Charles could hear the helicopter lift, engines purring. Perhaps the man knew about the stream. There was a clearing (Charles was pretty sure) about a quarter of a mile from where he was tailing the man.
Unlikely that Charles could pull down the helicopter. But the man was easy prey.
He’d capture this one, Charles thought. This one was human, so not a werewolf intruding on their territory. Brother Wolf wouldn’t insist on his death. This one would be full of interesting information. He slid silently through the forest, he and Brother Wolf on a hunt.
And then the earth rumbled, and the spirits of the earth rose with a howl of anger and loss. Next to Charles, a lodgepole pine that was older than he was, maybe seventy feet tall, fell with a crack that shook the ground again.
It took a moment for Charles to realize what had happened.
Charles understood that some of his choices had just been made for him. Brother Wolf would not allow any of the attackers to live now. The meaty noise as Brother Wolf tore into the last of their enemies on the ground must also have made it through the device the man wore because the helicopter abruptly changed directions, the noise it generated growing softer and disappearing to the east.
Brother Wolf dropped the body, finished with his task. Charles stepped into his human shape and frowned down at the dead man. He had needed to save one of them. One. So he could question him and find out who was sending teams with helicopter backup into the Marrok’s territory.
But he would have to find that information elsewhere. Inside him, Brother Wolf snarled back, still raging. The earth roiled again, a lesser quake soon over. Charles took a deep breath and starting walking back.
* * *
• • •
ANNA DROPPED AS soon as Charles did. She belly-crawled to where he’d tossed the witchcrafted weapon and grabbed it. It was important both as a clue and as a weapon that someone could use against them—as evidenced not only by common sense but because Charles dumped it before he changed so that it wouldn’t go wherever his clothes went when he shifted.
A rifle sounded twice. She was fairly certain the sound came from the same place as the initial shots had. Charles had found their shooter. A moment later, she heard a thud as something heavy hit the ground with significant force. She hoped it wasn’t Charles.
But worry or not, she kept moving. Once the weapon was securely tucked back in the waistband of her jeans, she crawled to where Hester had dropped in the shelter of the underbrush, where her black coat made her virtually invisible.
“We should get deeper into the shadows,” Anna whispered, her attention on the forest around them. She could hear the soft sounds of movement approaching their position. She wasn’t as good as some of the old wolves yet, but she could tell distance and direction pretty well.
Scent should be useful, too, and she took a deep breath of blood-scented air. About that time, Anna noticed that Hester wasn’t just being still—she was still.
She grabbed the wolf by any hold she could find and pulled her deeper into the bushes, where the leaves would give them some cover from any sniper fire. Anna dragged Hester into a bed of old leaves that smelled of coyote and mulch tucked in the lee of a rock the size of a small house.
Sheltered in the overhang of the rock and the leafy branches of a strand of aspen, Anna looked for the wound that left Hester limp and unresponsive. She found it, a darker hole in the darkness of Hester’s black fur, a hole in the center of her forehead. Hester wasn’t going to walk out of this one.
The wolf’s ribs moved, air hissed out, then Hester . . . Hester’s corpse, was still. A moment later the earth rolled, dirt sifting down from the rock above. Anna gave the rock a worried look, but, like an iceberg, she was pretty sure the biggest part of it was buried underground. If that rock rolled over, it would be a sign that the end was near and nowhere was safe.
Anna crouched beneath the rock, buffeted by the earth and by the death of the wolf she’d only just met, a death she could feel sliding through Bran and into the pack bonds like the icy burn of a dental probe that left numbness behind. Not as bad as when one of the members of the Marrok’s pack itself died, but it was bad enough.
After a breathless second, the earth rolled a second time, then stilled. It was a waiting stillness. Almost, Anna thought she could see the wood as her mate sometimes did, alive with spirits, all of them watching . . . something. Waiting.
She waited, too. But when nothing more happened, Anna turned her attention back to Hester. Anna found the slug caught in a mass of blood and fur at the back of Hester’s neck. She untangled it, a small, mangled thing. It burned her hands.
If it had been lead it probably would have killed Hester anyway. Werewolves were tough but not indestructible.
Anna closed her fingers around the slug. Such a small thing to end the life of a creature who had been alive when the Mayflower set sail. Powerful . . . ugly . . . and sad.
The fingers of her other hand worked their way into black fur, caressing the wolf who would not care. Anna could hear the faint sounds as the enemies around her died, and she could not feel sorry for them. They were the ones who had brought death here.
But the lumpy weapon in the small of her back made her worry for her mate. She could still see, in her mind’s eye, the moment he fell—and only her mating bond had attested that he was still alive. Hester, old and clever, lay dead beside her. In a world where such things happened, Charles could die, too.
It was only five or six minutes after the last tremor before the leaves rustled and Charles, in human form, crawled into her refuge. Light trickled shyly through the canopy of foliage over their heads and touched his braid and the edge of his cheekbone.
This time his T-shirt was black. Usually, the shirts he wore when his magic clothed him were red. The black one meant that he’d known about Hester, Anna thought, either from the eerie knowing of her death through Bran’s bonds with the pack or from the strange waiting feeling that had followed the last earthquake.
Earthquakes weren’t as common here as they were in California, but the heart of the Rocky Mountains was a living thing, and sometimes it moved. But the rumble of the ground beneath her had felt more personal than that.
“First shot took her in the head,” Anna told him, her voice sounding abnormally calm to her own ears. “She dropped before the second shot.”
Charles’s eyes, dark and liquid, watched her carefully.
She cleared her throat. She was a werewolf, she reminded herself sternly, someone who was used to death, the proper mate of Charles Cornick, son of the Marrok. She held out the slug to Charles and pretended her hand wasn’t shaking, that her free hand wasn’t buried in the ruff of Hester’s thick, black coat, clutching the other wolf as if letting go would signal the end of something important.
Her voice was steady when she spoke. “This is what killed her—it looks weird to me. Not like the bullets we shoot.”