Fire Touched (7 page)

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.”

The black stone surrounding the tibicena cracked and fell away, leaving Joel in his human body, pale, naked, and unconscious, facedown on the roadway. The boy stepped back. When he met
my eyes with his own, for a moment I could see that fire lived inside him. Then they were just ordinary hazel eyes.

“Did you hear that, Aiden?” Tad said. “The fire dog is a friend.”

“Yes,” said the boy, “I hear you. I heard, when the big man who killed the troll told us both the same thing before we set foot on the bridge. I'm not an idiot. I need them. The man who bears the fire dog will come to no harm from this. I didn't kill anything, just banked the fire for a while.”

The boy's accent wasn't so much a matter of pronunciation but of cadence. English wasn't his first tongue.

I took a good long breath and took stock.

Darryl, the big-man-who-had-killed-the-troll, was a couple of yards away—in position to step in if the boy hadn't defanged the tibicena. His hair still dripped water, but his various cuts and bruises from the fight had begun to fade.

“How did you get out of the river?” I asked. I didn't move because, beside me, Adam had awakened and was considering rolling to his feet. Where I was standing, my legs touching him, he could use me as an unobtrusive crutch.

His pack was loyal. Two years ago, Darryl might have put Adam down had he come upon him when he was injured like this. Adam's decision to court me had weakened the pack, and Darryl would have viewed himself as the better leader. Part of me didn't like seeing him so close to Adam when Adam couldn't defend himself—even though matters had changed. Darryl respected Adam and had not so much as breathed a desire to move to the top of the food chain.

I don't need protection from Darryl.
Adam's voice was clear in my head, though he made no effort to move.
I think you've gotten caught up in the battle that is over now, sweetheart. But
there are others watching. I'd just as soon wait until I'm sure I can walk before I try to get up.

We'd discovered that he had more control of the link between us than I did. The werewolf mating bond seemed a little confused by me. I'd grown to believe that the weird way the mating link seemed to function stronger some times than others was due to my partial immunity to magic. But this time I caught his words just fine.

He was right about Darryl, and about the wound-up feeling in my stomach that tried to tell me that the battle wasn't over yet. I breathed in and tried to relax.

“One of the patrol boats fished me out,” Darryl was saying, answering my earlier question. “I got to shore and ran into Tad, Zee, and that one.” He nodded toward the boy, who smiled, a wide, sweet smile that sent the warning hairs on the back of my neck straight up.

“The troll,” said Zee's voice heavily, “was sent after us, but someone forgot about trolls and bridges and the effect of running water on some forms of magic. Old Jarnvid might not have won in the lottery when they were passing brains out to trolls, but running water was his element, and trolls are difficult to control when they are in the same room with you.”

I stayed where I was, one foot touching Adam, but turned to see my old friend. It was unlike him to have sent Tad into battle while he waited on the sidelines.

Zee wasn't looking at me but at the ashes of the troll, which were blowing away in the river's breeze, as he continued talking. “Or maybe they thought they were safe because trolls can't connect to most bridges now. Too many of the bridges today use too much steel. Maybe they—whoever they are—mistakenly assumed the troll would remain under their influence despite the distance
and the running water. Or maybe they intended to ‘accidentally' lose control and let loose one of the more violent trolls in history on the human population.”

Beyond him, I saw a handful of pack members running up the arc of the bridge toward where we were standing. Down by the police barricade, Warren was talking to the police officers. I knew from his body language, and because I knew Warren, that he was keeping them back until we had our vulnerable protected and our dangerous people contained.

“Hey, Ben?”

Our English wolf looked at me, his clear blue eyes missing their usual ironic cast, and sprinted the rest of the way to us.

“Could you go check on Zack? I think the troll threw a car on him just over the crest of the bridge.” He wasn't dead. I'd know if he were dead, but I was betting Zack was a long way from healthy.

