Fair Game

8

Charles kept a close watch from the bow as Malcolm threaded the Daciana around boats and other assorted obstacles with all the sailing skill of a pirate and a cheery rendition of ‘The Mary Ellen Carter,’ a song about men reclaiming a sunken ship, whistled off-key. If Bran had been with them, doubtless he’d have joined in the song. Charles’s da loved impromptu concerts, especially with people who sang – or whistled – Stan Rogers songs, though considering the boat’s passengers, ‘The Witch of the Westmoreland’ might have been more appropriate.

The rise and fall of the ocean made Charles’s stomach roil – another reason he didn’t like boats. Anna was kneeling on the bow as far forward as she could, with her face in the wind and a peaceful expression that made Brother Wolf want to kiss her feet and other places – if only he wouldn’t have thrown up the moment he bent over.

‘Gets me, too,’ said Isaac, coming up from the rear of the boat. He braced himself on the wall of the console and talked in a voice nicely calculated to carry just over the noise of the engine, but not so loudly that anyone else was likely to hear. ‘Once I throw up, I’m okay.’ Then he raised his voice. ‘But I’m the Alpha of the Olde Towne Pack, damn it, and I can’t afford to upchuck in front of a bunch of strangers. They might find bits of that annoying salesman I ate last night.’

Charles scowled at him. ‘Thanks for the visual.’

Isaac threw his head back and laughed. ‘You’re all right, man. Malcolm says he’s headed to a spot that he thinks is pretty much a clear shot to most of the islands. There are also lots of abandoned warehouses along the shoreline, thanks to the crumbling of the fisheries around here. Lots of places to hold and torture people without anyone hearing. You really see Indian spirits and talk to them?’

‘Spirits,’ corrected Charles. ‘Nothing Indian about them other than we believe they exist and most of you white-eyes don’t. Yes.’

Isaac cackled. ‘I can’t believe you just called me a white-eye. Better than a pale-face, I suppose, but it just seems so Bonanza.’ His face softened. ‘My granddad, he could see ghosts. When he was really old, he would rock in this old, dark wood rocking chair and tell us kids about the murderer who haunted the house he grew up in and tried to make his life hell when he was too young to read and write.’

‘Ghosts are different from spirits,’ Charles said. Yes, howled the ones who haunted him, tell him about your ghosts, make us a little more real every time you speak of us, every time you see us or think about us. Tell him that ghosts of people you kill can come back and kill the ones you love if you are dumb enough or too clueless to figure out how to set them free.

Charles had to wait a moment before he could continue, and disguised it as his motion sickness from the boat ride by swallowing heavily. ‘The spirits I see are more … a way for nature to talk to those with the eyes to see and the ears to hear. They never were human. I don’t see ghosts’ – Liar! cackled one in his ear – ‘not the way your granddad did, but I’ve met a couple of people who do. Not an easy gift.’

‘My granddad, he was a tough old bird. I’d guess he was tough even when he was five years old and faced down a haunt no one else could see.’ Isaac grinned. The sun was down now and his teeth gleamed in the light of the waxing moon. It was two days until full moon. ‘Tough like me.’

Tough and stupid, thought Charles with a sigh. ‘You are sleeping with the witch?’

Isaac smiled whitely. ‘Yessir. And she makes me breakfast in bed, too.’

Charles liked this young, tough Alpha, so he wanted to warn him. ‘Black witches are untrustworthy lovers.’

‘I get that,’ Isaac said. He shook his shoulders to loosen them. ‘I’m a werewolf; I can’t afford to be delicate – but I could never fall for a woman who tortures kittens to make love potions, even if she doesn’t do it around me. She’s just scratching an itch and I’m enjoying it while it lasts – and I’m clear with her that’s all it is.’

‘Women hear what men say,’ Anna said without turning around. ‘That doesn’t mean they believe them. A witch isn’t anyone to screw with, Isaac, and they get as possessive as any other woman. You’re beautiful, strong, and powerful – she’s not going to let that go easily.’

‘Are you trying to steal my man?’ Hally didn’t seem to have any of the trouble the rest of them did moving about the bouncing boat. And she was good at sneaking around because Charles hadn’t noticed that she’d gotten up from her seat to round the opposite side of the console. She still had her satchel – and was holding the Baggie next to her face as if it held a rose instead of a piece of dead boy’s skin.

