her tonight, thought Asil. I will get Joshua’s mother out of this house. She will be more difficult to free than the children because it has its hooks in her.
He thought of the avalanche that had fallen to trap Joshua and his sisters. They had been intended to be part of the hoard. And over the foul stench of the hoard, the scent wafted to his nose again.
Wyrm, whispered the wolf.
Hah, thought Asil. I was right.
“Come on, squirts,” Joshua said. “You’re staying with me tonight.”
No mother appeared as they exited the house. Asil shut the back door and took them all to his car. As Joshua worked on how to make his sisters safe in a car without car seats, Asil held out his keys to Tami.
“Take them away,” he told her. “You can come back and pick me up later.”
“What are you going to do?” she said, not taking the keys. Then, dropping her voice to a whisper, she said urgently, “Their mother is broken, she’s not evil. Don’t do anything to hurt her.” Then, belatedly: “Please?”
Asil shook his head. “This is not a human thing,” he told her, waving his hands at the house. “I know you can’t smell it—especially given the odor of that house. But I would think that you can feel it.”
She frowned at him, then turned toward the house and lifted both of her hands. After a second, she took a step toward the house, and this time he felt her magic. Witch, snarled his wolf.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Wyrm,” he told her.
She turned a startled look on him. “A dragon?”
“There’s a lot of debate about that, I am told. But I have seen both—and wyrms are very different creatures. Thankfully. I do not think even I would be equal to a true dragon.”
She stared at him a moment, then said, “I’ll leave that one. A wyrm, my mother told me, is driven by the need to surround itself with treasure. But unlike other . . . unlike dragons, it doesn’t gather its treasure by itself. It takes a human in thrall and uses them to gather it.”
Asil nodded. “Yes. And a wyrm’s treasure is not what a dragon’s treasure is. Dragons surround themselves with metals. Wyrms gather whatever catches their eye.”
“If it’s magic shit,” said Joshua, coming up to them, “we need to get Mama out of there.”
Asil looked at the boy. He was shivering in the night air even with his coat on. He didn’t appear any of the ways Asil had seen mundane people react to the supernatural world.
“Magic?” said Tami, sounding surprised. It was the first lie Asil had heard from her—and it was a lie of tone, not substance.
“We all know you do magic,” Joshua told her. “It’s like a beacon of hope in the shelters. People get better when they shouldn’t. Bad people back down or go away—when they never would normally do that. People say, ‘Things will be okay, because we got our own witch.’”
Tami’s mouth fell open, but she didn’t say anything.
Joshua turned to Asil. “So are you a witch, too?”
Asil shook his head. “Werewolf.”
And despite the cold and fear, Joshua’s face lit up. “No shit? No shit? We got rescued by a werewolf?”
“Correct,” agreed Asil solemnly. “And I am going to rescue your mother, too. Tami will take you and your sisters to your home, and I will call her when I’m finished.”
And then there was a great round of protests.
If his wolf hadn’t been so eager for hunting the wyrm, Asil might have had serious issues. It was decided that Joshua and the girls would wait in the car—a defeat Joshua agreed to only because someone needed to stay with the girls.
“I can break the enthrallment,” Tami told Asil. “A little spell my mother taught me.”
“Your mother taught you a spell to break a wyrm’s enthrallment?”
“Well, no,” she admitted. “But an enthrallment is an enthrallment. The one I know breaks the hold of a black witch—but my