Wild Sign

CHAPTER 5

A quarter mile along the trail they came upon a sign that read Here there be Music. Charles was becoming quite fond of the signs scattered around the settlement with abandon. He wondered if the sign maker had intended a large-scale pun on the name of the town.

Here there be signs, thought Brother Wolf with amused agreement. Signs in the Wild.

Brother Wolf had not spoken to him in words before they had found Anna. He was pretty sure it was because Brother Wolf didn’t trust Anna to read the images he’d used to communicate with Charles.

Our da always regretted he didn’t take the time to learn our mother’s tongue, Brother Wolf told him unexpectedly. He always wondered what stories she would have told him, what thoughts of hers he will never know. If he could have talked her out of dying had he been able to argue with her more effectively. I chose not to make the same mistake.

Charles wondered how Brother Wolf knew that, because he was sure his da had never said so much in his hearing. Not that he remembered, anyway.

Given the sign, Charles wasn’t entirely surprised when the trail dropped through a copse of trees and ended in an amphitheater. Most of the basin was natural, a trick of the regional geology that backed the flat clearing with stone cliff faces to reflect sound on three sides.

But it wasn’t untouched by human hands. Nature had never gathered all of the seat-sized boulders into a circle. They weren’t large boulders; a strong human could have rolled them, or they could have used the four-wheeler he’d seen signs of. He wondered absently if they’d taken the machine with them or if it was somewhere around here, hidden in the forest, even as he registered that some of those stones had been there much longer than three years. Had Leah’s people moved them? Had there been a Native tribe here at one time?

The tree stumps had been moved here during the time of Wild Sign, though; he could tell by the chain saw marks. The stumps had been used to fill in the gaps between rocks, as well as to form the bottom half of the arrangement, so there was a full circle of crude seating. Wild Sign folk, at least, had not used the area to perform before an audience; they’d used it to perform for themselves.

The amphitheater alone would have been interesting enough for Tag to bring them here. But he’d had a better reason—Charles understood why he’d wanted them to see it rather than explaining. The impact was startling.

Tag had stopped beside Charles, waiting until Charles looked at him with a raised eyebrow before speaking.

“I said it was weird,” Tag said, and Charles reflected that Tag was a musician, too. He’d understood the meaning of what he’d found here.

Instruments, battered by months of wind and weather, lay where their owners had left them. Guitars, a couple of violins, at least one bodhran, and a tarnished flute were balanced on the sitting stones. What looked like the remains of a bagpipe were strewn across the ground, with grass growing thick around them.

Anna, who had gone ahead, picked up one of the guitars. The gentle motion caused the neck to separate from the body. Rain could have done that, Charles thought, swelling the wood until the glue gave.

“It’s a Martin,” Anna told them. “Custom. Hand inlay work.” She turned it toward him so he could see the mother-of-pearl designs on the fretboard and body.

A custom Martin was expensive to be leaving out in the weather. Without being able to play it, it was impossible to accurately assess the price, but a guitar like that started around ten thousand and could go as high as someone was willing to pay. She set it down gently, as if she was worried she might hurt it further.

No, thought Charles grimly, this had not been some orderly exodus where people had fled the threat of predators. He didn’t know a serious musician who would have just left their instruments to rot—and not because the Martin was worth money. Unlike the careful laying out of their pets, this was disrespectful. He didn’t know what had gone on at Wild Sign, but he would find out.

He strode forward with the intent of joining his mate, took five strides, and stopped dead as darkness sent the hair on the back of his neck crawling. It wasn’t magic, this feeling. On old battlefields, pain and blood sometimes twisted the spirit of a place until merely standing on such ground made a man’s heart ache—or caused fear to rise through his bones. In old jails and psych hospitals, the spirit was so damaged it could make it hard to breathe.

A stride behind him, Tag swore, feeling it, too.

Something very bad had happened here. Not, he was pretty sure, whatever had made the people of Wild Sign leave their musical instruments behind. Something like this did not happen in a season. Two years after the Battle of Little Bighorn, Charles had felt nothing while he’d traveled over that ground. Ten years later, the spirit had been so heavy with sorrow, he had stood alone in the darkness and cried for those who had been lost.