Anna kept a hand on the railing and rolled to sit with only one hip on the ledge at the bow so she could face the witch. His mate smiled one of her big, generous smiles. ‘No. Just warning him about sleeping with dangerous things. Tigers are rare treasures – and they will eat you and not give it a second thought.’

The witch preened, her ire sliding away. His Anna was so good at managing people – him included. It was a good thing that the witch was looking at Anna and not Isaac, because Isaac had clearly heard what Anna had said, too. And when an Omega talked, the wolf listened no matter what the man thought. Isaac looked like he’d been slapped.

‘Tigers need to be wary around wolves,’ Charles said, to keep her from looking Isaac’s way.

Hally narrowed her eyes. She reminded him more of a snake than a tiger – they were beautiful, too, beautiful and cold survivors, killing with poison rather than fang or claw.

‘You are sticking your nose into places it doesn’t belong, wolf,’ she said, as if she thought he ought to be worried about her.

Hally had overstepped, and so Brother Wolf met her eyes and let her see that they had killed more powerful witches than she was – and that it wouldn’t bother them to do it again.

She swallowed and stepped back, stumbling when a wave threw her off balance.

‘You scratch whatever itches you choose,’ Charles told her, his voice cold and quiet. ‘Enjoy yourself. But at the end of the day, you remember that Isaac belongs to my father – and to me. He is necessary to us as you are not. You will leave him unharmed or I will hunt you down and destroy you.’

She hissed at him like a cat. When he just stared at her, Hally scrambled ungracefully around the far side of the console, out of his line of sight.

Isaac was watching him, his eyes bright gold. And then he tilted his jaw, exposing his throat. Charles lunged forward and nipped him lightly before releasing him.

From the back of the boat Beauclaire watched them with inhuman eyes, and Brother Wolf wanted to teach the fae man respect the way he’d just put the witch in her place. The moon urged, the ghosts in his head howled … and Charles took a half step away from the gunwale railing.

‘You made yourself an enemy,’ Isaac said, his voice quiet and soft, distracting Brother Wolf. Beauclaire dropped his eyes at last and the moment was gone.

‘She is a black witch,’ Charles said, equally quietly. ‘We have always been enemies. For right now, we are aimed at the same target; that is all. If your target is pleasure and you’re sure that’s what hers is, too, that’s fine. Just remember – a black witch doesn’t love anything but power.’

Isaac swallowed and looked away. ‘White witches are just food for the rest. Hally had a sister who died when she was sixteen because she refused to take the black route to power. A big, bad wicked witch ate her down.’

Charles nodded. ‘You can admire the survivor – but Hally did survive. She’ll make sure she always survives. You better make sure that the same is true of you.’

The little boat slowed; the engines quieted. The sky was inky except for the silver moon and the thin ribbon of cloud that crossed between them and her.

‘Here,’ said Malcolm unnecessarily.

The witch took her satchel and the Baggie Goldstein had given her and climbed up the aluminum ladder to the fishing platform above the console. It was the best place to do it – a flat open surface on a crowded boat – but Charles was sure that the witch knew and enjoyed the fact that the height put her onstage and made the rest of them her audience.

Standing on the top of the ladder, Hally took a small rug out of her pack and laid it out flat. While she was snapping it into place, Charles caught a glimpse of circles and symbols and realized that she’d woven into the rug the protections that a witch would normally have used chalk for. It was a clever thing, something that would save her time and trouble – and also work admirably well on a boat in the rain.

Kneeling on the rug, she took out four or five small pottery jars and set them up as if their placement was important. She did the same with eight silver candlesticks holding dark-colored candles – probably black candles, but some witches worked with red. She adjusted and moved things around for a while. At last she set a tall candle in the center of her work.

‘Light,’ the witch said, in an ordinary voice a half beat before the candles lit themselves despite the salt-sea air. The flames on the wicks burned steady and true though the wind whipped the strands of hair that had worked their way out of his braid. Magic. Her voice hadn’t been the trigger, just a distraction or embellishment. The smoke told his nose what Charles already surmised – there was human blood worked into the candles she burned.

