
She flicked a trembling finger at him. "Shut up."
Asil's face lost its cool composure, and he grimaced. As he continued, his voice was breathless with pain. "What you have done is an abomination. This thing you have turned Sarai into doesn't love you, she serves as a slave serves, without the ability to choose, just as I do. Bran is more than you can handle. He will kill you-and it is your own fault."
"I won't die," she shouted at him. "I didn't die when Linnea tried to kill me-she didn't know how powerful I was or how much my mother had taught me. I killed her and her pet students and studied the books she left behind-for months I wrote to you and signed the letters from her while I studied. But I knew that I would die without protection. Even my mother died. So I took Sarai as my guardian, and she gave me her long life so that she would never live without me. You can't do that to someone against her nature. You can't. She had to love me for it to work."
Not true for the guardian spell, thought Bran, but perhaps for the binding that allowed Asil's witch to share in a werewolf's immortality. Maybe that was why his mother had used him, rather than the pet she used to Change him and Samuel.
"Did you love her?" Asil asked.
"Of course I loved her!"
He grimaced, and whispered, "I would have given my life for hers-and you stole it for yours. You don't know what love is."
Suddenly she was calm. With a queenly lift of her chin, she said, "I'll live longer than you. Come along, I have business to attend to." She looked down at Bran. "You, too, Colin Taggart. We have things to attend to."
He sent a question to Asil, not knowing if the witch's magic would allow it. How important is it that she not know who I am? His mother had made certain that the only one he could talk to mind to mind was her. But this witch was not of his mother's family, so it should work.
The witch reached out an imperialistic hand, and Asil gave her his arm. "Now, how long do you suppose it will be before Bran comes himself-and how many wolves will he bring with him?"
Asil glanced back at Bran, and as soon as the witch couldn't see his face, he shot his eyes up to the sky answering Bran's question. It was very important that she not know who he was.
"Soon," Asil told the witch. "And I don't think that he'd bring any wolves at all. Once you take him, you'll have all of his pack."
That last sentence had been meant for him. Well, then, he'd protected his pack as best he could for now.
"Good," the witch said. "Let's go deal with his son and that interfering bitch, shall we? Maybe I'll prepare a present of him for Bran-a welcoming gift. What do you think he'd like best? A wolf pelt or human skin. The pelt is soft and warm, but human skin is so much more horrifying-and more useful afterward. Take me to Charles."
It stirred in him, the berserker making itself felt. He soothed it and himself, with the knowledge that Charles was a wily old wolf, an experienced hunter. If she hadn't taken him yet, if that explosion had been him, then Charles knew what he faced. She wouldn't take him by surprise.
Watch out, my son. The witch is after you. Run.
Charles half expected the witch to come hurrying back, but he caught no sign of her all the way back to the Humvee. Which was where things quit going their way.
"Isn't that your truck?" Anna asked him.
"Yes," he said grimly. He opened the door and let his nose tell him what he already knew. His father had driven it here. The cab was cold. He'd come hours ago.
As Tag had promised, it took only a little wandering around to find a place he could call.
The phone call to Bran's cell turned up the phone in his father's pants pocket, neatly folded on the truck's seat. A call to his father's mate only established what he'd already known-his father had left in the middle of the night, and Leah didn't like Bran's younger son any the better for it. Samuel was more helpful, though Charles didn't like what he had to say.
Charles ended the call after a few unsatisfactory minutes. "You heard all that?"
"Your father knows that we might be hunting the witch who killed Asil's mate. He knows that Asil came here looking for us." She touched his shoulder.
On the off chance it might help him figure out what his father was up to, Charles gathered such magic as belonged to him as his mother's son and reached out to the pack.
"Charles?"
He was astounded to find himself still on his feet. His head felt as if someone had clubbed him, and he had to blink a couple of times to see. All he could think was that the unimaginable had happened-Bran was dead.
"Charles, what's wrong?"
He held up a hand as he focused his attention on the blankness that had always been his link to his father, and through him, the rest of the pack. What he found let him breathe again.
"Da's shut down the pack bonds." He gave Anna a smile as bleak as he felt inside. "He's not dead; they're not gone completely."
"Why would he do that? What does it mean?"
"I don't know." He looked down at Anna. "I want you to take Walter and drive to Kennewick, Washington, where my brother is."
She folded her arms and gave him her stubborn look. "No. And don't try that again. I felt that push. You can be as dominant as you want, but remember it doesn't work on me. If she's using the pack bonds, Walter and I might be your ace in the hole. I'm not going to leave you here, and you might as well stop trying to make me."
