I don't know why I thought of that right then, or why the thought tried to bring tears to my eyes. My foster parents were both of them almost seventeen years dead. She died trying to become a werewolf because, she'd told me, every year she got older and he didn't. There are a lot fewer women who are moon called, because they just don't survive the Change as well. My foster father died from grief a month later. I'd been fourteen.
I took a sip of cocoa and waited for Bran to talk.
He sighed heavily and leaned back in the chair, balancing it on two legs, his own legs dangling in the air.
"People don't do that," I told him.
He raised an eyebrow. "Do what?"
"Balance like that-not unless they're teenage boys showing off for their girlfriends."
He brought all four legs back on the flour abruptly. "Thank you." Bran liked to appear as human as possible, but his gratitude was a little sharp. I took a hasty sip of cocoa so he wouldn't see my amusement.
He put his elbows on the table and folded his hands. "What are your intentions now, Mercy?"
"What do you mean?"
"Adam's safe and healing. We'll find out how your young friend was killed. What are you planning to do?"
Bran is scary. He's a little psychic-at least that's what he says if you ask. What that means is that he can talk to any werewolf he knows, mind to mind. That's why Charles was able to be his spokesperson out in the woods. Bran uses that ability, among others, to control the North American packs. He claims it is all one way, that he can make people hear him but not the other way around.
The pack whisperers say he has other abilities, too, but no one knows exactly what they are. The most common rumor is that he really can read minds. Certainly he always knew who was responsible for what mischief around the town.
My foster mother always laughed and said it was his reputation for knowing everything that allowed him to appear infallible: all he had to do was walk through the room and see who looked guiltiest when they saw him. Maybe she was right, but I tried looking innocent the next time, and it didn't work.
"I'm leaving in the morning." Early, I thought. To get away without talking to Samuel again-but also to get started looking for Jesse.
Bran shook his head and frowned. "Afternoon."
I felt my eyebrows rise. "Well," I said gently, "if you knew what I was going to be doing, why didn't you just tell me instead of asking?"
He gave me a small smile. "If you wait until afternoon, Adam will be ready to travel, and Samuel should know something about how your young man… Alan MacKenzie Frazier died. He's staying up tonight to perform the autopsy and run tests in the lab."
He leaned forward. "It's not your fault, Mercy."
I spilled the cocoa all down the front of my T-shirt. «Sh-» I bit off the word. Bran didn't approve of swearing. "You can read minds."
"I know the way your mind works," Bran said, with a little smile that managed to be not quite smug. But he was quick enough retrieving a roll of paper towels stored under the sink and handed them to me as I held my shirt away from my body. The cocoa was still hot, though not scalding.
As I mopped myself up at the sink, he continued, "Unless you've changed more than I can believe, if something happens, if someone gets hurt, it must be your fault. I had the story from Adam, as far as he knows it, and it had nothing to do with you."
"Hah-you can read minds. He's in wolf form, and can't talk," I said. I'd done the best I could with the shirt, but I wished I had an extra change of clothing.
Bran smiled. "He's not now. Sometimes the change helps us heal faster. Usually we change from human to wolf, but the other way works as well. He was not happy with Samuel." Bran's smile deepened. "He spent his first words chewing him out. Told him that second-guessing the man in the field was an amateur's mistake. He said he'd rather not have someone who didn't know what they were doing 'mucking about' with his wounds. He also said that you had more guts than sense sometimes." Bran tipped his styrofoam cup in my direction. "As it happens I agree-which is why I asked Adam to keep an eye on you for me when you moved into his territory."
Ah, I thought and tried not to look as devastated as I felt. So Adam had been ordered to look after me? I had rather thought that the odd relationship we had was based on something else. Knowing that Bran had told him to watch me changed the shading of every conversation we'd ever had, lessened it.
"I don't like lies," said Bran, and I knew I'd failed to keep the pain of his revelation from my face. "Not even lies of omission. Hard truths can be dealt with, triumphed over, but lies will destroy your soul." He looked as though he had personal knowledge of it. "That distaste leads me to meddle where perhaps I should step back."