The way witches cast spells differed from one witch to the next depending upon a lot of things: their family background, who their teachers had been – and a little of their own personalities. This one was a wiggler and moaner, but she did it with all the grace of a talented belly dancer, and her moans were both musical and mesmerizing. Charles felt her magic rain down upon their little boat and found himself agreeing with Isaac’s assessment: she was a power.

It made him wish that he’d called the white witch Moira after all. Hally didn’t scare him, but his paranoia didn’t like being in the middle of the ocean on a boat with his mate with a world-class witch who would – as Anna had helpfully pointed out earlier – as soon kill them as not. He intensely disliked being in someone else’s power.

If we jumped up there, she’d scream and fall in the water, Brother Wolf assured him, because he didn’t like being in her power, either. Or we could just kill her and save her the trouble of drowning.

Hally put the contents of the Baggie in a small ivory-colored pot shaped like a toad with big black cartoon eyes, its back open as if it had been made to hold a candle or a small plant. It fit into the palm of her hand. She pulled a vial out of her bag, pulled a cork stopper out with her teeth, and poured the liquid into the pot. By the smell, Charles knew it was brandy, and not the good stuff. Annie Green Springs, Everclear, or rubbing alcohol would have probably done just as well.

Storing the empty vial back in her pack, she held the pot over the flame of the middle candle with both hands and continued her melodic chanting. After a few moments, she slid her hands away and the pot hung over the candle without moving. She sat back on her heels and lifted her face so that the moon caressed her English-pale skin and slid down her hands, which were shaking feverishly about three inches from the pot. Theatrics designed to hide which were the important bits, in case another witch was watching.

Charles started to turn away from the show, but the corner of his eye caught something and he froze. A shadow thicker than steam slid out of the mouth of the frog. It sank to the rug and grew even thicker and darker, filling the space between the witch and the candles. He glanced around at the others, but no one looked worried or excited so he supposed he – and Beauclaire, who was slowly rising to his feet – were the only ones who saw the shadow.

In the middle of her music, at the height of her dance, the witch stilled and said, ‘Darkness.’

The candles and every one of the boat’s lights went out.

Malcolm swore, dove for his console, and frantically played with the switches. He put a foot on the first rung of the ladder, presumably to go up and confront the witch for meddling with his boat.

Malcolm was under Charles’s protection, so Charles shoved past Isaac (still watching the witch instead of Malcolm), trusting that the Alpha wolf would have enough presence of mind not to fall overboard. He caught Malcolm by the shoulder when he was two rungs up, pulling him back to the deck. Interrupting a witch was not a good idea for anyone who wanted to survive long. Malcolm wrenched himself free of the unfamiliar hold and snarled. The noise cut off as soon as he saw who it was who’d manhandled him.

A dim light began to glow on the top of the fishing platform, distracting both of them.

‘What in …’

In hell, thought Charles, as the light resolved itself into the three-dimensional shape of an eight-year-old boy.

The smell of the black magic made Charles’s earlier seasickness rise with a vengeance, and he moved as far from the center of the boat as he could get. Anna’s cold hand closed on his. She was shaking. Not with fear. Not his Anna. No, she was shaking with rage.

‘Tell me this was necessary,’ she said.

‘No,’ Charles answered. He knew Anna didn’t mean the witch; she meant the method the witch had chosen. Directional spells were easy. He didn’t do them himself, but he had watched them cast. Calling a ghost as a compass was a major spell, a show-off spell, and entirely unnecessary.

‘Tell me she doesn’t get to keep him.’

‘She won’t get to keep him,’ Charles told her. He was no witch, but his grandfather had taught him a thing or two. He might not be able to get rid of his own ghosts because he had to somehow fix himself first, but Jacob Mott, held by black magic, would be no trouble.

‘All right,’ Anna said, her voice tight, trusting him to keep his word.

‘Jacob, I invoke thee,’ the witch said, her voice like honey rising over the wind and slap of wave. ‘Jacob, I conjure thee. Jacob, I name thee. Do thou my will.’

The boy’s figure, glowing with silvery moonlight, stood with his back to her, his head bowed, reluctance in every line of his body. But Charles could see his face – and there was no expression at all upon it, and his eyes glowed red as fire.

‘Where did they kill you, Jacob Mott? Where did they sacrifice your mortal being?’

The boy lifted his head, looked south and east, and pointed.

