Fair Game (Alpha & Omega #3)(51)
Author: Patricia Briggs

Charles’s back legs were on the ground and he used them to shift his weight, preparing to find something more fragile than the thick bone he had, no matter that it gave him a good solid hold. It was too thick to break with his jaws and he needed to incapacitate it so it couldn’t get to Anna.

The creature screamed again and ripped Isaac free, tossing him all the way across the room and into the cement wall. Watching how it handled Isaac told Charles that the horned lord had hands of some sort – and was seriously strong, stronger than a werewolf.

Free of distraction, the creature turned its attention back to Charles. It pounded twice more at him, but awkwardly, as if it couldn’t quite get to him. Then it lifted the leg Charles had grabbed and something hit him in the shoulder again, a fair hit that loosened his grip. Before he could regain his hold or drop it, the horned lord kicked his hock against the back wall.

Charles dropped to the floor. For a moment he was helpless, the wind knocked out of him, but before the creature could do anything about it, a black dynamo dove over Charles like a whirlwind.

Anna didn’t bother trying anything fancy. She just ran, back and forth and in dizzying circles. When she hit something she sliced at it, but kept going. Distracting it.

Charles staggered to his feet and launched himself at the creature again. This time, dizzy from hitting the wall and then the floor, he had no idea what he hit – all he knew, all Brother Wolf knew, was that they had to protect their mate. But luck favored him and he got a clean hit. It was flesh and bone beneath his fangs and he sank his claws in deep.

He didn’t know when Beauclaire joined the fight. Just suddenly he was there, his face icy and more beautiful and inhuman than Charles remembered it. He was taller, too, and thinner, and he fought with a knife in one hand and magic in the other. He was quick and tough, fighting blind, but he scored again and again with the knife – and when he used his magic, Charles couldn’t tell what Beauclaire did, but the horned lord felt it and shuddered underneath his fangs.

Charles was pretty sure that it was the magic that turned the tide. As soon as Beauclaire attacked him with it, the horned lord quit fighting to win and started fighting to get away.

The fae beast that Charles clung to screamed, this time a raw, drum-deep sound that hurt his ears, and threw itself on the floor, rolling as if it were on fire, first one way, then the other. Charles hung on for two rolls, but fell off on the third. Beauclaire, having neither fang nor claw, lay motionless on the ground after the first roll.

Free of his attackers, the creature made for the stairs – and Charles got a good look at what they’d been fighting, because whatever it was that kept it invisible had quit working. Its antlers were huge. He thought at first that they were shaped like a caribou’s, but it must have been a trick of shadows because they started…glowing faintly with an icy white light, and they were the horns of a deer – a huge ancient deer.

It had a silvery coat that whitened as it staggered upward – and Charles realized he’d been mistaken earlier because it had four legs, long and delicate looking. Black blood disappeared even as he watched, absorbed by the silvery coat of a great white stag taller by a hand or more than any moose he’d ever seen.

Brother Wolf wanted to chase it down and kill it because they wouldn’t be safe until it was dead. Charles agreed, but decided that since one of his shoulders was out of joint or broken, having one werewolf go after a creature that was healing as it retreated faster than a werewolf could was stupid. Especially when it had nearly defeated three werewolves and a tough fae already. He wondered if the horned lord, a half-blood, was really that tough, or if his borrowed magic made him that way. Either way, Charles wasn’t going after him, no matter what Brother Wolf wanted.

He wasn’t going to leave his Anna defenseless.

Brother Wolf roared his frustrated rage and took what satisfaction he could when the stag leapt up the last five or six stairs, staggering at the top when its left rear leg, still healing, didn’t support its weight.

When it was out of sight, Charles turned to survey the fallen. Isaac was still on the ground, but he’d rolled to a sphinxlike pose and blinked a little stupidly at Charles. If he wasn’t dead, he’d heal soon. Beauclaire was on one hand and his knees, trying to regain his feet with limited success – but everything seemed to be moving all right except for an obviously broken wrist. Anna…Anna was crouched next to Lizzie Beauclaire and crooning to her, or as close to a croon as a wolf could get.

The girl…He’d seen photos of her on her wall and she’d been beautiful. Now scabby wounds decorated her forehead and cheeks, all of the skin he could see. She was wearing her father’s shirt, but was obviously naked underneath it, and her formerly flawless skin was covered with sigils and bruises – just as Jacob’s body had been. On a living, breathing person it was even worse, because she was also covered with a miasma of black magic that he could see – like a fog of invisibly small fleas. Lizzie blinked at him with drugged eyes and moved backward, stopping abruptly with a little gasp because something hurt.

They’d broken her knee. Shattered it, if he was any judge – and he was. It was deliberate – and he wondered if she, a trained athlete, had been a little tougher than they expected. Her feet were bruised and bloody, as though she had broken free and gone running through the rocky terrain barefoot. She’d have had no chance of really escaping, not unless she could call upon the merfolk – and he doubted that. They tended to be standoffish or aggressive, even with their own kind.

Lizzie was clearly in no shape to walk. She’d have to be carried out, and, looking at the others, Charles knew he would have to do it. With a broken wrist, her father wasn’t going to be able to, and Anna was still too new of a werewolf to change back and forth this quickly. Isaac was dazed and confused, and pretty new as well. He’d been Changed about the same time as Anna, as Charles recalled, only a few years ago. So Charles was just going to have to manage one more shift to human right this minute.

It hurt. He’d forgotten how badly it hurt to change when something was wrong. He was old and changing would help heal any injury that wasn’t caused by silver – but the change healed the same way salt water kept wounds from getting infected: accompanied by a lot of pain.

Charles didn’t cry out. He didn’t howl and scare the poor little dancer who had wrapped herself around Anna as if the werewolf were a stuffed puppy. Sweat poured off his body even before he should have been human enough to sweat. And then he became human, kneeling in the dust-covered cement, wearing a red T-shirt soaked with sweat and his blue jeans, which – he noted with a hint of amusement – were old-style button fly.