He paused, as if to let me speak, but I had no idea where he was going with this.
He sat down and took another sip of cocoa. "There were those who thought the truth of Bryan's death should be kept from you." Bryan had been my foster father.
I remembered waking up shortly after Christmas to Bran's low-key voice in the kitchen. When I came out of my room, Bran told me that the police had found Bryan's body in the Kootenai River.
Suicide is difficult for werewolves. Even silver bullets don't always defeat the wolf's ability to heal itself. Decapitation is effective, but rather difficult to achieve in a suicidal situation. Drowning works very well. Werewolves are very densely muscled; they tend to have a difficult time swimming even if they want to, because, like chimpanzees, they have too much muscle and not enough fat to float.
"Some of the pack would have told you that Bryan had an accident." Bran's voice was contemplative. "They told me that fourteen was too young to deal with a suicide, especially on top of the death of Bryan's mate."
"Her name was Evelyn," I told him. Bran had a tendency to dismiss the humans around him as if they didn't exist. Samuel once told me that it was because humans were so fragile, and Bran had seen too many of them die. I thought that if I could handle Evelyn's death when I was fourteen, then, by hang, Bran could, too.
He gave me a quelling look. When I didn't look down as protocol demanded, his lips turned up before he hid them with the cup.
"Evelyn, indeed," he said, then sighed. "When you chose to live alone, rather than go to your mother, I agreed to that, too. You had proven your mettle to me; I thought you had earned the right to make your own choices." His eyes roved around the room. "Do you remember the last time you and I talked?"
I nodded and sat down finally. Even if he wasn't insisting on protocol tonight, it felt awkward to be standing while he was sitting in the chair.
"You were sixteen," he said. "Too young for him-and too young to know what it was that he wanted from you."
When Bran had caught Samuel kissing me in the woods, he'd sent me home, then shown up the next morning to tell me that he'd already spoken with my real mother, and she would be expecting me at the end of the week. He was sending me away, and I should pack what I wanted to take.
I'd packed all right, but not to go to Portland; I was packed to leave with Samuel. We'd get married, he'd said. It never occurred to me that at sixteen, I'd have trouble getting married without parental permission. Doubtless Samuel would have had an answer for that as well. We'd planned to move to a city and live outside of any pack.
I loved Samuel, had loved him since my foster father had died and Samuel had taken over his role as my protector. Bryan had been a dear, but Samuel was a much more effective defense. Even the women didn't bother me as much once I had Samuel at my back. He'd been funny and charming. Lightheartedness is not a gift often given to werewolves, but Samuel had it in abundance. Under his wing, I learned joy-a very seductive emotion.
"You told me that Samuel didn't love me," I told Bran, my mouth tasting like sawdust. I don't know how he'd found out what Samuel had planned. "You told me he needed a mate who could bear his children."
Human women miscarry a little over half of the children they conceive by a werewolf father. They carry to term only t
hose babies who are wholly human. Werewolf women miscarry at the first full moon. But coyotes and wolves can interbreed with viable offspring, so why not Samuel and me? Samuel believed that some of our children would be human, maybe some would be walkers like me, and some would be born werewolves-but they all would live.
It wasn't until Bran explained it all to me that I understood the antagonism Leah had toward me, an antagonism that all the other females had adopted.
"I should not have told you that way," Bran said.
"Are you trying to apologize?" I asked. I couldn't understand what Bran was trying to say. "I was sixteen. Samuel may seem young, but he's been a full-grown adult as long as I can remember-so he's what, fifty? Sixty?"
I hadn't worried about it when I had loved him. He'd never acted any older than I. Werewolves didn't usually talk about the past, not the way humans do. Most of what I knew about Bran's history, I picked up from my human foster mother, Evelyn.
"I was stupid and young," I said. "I needed to hear what you told me. So if you're looking for forgiveness, you don't need it. Thank you."
