“Stay back,” I shouted, starting forward—but a hand closed around my arm and pulled me back against a man’s body. He only controlled that arm, so I twisted toward his hold, desperate to get free so I could stop the poor dumb kid who was about to die. When I turned, I saw it was Tad who held me back, his face thin, grim, and bruised. I only just stopped the instinctive hit that would have broken his ribs and set me loose.
“Let me go,” I snapped at him. But I kept my voice low—I didn’t want to set the tibicena off. I jerked to get free, but Tad held me as if I hadn’t been practicing how to break this exact hold just last week—if I’d been willing to hurt him, I could have broken away, but I couldn’t make myself do it.
“Wait,” he said.
“Tad, Joel isn’t running this show,” I hissed. “He’s going to kill that boy.”
Joel had quit looking at me at all. His attention was focused on the kid, who was dressed in sweats that were too large for him. They looked suspiciously like the sweats we kept tucked around in the cars of pack and friends of pack members.
Joel wouldn’t survive if he killed a child. The thought decided me, and when I started struggling again, I went for blood.
Tad grabbed my hand before I could hit him in the jaw, then pinned me in a lock I couldn’t break, my back to his front. “It’s okay,” he said. “This one isn’t just a kid. Watch.”
Joel snarled at the boy, who ignored him and touched the tibicena’s shoulder. Joel, who was not Joel but the volcano demon who lived inside him, looked smug, probably waiting for fiery death to consume the boy the way it had the troll. Horrified, I waited for the same thing.
We were both wrong.
The skin of the boy’s hand flushed red, and the color traveled through him, and he rocked back a little, then leaned his weight on his hand.
Whatever he looked like, that was not a human boy. His hand hadn’t burst into flame or blackened with third-degree burns. No human could have touched Joel when he was running that hot without getting hurt. Tad released my arm with a pat. I took two steps so that I stood next to Adam’s prone body, in case the tibicena decided to do something rather than just stand under the boy’s touch, because fire was only one of Joel’s weapons.
The hot air on my face faded, replaced by river-cooled wind. Joel staggered and collapsed. The curious blackened-stone exterior of the tibicena lost the redness of heat and became entirely black.
“I told you it would be okay,” Tad said.
“He’s not hurting Joel?” I asked anxiously.
“Joel?” he asked. “Is that the name of the fire-breathing foo dog? I thought you killed it. How did you manage to take the volcano god’s servant? I assume he’s yours from the way he was fighting.”
“Not a foo dog,” I said tightly. “He’s a tibicena. They are very hard to kill, and when you do, they go out and invade the body of friends. Like Joel. But we . . . I made him pack.”
The black stone surrounding the tibicena cracked and fell away, leaving Joel in his human body, pale, naked, and unconscious, facedown on the roadway. The boy stepped back. When he met my eyes with his own, for a moment I could see that fire lived inside him. Then they were just ordinary hazel eyes.
“Did you hear that, Aiden?” Tad said. “The fire dog is a friend.”
“Yes,” said the boy, “I hear you. I heard, when the big man who killed the troll told us both the same thing before we set foot on the bridge. I’m not an idiot. I need them. The man who bears the fire dog will come to no harm from this. I didn’t kill anything, just banked the fire for a while.”
The boy’s accent wasn’t so much a matter of pronunciation but of cadence. English wasn’t his first tongue.
I took a good long breath and took stock.
Darryl, the big-man-who-had-killed-the-troll, was a couple of yards away—in position to step in if the boy hadn’t defanged the tibicena. His hair still dripped water, but his various cuts and bruises from the fight had begun to fade.
“How did you get out of the river?” I asked. I didn’t move because, beside me, Adam had awakened and was considering rolling to his feet. Where I was standing, my legs touching him, he could use me as an unobtrusive crutch.
His pack was loyal. Two years ago, Darryl might have put Adam down had he come upon him when he was injured like this. Adam’s decision to court me had weakened the pack, and Darryl would have viewed himself as the better leader. Part of me didn’t like seeing him so close to Adam when Adam couldn’t defend himself—even though matters had changed. Darryl respected Adam and had not so much as breathed a desire to move to the top of the food chain.
I don’t need protection from Darryl. Adam’s voice was clear in my head, though he made no effort to move. I think you’ve gotten caught up in the battle that is over now, sweetheart. But there are others watching. I’d just as soon wait until I’m sure I can walk before I try to get up.
We’d discovered that he had more control of the link between us than I did. The werewolf mating bond seemed a little confused by me. I’d grown to believe that the weird way the mating link seemed to function stronger some times than others was due to my partial immunity to magic. But this time I caught his words just fine.
He was right about Darryl, and about the wound-up feeling in my stomach that tried to tell me that the battle wasn’t over yet. I breathed in and tried to relax.