The man who introduced himself as Walter ate as if he were half-starved-maybe he was. Every once in a while, though, he’d stop eating to look at Anna with awe.
Sitting between them, Charles repressed a smile-which was something he was doing more often than he ever remembered since he’d found his Anna. Watching her squirm under Walter’s worshipping regard was pretty funny. He hoped he didn’t look at her like that-at least not in public.
“It’s not as if it’s anything I’m doing,” she muttered into her stew with carrots. “I didn’t ask to be an Omega. It’s like having brown hair.”
She was wrong, but he thought she was embarrassed enough right now without him arguing with her over something he wasn’t entirely sure he was supposed to have heard. Or at least she was mostly wrong. Like dominance, being an Omega was mostly personality. And, as his father liked to say, identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.
Anna brought peace and serenity with her wherever she went-at least when she wasn’t scared, hurt, or upset. Some of her power depended upon her being a werewolf, which magnified the effect of her magic. But a larger part of it was the steel backbone that made the best of whatever circumstances she happened to be in, the compassion she’d shown to Asil when he’d tried to scare her, and the way she hadn’t been able to leave poor Walter out in the cold. Those were conscious decisions.
A man made himself Alpha, it wasn’t just an accident of birth. The same was true of Omegas.
“Once,” said Walter quietly, pausing in his eating, “just after a very bad week, I spent an afternoon camped up in a tree in the jungle, watching a village. I can’t remember now if we were supposed to be protecting them or spying on them. This girl came out to hang her wash right under my tree. She was eighteen or nineteen, I suppose, and she was too thin.” His eyes traveled from Anna to Charles and back to his food.
Yes, thought Charles, I know she’s still thin, but I’ve had less than a week to feed her up.
“Anyway,” the old vet continued, “watching her, it was like watching magic. Out of the basket the clothes would come, all in a wad, she’d snap ’em once, and, like that, they’d fall straight and hang just so. Her wrists were narrow, but so strong, and her fingers quick. Those shirts wouldn’t dare disobey. When she left, I almost knocked on her door to thank her. She reminded me that there was a world of daily chores, where clothes were cleaned and everything was in order.”
He glanced at Anna again. “She likely would have been terrified by a dirty American soldier showing up at her door-and like as not wouldn’t have a clue what I was thanking her for, even if she understood what I was saying. She was just doing as she always did.” He paused. “But I should have thanked her anyway. Got me through a bad time and several bad times since.”
They were all quiet after that. Charles didn’t know if Anna understood his story, but he did. Anna was like that woman. She reminded him of winters spent in front of a fire while his da played a fiddle. Times when he knew that everyone was full and happy, when the world was safe and ordered. It wasn’t like that often, but it was important to remember it could be.
“So,” said Charles, as Walter ate the last of his third freeze-dried dinner. “You’ve lived here in the mountains for a long time.”
Walter’s spork stilled for a moment, and he looked at Charles suspiciously. Then he snorted and shook his head. “It’s not like it’s important anymore, is it? Old news.”
He ate another bite, swallowed, and said, “When I got back from the war, everything was okay for a while. I had a short fuse, sure, but not enough to bother about. Until it got worse.” He started to say something but ate another bite instead. “That part matters even less, now, I suppose. Anyway, I started reliving the war-like it was still going on. I could hear it, taste it, smell it-but it would turn out that it was only a car backfiring-or the neighbor chopping wood. Stuff like that. I moved out before I hurt my family more than I already had. Then one day an enemy soldier came up behind me. It was the uniform, you know? I hurt him, maybe killed him…”
That last sentence the man had choked out was a lie.
Walter looked at his feet, snorted, turned his head to meet Charles’s eyes. And when he spoke again, his voice was cool and controlled, the voice of a man who had done a lot of bad things-just like Charles. “I killed him. When he was dead I realized he wasn’t one of the Viet Cong, he was a mailman. That’s when I figured no one was safe around me. I thought I’d turn myself in, but the police station…well, policemen wear uniforms, too, don’t they? The bus depot was right next to the station, and I ended up on a bus for Montana. I’d come here camping with my father a time or two, so I knew I could get away from people up here. There wasn’t anyone to hurt up here.”
“You stayed in the mountains for all those years?” Anna put her chin on her hand, and Charles noticed that two of her nails were broken to the quick-and looked around until he saw her gloves sitting beside her.
Walter nodded. “God knows I knew how to hunt. Didn’t have a gun-but hell, half the time your gun didn’t work in the jungle, either.”
He pulled a knife nearly as long as his forearm out from somewhere and contemplated it. Charles tried to figure out where it had come from. There weren’t actually all that many people who could move that fast, werewolf or not.
Walter looked sideways at Anna, then back to the knife, but Charles knew he’d seen the sympathy on Anna’s face, because he tried to downplay his survival. “It wasn’t that bad, really, ma’am. Winters can get rough, but there’s an old cabin I stay in now and then if conditions get too bad.”
Walter wasn’t the only one who escaped to the mountains, Charles thought. There had been a few places, twenty years ago, where whole communities of broken men had holed up in the wilds. Most of the old soldiers had healed and moved on years ago-or died.
Before this trip he wouldn’t have believed there was anyone here; the Cabinets had little gentleness to share with the hearts of men. Charles had never come here that he hadn’t felt the old places pushing him out on his way. They weren’t meant for man-even one who had a Brother Wolf. Even in the old days, the trappers and hunters had avoided this area for somewhere with a gentler nature.
A man who lived here over thirty years, though, might not be an intruder anymore. He might be accepted as part of the mountain.
Charles looked into the night-dark sky and thought that a man who stayed here that long might become beloved of those spirits. Spirits who could hide someone even from Charles’s own keen senses.
Walter wiped the spork in the snow and handed it back to Charles. “Thank you. I haven’t eaten like that in…a long time.”
Then, as if his words had just run out, he closed his eyes and leaned against the nearest tree.
“What do you know about the werewolf that attacked you?” Charles asked.
Walter shrugged without opening his eyes. “They came in the fall on a four-wheeler and took over my cabin. After it Changed me…I did a little hunting of my own. Wish I’d seen it before it confronted that boy. If I’d been a little faster that day, I might have killed it-if I’d been a little slower, it’d have killed me. Good thing silver’s bad for werewolves.” Walter heaved a loud sigh, opened his eyes, and pulled the long blade out of a forearm sheath again. This time Charles saw him do it-though, come to think of it, he hadn’t seen him put it away.
“This old knife of mine burns my hand now when I clean it.” He looked at his hands, or maybe the knife. “I figured I was dead. I hurt that demon bad with this old blade-it’s got silver etched into it, see? But the monster opened my gut before it fled.”
“If a werewolf attack almost kills you, you become one,” Anna said in a low voice.
Did she still regret that? Charles was overcome with the wild desire to kill them all again, Leo and his mate, the whole Chicago pack-but at the same time he was pathetically grateful that his mate was a werewolf who wouldn’t fade and die the way Samuel’s wives all had.
Brother Wolf stirred and settled down, just like Walter had.
“The wolf who attacked you didn’t come back to you, then, after you Changed?” Charles asked.
Usually when a wolf Changed someone, it was drawn back to the new werewolf for a while. Mostly, Samuel had theorized to him once, some genetic imperative to make sure that an untaught, uncontrolled werewolf wasn’t going to draw too much unwanted attention.
Walter shook his head. “Like I said, I tracked her down myself, after the first full moon-she and that woman. What is she anyway? She sure as hell ain’t human-sorry, ma’am- not with the things I seen her do. She tried to call
