Because of that, they had almost lost her again, this afternoon. If she had not played it smart, if she had not been able to fight—she would … he didn’t know what their enemy would have been able to do to his Anna. He was supremely grateful he hadn’t had to find out. Brother Wolf, though, was ashamed.
He, Brother Wolf, had been ineffectual against it. He was not used to being helpless, but that had not been the kind of battle won with tooth and claw. If he had given way to Charles sooner, they would have been able to give Anna the help she had asked for when she’d asked them. By the time Charles wrested control from Brother Wolf, Anna had already saved herself.
Charles could feel Brother Wolf’s guilt. But he couldn’t do anything to help until his own anger at the wolf settled a bit. So it was good that Brother Wolf chose to be quiet.
He hated to see the bruised expression in Anna’s eyes now, when she didn’t think anyone was watching. He’d hated seeing it the first time he’d met her, in the busy Chicago airport. He’d wanted to kill whoever had put that look there then—and that had been before she was his. Before he knew her—his indomitable, intrepid Anna.
To keep from hovering over her, he buried himself in work. The Suburban had an Internet uplink and a place to plug in his laptop. So he’d started the SUV and sat in the passenger seat, where he wouldn’t have to contend with the steering wheel.
He couldn’t manipulate their accounts on an insecure system—insecure by his standards, anyway. But he could research and watch the world markets to make sure that he did his part to keep the pack safe. Fangs and sinew were all well and good—but money was a better weapon. He lifted his head to look out to the campground where Anna and Tag were playing blackjack with pine needles.
Money was a better weapon against most things, but not all.
It grew dark and they wrapped up their card game. Anna took a flashlight into the bigger tent. Tag busied himself with putting away the folding table and camp chairs. Charles turned off the SUV.
Tag came up to Charles as he finished closing his laptop case. Charles could feel the other wolf’s trepidation. Tag was an old wolf. He knew that Brother Wolf was unhappy, and Tag was smart enough to be worried about that.
“I’m going wolf tonight,” Tag told Charles. “There’s a nice patch of grass up there on that knoll—I found it while we were chasing Anna this morning. That will leave me close enough to come if something happens. But it should give you some privacy, too.”
Charles caught his arm as Tag started to turn away. He pulled him into an embrace, kissing his cheek before letting him go. Letting Tag know that Brother Wolf was not unhappy with him. And that Charles appreciated his generosity and perceptiveness.
“Da chose well when he sent you with us,” Charles told him. “Thank you for coming.”
Tag huffed, but he looked pleased. “Well enough,” he said. “But I’m expecting a fight where I can dig my fangs into someone and taste some blood. Otherwise, I’ll count this as a wasted trip.”
“I expect that we aren’t going to get out of this without bloodshed,” said Charles.
“Hopefully no more of Anna’s blood,” said Tag as he began to strip off his clothing. “I don’t want to ever see that again.”
Charles was in total agreement.
Anna looked around when he joined her in the tent. She was moving stiffly and held her head in a way that told him she still had a headache. But she welcomed him with a happy smile.
He thought she might be the only person in the world who was always happy to see him. Some of the tension between him and Brother Wolf faded away—and only a very little of that was the natural effect that an Omega’s presence always brought.
She had their sleeping bags zipped up together and had stripped out of her daytime clothing. She wore an oversized T-shirt that hung halfway to her knees. It was emerald green, a color that made her hair look more red than usual. Giant white letters across her chest read Werewolf?
“New shirt?” he asked.
“Not that new,” she said. “Mercy sent it to me a while back because she thought it was funny. I just haven’t worn it yet.” She turned around so he could see the back, where a ferocious Hollywoodized werewolf bared its fangs. Below the werewolf, across her lower back and butt, it read Ware Wolf! Where Wolf? There W—agh!!!!
He laughed. He hadn’t expected to, not after the day they’d had. He closed the space between them and pulled her against him, her back to his front. He buried his face in her hair and just breathed in. They felt like the first easy breaths he’d taken since they’d walked into Wild Sign yesterday.
“Why don’t you lie down on top of the sleeping bag and I’ll see what I can do about your headache,” he murmured, stepping back so she could do just that.
He’d taken off his boots at the door of the tent, but he stripped off his jeans and shirt so he could move better.
His brother, Samuel, was the healer—their da’s mother’s magic taking that path in him. Samuel wasn’t a miracle worker; he couldn’t raise the dead or cure old age or heart disease. But he used his magic to help people. Their da said it was the reason that Samuel spent so much time on his own out in the world with the humans—because it was the humans who needed his touch. Their da wasn’t happy about it.
Charles couldn’t do what Samuel could do. But if his contrary powers were willing, he could ease his mate’s pain. He knelt beside her and put his hands flat on her shoulders.
“Do you need me to take off the T-shirt?” she asked, taking in his lack of dress.
“No,” he said. He didn’t need the distraction. “Just relax if you can.”