This darkness of spirit had been here before the people of Wild Sign had decided to make this ground into a gathering place. It would have taken more than half a year to grow darkness this deep. He wondered why a group of witches would have thought it a good idea to come here. Did they have no common sense at all? How could they not have felt this?

“There’s something bad about this place, isn’t there?” Anna asked, watching them. “I thought maybe I was just spooked because of the dead animals and the abandoned instruments.” She looked around. “I don’t like it here. What happened to these people to make this place feel so awful?”

“It’s not the Wild Sign people,” Tag said, his voice certain. “This”—he swept a hand wide—“feels like Culloden.” Interesting, Charles thought, that Tag’s mind, like Charles’s, had gone to another battlefield for comparison. “It would take a great deal of horrible to make the deaths of forty people resonate in the land.”

While Tag had been talking, Anna’s toe had sent something rolling on the ground. She’d bent down and picked it up—a recorder. Doubtless there were other instruments scattered about and hidden by a season’s growth of grasses. Absently she knocked it against her leg to dislodge the dirt.

“My da said Sherwood told him there were over a hundred people here, and everyone but Leah died,” Charles said. He wasn’t sure a hundred deaths would be enough to make the land feel as it did.

He closed his eyes, trying to get a better feel. He missed the little spirits of the woods who sometime gave him clues.

Brother Wolf said, out loud so everyone could hear it, “This feels like a place where sacrifices were made.”

Anna nodded her head. “It feels tragic.”

She lifted the recorder to her lips, almost absently. The note rose in the air, pure and clear, the stone walls behind them pushing the sound out. Like the guitar, it was a fine instrument. Unlike the guitar, it had survived somehow undamaged from its exposure.

Anna played a quick scale first, to check it for tune and playability—and to let her fingers get used to the hole placements. It was what Charles would have done with a strange instrument, too. You had to know your partner before you could make proper music.

Typically, his Anna’s first instinct was to make things better, and music was always her willing tool. She started out in a minor key, trying several songs before settling on an old Irish tune. He and Tag waited where they stood, caught by the music.

The old words sang through his head in time with her playing:

The Minstrel-Boy to the war is gone,

In the ranks of death you’ll find him;

His father’s sword he has girded on,

And his wild harp slung behind him.

It was a song suited to this time and place, with its melancholy themes of death and beauty, war and music. Charles became aware something was stirring in response to the music—something, here and now. It made Charles uneasy. He could not tell if it was something physical or spiritual. He couldn’t tell if it was for good or ill.

He wasn’t the only one who felt it. Tag had started to sing along—had gotten as far as “in the ranks of death” before he quit singing in favor of watching the land around them with battle-honed alertness.

“Land of Song!” said the warrior-bard,

“Tho’ all the world betrays thee,

One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,

One faithful harp shall praise thee.”

“Do you feel that?” Tag asked Charles in a soft voice that didn’t interfere with Anna’s song. “Something . . .”

Charles nodded, trying to isolate what was happening, but the twisted feel of the land kept getting in the way, tangling his senses—he could hear her sing the words. And he knew she could not possibly be doing that. She was playing the recorder; he could see her with her lips clearly closed around the mouthpiece. But even so, he could have sworn he heard her voice.

The Minstrel fell!—but the foeman’s chain

Could not bring that proud soul under;

The harp he lov’d ne’er spoke again,

For he tore its chords asunder;

Anna turned away from him, playing to another audience, someone . . . something other than them.

“She’s singing,” Tag said, sounding worried. “Can you hear it? How is she doing that? Should we stop her?”

“Yes,” said Charles, but he made no move to do so.

And said, “No chains shall sully thee,

Thou soul of love and bravery!

Thy songs were made for the pure and free,

They shall never sound in slavery.”

The words echoed, and the music was amplified by the natural acoustics of the amphitheater into something much more powerful than a musician should have been able to get out of a little recorder. Even a musician as good as his Anna.

