It wasn’t that far from our house—maybe ten minutes in a direction I seldom took, one of those out-of-the-way places that didn’t lie on a direct route between our house and anywhere I was likely to need to go. It was out in the hill country between the Tri-Cities and Oregon where there was no water available for irrigation and not enough houses that the city would pipe water out. This late in the summer the hills were a pale dirt brown dusted with sparse remains of grass.
I turned up a well-tended gravel road and followed it for a quarter of a mile that twisted around with the lay of the land, no houses in sight. It took a final turn, climbed a steep grade, and popped out on the top of a hill, where it ended in an asphalt circular driveway laid out before a huge house. The house had been carefully placed to hide itself from the highway below without impacting the panoramic views. A narrow ring of bright green grass circled the house, and there were a few raised flower beds that were unplanted.
I parked the car near the front door, as far as I could get it from the three people on the other edge of the driveway. It left me with about twenty yards to walk—it was a big circular drive. But I didn’t want Jesse’s car to suffer the same fate my last two cars had, so I wanted it well out of the action. I couldn’t do anything until Adam got here anyway.
I didn’t say anything as I approached the three werewolves because I was too busy looking at the tall, pillar-like rock they were huddled around. I had expected a detailed sculpture in stone—maybe because of Nonnie’s comparison to The Hobbit, or maybe because of how detailed the concrete version of the semi tractor’s tire at the Lewis Street tunnel had been. But this looked sort of like a basalt columnar joint—the kind houses like this used as landscaping focal points—except that it lacked the sharp-edged hexagonal structure.
I walked around to the side that the others were standing in front of, and I realized that the image I should have been imagining was more like Han Solo’s encasement than Peter Jackson’s stone trolls. This side of the rock had eyes and an opening through which I could hear the faint slide of air.
Nonnie looked at me with a tear-stained face and said, “He’s having trouble breathing now.”
It did sound shallow and irregular.
“Adam’s bringing what I need,” I told her.
“What kind of a place is this?” asked Kent, sounding traumatized.
“The kind of place where fairy tales live,” said Chen Li Qiang in a dreamy voice, “and monsters dwell.”
I gave him a concerned look, but he just hugged himself.
“We are the monsters,” he told me seriously. “And we are damned.”
I frowned at him and asked the others, “Has he been bitten recently? By anything, a rabbit, maybe?”
“No, he just falls into bad poetry when he’s sad. It was—” Kent Schwabe stopped as Adam’s big black SUV topped the rise and drove directly to where we stood.
Li Qiang watched it for a minute, then said, “Is there something wrong with the suspension? It seems to be bouncing more than nec—”
One of the rear windows exploded outward in a shower of glass.
“Nothing wrong with the SUV,” I said, and turned my attention back to James. His eyes, encased in stone, were red and dry. He couldn’t blink because he did not have lids. I wondered if the smoke weaver had done that deliberately, or if it had been a cruel accident. Regardless, they didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if that was because he couldn’t move them—or because he didn’t move them.
If it weren’t for the shaky breathing, I would never have believed that he was still alive.
“Oh my God,” said Jesse beside me.
“What are you doing here?” I said, horrified.
“There wasn’t anyone to drive the car,” she told me.
“Oh,” said Aiden in a small voice. “This. He’ll take a day or two to die all the way.”
“Not going to happen,” I said, with a lot more sangfroid than I actually felt.
I looked around and said, “Li Qiang? I am putting you in charge of making sure that Jesse and Aiden don’t get hurt. Jesse”—I tapped her on the shoulder—“is our human daughter. This is our son, Aiden.” I tapped him. I met Chen Li Qiang’s eyes. “I am trusting you because everyone else I trust will have their hands full—and Carlos has vouched for you. I trust Carlos’s judgment.”
Li Qiang gave me an oddly formal bow that would have been more at home on another continent. “You can help my friend?”
“I hope so,” I told him.
“Then I will keep them safe this day as long as I have breath in my body.”
I turned to Jesse and Aiden and started to say something, but Aiden beat me to the punch. “Your son.”
I raised an eyebrow. “It would be weird the other way around, don’t you think?”
His smile was a little tentative and he gave me a nod.
“Okay—you two and Li Qiang, I want you to stand …” There was nowhere safe, not until I was further into my gambit.
“Next to each other out of the way,” said Jesse.
“I’ll help keep them safe,” Kent said to me. He had to raise his voice a little to be heard over the sounds coming from the SUV. “If you are what I have heard, you will know I am telling the truth.”
He was. But he was also the one that Bran had been unsure of. I hesitated—but Aiden was capable of protecting himself, now that his fire was mostly recovered from what Wulfe had done to it.
“Thank you,” I said, nodding toward Li Qiang, so he would know I meant him, too. I liked having the (more or less) innocent bystanders innocently bystanding instead of getting hurt.
I looked at the SUV and said, “Hey, Jesse. You and Aiden are here. And that looks like Luke, Kelly, and your father in the car. Who is minding the fort?”
“Joel is there,” she said. “Darryl and Auriele are on their way—about twenty minutes out. Dad was going to leave Kelly behind but”—another of the back windows in the rocking SUV exploded—“they were having more trouble than they expected. It took all three of them to get him into Dad’s SUV, and it took all three of them to keep him in. Finally, Dad said that given that Fiona and Harol-somebody were out fruitlessly hunting Kyle, the house should be safe enough for twenty minutes.”
Ben would have heard that—which meant the smoke weaver knew it, too. So I should hurry and get started. Once I had begun, hopefully he would be too busy to launch a counterattack.
Aiden touched my arm. “Joel is good protection,” he said. “Hard to bite a tibicena.” And that was very true. Some of my worry left me. “I thought I might be useful here given my background. But maybe I should have stayed home, too?”
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “Tough call to make. For what it’s worth, I’m happy to have you here. If you hear me about to do something stupid, you might warn me.”
He nodded. “Don’t put me so far away I can’t help.”
Nonnie touched the rock and then told me, “I will help guard your children. Help Li and Kent. I will keep them safe if it is in my power.”
“I will do my best for James,” I said, nodding. “I have a couple of guys who need rescuing from the smoke weaver, too. I’m going to try to do it all at once.”