“I didn’t,” she said with a wild little laugh. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when you walked into the restaurant this evening and told me your name. How many werewolves are there who call themselves Asil? I am fated to be your death, old wolf. A circle of fate—you killedher, and I will kill you.”
Coincidence. Asil had believed in a lot of things in his long life; coincidence was not one of them. But she was not lying.
“You set all of this up after you saw me tonight?” he asked skeptically—though he knew she was telling the truth. She was not powerful enough to conceal lies from a werewolf. But hisdisbelief—unfeigned, though not directed at her—would keep her talking.
“Joshua always visits his sisters on Friday nights,” she told him. “I knew if something happened, he would call me. I ensured something happened.”
She must have used magic to contact the wyrm, Asil thought, wondering how he’d missed her using magic in the restaurant. But she’d gone to the restroom, hadn’t she? Communication over a few miles wouldn’t have taken a lot of magic.
She drew out a knife. “I have a special death planned for you. How convenient that Helen is here to give me the power I need to make your dying so terrible that it will feed me fordecades.”
“Black witches like you gain power from pain and death,” said Asil, stating clearly what they both knew.
But Tami, crouched beside Helen and petting the unmoving woman with a tender hand, wasn’t paying attention to Asil. Instead, she crooned, “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt for long.”
He didn’t care that she didn’t acknowledge his words, because it hadn’t been Tami that Asil had been talking to.
As the witch raised her hand to position the knife against Helen’s flesh, a shot rang out.
It was a head shot, beautifully placed. The witch was dead before she would have heard the sound, her head the sort of messy ruin that buckshot fired at close range tended to make.
Shotgun in hand, Joshua jumped down into the basement with a grace that none of the other humans had managed. Asil shook himself free of the shadows of Tami’s dark magic, already fading with her death. He listened, but didn’t hear anyone approaching. A shotgun was not silent, but it also was nota common sound for the center of a city. He was of the opinion that, if they were a little lucky, andifthe shotgun was not fired again, the neighbors would probably not call the police.
Carefully not looking at the dead body, Joshua knelt beside his mother.
“Unconscious, but her breathing and her heart rate are fine,” Asil told him. She must have passed out when Tami’s magic freed her. “You were supposed to wait in the car.”
“I saw Mama come running out the front door with her shotgun,” Joshua told Asil. “I left the kids in the car—they won’t come out until I tell them—and came to see if I could talk sense to her before she confronted a witch and a werewolf.
“She set the shotgun down so she could jump into the basement, I think. She wouldn’t have jumped with a loaded weapon. By the time I got to the basement door, she was down and Tami was—Tami was…I thought Tami was one of the good guys, you know?” His voice cracked.
Asil nodded. “As did I.”
“I picked up the shotgun,” Joshua said. “And I listened to you. You were talking to me, right? Telling me what Tami was going to do to my mom?”
“Werewolves have very good hearing,” Asil told him. “I heard you.”
Joshua’s mouth twisted, and he glanced at the dead woman who lay no more than two feet from him. He swallowed. Then touched his mother’s cheek. “I know how to shoot. Mama taught me.”
“You saved your mother and me,” Asil told him.
He was pretty sure he would have killed the witch before she could get to him. The Marrok’s pack magic was particularlygood at dealing with witchcraft, possibly because the Marrok had been born a witch. But he might not have freed himself before Tami hurt Helen again—or killed her. The shotgun had been the most certain way to ensure Helen’s survival.
The boy looked at the dead witch again. “God. God. I’m going to jail. What will happen to the girls?”
A soft sound told Asil that Joshua’s situation would have to wait. He scooped up the unconscious woman and urged her son into the corner of the room farthest from the two doorways that led deeper into the basement. “Urged” was probably the wrong word. Shoved. Thrust.
Set out of harm’s way.
He got them out of the wyrm’s path while the creature busied itself with the witch’s body. It took no more than a minute for it to consume the body whole.
It was young.
An old wyrm’s scales faded to a sort of blue-tinged putty color. Their heads puffed up to an amorphous blob, while their eyes acquired a whitish coating that made them look blind. He had no idea if they were truly blind. Asil had killed an old wyrm who had enthralled a whole village. That wyrm had been forty feet long and six feet in diameter, and if it couldn’t see, it had not needed sight to be deadly. Afterward, piecing together stories, Asil thought it had been nearly six hundred years old.
Old wyrms were ugly, dreadful things. This one was beautiful.
Deadly and beautiful. Ruffled red-edged yellow scales covered it from head to tail, a distance of about fourteen feet. Its eyes, wolf gold and slit pupiled, sat in a face that reminded Asil forcefully of its distant cousin the dragon.