Driven by the urgent feeling that something was wrong, Charles started to move toward her. It felt like slogging through mud. Only then did he realize he’d been caught in the music, too. There had been magic at work—though, he thought with grim self-directed anger, that revelation should have hit him when he’d heard, impossibly, the words of her song.

The magic had lessened when she’d quit singing, having finished all the lyrics. The sweet voice of the recorder continued as Anna played variations on “The Minstrel Boy.” He needed to get to her before she found another song; he was fairly sure when she found one, they would be caught in its spell again.

He had to free her.

“I can’t move,” said Tag tightly, berserker rage shadowing his voice, making it rasp.

“Wait there,” Charles told him with authority he hoped Tag could hold on to. In a gentler voice he said, “Anna, love, put the recorder down. The song is over, the last verse sung.”

She ignored him.

She can’t hear us, Brother Wolf told him.

He wanted to see her face. He had to wade through the sticky magic to get to her—it wasn’t only Tag who was riding an edge. Since she hadn’t responded to his voice at all, he changed tactics.

“Anna,” he barked. He tried reaching through their mating bond again; he’d been trying to touch her through it since she’d started playing. If she felt him, he could not tell.

Fight fire with fire, suggested Brother Wolf, though not in words. Instead, Charles got a vision of a backfire lit in the path of a blazing forest. Sing.

It was as good an idea as any. He chose a courting song Buffalo Singer had taught him, a song his uncle had learned from his father, who had learned it from his father before him. Like most of the songs his uncle had taught him, it had no words but plenty of meaning. It had been composed by Charles’s great-grandfather as he sought to win the hand of the shy woman who became the mother of his children. It was a song rooted in love, carrying the weight of the generations of people who had sung it.

Charles had not sung this song since his uncle had died in his arms, raving with fever.

The rich notes filled him from his chest and up through his sinuses in a way most music did not, bringing with it the memory of men singing in the dark in the world of his childhood. As with Anna’s music, the amphitheater gave depth and power to his voice—and so, in a way he did not pause to examine, did his memories.

Charles was forced to stop walking because he couldn’t keep moving and allow Brother Wolf to sing at the same time—and the song was doing something.

He closed his eyes to better sense the flows and currents of magic that were mixing, driven by his music and Anna’s trapped song. But he kept getting caught up in the voice of the tragic and broken land—he knew now why Brother Wolf thought this place had been used as a blood altar. It had that feel, layers upon layers of death.

He wasn’t sure whether the land’s twisted spirit was caught up in this or if it was something else. The not-scent he’d noticed earlier, the one that reminded him of how Leah had smelled when he’d first met her, was noticeably stronger than it had been before Anna had started singing. But he knew unraveling the magic in play was beyond his abilities right now. He’d have to go about it another way.

Brother Wolf joined in. As he did so, Charles was certain the tide of magic was about to change.

But when it stopped, it all stopped. There was no gradual defeat, no unraveling, no sense of victory. Just a sudden withdrawal of everything opposing Charles’s attempt to defeat it. The air became clear and easy to breathe, the strange scent entirely gone.

Even the darkness that emanated from the land died away until he was tempted to believe he’d imagined it. Shadow-ladened land could be healed, but only by a great shaman over a period of months or years. It didn’t just disappear.

Tag swore with feeling, for which Charles couldn’t blame him. The abrupt cessation of whatever they had been struggling against made him feel like he’d been engaged in a game of tug-of-war and the rope had broken, leaving him sprawling (if only metaphorically) in the mud. It was disorienting on the verge of being painful.

Even so, Charles kept singing until he reached a place where his song had a natural stopping place. Breaking off untidily felt both ungrateful and unwise.

As Charles fell silent, Tag started toward Anna at a run, but stopped when Charles held up a hand. Charles was watching Anna’s tensing back, felt the bond between them still shut painfully tight—but now it no longer seemed like outside interference. It felt as if she had rejected him utterly—which was not like his Anna. The scent of her fear threatened to send Brother Wolf into a frenzy.