‘I can’t run without lights,’ Malcolm said. ‘It’s illegal, for one thing. And I don’t want to get caught with candles made with human blood. I don’t mind fines, but jail isn’t going to happen.’

‘My magic needs darkness,’ said the witch in a midnight voice.

Beauclaire got out of his seat and touched the rail of the boat. The lights came back on and the witch turned to glare at him.

‘Your magic is darkness,’ said the fae repressively. ‘The rest is cheap theatrics.’

The witch ignored him and put her hands on the shoulders of the boy, caressing him in a not-motherly fashion.

‘Thanks,’ said Isaac to the fae.

Malcolm, his face tight – he had to stand directly under the taint of black magic in order to run the boat – turned the Daciana. When the direction the boy was indicating lined up with the point of the bow, Isaac said, ‘That’s good,’ and the Daciana steadied on course.

Malcolm got busy with his charts and then called out loud enough that people who were not werewolves or fae could hear him over the engine and waves, ‘Looks like we’re headed to Long, Georges, or Gallops Island.’

‘What do you think?’ Isaac asked; then to the rest of them he said, ‘Malcolm makes his living hauling anyone who will pay him out fishing or exploring. He’s been doing it for thirty-five years and he knows the harbor as well as anyone living.’

‘Could be any of them, I suppose. Georges has a lot of people during the day, which would make me nervous if I was trying to keep live prisoners.’

‘What about Long Island?’ asked Leslie. ‘It’s accessible by car, too, right?’

‘Right.’ Malcolm was quiet. ‘Long Island has the public health facilities, and people who live and work there every day. But there are lots of places no one goes. Places for someone to hide people in, more than either Georges or Gallops. Those old hospital buildings have tunnels going from one to another. There are a few empty buildings – the old concert hall, the chapel, and a couple associated with the old hospital. Fort Strong is falling down and full of good hidey-holes. The old Alpha had me lead a couple of full-moon hunts out there. We hunted Gallops, too – ought to do some more there because there are rabbits doing a lot of damage. As long as no one notices the boats, it would be cool. We don’t have to hunt quiet there ’cause it’s been quarantined for the past decade. Gallops has old military buildings full of asbestos and there’s no money to clean it.’

‘Our UNSUB knows a lot about the local area,’ Anna noted.

‘Always seemed that way to me, too,’ agreed Goldstein, who had gotten up and worked his way around the boat until he could get a better look at the dead boy who guided their trip. ‘He does that in most of his hunting grounds – uses the territory more like a native than a traveler.’

Goldstein stopped and frowned up at the softly glowing boy.

‘Is he a ghost?’ he asked.

Anna looked at Charles and everyone else followed suit.

The witch looked at him, too, and smiled.

Charles ignored her and did his best to answer. ‘Not his soul; that’s gone on. She couldn’t have touched it.’ He believed that, believed that the only person who could destroy or taint a soul was the person whose soul it was, even though his ghosts were laughing as he spoke. You tainted us, they told him. You stole our life and tainted us.

He continued, stoically ignoring the voices of the dead. ‘A ghost is the little left-behind bits, collected together. Memories held in buildings or things – and here by flesh and hair.’

‘It’s not really the boy?’ asked Leslie Fisher, and from the tone of her voice, if he said yes, she would have shot Hally without a second thought.

‘No. More like a sweater that he wore and discarded,’ Charles told her. The red eyes, he was pretty sure, were caused by some aspect of the witch’s magic.

Leslie looked at him, and he thought that if she looked at her children that way, they would squirm. Then she nodded her head and made her way to the rear of the boat – and sat next to Beauclaire instead of the backward-facing seats behind the console that would have left her back to the witch. He didn’t blame her.

After a while, Malcolm said, ‘It’s not Long Island or Georges. We’re either going to Gallops or someplace along the coastline.’

‘It’s not the coast,’ said the witch, lifting her face to the night sky. ‘Don’t you feel it? It’s glorious. They must be amateurs to leave such a feast behind unconsumed.’ She smiled, and it was a terrible smile because it made her look so sweet and young – and the cause of the smile was the death of Jacob Mott and others before him.

‘It is too bad that so many of us, so many witches, are afraid of water,’ Hally said to Charles. ‘Otherwise we’d have known about this a long time ago. They’ve used this more than just this season.’

