Black Wolf (55 page)

Adam came out,
and they chatted for a few minutes while she finished what she had
to do. He'd take care of the rest. She slung her bag onto her
shoulder, and left, calling a farewell behind her as the door swung
shut.

She got down
the steps and out onto the sidewalk.

It took her a
few seconds to register what it meant when five bodies in
magesilks, black and silver-blue and scarlet and forest-colours,
surrounded her, cornering her between them and the wall.

Rebecca
crossed her arms, and leaned against the cool bricks calmly. "What
can I do for you?"

"Coward,"
Evaline spat. "You won't fight fair. You let others fight your
battles for you, while you stand back and plan more tricks and
lies. You've gotten away with it for far too long. Now stand and
fight like a wolf, or run away like a dog!"

Rebecca's
thoughts darted in rapid loops, analysing this. The most likely
possibility was that they believed her still part of Whitethorn,
and the demons had lured Whitethorn into some other stupid attack
on Jesse.

"I don't have
to fight you," she told them.

"Coward," Bane
echoed the taunt. "You've been refusing to fight me fairly for
years, because I'm bigger than you. You can't use that this time.
Anyone in this pack will fight you, here and now, one on one. Or
are you only brave when you've got Karl beside you and when you've
had time to cheat?"

They certainly
had attention; everyone on the streets was drawn over. Rebecca
hesitated. If she refused to fight, she'd lose face yet again, and
it would be even harder to regain any kind of standing among the
other wolves. On the other hand, why should she fight for
Whitethorn?

Then she
smiled to herself. Jump to conclusions, would they? Assume that it
was her personally who goaded her coven into attacks, breaking the
unspoken truce. They deserved anything they got.

If she fought,
and won, they'd be no more wary of Whitethorn than they were now,
and she'd regain a little face. If she fought and lost fairly she'd
lose no face, and they'd believe Whitethorn neutralized as a
threat...

Either way,
she gained something, and to not do it would lose her
something.

Moonwolf, but
she hated being trapped into doing things.

Certain that
her eyes were hot furious gold, Rebecca moved away from the
wall.

"My choice,"
she said. "I can choose who I fight."

"Yes," Evaline
agreed.

"Then, since I
imagine this is once again related to him, I choose Jesse." He was
limping slightly, looked tired, and of the pack facing her, he was
the most inexperienced at wolf-fights; not the best for gaining
face in that sense, but to confront him directly after their
history would more than make up for that.

She saw him
wince, very slightly, but he stepped forward away from the others,
shifted to wolf, and waited for Rebecca to do the same.

Everyone else
moved back, left them in the centre of a large ring.

Red werewolf
and black circled each other measuringly, then both lunged at the
same instant, tearing with teeth and claws. Rebecca threw Jesse
entirely off his feet, slashed at his stomach. Jesse writhed away,
got ahold of her ear and tore. Startled, Rebecca yelped in pain,
and redoubled her attack, but Jesse got his feet under him and
darted around behind. Though she whirled to keep facing him, Jesse
kept moving, kept circling, and she had to keep turning, keep
watching him. He feinted to one side, came in quickly on the other,
was in and out in a heartbeat. She felt teeth dig into her shoulder
through the heavy fur. Reflexively she struck out in return, and he
didn't get clear quite fast enough: Rebecca's claws raked the side
of his face, over his eye, and blood blinded his vision on that
side.

Such a shame.
Whatever else he was, he was certainly easy on the eyes. Ah, well,
either Winter's healer or that little dryad girl would fix it.

Rebecca darted
into his blind spot; he spun to keep her in sight, but Rebecca used
his own trick against him, stayed in the same relative place. Jesse
whipped around in the other direction, answered her earlier yelp
with one of his own as Rebecca's teeth scored shallowly on his
flank. He stumbled as she tore across half-healed wounds there;
already hurt, was he? She pressed the attack; desperately, he
twisted out from under her and scrambled to his feet, whining
softly in pain, but obviously not about to give up.

