From the way he let nothing leak through to her, she knew it had been another bad trip, one that had left too many people dead, probably people he hadn’t wanted to kill.
Lately, they had all been bad trips.
At first she’d been able to help, but when the rules changed, when the werewolves had admitted their existence to the rest of the world, the new public scrutiny meant that second chances for the wolves who broke Bran’s laws were offered only in extraordinary circumstances. She’d kept going with him on these trips because she refused to let Charles suffer alone. But when Anna started having nightmares about the man who’d fallen to his knees in front of her in mute entreaty before his execution, Charles had quit letting her go.
She was strong-willed and she liked to think of herself as tough. She could have made him change his mind or followed him anyway. But Anna hadn’t fought his edict because she realized she was only making his job harder to bear. He saw himself as a monster and couldn’t believe she didn’t also when she witnessed the death he brought.
So Charles went out hunting alone – as he had for a hundred years or more, just as his father had said. His hunt was always successful – and, at the same time, a failure. He was dominant; he had a compulsory need to protect the weak, including, paradoxically, the wolves he was there to kill. When the wolves he executed died, so did a part of Charles.
Before Bran had brought them out to the public, the new wolves, those who had been Changed for less than ten years, would have been given several chances if their transgression came from loss of control. Conditions could have been taken into account that would lessen the punishment of others. But the public knew about them now, and they couldn’t allow everyone to know just how dangerous werewolves really were.
It was up to the pack Alpha to take care of dispensing commonplace justice. Previously, Charles had only had to go out a few times a year to take care of bigger or more unusual problems. But many of the Alphas were unhappy with the new harshness of the laws, and somehow more and more of the enforcement fell to Bran and thus to Charles. He was going out two or three times a month and it was wearing on him.
She could feel him standing just inside the house, so she put a little more passion into her music, calling him to her with the sweet-voiced cello that had been his first Christmas gift to her.
If she went upstairs, he’d greet her gravely, tell her he had to go talk to his father, and leave. He’d come back in a day or so after running as a wolf in the mountains. But Charles never quite came back all the way anymore.
It had been a month since he’d last touched her. Six weeks and four days since he’d made love to her, not since they’d come back from the last trip she’d accompanied him on. She’d have said that to Bran if he hadn’t made that ‘Grow up, little girl’ comment. Probably she should have told Bran anyway, but she’d given up making him see reason.
She’d decided to try something else.
She stayed in the music room Charles had built in the basement while he stood upstairs. Instead of using words, she let her cello speak for her. Rich and true, the notes slid from her bow and up the stairway. After a moment she heard the stairs squeak under the weight of his feet and let out a breath of relief. Music was something they shared.
Her fingers sang to him, coaxing him to her, but he stopped in the doorway. She could feel his eyes on her, but he didn’t say anything.
Anna knew that when she played on her cello, her face was peaceful and distant – a product of much coaching from an early teacher who told her that biting her lip and grimacing was a dead giveaway to any judge that she was having trouble. Her features weren’t regular enough for true beauty, but she wasn’t ugly, either, and today she’d used some makeup tricks that softened her freckles and emphasized her eyes.
She glanced at him briefly. His Salish heritage gave him lovely dark skin and exotic (to her) features, his father’s Welsh blood apparent only in subtle ways: the shape of his mouth, the angle of his chin. It was his job, not his lineage, that froze his features into an unemotional mask and left his eyes cold and hard. His duties had eaten away at him until he was nothing but muscle, bone, and tension.
Anna’s fingers touched the strings and rocked, softening the cello’s song with a vibrato on the longer notes. She’d begun with a bit of Pachelbel’s
If she couldn’t get Bran to quit sending her mate out to kill, maybe she could get Charles to let her help with the aftermath. It might buy him a little time until she could find the right baseball bat – or rolling pin – to beat some clarity into his father’s head.
She deserted Pachelbel for an improvised bridge that shifted the key from D to G and then let her music flow into the prelude of Bach’s
Her fingers moving, she didn’t allow herself to look at him again, no matter how hungry she was for the sight of him. She stared at an oil painting of a sleeping bobcat while Charles stood at the door and watched her. If she could get him to approach her, to quit trying to protect her from his job …
And then she screwed up.
She was an Omega wolf. That meant that not only was she the only person on the continent whose wolf would allow her to face down the Marrok when he was in a rage, but also that she had a magical talent for soothing wolfish tempers regardless of whether or not they wanted to be soothed. It felt wrong to impose her will on others, and she tried not to do it unless the need was dire. Over the past couple of years, Anna had learned when and how to best use her ability. But her need to see Charles happy slipped over the barrier of her hard-won control as if it wasn’t there at all.
One moment she was playing to him with her whole self, focused solely on him – and the next her wolf reached out and calmed Charles’s wolf, sent him to sleep, leaving only his human half behind … Charles turned and walked purposefully away from her without a word. He, who ran from nothing and no one, exited their house by the back door.
Anna set down her bow and returned her cello to its stand. He wouldn’t come back for hours now, maybe not even for a couple of days. Music hadn’t worked if the only thing holding Charles in its spell was his wolf.
She left the house, too. The need to do something was so strong it had her moving without a real destination. It was that or cry, and she refused to cry. Maybe she could go to Bran one more time. But when the turnoff for his house appeared, she drove past it.
Like as not Charles was headed to Bran’s to tell his father what he’d done for the wolves of the world – and it would be … awkward to follow him, as if she were chasing him. Besides, she’d already talked to Bran. He knew what was happening to his son; she knew he did. But, like Charles, he weighed the lives of all of their kind against the possibility that Charles would break under the strain of what was necessary, and thought the risk acceptable.
So Anna drove through town, arriving at a large greenhouse in the woods on the other side. She pulled over and parked next to a battered Willys Jeep and went in search of help.
A lot of wolves called him the Moor – which he disliked, saying that it was a vampire kind of thing to do, take a part of who a person was and reduce him to it with a capital letter or two. His features and skin showed traces of Arabia by way of North Africa, but Anna agreed that certainly wasn’t the sum total of who he was. He was very beautiful, very old, extremely deadly – and right now he was transplanting geraniums.
‘Asil,’ she began.
‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Don’t disturb my plants with your troubles until they are safe in their new houses. Make yourself useful and deadhead the roses along the wall.’
She snagged a basket and started picking dead flowers off Asil’s rosebushes. There would be no talking to him until he’d accomplished what he intended, whether that was to calm her down before they talked, get some free labor, or merely keep the silence while he tended his plants. Knowing Asil, it could be all three.
She worked for about ten minutes before she got impatient and reached for a rosebud, knowing that he always kept an eye on anyone working with his precious flowers.
‘Remember the story of Beauty and the Beast?’ remarked Asil gently. ‘Go ahead. Take that little bloom. See what happens.’