He frowned at her fiercely-a look that had cowed older, more powerful people-and she tapped her finger on his breastbone. "Won't work. If you leave me here, I'll just follow you."
He wasn't going to tie her up-and he had the sinking feeling that was the only way he'd be able to leave her behind. Resigned to his fate, he organized them for another trek into the wilds. They'd travel light. He repacked Anna's pack with food, fire-starting equipment, and their pot for heating water. He found the pair of snowshoes that lived behind the seat of his truck in the winter. Everything else he left in the truck.
"Do you think he's found her already?" Anna asked, as they trudged back into the mountains, following his father's tracks.
"I don't know," he told her, though he was afraid he did. Unless Bran really could read minds, the only way Charles could see Bran knowing the witch was using their pack magic against them was if he'd seen it for himself.
He wished he knew if following his father was smarter than getting in the car and driving to southern Mexico. Part of him wanted to believe in the myth of the invulnerable Marrok, but the smarter part, the part that had stood meekly answering the witch's questions, was all too aware that his father was a real person, however old and powerful: he wasn't invulnerable.
Charles drew in a breath. He was bone-deep tired, and his chest hurt, and his leg. Worse than they had earlier this morning. He was not so stupid that he did not know why. His father had been feeding him strength from the pack.
Even with his spare snowshoes walking was hard. If she had Bran, Charles was no longer sure they had even a chance of saving themselves.
He didn't tell Anna. Not because he thought it would frighten her-but because by voicing his fears, he might make them real. She knew anyway; he saw it in her eyes.
Watch out, my son. The witch is after you. Run.
"Now that was useful, Da," he said out loud. "Why don't you tell me where you are, or where you're going?"
"Charles?"
"My father can talk in people's heads," he told her. "But he claims not to receive. Which means when he tells you something, you can't argue or ask him for what you need."
"What did he tell you?"
"The witch has him, and she's coming after us. She has Asil-she can find us. He didn't give me any useful information, like where they are or anything like that."
"He told you to leave."
"He told me to run." Charles glowered at her. With the pack bonds constricted so far, his father's order had been more like a suggestion. "Damned if I'm going to leave him to her."
"Of course not," Anna said. "But we're going the wrong direction."
"What do you mean?"
"I think they'll be headed to the cabin we blew up."
Charles stopped and looked at her. "Why?"
"If she asks Asil to find us, that's where he'll go-to give us a chance to escape." She gave him a tired grin. "Asil is practiced at hedging orders-I've heard the stories."
It sounded like something the old bastard would do at that. If he hadn't been so tired, he might have thought of it himself. At any rate, it was better than wandering in his father's footsteps.
Charles looked down at Walter. "You know the fastest way to the cabin from here?"
Even as they turned around and followed Walter, Charles knew they were making a mistake. His father was right, they should run. Every instinct told him so. But as long as there was a chance to save Bran, Charles couldn't leave him to his fate. Listening to your instincts, his father liked to say, was not the same thing as being blindly obedient to them.
Anna understood the impulse that had driven Charles to try to send her and Walter to his brother and out of danger. She felt the same way.
Charles was slowing down. Some of it was walking through snow that was two inches thick one place and hip high in others; even with them both in snowshoes, it was hard going. Most of it, she was pretty sure, was from his wounds.
Walter, still in wolf form, had taken to walking next to Charles and steadying him unobtrusively with a well-placed shoulder.
When she saw Charles shiver, she stopped.
"Change." She knew it wouldn't help much, but the wolf had four legs to bear his weight instead of two. The wolf would generate heat better than the human, and his fur coat would retain it. She knew from her own extensive experience that the wolf could function better wounded than her human form.
It was a measure of Charles's exhaustion that he didn't bother arguing but simply stripped. He stored his snowshoes, bandages, boots, and clothes tidily in some brush.
When he was naked, she could see all of his wounds clearly. They looked horrible, gaping desecrations of the smooth perfection of muscle and bone.
He crouched down so he didn't have as far to fall if he lost his balance when he changed. The new view of the hole in his back wasn't as bad as the last time she'd seen it. Despite everything, he was healing.
His change took almost as long as most wolves would have. The bullet hole looked odd on wolf-shaped ribs; the entry and exit wounds no longer lined up, the larger exit wound above the smaller hole.
"We'll need to rest and eat before we get there," she told him. "We won't do your father any good if we are exhausted. "
He didn't answer her, just put his head down and followed Walter.
Walter's shortcut was the roughest ground so far, leaving Anna cursing her snowshoes and the brush that caught at her bindings and hair. They were scrambling up a steep bit when both the wolves stopped and dropped to the ground.
Anna followed suit and tried to see what had alarmed them.
