Charles had known all of his life that his mother’s death had been his fault.
So had his father.
Charles had understood from the beginning that his da left when he could no longer look upon the son that his mate had loved more than she loved life. Those around him had given him other reasons, but Brother Wolf had known, and anything Brother Wolf understood, so did Charles. There had been nothing special about the trip Da had begun that had ended with him bringing home his new mate, though later Bran had claimed he’d needed to find a mate to make his wolf stable after Blue Jay Woman’s death.
Only in his own thoughts did Charles use his mother’s name. He thought that was safe, that it wouldn’t call her back from the land of the dead.
“You could not stay,” Charles said softly. “I know.”
Their eyes met—and it was Bran who looked away.
“I was running as wolf in the mountains, the wolf in charge, when I heard the call.”
“A summons?” Charles asked.
Bran shook his head, thought about it a moment, then, unexpectedly, grinned as he nodded. “Yes. I suppose. I have no idea how he knew I was nearby. That was very early on—there were maybe ten werewolves west of the Mississippi. Possibly only two.” He looked at the wall of books behind Charles. “All that territory and there we were with less than twenty miles between us. Sometimes I have to admit I believe in fate.”
He looked at Charles again. “I had decided not to come back for fear of what I would do. Had that wolf not called me …”
The room hung in silence for a moment.
“I know,” Charles said.
His da’s wolf was not like Brother Wolf, who reasoned as well as Charles himself did, though sometimes with a wholly different perspective. His da’s wolf would have destroyed the thing that took his mate from him, and his da had been running out of the willpower to stop him. The only option his da had was a final one. “I knew. Brother Wolf told me.”
Bran nodded. “Of course.”
Silence lingered between them. Charles had the feeling his da wanted to say something more but couldn’t find the words. When Bran spoke again, it was to continue the story.
“My wolf spirit and I were battling, the wolf ascendant when I heard my … heard him call me.” Bran pounded a closed fist on his chest.
“Heard whom?” Charles asked, though Da had dropped enough hints.
Bran smiled faintly. “Sherwood Post.”
Charles nodded.
“He didn’t call himself that then, of course,” Bran said.
The smile, barely there in the first place, died away. “There wasn’t much left of him when I found him—hide, bones, and determination. He had this girl … this woman with him, who was in worse shape. He was half-delirious and mostly incoherent, and it didn’t help matters that I was still more wolf than man. Much of what he said made no sense to me, and so I did not make an effort to remember it.
“More than a hundred people dead, he said. Of those he’d escaped with, the majority were women and children.” Bran shook his head. “He’d somehow managed to kill or subdue whatever was killing them or holding them—though he wasn’t clear on either of those points. I understood it had something to do with music and wild magic. The woman who was dying was the last of the group of people he’d initially managed to save. I found the bodies of the rest later—children, mostly. A couple of babies looked to be very nearly newborn. After all the rest died, when Leah was the last survivor, Sherwood decided that she would live whether she wanted to or not. I think he was probably half-mad by then. He wasn’t a healer like your brother, but he had power. I had the impression that he’d drained himself to the edge of death trying to save the others, and that affected his reason, too. Bereft of other, better choices, he Changed her—and then held her to life with his magic when the Change didn’t seem like it had taken. It was killing him.”
Charles sucked in a breath at the awful parallel. A stranger held to life by magic that was killing someone Bran loved. Just as Charles had killed Blue Jay Woman.
“I am not the mage he was,” Bran said. “Even if the wolf had not been so near, I could not break into the spell he’d worked. I—the wolf I was—determined the only way to save Sherwood was to save the woman also. I needed to form a pack again, to pull one of them into my pack so I could feed them strength.”
Bran had been running without a pack for a long time by that point, Charles knew, since long before he and Samuel had left Europe for the New World. Neither his da nor his brother had ever told him why, and Charles had never asked.
“Sherwood was too far gone, and too bound to the woman. If I tried to make him pack and he chose to fight, and I had reason to believe that he might, he would die.” Bran almost smiled again. “So, for that matter, might I have done. Instead, I performed the blood and flesh exchange with her. With Leah.”
He paused, his eyes on the map in front of him but his mind obviously on that long-ago day. His voice carried a note of wonder Charles was fairly certain his da didn’t know was there.
His voice a bare whisper, Bran murmured, “Of all of those people, she was the last survivor, Charles. When I bound her to my pack, the first of all that pack, I understood why. Her spirit … so strong.” He half closed his eyes and breathed in as if he were still in that desperate moment. Under the lowered eyelids, Charles could see the glimmer of gold. “Such determination, so much fight in her.” He let out a breath and smoothed a fold in the map with a flattened palm. “But not, alas, enough strength to allow her to survive without help. And making her pack was not enough. She’d been ill for a long time, and fighting for her life through the Change for several days.”
Surviving the Change was not something one usually did for days—or even hours. In Charles’s experience, the Change from human to werewolf happened in under an hour or it didn’t happen at all. He imagined the agony of it, to be hung suspended in the middle of a Change from human to wolf, neither one nor the other. The confusion would make the pain all that much worse.