“Car?” Ben said, and glanced around. “Fucking troll throwing fucking cars. What's the world coming to?” He pointed a finger at Scott and Sherwood, who'd followed his sprint. “You and you, come with me. We're to rescue our Zackie boy, who might have gotten smashed by a fucking car.”

Ben's swearing was usually a bit more creative. I had the feeling that he was a little overwhelmed. It didn't stop him from herding his chosen minions over the bridge. Ben had been climbing the pack hierarchy—not by battling his way up but by not backing down. It was a subtler way to do it, more difficult in its way. But it was better for the pack, and for Ben.

Satisfied that Zack would be attended to, I turned my attention back to Zee. “You escaped from the reservation, and they sent a troll after you?”

Zee was wearing his usual appearance, a wiry old man with a small potbelly and a balding spot in the thin white hair on his head. Unlike Tad, he didn't look thinner or grimmer or anything. But Zee wasn't half-human, and his glamour could look any way he chose. He held himself stiffly, as if he hurt—which explained why it had been Tad transforming pipe for javelins and not Zee. But the look in Zee's eyes told me not to mention it.

“Tad told me you destroyed my shop,” he said sourly.

I shrugged. “Wasn't me. It was pretty tough to keep up with things with just Tad and me anyway.”

He frowned at me suspiciously. “You still owe me the money on it even if it doesn't exist anymore.” The fae are very particular about their bargains.

“Insurance and Adam are rebuilding it,” I told him. “And I've been making payments into your account the tenth of every month, which you would know if you only looked. I've never been more than a week late since I bought it from you.”

“See that you aren't,” he grunted. “I love you” can be said in odd ways when you deal with very old fae. I was satisfied, and I think he was, too, because he quit paying attention to me. He frowned at Tad. It was the same expression he had on his face when someone brought a car into the shop before we figured out just what was wrong with it. He was, I thought, checking for damage.

Finished, the old fae glanced at Adam, who was still lying, apparently unconscious, next to me.

“Old man,” said the boy Tad had called Aiden. He'd been waiting with apparent patience while Zee and I talked, without moving away from Joel. It wasn't
quite
a threat, but there was something deliberate about it. If it doesn't walk or talk like a ten-year-old,
despite appearances, I wasn't going to treat him like a ten-year-old if I could help it. He was dangerous.

No one had gone to Joel's aid, and I realized they were waiting for me to signal them. Was this boy—and I wasn't the only one who knew he wasn't wholly human—an enemy? Joel breathed easily, but his body was lax.

“Old man,” said the boy, “I'll have you do as you promised.”

“This is Aiden the Fire Touched, Mercy,” Zee said neutrally. “I told him that your pack could likely make the Gray Lords back down for a day or two if you chose to.”

“You should live up to your word,” said the boy, his voice low and threatening.

Zee's eyelids lowered. “You don't know as much as you think you do,” he said.
“Boy.”

Nope, I thought. If this boy was as young as he looked, I'd eat my hat—but he didn't smell like fae. I was close enough, and the wind was right; if he were fae, I should be able to scent it.

The boy held up his hand, still ruddy with heat. “One,” he said, displaying a finger. “You will introduce me to the Alpha of the pack.” He held up a second finger. “Two. You will ask them, as a person friendly to the pack, if they will protect me—even if it is only temporary.” He held up a third finger. “Three—you will do your best to see that they agree.”

“Snotty,” I observed to Zee.

He pursed his lips. Which wasn't actually an agreement. He didn't like many people, my old friend, but he was soft on this boy, and I couldn't see much reason for it. Most people wouldn't be able to tell that Zee liked him, but I'd known the grumpy old man for a long time.

“What did he promise in return?” I asked him curiously.

“He got Dad and me out of Fairyland,” Tad said, and when his dad grunted, he added, “Out of the Walla Walla reservation, then. And when he could have left us behind and escaped free without going back on his word, he stayed to help.”

The boy had been following the conversation; now he narrowed his eyes at me. “
Who
are you?”