something happened—it didn’t take much to persuade the wyrm. It is afraid of me.”
She drew out a knife. “I have a special death planned for you. How convenient that Helen is here to give me the power I need to make your dying so terrible that it will feed me for decades.”
“Black witches gain power from pain and death,” said Asil, stating clearly what they both knew.
But Tami, crouched beside Helen and petting the unconscious woman with a tender hand, wasn’t paying attention to Asil. Instead she crooned, “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt for long. I don’t need your pain to power this spell.”
That was fine with Asil, because it wasn’t Tami that Asil had been talking to.
As Tami raised her hand to position the knife, a shot rang out.
It was a head shot, beautifully placed. The witch was dead before she would have heard the sound, her head the sort of messy ruin a shotgun fired at close range tended to make.
Shotgun safely held, Joshua jumped down into the basement. Carefully not looking at the dead body, he knelt beside his mother, where Asil was already checking her out.
“Unconscious, but her breathing and her heart rate are fine,” Asil told him. “Weren’t you supposed to wait in the car?”
“I saw Mama come running out the front door with her shotgun,” Joshua told Asil. “I left the kids in the car and came to see if I could talk sense into her before she confronted a witch and a werewolf. Funny thing is, though, about ten feet from the door, she stopped, set the gun down. She stood for a few moments and then ran screaming and jumped into the basement.”
The black witch had needed a victim to power her revenge, and apparently had persuaded the wyrm, who held a leash on Joshua’s mother, to cooperate.
“I would have followed Mama, but by the time I got to the basement door, she was down. I thought Tami was one of the good guys, you know?” His voice cracked, as if he were a few years younger than he was.
Asil nodded. “As did I.”
“You knew I was watching,” Joshua said.
Asil nodded. “We werewolves have very good hearing. I heard you load the shell into the shotgun.”
Joshua’s mouth twisted. He glanced at the dead woman and then away. “I know how to shoot. Grandma taught me.” His eyes widened. “What will happen to the kids when I go to jail?”
“You saved your mother and me,” Asil told him. Though he was pretty sure he would have killed the witch before she could get to him. He had the pack magic and he hadn’t been idle while the witch was talking. But the shotgun had been most effective.
“What do you mean?” Joshua asked. “Who was Mariposa?”
Asil considered how to spin the events of this night so that they worked to the advantage of all of the survivors. He was too old to have much faith in the justice system. Maybe—
And that was when the wyrm broke through the pallets and attacked.
It was young—which he had gathered when he found that only Helen was enthralled. He had once killed a wyrm who had enthralled a whole village. That wyrm had been forty feet long and six feet in diameter.
This wyrm was a quarter of that size, but quick. Asil had worked up a pretty good sweat, and his wolf was quite happy by the time he slid the sword into the wyrm’s brain and it writhed its last.
With a satisfied grunt, Asil pulled his sword free, cleaned it on a piece of relatively clean cloth from the hoard, and then checked on Joshua and his mother.
The boy was standing over his mother, shotgun at the ready. He looked a little pale, and when Asil approached, he flinched back. “Jeez, you’re fast,” he said.
Awe, thought Asil. With a touch of fear. Appropriate reactions to the sight of Asil in action.
“Yes,” he agreed mildly.
Joshua swallowed, squared his shoulders, and said, “I’m glad you were on my side.” He glanced