“I think if I had been less broken,” Bran said, “or less moonstruck, I would have made other choices, but I cannot know that. I could simply have let her die. I could have helped her along. Sherwood would have died, too—but that was a choice he had made.”
His voice trailed off and his body went very still. “I have done a lot of things I am ashamed of,” Bran said. “This was not the worst.”
“You bound her as your mate,” said Charles, who had seen where this was leading—had grown up with the result of that decision. “But you couldn’t have done it without her consent.”
He knew that, remembered the tension of waiting to see if Anna would accept him. A person could be forced into the Change. Could be forced into a pack. But the mating bond could not be forced—it required acceptance by both parties.
“Could I not?” asked Bran, his mouth twisting. “She had been forcibly Changed, left in agony, then forcibly bound to a pack. I don’t think she was capable of giving consent.”
Bran shrugged his shoulders as if he were trying to shed some burden. “I knew it then, and I know it now. I am not proud of what I did. I bound her wolf to mine by force. She was dying. She was dying and taking Sherwood with her.” He met Charles’s eyes. “I could not bear it, not after Blue Jay Woman. My wolf spirit was looking for surcease, and Leah’s was trying to survive.” He paused, then said, “I do not regret taking Leah as my mate, only that I did it without giving her an alternative.”
Charles gave him a formal nod, though both of them could hear the lie in Bran’s voice. Leah was not Blue Jay Woman, who had been fierce—but from all accounts also brilliant and charming. Leah was cold and methodical.
Charles remembered the cold-eyed, brittle woman his da had brought home and thought of her, for perhaps the first time, from his adult perspective instead of the perspective of the child he had been. He considered that woman now in the light of his da’s revelations—a survivor. A vic
tim. Not a jealous woman, perhaps, so much as a broken one. He could see it. No wonder his da had been so protective of her; guilt could drive a person harder than love.
“As soon as the mate bond fell into place …” Bran hesitated only a bare moment and continued, “Sherwood’s magic fell away and I was able to pull her all the way into the Change. They both survived.”
Bran took up a pencil and touched it to the map at the edge of the silver line marking Leah’s lands. “I think they were somewhere in here when I came upon them. It was a clearing on the shoulder of a mountain. Sherwood didn’t tell me much, but I got the impression he had dragged his little group of survivors as far as they could travel before stopping.
“We buried the dead while Leah recovered enough to travel.” He hesitated. “She never said, but I am quite sure one of the children we buried was hers. After the first day, after Sherwood recovered his senses, he would not say a word about what he had fought, about why he worried when Leah sang. He told me only that it was dangerous to speak of. I believed him, believe him still. Leah told me once that she remembers that time in her life in snapshots of memories.” He paused. “She remembers some faces, a few moments. But nothing concrete. She thinks Sherwood made her forget.”
“And now something is happening and we can’t ask Sherwood,” said Charles. “Because Sherwood doesn’t remember anything before the day the Emerald City Pack found him in the witch’s cage, and Leah doesn’t remember anything because of Sherwood.”
“And I can’t send him with you because he belongs to Hauptman now,” agreed Bran. “Though I’ve got half a mind to make him go anyway. Maybe something about the trip would jog his memory loose.”
His da, Charles believed, thought Sherwood’s amnesia was something he could have overcome if Sherwood had been willing to try to remember who and what he had been. Charles wasn’t so sure—he’d been there when they’d dragged him out of the silver cage, more skin and bones than flesh. Da had known the old wolf longer, but Charles thought that might be giving his da unrealistic expectations.
Bran had finally had it out with Sherwood one night behind the closed doors of his study. Charles didn’t know what had happened there, but magic had leaked from the room and a dark voice that did not belong to his da spoke in tones that rattled the bones of the house, though no one who heard it could understand what it said.
The next day, Da had given the old wolf a new name: Sherwood Post, a name he’d claimed to have taken at random from a pair of books he’d had on his desk. Charles thought it was more calculated than that; he hadn’t even known his da had a copy of Emily Post’s book in his library. Bran had then forbidden any of his wolves who had known Sherwood before from speaking the wolf’s old name. There hadn’t been very many of them—the old Sherwood Post hadn’t sought out werewolf company, and when he had, he’d often used names other than his own.
“I’m not sending you alone,” Bran said. “I spoke to Tag, told him the pertinent parts of this story, and he has agreed to go.”
“Tag,” Charles said warily. Taking the berserker out in public was a risk.
Bran nodded. “Sherwood Post almost died. He thought he’d defeated it—I know this because he never went back, and he would have. But if he’d been sure, he wouldn’t have worried about telling the story of what he’d faced. I need to send you with backup.”
He clenched his hands and met his son’s eyes. “I can’t come. Risking both of us is unacceptable—and I need to stay here.” He hesitated, then admitted, “With Leah. I don’t like any of this. Tag isn’t a mage—but magic slides off him in unusual ways, and he’s traveled all over. He’s had encounters with more kinds of creatures than almost anyone I know.”