The Hunter had hit Boston twice, Charles remembered.

‘If this were springtime, we’d have trouble accessing Gallops,’ said Malcolm. ‘As it is, there are some docks that are still usable. I’ll take us around.’

‘We know where we’re going,’ said Charles to the witch. ‘Release the boy.’

‘I thought he was just a collection of memories,’ she murmured. ‘Just an old sweater discarded when Jacob died.’

Charles jumped to the top of the railing of the fishing platform and bent his knees, balancing with the sudden lurch the force of his jump had caused and then settling more comfortably as the rise and fall of the boat steadied to the ocean’s hand.

He caught the witch’s eyes and, bringing Brother Wolf and all of his power to the fore, said, ‘Let him go.’

She obeyed before she thought, his sudden appearance and the force of his order dictating her actions. She dismissed the ghost with a flick of her power. Then her jaw dropped in outrage, and magic gathered around her.

‘Don’t,’ said Charles before she could complete whatever mischief came to mind. ‘You won’t like what happens.’

He hopped down beside her and picked up the little frog pot. The sickly magic residue tried to crawl onto his fingers, but flinched back from Brother Wolf’s presence at the last moment. His instinct said that whatever ties the contents of the pot had to Jacob were gone, used up – and that was good enough for him. He tossed the frog out over the side of the boat, making sure that it spun upside down and scattered its contents as it fell.

She hissed and flung something that slid off him like water. Charles shook his head.

‘Do you think I would have survived this long if some hastily constructed spell could harm me?’ It wasn’t a lie. He was just asking her a question. If her answer was the wrong one, it was not his fault. Half of his reputation rested on stories people told about him. He’d been lucky. He wore some protections, and being a werewolf was another kind of protection, but no one was invulnerable. The secret of being safe from magic was to make people think it was useless to attack him by that method.

Charles swung back over the platform railing and landed lightly on the deck below. He took a seat on one of the benches that served as bait containers near the bow, and his mate scooted over and sat on his lap.

Anna kissed his jawline and he felt the ghosts’ predatory rumblings. Closer, bring her closer, they said, cackling. We shall eat her and share her among us.

Mine, answered Brother Wolf. He tightened his arms around her when Charles would have sent her to safety. But Brother Wolf held her and stared at the moon, who sang serenely to him.

Charles jumped out with one of the dock lines as soon as the boat was near. The wooden platform felt sturdy under his boots and the cleat he tied his line off to looked new. He asked Malcolm about it as the others disembarked.

‘The parks department comes out and they need somewhere to tie up their boats, don’t they?’ asked Malcolm rhetorically. ‘So they keep the dock up.’

‘Stick together,’ said Charles. ‘Malcolm, your job is to keep our FBI agents safe.’

Leslie drew in a breath, but Goldstein held up a hand. ‘You and I can’t see in the dark if our flashlights give out. There’s a moon out right now, but given the clouds in the sky, that could change. We are slower and more vulnerable than they are – and if this is the killing ground, then someone might be here to guard their latest victim.’

Leslie pulled out her gun, checked to make sure it was loaded, and then put it back in her shoulder holster.

‘If you can manage without flashlights,’ Charles told them, ‘it will help the rest of us keep our night vision. But don’t risk a broken ankle. I don’t know how well you can see – we wolves can see just fine in the dark; most witches have a trick or two—’ He glanced at Beauclaire.

The fae nodded. ‘I can see fine.’

‘So it’s up to you. If you use the flashlights, please try not to shine them in our eyes.’

‘I have a question,’ said Leslie. ‘If you can see in the dark, why did Malcolm say he needed lights to find the island?’

‘Because I’m not taking a boat that has parts not working into waters that aren’t safe,’ Malcolm said. ‘There are some pretty nasty places around here if you don’t know where you are, and her spell killed all of my instrumentation lights – GPS, depth finders, the whole kit and caboodle.’

The witch smiled at them all. ‘Are you still talking?’

Isaac touched her shoulder. ‘Lead the way, Hally.’

The fae followed Isaac and his witch, her pale skin standing out in the darkness like a candle in the night. The FBI agents followed the witch with Malcolm trailing them. That left Charles and Anna to take the rear guard.