He cocked his head. In human form his eyes were warm hazel, like a sunlit oak leaf.
"I'm not apologizing," he said. "Not to you. I'm explaining." Then he smiled, and the resemblance to Samuel, usually faint, was suddenly very apparent. "And Samuel is a wee bit older than sixty." Amusement, like anger, sometimes brought a touch of the old country-Wales-to Bran's voice. "Samuel is my firstborn."
I stared at him, caught by surprise. Samuel had none of the traits of the older wolves. He drove a car, had a stereo system and a computer. He actually liked people-even humans-and Bran used him to interface with police and government officials when it was necessary.
"Charles was born a few years after you came here with David Thompson," I told Bran, as if he didn't know. "That was what… 1812?" Driven by his association to Bran, I'd done a lot of reading about David Thompson in college. The Welsh-born mapmaker and fur trader had kept journals, but he hadn't ever mentioned Bran by name. I wondered when I read them if Bran had gone by another name, or if Thompson had known what Bran was and left him out of the journals, which were kept, for the most part, more as a record for his employers than as a personal reminiscence.
"I came with Thompson in 1809," Bran said. "Charles was born in the spring of, I think, 1813. I'd left Thompson and the Northwest Company by then, and the Salish didn't reckon time by the Christian calendar. Samuel was born to my first wife, when I was still human."
It was the most I'd ever heard him say about the past. "When was that?" I asked, emboldened by his uncustomary openness.
"A long time ago." He dismissed it with a shrug. "When I talked to you that night, I did my son a disservice. I have decided that perhaps I was overzealous with the truth and still only gave you part of it."
"Oh?"
"I told you what I knew, as much as I thought necessary at the time," he said. "But in light of subsequent events, I underestimated my son and led you to do the same."
I've always hated it when he chose to become obscure. I started to object sharply-then realized he was looking away from my face, his eyes lowered. I'd gotten used to living among humans, whose body language is less important to communication, so I'd almost missed it. Alphas-especially this Alpha-never looked away when others were watching them. It was a mark of how bad he felt that he would do it now.
So I kept my voice quiet, and said simply, "Tell me now."
"Samuel is old," he said. "Nearly as old as I am. His first wife died of cholera, his second of old age. His third wife died in childbirth. His wives miscarried eighteen children between them; a handful died in infancy, and only eight lived to their third birthday. One died of old age, four of the plague, three of failing the Change. He has no living children and only one, born before Samuel Changed, made it into adulthood."
He paused and lifted his eyes to mine. "This perhaps gives you an idea of how much it meant to him that in you he'd found a mate who could give him children less vulnerable to the whims of fate, children who could be born werewolves like Charles was. I have had a long time to think about our talk, and I came to understand that I should have told you this as well. You aren't the only one who has mistaken Samuel for a young wolf." He gave me a little smile. "In the days Samuel walked as human, it was not uncommon for a sixteen-year-old to marry a man much older than she. Sometimes the world shifts its ideas of right and wrong too fast for us to keep up with it."
Would it have changed how I felt to know the extent of Samuel's need? A passionate, love-starved teenager confronted with cold facts? Would I have seen beyond the numbers to the pain that each of those deaths had cost?
I don't think it would have changed my decision. I knew that because I still wouldn't have married someone who didn't love me; but I think I would have thought more kindly of him. I would have left him a letter or called him after I reached my mother's house. Perhaps I'd even have gathered the courage to talk to him if I hadn't been so hurt and angry.
I refused to examine how Bran's words changed my feelings about Samuel now. It wouldn't matter anyway. I was going home tomorrow.
"There were also some things I didn't know to tell you." Bran smiled, but it wasn't a happy smile. "I sometimes believe my own press, you know. I forget that I don't know everything. Two months after you left, Samuel disappeared."
"He was angry at your interference?"
Bran shook his head. "At first, maybe. But we talked that out the day you left. He would have been more angry if he hadn't felt guilty about taking advantage of a child's need." He reached out and patted my hand. "He knew what he was doing, and he knew what you would have felt about it, whatever he tells himself or you. Don't make him out to be the victim."
