26

ASHES, ASHES, WE ALL FALL DOWN

There were three different curtains or walls made out of animal hide staggered between the entranceway and the lair, and I was meditating between the first two when the birds told me something was wrong. Flocks were calling out to each other as they flew overhead in the night, and a lot of those calls belonged to birds who were not nocturnal. I sat there listening, then turned and called out a warning.

After a brief explanation, Muscles went out to join Gabriel on patrol and Phoenix’s crew began gathering their work. Bernard and Nikolai formed a command center of sorts.

Bernard located a spot outside where cell phones worked, but he couldn’t reach anyone in the training grounds. He could reach people in a sixty-mile radius surrounding them, but none of the paws he’d scattered throughout the forest reserve were responding.

Nikolai came and stood near me at the cave entrance while Bernard talked to someone in Woodruff. “Knights?”

I hesitated. “Probably.”

A vein pulsed in his temple. “You said that they wouldn’t move unless it was a massive attack or a surgical strike to take out Bernard.”

“Or both,” I said.

Nikolai cursed and Bernard came back to join us. We went back inside the cave.

There was a vehicle hidden about two miles away from the cave, and Nikolai and Bernard began to discuss how to proceed—argue, really, with Nikolai maneuvering to make Bernard’s safety the main priority. The rest of us rounded up weapons and gear.

Gabriel came running in while Bernard and Nikolai were still hammering out the details. It was one of the first times he’d been in the cave since we’d moved in. “The forest animals are stampeding!”

“What?!?” Phoenix blurted. “How big a force are the knights sending?”

I heard the sounds of an engine and went back through the grid of hides so that I could look up at the sky. I couldn’t distinguish the colors, but a fixed-wing aircraft was briefly silhouetted against the moon as it flew north overhead.

Muscles joined me and peered upward. “That’s an air tanker. A firefighting plane.”

I didn’t ask him how he knew about planes. Why weren’t there any werewolves among those stampeding forest animals?

I knew then. Knew it in that part of me that is always waiting for the next disaster. My paw was dead. Mayte. Chai. Jelly. Cory. But some knowledge you don’t accept, and some you can’t accept. Some you have to verify anyway. You have to.

“Bernard?” I didn’t have to ask loudly or stop looking at the sky. Something in my voice made everyone within forty feet stop talking.

“What?” His voice came from within the cave, beyond the hides. He didn’t have to respond loudly, either.

“I know you can’t reach your firefighters right now,” I said. “But you need to call someone who can track down where they were when their cell phones stopped working.”

We picked up another claw that was heading toward Bernard’s base camp and took them with us, then found the first and last member of Bernard’s werewolf firefighting unit a little over an hour later. The fire was closer now—we were actually traveling in its wake at the moment—and the air was full of smoke and ash and had a biting taint that stung in our lungs. The woods were black, and burned trunks and stumps still fed guttering flames.

The firefighter had been winged with a shotgun shell full of silver shot, and he had only gotten away by crawling through flames. His wounds weren’t healing.

“Where are the paws, Steve?” Bernard asked, crouching down. Steve’s face had been the least burned part of him when we removed his mask, but his face was still cooked. He was lying on the ground and no one wanted to move him.

Steve’s lungs had been toasted, and his scraping sucks of breath hurt in my ears. “They were dressed like us. Like firefighters. But they weren’t.”

He was talking about a knight strike team, sweepers.

“We’ll find them,” Bernard promised, but I doubted it was a promise he could keep. “Where are the paws?”

“They didn’t make it,” Steve rasped. “No way.”

“How is that possible?” Bernard had control. I couldn’t hear a quiver in his voice.

“There were two fires,” Steve gasped. “Real pro jobs. A large one. It was… north… fast. With the wind. Smaller one moving to meet it. The bigger one made a vacuum. Pulled the small one in. The campsites were caught between them. Real pro jobs.”

“The paws,” Bernard repeated grimly.

“Between them,” Steve said. “The fires. The paws.”

Complete immolation is an effective way to kill werewolves. It is how villages used to execute us in the Middle Ages.

“And the planes,” Steve gasped. “Some weren’t dropping flame retardant.”

“What were they dropping, Steve?” Bernard asked gently.

“Gas crystals. We got caught in it. Two of us died. Switched to oxygen tanks.”

Wolfsbane. I could catch the faintest whiff of it in the air. The kind of weaponized wolfsbane they’d used at the lodge. Gas clouds of the stuff.

We found the first remains about half an hour later, and it was a miracle we found it that quickly. We couldn’t track the bones by smell and ash was everywhere and our infravision was useless.

“We have to go,” Bernard growled.

He was right. The smell of wolfsbane was stronger and the air was getting hotter, as if maybe the fire had shifted again. The sight of planes overhead was becoming more frequent and we could hear men yelling in the distance.

My paw was dead. I would never find the bodies. But my paw was dead.

There was no real reason to feel like I was standing on that rooftop in Philadelphia again, to feel choking fury and grief. Mayte wasn’t Alison. Chai… who I had started to respect and like… wasn’t An Rong. What was it Chai had tried to make me understand? Something about how important it is to get to know people when life is fragile.

I understood him now.

The paws hadn’t been killers, at least not yet. They hadn’t asked for any of this. They were just innocent, messed-up people trying to get their act together like anybody else. The knights had done this because Bernard had attacked the lodge, and Bernard had attacked the lodge because of me, and everything was all tangled up and somebody had to cut the knot in half with a sword.

Emil had tried to make me the knights’ slave. Bernard had offered me a choice.

“All right.” The words vibrated painfully in my chest. My head was bent low, my hands fists that I couldn’t unclench.

Bernard was there in an instant, his voice a growl even if the words were recognizable. “What is it?”

I tried to say it and couldn’t. Swallowed and moved my jaw and finally bit the empty air as if an invisible gag were in my mouth. It seemed to help.

“I’ll join your clan,” I croaked.