Burn Bright (Alpha & Omega #5)(80)

While she’d been thinking—only a second or two, she was pretty sure—Devon had disappeared. Apparently, the Kodiak bear that had appeared in Jericho-the-wolf’s stead had convinced him when she had not.

Anna rolled to her feet and sprinted for where they’d left the vehicles. There wouldn’t be a holy man waiting for her, but maybe someone would still have things that she could use to set a skinwalker on fire. She tried not to remember that she’d ridden in two of those vehicles and didn’t recall noticing the smell of anything volatile.

? ? ?

THE CARS WERE all locked. Since Asil had been in charge of Hester’s pyre, his was the first car she assaulted. She could probably have broken the latch on the back hatch but wasn’t sure enough to try it. If she failed, she might just jam the stupid thing—and that would slow her down further.

So she broke the driver’s side window with her elbow. A rock would have saved her some pain, but she was too worried about time to look around for a rock.

“Keep him busy,” she muttered to her husband, but she didn’t send it along their bond. She didn’t want to distract him. That Kodiak had been as big as a truck and unholy quick.

Charles was the bogeyman of the werewolves. He could take a bear, no matter how big it was. And all he had to do was hold on until she got back.

She popped the back hatch of Asil’s Mercedes open with a button and found a barbecue lighter but nothing else. Nor was there any sign that there had ever been anything else. Knowing Asil, he probably had C-4 stashed in sealed containers along with detonators somewhere in the car. But no one but Asil would be able to find it.

She wondered if C-4 would kill the skinwalker as well as fire would.

“Come on, come on,” she said, frustrated at the empty vehicle. “It’s a start, but I need something bigger.”

Not too far away, she heard the sound of a motorcycle and wondered if Sage had planned far enough ahead to have stashed a vehicle to use—or if she had just found it somewhere. Anna supposed it might be someone else, but the wildlings lived in the most remote corners of the pack territory, so it was unlikely.

She broke the window on Sage’s SUV with her left elbow since her right was still sore from Asil’s car. A quick search, during which the motorcycle appeared to be approaching closer, showed her that there was nothing in Sage’s car that would be useful. But she grabbed the witch gun and tucked it into the back of her jeans. She was pretty sure that the old shaman who talked to Charles’s grandfather would have tried a witch gun on a skinwalker if he’d had one.

The motorcycle rider must be coming here because this was remote enough that there wasn’t anywhere else. That seemed to indicate that whoever it was, it was not Sage after all. If she had a motorcycle to escape on, Sage would be riding away from here as fast as she could go.

The shell on the back of Leah’s pickup wasn’t locked. In the bed of the truck, bungee-corded to the side, was a battered, metal, five-gallon can of gasoline.

“Hallelujah,” she said. “Just keep him busy, Charles, I’m coming.”

She hopped out of Leah’s truck with the full gas can in one hand and the lighter in the other just as the motorcycle—carrying a helmetless Wellesley—roared up the track and slid the dirt bike to a stop with all the aplomb of a motocross maven.

“What’s wrong?” Wellesley asked at the same time she asked him, “What are you doing here?”

He waved at her to get her to answer his question first.

“Charles—” She started to tell him, then realized how long that would take.

“I don’t have time for this,” she told him, impatiently, and took off up the trail, carrying the mostly full five-gallon can and the lighter.

She didn’t care if she lit the whole forest on fire just so long as she saved Charles. Wellesley ran beside her. He made no effort to take the gas can from her.

“Talk while you run,” he said.

“If I can talk,” she retorted, increasing her pace, “then I’m not running fast enough.”

Apparently, he could run and talk at her fastest pace because he said, “I’m here because my wolf spirit woke me up from a sound sleep and told me that our enemy was this way. So what are you trying to burn, Anna Cornick? Why are you in such a hurry to do it?”

“Skinwalker,” panted Anna. Deciding talking might be useful after all, she slowed enough that she could manage short sentences. “I think that’s the Native American version of a black witch.”

Wellesley smiled, his eyes bright gold, and when he spoke, his voice had a rasp of wolf in it, too. “I know what a skinwalker is. There was a skinwalker at Rhea Springs. She is here.”

“It is a him,” Anna huffed.

“Doesn’t matter to her what form she takes,” said Wellesley. “Male or female.”

There was a lot of confidence in his voice. “You remembered what happened at Rhea Springs,” she said.

“I did,” he said. “I remembered—”

Pain hit her through her mating bond, sharp and sudden. She put a foot wrong and tumbled into a tree, unable to catch her balance while her mind was consumed with agony that had nothing to do with her fall.

? ? ?

THE THING THAT wore Jericho’s flesh had not been a werewolf for long enough to figure out how to fight in that body. It didn’t take the skinwalker long to figure that out and take on another form.