"What was she trying to do?" She stayed in the doorway, and Walter settled in behind her. Neither of them made any attempt to come inside.
He shrugged. "I have no idea. Maybe it was to power the spell she worked on you last night. A dark witch gains power from others' pain and suffering."
Anna looked sick. "There are worse monsters to be than a werewolf, aren't there?"
"Yes," he agreed. "Not all witches use things like this, but it's hard to be a good witch."
There was a scrying bowl, still filled with water, on the floor next to the raccoon. The interior temperature of the cabin wasn't much warmer than outside; if it had been there long, it would have been ice. They hadn't missed the witch by much.
He didn't want to, but he touched the dead animal to see how long ago she'd worked her misery on it. Its flesh was still...
It moved weakly, and he had his knife out and its neck severed as quickly as he could manage, nauseated by the knowledge that it had still been alive. Nothing should have been able to live through the torture it had undergone. He gave a more thoughtful look to the floorboards. Maybe the reason there was no smell of rot was because what she had down there, anchoring her power circle, wasn't dead, either.
Walter growled, and Charles echoed the sentiment.
"She left it alive," Anna whispered.
"Yes. And likely she'll know we killed it." Charles cleaned his knife on the sleeping bag, then put it back in its sheath.
"So what do we do now?"
"Burn the cabin," Charles said. "Most of witchcraft is potions and spells. Burning her place of power will cripple her a bit." And release whatever poor thing or things she had trapped underneath the cabin, too. He wasn't going to tell Anna about that unless he had to.
Anna found a half-full five-gallon can of gasoline tied onto the four-wheeler, and Charles doused the cot and then the bonfire he'd built in the middle of the floor with the witch's firewood. He sent Anna and Walter away from the building before lighting the tinder with a match. The gasoline burned his nose as the fire flared hotly to life. He waited until he was sure it was hot enough to burn the cabin before he left.
He trotted toward Anna and Walter, who'd stopped some distance away. When he reached them, he caught Anna's hand and tugged her farther, urged on by the itch between his shoulder blades. Which was why they were fifty yards away when the cabin exploded, knocking them all to the ground.
Anna raised her face out of the snow and spat some dirt out of her mouth. "What happened? Did she have some dynamite or something?"
Charles rolled over and sat up, fighting not to show how much falling with a chest wound had hurt. "I don't know. But magic and fire have an odd, synergistic effect sometimes. " He looked at where the cabin had been and whistled soundlessly. There was almost nothing left of it, just a few rows of stone on the ground where the base of the fireplace had been. Pieces of four-wheeler and cabin were scattered almost to their feet, and the trees nearest the cabin had been splintered like toothpicks.
"Wow," Anna said. "Are you all right, Walter?"
The wolf came to his feet and shook himself, looking into Anna's face with adoring eyes.
"She knew we'd be hunting her," said Charles. "She tried to hide this from us. I didn't smell any trace of her when Walter and I circled the cabin. Did you, Walter?"
The big wolf had not.
"So what do we do?"
"Despite all our fears, I think it's time to call my father." He smiled at Anna. "We're not too far from the car, and he knows something's wrong anyway. He woke me up last night-that's how I knew you were in trouble. He's not stupid, and he knows a few other witches we can call upon."
* * * *
Bran had been running for several hours or so when he heard them.
"I told you he was most likely to send Tag if Charles needed help," said Asil. "I told you he wouldn't be such a fool as to come himself."
Bran planted all four feet and slid to a stop. Asil hadn't spoken loudly, but he'd known Bran would hear him. Which meant it was already too late to escape.
Witches could hide in plain sight if they had some sort of hold on you. And Asil was clearly not speaking to Charles, so he belonged to the witch. And he belonged to Bran. That was enough of a connection for hide-me spells to work on Bran.
He turned to face Asil and found him standing on a boulder the size of a small elephant. Next to Asil, a smallish woman bundled against the cold held on to Asil as if she thought the wind might blow her off the rock.
"Why he'd think that Tag would do any better than I, I don't know," continued Asil coolly. There was hell in his eyes, but the rest of his face and his body language matched the voice.
"Come here, senor," the woman purred-and she facilitated their meeting by climbing down the boulder with unusual grace.
She spoke with an American accent except when she spoke pure Castilian Spanish-aristo Spanish. Part of him was interested in the fact that she'd been here long enough to pick up an American accent. His ear was too good to be fooled about which one was her native tongue-even if he hadn't known that he was hunting for a witch who had killed Asil's mate in Spain. Part of him was interested in the wolflike dexterity she'd displayed as she hopped down the boulder after Asil. No human could move that well, witch or not. But when Bran's mother had enslaved him, she could move like that, too.
He'd have been horrified, except that worse happened: he came to her call like the well-trained pet he'd once been-a long, long time ago.
"Tag," the witch purred as she walked around him. "Colin Taggart. A little on the small side...for a werewolf."
He was aware, though she was apparently not, of the tension that held Asil as he waited for her to discover how he'd misinformed her, without ever lying. "I told you he'd send Tag" was not "Look, there's Tag." Asil was trying, and Bran gave him credit for it, knowing how difficult to balance upon was the line he was treading.
From the fear radiating off of him, Asil knew what the consequences of a witch trying to make Bran a pet might be. There weren't many people left who would remember what had happened when Bran had broken free of his mother at last: Samuel, Asil...He couldn't think of a third, it had been a long time ago. Likely the witches themselves didn't know why it was forbidden to try to take a werewolf for a pet or familiar-not that most of them had the power to do it.
Bran would hold out for a while. First, the witch could make a mistake-especially if she didn't know whom she held. Second, he was afraid that this time no one would be able to kill him. It had been Samuel who brought him out of it before...and Samuel wasn't as certain of himself as he used to be.