Her next
attack left the side of her neck exposed, and she recognized it a
fraction of a second too late to do anything about it; her jaws
snapped shut on his foreleg, but he stretched awkwardly and sank
his teeth into her already sore shoulder, right through the thick
ruff. The red bitch went down, though she held her grip on his leg;
he let go, closed his jaws around the underside of Rebecca's throat
until the red bitch surrendered her hold on his foreleg, stopped
thrashing and just laid still, struggling for breath.

Damn him! How
had a whelp who'd only known for a year that he had a second form
managed to defeat her?

Jesse released
her, and turned away. Rebecca didn't move until he'd changed to
human, and then she only rolled to her belly, gazing up at him in a
mixture of submission and resentment.

"Get out of
here," Jess told her wearily. "And leave me and Kev and the rest of
us alone."

Rebecca
whined, shifted heavily to human. "You won," she conceded, as
graciously as she could manage. "And you have my word as a wolf, I
will do nothing at any point in the future against you or Kevin or
the rest of your friends." She gathered her dignity around her,
scooped up her bag with her good hand, and walked away in the
direction of Mandisa's office, cradling her other arm against her
body to keep from jarring her shoulder.

* * *

Bane slid an
arm around Jess' waist, steadying him. "Beautifully done."

"Shorter than
I expected. I sort of thought we'd end up fighting until one of us
couldn't get up."

"She's still a
wolf," Bryan said quietly. "Whatever she's done, whatever's wrong
in her head, some things still run too deep for even her to go
against."

Jess decided
to think about that later. Meanwhile, Gisela was there, her hands
finding each wound deftly and making the bleeding stop.

"She had it
coming, but did you have to get hurt doing it?" she grumbled.

"It's just a
few bites," Jess said. Although, they were increasingly painful
bites, now the adrenaline was fading...

"Our place is
closest," Evaline said.

"Déjà vu,"
Jess muttered to himself. Finally fighting back instead of letting
others rescue him all the time felt good—but was he forever going
to have friends taking him home afterwards to put his hide back
together?

Probably.

Come to think
of it, that was much better than not having friends there to do
it.

He submitted
meekly to Gisela, and didn't argue when she sent a rather startled
Nick to make a wolfsbane-and-painkiller tea for him. It made the
world fuzz out, but it effectively dulled the pain.

Bane demanded
a report.

"She cracked
one bone in his arm and bruised both of them nicely," Gisela said.
"The other damage you can see for yourself, none of it hit anything
vital. It's a good thing wolves mostly don't scar permanently,
though. I think I've got the bleeding completely stopped. Somebody
grab me something I can use to clean some of the blood up?"

A moment
later, something wet gently wiped away the blood on his face.

"Ouch," he
mumbled.

"I'm trying
not to hurt."

"How bad's
that one?"

"She got you
with two claws. It starts in the middle of your forehead, skips
over your eye luckily, and ends on your cheek. It's going to look a
bit wild until it heals."

"Huh. She
would."

Time got
blurry, too, but sometime after dark he found himself in Coven
Winter's van with Gisela and Bane, and Nick was driving.

Kevin appeared
from somewhere to steady him into the house.

"I beat her,"
Jess told him.

"I know, Bane
told me. Everyone knows by now."

"She won't bug
you anymore now, right?"

"Right," Kevin
said softly.

"Man, whatever
Nick gave me's real cool. Somebody tell the world to stay
still."

"I told you it
was too much, 'Sela," Nick sighed.

"He's okay,"
Gisela said. "He's hurting bad enough that it'll wear off
soon."

Dark coolness
became bright warmth. He coiled himself into a corner of the couch,
vaguely aware that the scents were those of the living room, and
rested his head on the arm, listening while Bane described the
fight for his coven and Shaine. Hob, inevitably, appeared from
somewhere and joined him, a warm purring mass cuddled against his
stomach.