Castle Island had been parklike with carefully planted trees and bushes. Gallops was more like a jungle. Not quite as dense as the temperate rainforest near Seattle, but the undergrowth could have used a machete or two to clear it out. Perforce they followed paths that had once been sidewalks or narrow roads before nature had started to reclaim them. Mostly they walked uphill – from what he’d seen on the water, the whole island was mostly one long, narrow hill. It wasn’t very big, less than forty acres, he thought. It wouldn’t take them long to find the place where Jacob had been killed, as long as the witch was telling the truth – that she could feel it.

Anna pointed out the cornerstone of a house and what was undoubtedly originally a planted hedge of roses that had gone wild. He pointed out some poison ivy and a pair of curious rabbits who weren’t at all scared of them. Any hunt on this island would be boring if they were hunting rabbits.

The whole thing stank of black magic. If he’d been trying to find the center on his own, he’d have had to crisscross the whole island and hope he’d stumble into it.

As much as he hated to admit it, the witch had been right. Only amateurs would leave this much power residue behind. After they were done here, he’d have to talk to his father about how to clean it up. This much tainted power was more troublesome than asbestos – people would get sick here and die from colds. They would scratch themselves on a thornbush and die from the resultant infection. They would kill themselves from a despair they would never otherwise have felt.

This much residue would also attract dark things – and in the ocean there were some very bad things who might decide to come ashore for the kind of invitation the island was sending out. And the worst part was that there were more places like this, everywhere the killers had struck over the years.

Sally Reilly, Caitlin the witch had said when she identified the marks the killers left on their victims. It made sense. He hadn’t ever met Sally, but his father had made a point of attending one of her ‘demonstrations’ and had come back shaking his head and sent Charles out to do research. Back then it had been more foot and phone work than computer work. After talking to her father (her mother was dead), some old friends, and a couple of witches, he’d returned to Bran with a report.

Sally wasn’t a hack or an amateur, but rather a skilled witch. She’d broken with her family and decided to turn the heat up – maybe cause another witch hunt. A hunt that she intended to protect herself from by money she gained while she was busy convincing the television-watching public that witches were real.

He’d told Bran that they needed to stop her – and then she’d quit trying to publicize witches. Instead, she’d started charging rich people large fortunes for her work. She’d disappeared altogether sometime in the early 1990s, but he’d always supposed that she had retired, until Caitlin the witch had been so utterly convinced that Sally Reilly was dead.

It would have been just like Sally to do something like agree to work up a spell that would leave a residue like this, one with incorrect symbols, maybe – while she charged them through the nose for it, thinking them fools who intended to kill chickens or goats.

Had they killed her? The timing was right. And if he’d paid a witch for a spell to let him feed from people he killed, he’d have felt the need to get rid of her, since she was a witness he wouldn’t have wanted. And a serial killer didn’t stay free and killing for this many years without being smart enough to take care of witnesses.

Charles let his hand linger on Anna’s back. She wore a sweater and a light jacket, but he pretended he could feel the heat of her through the clothing that covered her.

Brother Wolf wanted her off this island and somewhere far away from killers who hunted werewolves and left no scent behind for them to discover. But Charles knew better. To try to encase his Anna in bubble wrap would be to kill the woman who protected him with her grandmother’s marble rolling pin. She was the woman he fell in love with.

Then why are you hiding your ghosts from her? Brother Wolf said.

Because I am afraid, Charles answered his brother, as he would have answered no one else. He had lived a very long time, and only since he gained Anna had he learned to fear. He’d discovered that he had never been brave before – just indifferent. She had taught him that to be brave, you have to fear losing something. I am afraid I will lose her. That they will take her from me – or that I will drive her away when she sees what I really am.

Beauclaire had addressed that. Charles couldn’t remember the fae’s exact words, but he felt them. People as old and powerful as he should never be given someone to love.

For Anna he would destroy the world.

Anna felt Charles more than heard him, even though he’d taken his hand off her back and let her go ahead. She could hear the others walking in front of her, but Charles was a silent, reassuring presence behind.

She could smell the wrongness in the air and it made her wolf nervous. It felt like something was watching them, as if the wrongness had an intelligence – and it didn’t help to remember that at least one of the people they were hunting could hide from their senses.

Anna fought the urge to turn around, to take Charles’s hand or slide under his arm and let his presence drive away the wrongness. Once, she would have, but now she had the uneasy feeling that he might back away as he almost had when she sat on his lap in the boat, before Brother Wolf had taken over.