He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, reaching for the well of dormant power that he seldom touched. This wasn’t his mother’s wild magic. This magic was hungry, violent, and raw; it came from the other side of his family line. Witchborn. But it wasn’t the pristine magic of white witches, though he’d never fed it with anyone else’s trauma. It had always felt like this. Not tainted, but not good, either, as if this magic was forever damaged by the blackness of his paternal grandmother’s heart. It had taken Brother Wolf to show Charles that it was not evil.
He knew his da would have been repulsed by it, and so he had always been careful to hide this magic from Da. Charles was very, very careful about the kinds of things that he used it for. Like Brother Wolf, it could be difficult to control, and out of control it was dangerous to others. Mostly he tried to forget about it.
But it was good for this.
Under his hands, Anna’s tight muscles began to soften. Charles wasn’t really healing her, but Anna’s sore muscles hadn’t come from overuse. They had come from Anna’s struggle to drive the Singer—to steal Anna’s name for it—away. Her wolf had borrowed energy from her body to shield her mind. It was the way wolf magic worked.
Generally the pack never noticed the drain—most of their kind of magic was something they used for a few minutes or less. The kinds of things that took longer than that, like the constant magic used to make humans see dogs where there were werewolves, tended to be shared among the pack as a whole.
But Anna’s wolf had battled for the better part of a day. And it had not been an easy battle. Efficiency only came when you understood what you fought. She had used a huge amount of energy, and it had damaged her body.
She would have healed with some rest combined with eating well—both he and Tag had been putting food in front of Anna. But he saw no reason that she should wait when he could do something about it.
If Brother Wolf had settled down sooner, he could have done this earlier in the day.
“Mmmpf,” Anna said, her voice drowsy. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but it feels good.”
He fed energy into his mate’s body until it began washing back at him. He stopped—and was very, very careful not to take any of that energy back into himself, in case some of it was not his. He’d done that once when he had been very young, and he’d felt as though he was going to turn
into the Hunger that Devours. Except that he wasn’t hungry for flesh, not even human flesh.
He’d gone to his grandfather because going to his da would have been disastrous. It had taken days of the old man’s prescription of fasting and sweats to make Charles feel normal again.
“Gray witchcraft,” his da would have called it. “Poison” was what his grandfather had said. Charles just knew he never wanted to feel like that again.
Anna fell asleep with a happy sigh. Likely she’d have been asleep earlier if she hadn’t been hurting. Charles moved away from her, found a comfortable position, and sat cross-legged, hands loose, eyes closed, and sought balance as a precursor to binding the witchcraft away again. If Anna hadn’t been there, he’d have sung one of his grandfather’s songs. He used those songs to heal his spirit and cleanse his mind the way a shower cleansed his body.
He paused. Had that been what Anna had done when the Singer caught her? She had played a lament to the broken land—which is exactly how his grandfather would have begun to heal it. It was a way of connection, of opening up to the damaged spirit.
He examined his memories of the events in the amphitheater and decided that was probably what had happened. Anna, like most people, was mostly blind to the spirits in the world around her, which didn’t mean the reverse was true. A lesser musician might have simply been playing a folk song. But Anna didn’t play music that way. She had opened herself to her audience—and something had taken her up on her invitation.
He considered the amphitheater with its haunted atmosphere, and wondered if Anna’s actions had only been an accident. Brother Wolf had examined that recorder with all of their collective senses. He had discovered nothing that suggested it was anything other than a rather well-made instrument. But it had survived in the open air for months, even if it hadn’t survived Brother Wolf.
Music, he considered, as a trap. Had Anna picked up that recorder from her own impulse? Or had there been something more sinister at work?
His patrilineal witchborn magic had taken advantage of his distraction and was leaking out into the tent, seeping into the ground. Likely a real witch would have considered this a result of failing to contain their abilities. He understood the magic was curious and bent on exploration. He centered himself and began the process of coaxing it back.
Charles was sweating and tired when he had his grandmother’s legacy wrapped safely away again, the ground and the air in the tent free of inquisitive magic. He glanced at Anna, who had rolled over and was limp with the sleep of the exhausted.
He shifted to wolf and back to human, grimacing with the exquisite pain of the change. Had Tag not been on guard, he wouldn’t have risked tiring himself out. But he didn’t want to sleep beside Anna still covered with the sour sweat that he’d accumulated with one thing and another today.
He glanced again at Anna—but this time she was awake. She sat up and pulled off her shirt.
“No,” he said. “You need to rest.”
She gave him an imperious look that made Brother Wolf want to roll with joy. She wasn’t afraid of him. The terror on her face before she’d run this morning … he would happily go to his grave if he never saw her look at him with that expression again.
“I need you,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve felt good all day. All that I need now, to feel like myself, is for you to wipe away the feel of Justin’s hands.” She covered herself and shivered, looking away, whispering, “I have been smelling him on my skin all day.”
He gathered her up and rearranged the sleeping bag so that they were both on the soft inner surface. Then he laid her back down with care.
“Where do you smell him?” he asked, instead of telling her that she only smelled of herself. He’d smelled Justin last night, too. If she could still scent that old hurt, he would not argue with her.
She raised her right hand and showed him her wrist.
