wished I were a singer like the Marrok and both of his sons were because only music would do them justice.
Auriele was still in human form and she held my pitchfork as a weapon. Her clothes were burned, and, I imagined, hidden by the night, there were also burns on her skin. She was muscle and grace and speed as she stabbed and pivoted, jumped and dodged around her husband.
Darryl’s brindle coat made him nearly as hard to track as the tibicenas’ magic made them. Most wolves fight with instinct. Some, as I had tonight, fight with instinct and training. But a rare few hold on to enough humanity to use strategy. And that strategy was what made him and Auriele so impressive. He charged and leaped, she struck and rolled, and somehow neither of them was where they’d been when the tibicena who wasn’t guarding me lunged and tangled herself up with Guayota.
If it had only been the tibicena they fought, I would have had no fear.
Guayota, even in his fiery-dog form, was not as large as his tibicena, but there was no question who was the nastier predator. While the tibicena, Darryl, and Auriele fought with everything in them, Guayota played. Darryl bled from a dozen small wounds and, as I watched, Guayota struck him again, and a shallow cut stretched from Darryl’s shoulder to his hip. It was a wound from Guayota’s claw only, without the heat he could generate, though the wet grass smoked, and he left blackened patches wherever he stood for longer than a breath.
Are you going to let them die while you watch? Impossible to tell if the voice was Coyote’s or my own.
My muscles would just not move. I struggled like a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were a hundred pounds too heavy, and the effort built up to a growl in my chest and out my throat.
The tibicena quit licking my arm and growled back.
I stopped struggling as I met its eyes briefly and saw Joel in them. The tibicena shook his head, and the long, rocklike hairs that ruffed his neck rattled together. The connection broken between us, he went back to my arm. He had worked a piece of skin loose and was tearing it away, swallowing it.
I had a terrible, wonderful idea.
“Joel,” I said, and the tongue that had been traveling back to my arm paused, and his eyes met mine, again, eyes that were a dark, sullen red that was more like garnets than rubies.
Didn’t you want to save your friend Joel? Coyote had asked me when I asked him why he’d shown me what the tibicenas were. And I’d seen that the spells that tied Joel to Guayota’s immortal child were a lot like pack bonds.
I didn’t have the walking stick, but I could see the struggle that Joel still fought. Stefan had said something about bonds when he’d been apologizing for not breaking the one between us. He’d implied that a bond taken willingly was stronger than one that was forced.
“Answer the questions I ask you, and I can help,” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth. I had practice drawing on my mate’s power, and now I drew it around me, finding that I could borrow a little strength. That was useful, but the important part of Adam’s power that I preempted was his authority. “You don’t have to say your response out loud. Joel Arocha, I see you.”
Garnet eyes glittered with borrowed light.
“Will you join with us, the Columbia Basin Pack, to hunt, to fight, to live and run under the full moon?” There were ritual words, but I’d been taught that the ritual was secondary to intent in all werewolf magic. I thought of Joel—tough, thoughtful, and big-hearted—and welcomed him into my family.
I paused but held his eyes. “I claim you,” I told him, feeling the familiar gathering of pack magic until it burned in my throat, until the next words were determined more by the magic than by me. “We claim you, Joel Arocha, son of Texas, son of the Canary Islands, guardian of four-footed cousins. By my flesh and blood that is the flesh and blood that belongs to the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack is our bond sealed. From this day forward, you are mine to me and mine.”
Pack ties, mating ties did not break the bond between Stefan and me because they were two different magics: vampire and werewolf. But the spells I’d seen wrapping