Maybe he was just tired of her. She had been telling everyone that there was something wrong with him … but Bran knew his son and thought the problem was her. Bran was smart and perceptive; she ought to have considered that he was right.

Charles was old. He’d seen and experienced so much – next to him she was just a child. His wolf had chosen her without consulting Charles at all. Maybe he’d have preferred someone who knew more. Someone beautiful and clever who …

‘Anna?’ said Charles. ‘What’s wrong? Are you crying?’ He moved in front of her and stopped, forcing her to stop walking, too.

She opened her mouth and his fingers touched her wet cheeks.

‘Anna,’ he said, his body going still. ‘Call on your wolf.’

‘You should have someone stronger,’ she told him miserably. ‘Someone who could help you when you need it, instead of getting sent home because I can’t endure what you have to do. If I weren’t Omega, if I were dominant like Sage, I could have helped you.’

‘There is no one stronger,’ Charles told her. ‘It’s the taint from the black magic. Call your wolf.’

‘You don’t want me anymore,’ she whispered. And once the words were out she knew they were true. He would say the things that he thought she wanted to hear because he was a kind man. But they would be lies. The truth was in the way he closed down the bond between them so she wouldn’t hear things that would hurt her. Charles was a dominant wolf and dominant wolves were driven to protect those weaker than themselves. And he saw her as so much weaker.

‘I love you,’ he told her. ‘Now, call your wolf.’

She ignored his order – he knew better than to give her orders. He said he loved her; it sounded like the truth. But he was old and clever and Anna knew that, when push came to shove, he could lie and make anyone believe it. Knew it because he lied to her now – and it sounded like the truth.

‘I’m sorry,’ she told him. ‘I’ll go away—’

And suddenly her back was against a tree and his face was a hairbreadth from hers. His long hot body was pressed against her from her knees to her chest – he’d have to bend to do that. He was a lot taller than her, though she wasn’t short.

Anna shuddered as the warmth of his body started to penetrate the cold that had swallowed hers. Charles waited like a hunter, waited for her to wiggle and see that she was truly trapped. Waited while she caught her breath. Waited until she looked into his eyes.

Then he snarled at her. ‘You are not leaving me.’

It was an order, and she didn’t have to follow anyone’s orders. That was part of being Omega instead of a regular werewolf – who might have had a snowball’s chance in hell of being a proper mate.

‘You need someone stronger,’ Anna told him again. ‘So you wouldn’t have to hide when you’re hurt. So you could trust your mate to take care of herself and help, damn it, instead of having to protect me from whatever you are hiding.’ She hated crying. Tears were weaknesses that could be exploited and they never solved a damned thing. Sobs gathered in her chest like a rushing tide and she needed to get away from him before she broke.

Instead of fighting his grip, she tried to slide out of it. ‘I need to go,’ she said to his chest. ‘I need—’

His mouth closed over hers, hot and hungry, warming her mouth as his body warmed her body.

‘Me,’ Charles said, his voice dark and gravelly as if it had traveled up from the bottom of the earth, his eyes a bright gold. ‘You need me.’

He kissed her again, his hands roaming from her jaw down her neck and shoulders. His hips pressed forward, and he released her mouth as he slid his body up until his sex pressed, hard and full, against hers. She jerked involuntarily, and he laughed in the same deep way that he had spoken. She growled at him, wolf to wolf.

‘There you are, there you are,’ he said. ‘Are you just going to let me do this alone?’

He was talking too much when he should be feeling. She curled one leg up until the angle of their hips was better, climbing his body until she could bite down on his collarbone. He drew in his breath at the pain and she released him. Now his attention was on her instead of on making words, so she could be gentler. She licked the wound she’d made, feeling it heal under her tongue as she cleaned the iron-rich blood from his skin. She lunged upward and this time she caught the tendon in his neck gently, and his gasp had nothing to do pain.

She wiggled her hips, rubbing the seam of her jeans on him as she absorbed the heady smell that was her mate when he was aroused. She wanted to smell it better so she slipped down and rested her open mouth against his hardness, letting her hot breath caress him through his jeans. It had been so long since they’d touched.

