Tied With a Bow

guarded the path with a rifle.
    Maybe she’d fired by mistake? At a deer or raccoon or something, Arjenie thought as she got to her feet, and not at half a ton of bear. Or maybe the shot had hit the bear or scared it off and Benedict wouldn’t think he had to fight it even though—
    “Civilians, get down ,” Sheriff Porter ordered. “Get down and stay down. Don’t run. Rick—”
    A woman’s voice called out from the top of the draw. “It was a cow. A damn cow. Stupid beast ran straight at me. Sorry, Sheriff.”
    Arjenie heard something. She must have, though the sound didn’t really register in the busy din of her brain. But that barely heard sound sent fear flooding through her, made her spin around—and cast up one hand, fingers spread, and concentrate with all her might.
    A half-dozen balls of mage light sprang into being. The sudden brilliance gave her a great view of the monstrous bear charging them like a freight train.
    And the black wolf leaping off the rocks above it to land on its back.
    A gun went off. She wanted to hit whoever did that—couldn’t they see that they might hit Benedict? But the wolf had already bounced off, as if he’d used the bear’s back as a trampoline. Maybe he’d just wanted to get its attention.
    If so, it had worked. The bear turned to face its attacker, baring those horribly big teeth, and rose up. And up. And up. Kodiak , she thought numbly. That had to be nine feet of bear, and the only one that big was the Kodiak, which absolutely could not be down here in Virginia and—
    Another shot. Another, at a different timber, and she saw that one of the deputies was shooting his rifle and the sheriff had his handgun out and maybe she should drop the mage lights and get out Benedict’s .357, but oh God, they’d just made the bear mad because it dropped to all fours again and charged.
    She sent one of the mage lights winging straight at its face.
    It wouldn’t burn. Mage lights produced no heat at all, which wasn’t possible according to physics but seemed to be true. But bears were supposed to have poor sight. Having a light shining right in it eyes should blind it or at least confuse it.
    The bear skidded, batting at the light with one enormous paw—which of course did nothing. Mage lights had no physical substance.
    The wolf raced in—and latched on to the bear’s nose.
    It swiped at the wolf with that huge paw. The wolf went sailing—and a wall of fire sprang up in front of her. No, around her, all the way around her and Aunt Robin and Sammy. “Uncle Clay, Seri’s still out there! I can’t see! Drop your fire!”
    Uncle Clay’s strong arm gathered her close. “Hold tight.” He raised his voice. “It’s a thin ring of fire—you can get through if you hurry! Don’t worry about your clothes—I can douse fire as easily as I can start it. Don’t run, don’t attract the bear’s notice—but if you can get here without it seeing you, you can come through the fire!”
    “No, don’t say that! The bear can hear you!”
    “The bear?” That was Sammy, incredulous. “The bear doesn’t speak—”
    More shots rang out, a dizzying cascade of shots that hurt her ears. At first she thought her ears were ringing oddly, but after a couple seconds she knew that wasn’t it. She really did hear Havoc’s shrill, excited bark.
    “Havoc!” Robin cried. “Clay—”
    “No.” He said that in a final voice— no as in I will stop you. Do not think of leaving the safety of this ring of fire.
    If you could get in through the fire without getting hurt, you could get out that way, too. “I’m okay,” she told her uncle. Was Havoc’s bark fading, going away? “I—no, Sammy, don’t!”
    Even as her cousin turned an astonished face her way—he hadn’t done anything—Clay turned to look at him, his arm loosening just enough for Arjenie to pull free, suck in a lungful of air, and fling herself through the fire.
    She stopped a few feet outside it and stood, gasping and only slightly singed, in the trampled dirt and grass. At some point in all the chaos she’d lost focus, and all of the mage lights but the original were gone, but that first one still bobbed obediently over her head. Plus the fire gave out light as well as heat, so she saw pretty well.
    Sheriff Porter knelt beside one of his deputies. Rick, that was his name. The man lay on the ground. She couldn’t see how badly he was hurt—the sheriff’s body blocked most of her view. But she knew it was