Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson, #9)(18)

Darryl grabbed the javelin Tad handed him and bolted past Adam and me. I let Adam go and rolled so I could see. The troll was down; the second pipe javelin had struck truer than the first, and the top third of the troll had turned an unhealthy gray color. Darryl, javelin held high, skidded to a stop when Joel, his whole body a bright flaming orange, leaped from the top of a car, over the cement divider, and landed on top of the troll. Darryl backed up until he was level with Tad, who had stopped next to me, as Joel attacked in a ferocious rage and a heat that I could feel from twenty feet away.

The troll didn’t move when Joel tore into it, gulping down the green-and-red flesh. The troll was unconscious or dead, I couldn’t tell which, and it didn’t matter for long. Its flesh melted where the tibicena touched it, turning first black, then crumbling to gray ashes. The huge body was consumed by Joel’s heat in what could only have been a few minutes. The tibicena continued to eat, even when there was no meat left.

We didn’t move, none of us, but still, Joel looked up suddenly, his mouth full of ash. He glared at us, his eyes a hot, iridescent red.

I stood up, using the walking stick, which was under my hand though I’d left it a dozen yards away, for balance. I didn’t like being on the ground with a predator so near.

I cleared my throat. “Joel,” I said. My voice sounded oddly wobbly to me, and I hoped no one else heard it.

Joel’s lips curled back, displaying black teeth and a red, red tongue. The fringe of stone mane around his neck rippled as he shook his broad head in open threat, and it made a clattering noise, almost like wind chimes. He growled.

“Joel,” I said, reaching for Adam’s power. “Stop.”

I’d done this before, called upon my mate’s power of domination to make someone do something—or not do something. But this time, there was no surge of Alpha magic in my words. There were a lot of possible reasons for the failure: the fact that I’d never tried it with Adam unconscious came right to mind. Maybe he was too wounded to fuel my voice. But the reason didn’t matter, only the result. The tibicena took a step forward.

Some motion at the corner of my eye attracted my attention. I took a quick glance to my right and saw a kid, a boy maybe ten years old give or take a couple of years, climb over the cement barrier, just a few yards from Joel. I blinked, and it was still true. This stupid kid was dropping on the ground, his face calm, approaching Joel as if he were a friendly dog instead of a slathering tibicena with smoke and heat rising from his body in waves.

“Stay back,” I shouted, starting forward—but a hand closed around my arm and pulled me back against a man’s body. He only controlled that arm, so I twisted toward his hold, desperate to get free so I could stop the poor dumb kid who was about to die. When I turned, I saw it was Tad who held me back, his face thin, grim, and bruised. I only just stopped the instinctive hit that would have broken his ribs and set me loose.

“Let me go,” I snapped at him. But I kept my voice low—I didn’t want to set the tibicena off. I jerked to get free, but Tad held me as if I hadn’t been practicing how to break this exact hold just last week—if I’d been willing to hurt him, I could have broken away, but I couldn’t make myself do it.

“Wait,” he said.

“Tad, Joel isn’t running this show,” I hissed. “He’s going to kill that boy.”

Joel had quit looking at me at all. His attention was focused on the kid, who was dressed in sweats that were too large for him. They looked suspiciously like the sweats we kept tucked around in the cars of pack and friends of pack members.

Joel wouldn’t survive if he killed a child. The thought decided me, and when I started struggling again, I went for blood.

Tad grabbed my hand before I could hit him in the jaw, then pinned me in a lock I couldn’t break, my back to his front. “It’s okay,” he said. “This one isn’t just a kid. Watch.”

Joel snarled at the boy, who ignored him and touched the tibicena’s shoulder. Joel, who was not Joel but the volcano demon who lived inside him, looked smug, probably waiting for fiery death to consume the boy the way it had the troll. Horrified, I waited for the same thing.

We were both wrong.

The skin of the boy’s hand flushed red, and the color traveled through him, and he rocked back a little, then leaned his weight on his hand.

Whatever he looked like, that was not a human boy. His hand hadn’t burst into flame or blackened with third-degree burns. No human could have touched Joel when he was running that hot without getting hurt. Tad released my arm with a pat. I took two steps so that I stood next to Adam’s prone body, in case the tibicena decided to do something rather than just stand under the boy’s touch, because fire was only one of Joel’s weapons.

The hot air on my face faded, replaced by river-cooled wind. Joel staggered and collapsed. The curious blackened-stone exterior of the tibicena lost the redness of heat and became entirely black.

“I told you it would be okay,” Tad said.

“He’s not hurting Joel?” I asked anxiously.

“Joel?” he asked. “Is that the name of the fire-breathing foo dog? I thought you killed it. How did you manage to take the volcano god’s servant? I assume he’s yours from the way he was fighting.”

“Not a foo dog,” I said tightly. “He’s a tibicena. They are very hard to kill, and when you do, they go out and invade the body of friends. Like Joel. But we . . . I made him pack.”