“I am your son,” he said smugly despite the underlying worry in his tone. “At Mercy’s, of course.”
Bran smiled as he hung up the phone. Then he got out of bed and dressed for a drive.
He paused outside of Leah’s closed door, but what was wrong between them could not be changed. He didn’t even want it to change, only regretted that she was so often hurt. In the end he let her be.
He didn’t leave a note; she wouldn’t care where he was going or why.
Anna’s throat hurt from crying as she lay over Charles’s cooling body. Her face was wet with tears and blood that froze in the bitter cold. The ends of her fingers burned from the snow.
He was dead, and it was her fault. She should have realized the bleeding was worse than he’d let on. She’d only had him a few days.
She levered herself off him and sat cross-legged on the cold ground, studying his exotic and handsome face. He’d lived two hundred years or more, and she knew so little of that time. She wanted all the stories. What had it been like growing up a werewolf? What mischief had he gotten up to? She didn’t even know his favorite color. Was it green, like his bedroom?
“Red. It’s red.” His voice whispered in her ear, startling her.
But that was impossible, wasn’t it?
She reached out to touch Charles’s body, but she just blinked once and was lying flat on her back underneath a Charles who was very much alive, though the left side of his face looked as if some beast had clawed him.
She was panting, and her hands hurt as they slowly changed back to human. Was she the one who’d hurt him? Her heart felt as though it had been stopped in her chest and only now started beating.
“Charles?” she managed.
His face didn’t move very much, but she saw his relief anyway, and felt it in the relaxing of his hold.
Briefly he put his face down against her neck and breathed against her ear. When he pulled back, he rolled off of her, and said, “All you had to do was ask.”
She sat up, feeling weak and disoriented. “Ask?”
“What my favorite color was.”
She stared at him. Was he making a joke of it? “You were dead,” she told him. “I woke up and there was all of this blood and you weren’t breathing. You were dead.”
A growl from behind startled her; she’d completely forgotten about Walter.
“I smell it, too, wolf,” Charles said, the gouges on the side of his face rapidly fading. “Witchcrafting. Did the witch take anything of you, Anna? Skin, blood, or hair?”
When the wolf had appeared, Mary had grabbed at her hair.
“Hair.” Her voice was so hoarse she almost didn’t recognize it.
“When there are witches about, it’s good to keep them at a distance,” he said. “Your hair allowed her to get into your dreams. If you had died there, you’d have died for real.”
She knew that would be important in a minute, but not right now. A little frantically she unzipped his coat. He caught her hands, and said, “What is it you want? Can I help?”
His hands were so warm, but he’d been warm before. “I need to see your back.”
He released her, stripped out of his coat, and, still kneeling, turned so she could see that the strips of shirt she’d wrapped around his torso were free of blood. She put her head against his shoulder and breathed in his scent. Underneath, she could smell old blood and the tang of a healing wound.
She grabbed his shirt in both hands and tried to collect herself.
“It was just a nightmare?” she said, afraid to believe. Afraid that had been the truth and this was the dream.
“No,” he said. “It was the sum of the worst of your fears.” He turned in her grip and wrapped both arms around her, surrounding her cold body with his heat. He whispered in her ear, “We’ve been trying to wake you up for about fifteen minutes.” He paused, then said, “You weren’t the only one who was frightened. Your heart stopped. For almost a minute I couldn’t get you to breathe…I…I imagine you’ll have bruises. CPR is one of those things I find pretty difficult; the line is so thin between forcing air out and breaking ribs.”
He tightened his hold, and whispered, “One of the problems with having a brother who is a doctor is that I know how few of the people who need CPR survive.”
Anna found herself patting him on the back-up on his shoulder, well away from his wound. “Yeah, well, I bet most of them aren’t werewolves.”
He pulled back after a moment, and said briskly, “You’re cold. I think it’s time for more food. We’ve still got a couple of hours before daylight.”
“How are you?”
He smiled. “Better. A lot of food, a little rest, and I’m almost as good as new.”
She watched him closely as he pulled a few packets of food out of the pack-things that didn’t need hot water. More freeze-dried fruit and jerky.
She ripped a piece of jerky loose with her teeth and chewed. “You know, I used to like this stuff.” Eating the bits she fed him, Walter spread himself out over her feet. Big as he was, he soon had her frozen toes toasty warm.
They lay down again, Anna sandwiched between the males, Charles at her back once more.
“I’m afraid to go back to sleep,” she said. And it wasn’t because he’d told her the witch could have killed her, either. She couldn’t face seeing Charles’s dead body again.
Charles tightened his hold on her and began singing softly. His song was Native American-she recognized the nasal tone and odd scale.
Walter sighed and moved into a more comfortable position as they all waited for morning.
TWELVE
The darkness bothered Bran not at all as he followed Tag’s directions to the place he and Charles had thought would be the best starting point. He passed Asil’s Subaru and hesitated-if Asil had been going after Charles, he’d have known the fastest way there.
But Charles would be headed back to his car if something had gone wrong. So Bran kept driving.
Other things he might do ran through his head. There were witches in the pay of the wolves. Not his pack-he didn’t deal with black witches, and most white witches weren’t powerful enough to be useful. But there were witches available to him.
If he had a two-hundred-year-old witch capable of holding and torturing a werewolf for two days-he had no intention of advertising the fact and encouraging other witches to imitate this one. Especially since she, like Bran’s mother, might have gotten her ability through some kind of binding to a werewolf.
No. Best keep the witches out of it.
He could call Charles back.
That was a harder thing. Telepathy was how his mother had gotten her nasty little chains upon him in the first place. She was why he could no longer read the thoughts of others.
After he’d killed the witch who was his mother, the backlash had taken that talent from him-one of the many blessings of her death. Slowly he’d regained the ability to talk mind to mind, but never to listen in.
The only reason his mother had been able to catch him through his talent was that it was one she shared. A rare thing, even among witch born. He’d be surprised if there was another witch with that ability in North America. But he was still too cowardly to try until he knew for certain that his son was free of Asil’s witch.
Of all the magic users in this old world, Bran despised and feared witches above everything. Probably because, had matters been different, he would have been one himself.
He turned off the highway and drove up Silver Butte. Tracks of a wider-than-normal vehicle preceded him. Charles had followed the plans that far, anyway.
Getting Charles’s truck up the path the Vee had taken was a little tricky, driving all his other worries out of his