His scent grew stronger: musk and forest, salt and bitter, with an indescribably delicious edge of sweetness.

‘Anna,’ he said, a little desperately. ‘Isaac, Malcolm, and probably that damned fae can hear us.’

She opened her mouth and bit – not hard, just enough to shut him up and to let him know that pushing her away was not an option.

Charles made a noise that might have been a laugh, but all she heard was the surrender in it, and then he let her knock him onto his back in the damp soil of the island and unzip his jeans until she could get to him. Once she had his bare skin in her hands, the frantic need lessened, partly assuaged by the clear evidence that he wanted her as much as she wanted him.

His skin was so soft to sheathe something so hard. She licked him delicately, loving the taste of him now seasoned by the ocean’s salt. She loved him in all of his flavors, loved the noises he made as she pleasured him, loved the catch in his breath and the jerkiness of his movements – he who was always graceful.

She swallowed him down, claiming him, man and wolf, in the most basic way possible.

‘I am yours,’ he said, a finger under her chin dislodging her claim. ‘And you’ – he moved his hands under her shoulders and pulled until she was all the way on top – ‘are mine.’

Her jeans were in the way so he rolled her to the side and stripped her shoes, pants, and underwear off in three quick motions. He pulled her back on top with hands that were more urgent than gentle and slid inside her.

She closed her eyes and absorbed the feel of the slow burn, the slick pressure and warm friction that meant he was hers. Then he grabbed her hips and asked, so she moved – and quit thinking altogether.

Limp and well loved, Anna panted on top of Charles. As the last tingles died down, she started to think again instead of just feel.

‘Did we,’ she whispered, feeling the blush start at her toes and travel all the way out to her ears. ‘Did we really make love while everyone was listening? Right out in the open? When there might be a bad guy we can’t see or hear watching?’ She might have squeaked the last word.

Underneath her, Charles laughed, his belly bouncing her up and down. He felt resilient and relaxed, like a cat bathing in the sun. ‘All I was trying to do was get you to call up your wolf so she could fight off the black magic that was making you doubt yourself.’ He paused and the relaxation faded. ‘Making you doubt me.’ He rubbed her back. ‘I made you doubt me.’

Anna tucked her head in the hollow of his shoulder and closed her eyes, but hiding didn’t work. After a minute, she laughed helplessly. ‘There is no saving it, is there? We might as well go face the music.’

Anna sat up and lifted her head to scent the air. All she smelled was green growing things, Charles, sex, and the ocean air. ‘The wrongness is gone,’ she told him.

He frowned and closed his eyes, breathing in deeply. ‘From here,’ he said. ‘Not from the whole island. That’s interesting.’ Then he looked up at her and smiled. ‘I think we’d better pull ourselves back together. They’re waiting for us.’

Anna stood up and he handed her his T-shirt. She cleaned up as best she could, handed him back his shirt, and then climbed back into her clothes. He was faster, since he had only to zip his jeans. She was brushing the dirt off one of her socks when he took the shirt and pressed it against a tree.

She watched him as she put on a shoe and started dusting off another shoe.

Charles murmured to the tree in what she was pretty sure was his native speech – which he very seldom used. He and Bran were the only ones left who spoke it as his mother’s band of people had used it, a variant of the Flathead tongue. It made him feel sad and alone to use it, he told her once, and he and his father communicated quite nicely in English, Welsh, or any number of other languages.

Clothed and shod, she ran her fingers through her hair to dislodge leaves, grass, mud, and whatever creepy crawlies might have come to rest there. Charles went down to one knee and pressed the shirt into the ground … which ate it.

He murmured one more phrase and came back to his feet. He saw her watching him and smiled, his face more open than she’d seen it in a long time. ‘I wasn’t going to put it back on,’ he explained. ‘And leaving something like that lying around when we’re traveling with a witch is just not smart. The apple tree will absorb it eventually and guard it until she does.’

‘Are you done yet?’ called Isaac.

Charles tilted his head and called back, ‘I suppose that’s why they call you the five-minute wonder.’

Anna could feel her eyes round and her mouth drop open. ‘I can’t believe you just said that.’ She paused and reconsidered. ‘I am so telling Samuel you said that.’

Charles smiled, kissed her gently, and said, ‘Samuel won’t believe you.’ Then he took her by the hand and started off in the others’ wake.