Charles got up. “I’ll tell Anna what we are doing.” He paused. “I would rather leave her here. Tag and I both have some defenses against magic.”
“But you can’t,” said his da.
Charles met his eyes. “No. If you are sending Tag, bringing Anna becomes imperative. If he goes berserker, she’s the only one besides you who would have a chance of bringing him down.”
“Yes,” Bran said.
“You asked me to come here without Anna so you could tell me how Leah and this missing town might be part of the same story,” Charles said. It was a guess, but he could tell from his da’s face he hadn’t gotten it wrong. “If Anna comes with me, I need to tell her everything.”
Bran nodded. “I wouldn’t ask you to keep this from your mate.”
“So why did you make me leave her home?” Charles asked.
“Do you think,” said his da, a hint of amusement in his voice if not his face, “that your mate would have let me get through the story without demanding more information?” He lifted an eyebrow, and his eyes, wolf eyes, laughed. “Or chew me out for how I treated both you and Leah?”
Charles thought about it.
Bran’s face grew serious. “But these events have left my wolf a little unstable, and justified as Anna’s rebuke would be, I am not willing to risk hurting her feelings—” He paused and said, “—or scaring her.”
They were all—all of the pack—conscious of where Anna had been before Charles had found her. He was pretty sure she had no idea how hard they all worked to not be too scary. Some of that came from understanding what they owed her. Bran had not had to put down any of his pack for loss of control since Anna had become part of it. Charles wasn’t sure he could remember a year without either him or Bran having to end one of their own.
No sane dominant wolf wanted to distress an Omega in any way. Stable wolves, mostly, didn’t have to become one of Bran’s wolves, but they had not had so much as a serious fight break out among their own since Anna had come. Even the most broken of the wolves did not want to scare Anna, because she was an Omega.
Charles nodded. “Are we coordinating with the FBI on this?”
Bran leaned back and sighed. “I appreciate them bringing this to us. But I judge that this is our problem. If the people disappeared from private property, it is not their jurisdiction.”
“Are we interested in an alliance?” Charles said. “Not the one we were offered, with some secret-even-to-themselves collection of federal officials. But a real alliance with the mundane humans?” It seemed to him that a path could be cleared to doing so.
“What’s in it for us?” Da said. “I don’t mind this sort of … voluntary cooperation between us. But why should I enter into an agreement that would allow them to pull me into a conflict some idiot in Washington creates?”
Charles gave his da a shrewd look. He knew better than to tell his da that the strong should protect the weak. Da believed that all right; Charles had learned it from him. But even a torturer would not get the Marrok to admit he believed mundane humans should be protected.
So Charles said, “Because in the end, the human population holds all the cards. It would cost them, but they could kill us all.”
“Point,” Bran said. “But we are a long way out from having to make a decision on that.”
“I have a few questions about Leah’s story,” Charles said, fairly sure their listener had left. His da might be more willing to open up now.
LEAH LEFT THE hallway outside Bran’s study when the topic of conversation turned to theoretical politics. It wasn’t her habit to eavesdrop, but she had heard her name and paused. When it became clear what they were talking about, she found herself glued to the floor.
She didn’t know if Bran had known she was there. Or if he had intended to keep to himself the news that there was something going on in the mountains where she had been reborn, died, and been reborn again.
She’d never been back there, though she’d requested that Bran acquire the land after he had married her in the legal sense not long after he’d first brought her here. She couldn’t even remember what her reason for that had been. A lot of her memories of those early days of their marriage were foggy.
She only knew some part of her still longed to return �
� home—which was an odd way to think of a place she didn’t really remember and where she had lived so short a time. Another part felt it would be unwise to let that land fall to some innocent. It was sheer luck it had ended up in the middle of a wild area rather than on the edge of some settlement turned to town turned to city—luck and a rugged landscape that did not yield easily to the needs of mankind.
She wandered to her bedroom and over to the jewelry tower in the corner of the room. It was turned so she could observe herself in the full-length mirror, and she did so.
Straight dark blond hair, loose today, hung down to her shoulders in a shining wave. Large deep blue eyes surrounded by lashes she kept dyed, as she did her eyebrows, because they were several shades lighter than her hair.
She was tall and leanly muscled. She flexed her long-fingered, manicured hands. Her father had said she was built for work—it had not been a compliment. Bran said she looked like a Valkyrie. She wasn’t sure if that was a compliment, either, though she didn’t think it displeased him.
But no amount of grooming, of cleaning, of polishing, could erase the gaunt woman she had been, more animal than human, with dirty hair so tangled they’d had to cut most of it off. She looked at her muscled forearms and saw instead how they had appeared when she’d been so thin that both bones had shown through the skin. Sleek, smooth nails polished glossy red seemed more unreal than the filthy nails broken down to the quick.
And the stupid part of that? As clear and as visceral as the vision of that haggard creature was, she couldn’t actually remember looking like that. By the time Bran had brought her here, she had been healthy in body and very nearly sane.
Very nearly.
She should go there instead of Charles, she thought. She had survived whatever it was once; she should be able to survive it again.
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