"What on earth
possessed you to let Jess fight Rebecca, when he was already hurt?"
Deanna demanded.

"He wanted to,
he had a right to, both blood-debt and as part of the pack. Don't
argue, he won. For the time being, at least, Coven Whitethorn is no
longer a threat."

They argued
for a while. Jess lost track of the thread so often he gave up on
even trying to follow along, though he did notice Shaine's opinion
of his common sense hadn't improved any. He kept finding peculiar
things in his head: a black wolf much larger than him, that smelled
female and achingly familiar; a silver dagger with something
engraved on the blade, but he couldn't quite read it; an impossibly
beautiful song, twining into a rising storm; darkness and a soft
warm bed, snuggled against someone comfortably, perfectly content,
and the other whispered, "Good night, Jess," but it wasn't Shaine
or Caitryn; morning sunlight and the rich scent of bacon frying and
the sounds of laughter, the feeling of a fierce good-morning
hug.

The vivid
images faded, disappointingly, leaving behind an emptiness that had
nothing to do with the pain of his abused body.

He raised his
head, and blinked in confusion at the room. Sundark and Gisela were
still there, he decided, it was just that they were doing quiet
sorts of things: Cynthia was knitting, and Gisela was tossing
multi-coloured toy balls for Hob to bat out of the air, and Kevin
and Deanna were brushing Bane furform, and Flynn was writing
something on the clipboard he usually used for short stories. That
Shaine was absent was hardly surprising.

"Good
morning," Deanna greeted him. "Our hero returns to the real
world."

Jess made a
derisive noise. "Hero. Yeah, right, there's a new one." Cautiously,
he untangled himself, and flinched; the muscles of his lower back
and right upper thigh felt like they'd been completely shredded.
"Let me guess. I get to spend another week in bed eating and
sleeping. This sucks."

"As long as
you're
very
careful, you're allowed to go back to real life
probably in a day or two," Gisela said. "You just won't be able to
do anything too active that might pull the cuts open again."

"Anything
active like killing demons?" Jess said impatiently. "How fast can
you fix this?" He examined his left arm, the purpling bruises, the
shallow holes where Rebecca's teeth had broken the skin. It hurt,
but he still had most of the strength in it. "Not this, just the
ones on my back."

"I can't,"
Gisela said calmly. "I've already done everything I can. I've told
you before, if healing is pushed too far, it can do more harm than
good. You're going to have to let your body's own resources take it
from here."

"Great."
Unsteadily, he made his way to the kitchen, wishing he could muster
the energy for a more dramatic display of frustration. A cold glass
of juice helped him compose himself again. He visited the nearest
bathroom briefly, grateful that it was on the ground floor—and
groaned to himself at the thought of climbing the two flights of
stairs to his room later.

For the
moment, though, his friends were waiting, so he went back to the
dining room and his corner of the couch, and settled down to hear
what he'd missed.

54

Aindry sniffed
around the base of the tree, evaluating the scents that pooled
here. Anything left by passing carnivores she discarded
immediately; those of deer, raccoons, squirrels, birds, a lone
porcupine, she considered more seriously. There were plenty of deer
around, enjoying the open ground around the abandoned houses, but
she and Jaisan were too badly injured to hunt one; most of the rest
were fast or fierce or both. She might be able to take that
porcupine, though, since that took primarily skill and experience
and she had those in her favour. If, of course, she could find it
on the ground. The scent was fresh enough that she thought it might
be possible.

Nose to the
ground, she limped in pursuit. Her left hind leg was badly damaged,
enough so that she doubted it would ever heal right without help
from a doctor or a healer, but leading demons into Haven or into a
mundane settlement that had no idea what really existed, that was
unthinkable. Given how talking and chewing felt, it might be just
as well there was nothing to talk about and there'd been little to
chew, only a few mice swallowed more or less whole.