He brought it to him and brushed his cheek against it before kissing it gently. He touched her wrist with his nose, watching her as he took in the scent of her skin. Just them. He brought it to her nose for inspection.
“Better?” he asked.
She closed her eyes, concentrating. Then she looked at him and nodded.
It took time. He would have thought it to be a seduction game had it not been for their mating bond, because by the time she acknowledged that she could neither smell nor feel Justin on her skin, they both were flushed and taut with desire. But they were mated, and he could feel her distress, feel it lessen gradually as he touched, kissed, and licked his way over her body.
He did not enter her until their bond was free of the shadow of spirit, and that tested his patience to the breaking point. Hers, too. As he slid into her, wet and swollen for him, he felt her delight break free and was forced to bite his cheek hard not to follow her immediately.
He was not some pup who thought only of his own pleasure. He was an old wolf. Controlled. But it was a near thing.
When they were finished, she lay on top of him, as limp and wrung out as he himself felt. Brother Wolf, satisfied at last, slept deep so that it was only Charles who held their mate.
Only Charles who growled low in his throat at the memory of the thing that had tried to take his Anna away. It would not hurt her ever again.
He would make sure of it.
C H A P T E R
7
Anna stopped at the other campground, the one with the showers. She was not going to face Dr. Connors while smelling of fear, exertion, and sweat.
Charles might be able to take care of that for himself by shifting back and forth, and Tag smelled of nothing more noxious than the evergreen he’d apparently spent the night under. But Anna felt the need for hot water to clean herself physically and metaphysically. Showers, she informed Charles, despite the fact that he wasn’t arguing with her, were not a luxury but a necessity.
The shower building at the lower campground bore a large sign that read Bathrooms are for registered campers only. Anna, pulling towels out of one of the general supply bags in the back of the SUV and handing them out, reflected that she used to be a rule follower. She would once have gone dirty rather than ignore that sign. Being a werewolf had been good for her in many ways—from a certain perspective, anyway.
No one gave them a second look. By chance, Anna had the women’s side of the showers all to herself. She could have stayed under the hot water for a week, feeling clean inside and out as the water drained away by her feet. She contented herself with briskly scrubbing her hair and feet and everything in between.
The men’s side of the showers was silent by the time she turned off the water. But she didn’t hurry just because Tag and Charles were doubtless both done and waiting for her. Dr. Connors had sounded formidable, and, in Anna’s experience, women judged others by their appearance.
Anna briefly considered going for very casual, sending a message of “I’m so sure of myself I don’t care what I look like.” But the events of the past two days had left her unsettled. She felt like she needed all the armament at her disposal—that meant foundation and lipstick, as well as the carry gun tucked in the small of her back.
She was pretty sure that she was breaking California law with her gun. But Wild Sign looked as though it had been a colony of white witches. Dr. Connors’s father had been one of the people living there. It did not mean that he himself was a witch, but it did mean that he consorted with them. If his daughter did the same, if she was a witch, there was no guarantee that she was a white witch.
Anna had had enough dealings with witches not to go in unarmed if she could help it—breaking the law or not. Especially since it would take a foolhardy officer of the law to try to arrest Charles Cornick’s mate. She tried to feel guilty about the knowledge that there was no chance Charles would let her suffer for breaking the law. Or, if not guilty, at least not quite so smug about it. But she didn’t quite succeed.
She tucked her deep green silk shirt into black slacks, and
then donned the holster and gun. To cover the P365, she slipped on a sandy linen jacket she’d brought along for that purpose. The jacket didn’t look entirely out of place, though it would have been better if she’d brought brown slacks instead of the black. She was just glad that she’d gotten into the habit of packing nice clothes wherever they went. Charles’s being the son of the Marrok meant that they often found themselves in unexpected formal situations.
Metaphorical armor and literal weaponry in place, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was still wet and fell in loose curls. She considered putting her hair up to complete the look. But she wasn’t going on a job interview, so she left it down. It would dry better that way.
Charles was wearing a long-sleeved ivory shirt she’d bought for him, the stretchy fabric clinging lightly to bone and sinew. He’d rebraided his hair and tied it off with a piece of leather the same color as the shirt. The jeans and worn black boots shouldn’t have looked right, but they did.
He frowned at her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him, trying to get another look at herself. She hadn’t seen anything out of place in the mirror, but maybe she had a pant leg tucked into a sock or something.
“You covered up the freckles,” he said, folding his arms across his chest.
She felt her face light up. If she ever got a chance to really time travel, she’d go back and tell her thirteen-year-old self to quit worrying that her freckles would drive away any chance she had to date. The scariest and sexiest man in the universe was going to pout when she concealed them with foundation.
She put her hands on his forearms and used that to lever herself up and him down so she could kiss him.
“Sorry,” she told Charles. “But I’m trying for a professional look today.”
She rubbed her lipstick off his mouth with her thumb.
“Even without freckles, she still outclasses us,” Tag said.
Anna had to laugh. She was … ordinary. Something that neither of the men she was with would ever be. She turned to say something smart-assed back but shut her mouth when she got a good look at Tag.
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