Not a problem. "I won't. So if he wasn't angry with you, why did he leave?"
"I know you understand most of what we are because you were raised among us," Bran told me slowly. "But sometimes even I miss the larger implications. Samuel saw in you the answer to his pain, and not the answer to his heart. But that wasn't all Samuel felt for you-I doubt he knew it himself."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"He pined when you left," Bran said, the old-fashioned wording sounding odd coming from the young man he looked to be. "He lost weight, he couldn't sleep. After the first month he spent most of his time as a wolf."
"What do you think was wrong with him?" I asked carefully.
"He was grieving over his lost mate," said Bran. " Werewolves aren't that different from our wild cousins in some respects. It took me too long to figure it out, though. Before I did, he left us without a word. For two years, I waited for the newspapers to report his body discovered in the river like Bryan's had been. Charles tracked Samuel down when he finally started to use the money in his bank account. He'd bought some papers and gone back to college." Samuel had been through college at least once before that I knew of, for medicine. "He became a medical doctor again, set up a clinic in Texas for a while, then came back to us about two years ago."
"He didn't love me," I said. "Not as a man loves a woman."
"No," agreed Bran. "But he had chosen you as his mate." He stood up abruptly and put on his coat. "Don't worry about it now. I just thought you ought to know. Sleep in tomorrow."
CHAPTER 7
I ventured out to the gas station the next morning in my borrowed coat and bought a breakfast burrito. It was hot, if not tasty, and I was hungry enough to eat almost anything.
The young man working the till looked as though he'd have liked to ask questions, but I cowed him with my stare. People around here know better than to get into staring contests. I wasn't a were-anything, but he didn't know that because he wasn't either. It wasn't nice to intimidate him, but I wasn't feeling very nice.
I needed to do something, anything, and I was stuck waiting here all morning. Waiting meant worrying about what Jesse was suffering at the hands of her captors and thinking of Mac and wondering what I could have done
to prevent his death. It meant reliving the old humiliation of having Bran tell me the man I loved was using me. I wanted to be out of Aspen Creek, where the memories of being sixteen and alone tried to cling no matter how hard I flinched away; but obedience to Bran was too ingrained- especially when his orders made sense. I didn't have to be nice about it, though.
I'd started back to the motel, my breath raising a fog and the snow crunching beneath my shoes, when someone called out my name.
"Mercy!"
I looked across the highway where a green truck had pulled over-evidently at the sight of me, but the driver didn't look familiar. The bright morning sun glittering on the snow made it hard to pick out details, so I shaded my eyes with my hand and veered toward him for a better look.
As soon as I changed directions, the driver turned off the truck, hopped out, and jogged across the highway.
"I just heard that you were here," he said, "but I thought you'd be long gone this morning or else I'd have stopped in earlier."
The voice was definitely familiar, but it didn't go with the curling red hair and unlined face. He looked puzzled for a moment, even hurt, when I didn't recognize him immediately. Then he laughed and shook his head. "I forgot, even though every time I look in a mirror it still feels like I'm looking at a stranger."
The eyes, pale blue and soft, went with the voice, but it was his laugh that finally clued me in. "Dr. Wallace?" I asked. "Is that really you?"
He tucked his hands in his pockets, tilted his head, and gave me a wicked grin. "Sure as moonlight, Mercedes Thompson, sure as moonlight."
Carter Wallace was the Aspen Creek veterinarian. No, he didn't usually treat the werewolves, but there were dogs, cats, and livestock enough to keep him busy. His house had been the nearest to the one I grew up in, and he'd helped me make it through those first few months after my foster parents died.
The Dr. Wallace I'd known growing up had been middle-aged and balding, with a belly that covered his belt buckle. His face and hands had had been weathered from years spent outside in the sun. This man was lean and hungry; his skin pale and perfect like that of a twenty-year-old-but the greatest difference was not in his appearance.
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