“Anna, my love?” Charles said softly, knowing his struggle with Brother Wolf did not show on the outside.

She turned then, staggering a little—for which he could not blame her. Her face was composed, her body controlled, but all the same she reminded him of a deer, ready to flee at the slightest movement. Her eyes were terrified. He hadn’t seen that look on her face in a long time.

What had the music done to her, to leave her panic-stricken and afraid?

She tried to speak, but had to lick her lips. “Who are you?” she asked.

PACK MEETINGS ARE the worst, Anna told herself stoutly, trying, by the understatement, to buck up her spirits as she cowered in the back corner of the room, attempting to be invisible. She wished she were safe in her Oak Park apartment and not in the Western Suburb Chicago Pack’s stronghold in Naperville.

She knew she couldn’t really hide, not in a room filled with werewolves. She hated knowing it was going to be rough tonight—after this long in the pack, she’d gotten a feel for when trouble was brewing. She could feel the anticipation in the air. She hated that she cowered, head down, trying not to be noticed.

Her father once said she argued so much that when she died, she’d argue with St. Peter at the pearly gates. He’d been proud of her obstinance—he was a lawyer by profession and by calling. He would not recognize her now.

It was a good thing, she told herself, that she was not allowed to contact him anymore.

At first she’d tried to pay attention to what her Alpha said in these meetings, but she’d learned he could read her feelings through the pack bond. It was better not to listen than for Leo to know how much she despised him. He didn’t like being disrespected.

She could tell by the tone of Leo’s voice that he was ready to wrap things up, and her senses prickled at the heightened danger as the crowd of werewolves, who also picked up on Leo’s cues, started to fidget.

He was looking at her. Justin. She forced herself to keep her eyes down as her breath stuttered and her heart raced painfully in her chest.

Calm down, she told herself. Calm down. Panic makes him worse. Makes them all worse.

Leo quit talking and people began to move around. Anna had found one gambit that sometimes worked to keep her safe. She’d taken note of where Isabelle was and charted a path toward the Alpha’s mate’s side. Sometimes Isabelle would take her part—and usually even he moderated his behavior in front of Isabelle, who liked to pretend she was a good guardian of her pack.

Halfway to her goal, Anna glanced up from the floor to make sure Isabelle hadn’t moved—and met his eyes. He was pacing her through the crowd.

Cold terror numbed her fingers, because she knew that look, knew he’d decided she was his prey tonight. Again. It had been two weeks; she had hoped for three but had known it was unlikely. He liked her fear. Her pain.

Chest tight, she . . .

A deep voice wound around her, calling her, lulling her with gentleness. She didn’t understand the words, but for a moment she felt safe. She . . .

. . . looked for Isabelle. But the Alpha’s mate was no longer standing where she had been, and Anna couldn’t locate her. A rough hand grabbed her hair and jerked her head back harshly.

We have you safe. You are ours. No hand will touch you if you do not wish it.

A deep throbbing music tried to surround her with safety, but it dissipated in the pain of Justin’s human-blunt teeth digging into her neck, drawing blood. The scent attracted attention. Someone let out a low whoop that seemed to stir the whole room. The pack would join Justin’s hunt tonight. She knew she was lost.

Safe, insisted the music.

“Anna, my love,” said a deep voice.

And, abruptly, as if by magic, everything changed.

Instead of a dark room, too full of werewolves, too full of men, she stood in brilliant sunlight, wearing unfamiliar clothing, on the side of a mountain. Before her there was nothing but evergreen forest as far as she could see. It was autumn, she thought a little numbly, taking in the colored leaves of the undergrowth. But she knew it was summer.

Her neck hurt where Justin had bitten her. She turned around, half expecting Justin’s hold on her hair to stop her. Expecting that he would be there—that this was some game he was playing.

Justin wasn’t there. But she saw then that she wasn’t in untouched wilderness. She was standing in an amphitheater of sorts, surrounded by a circle of rocks spread around the space as though they were intended to be seating. Scattered about the rocks were broken instruments. Maybe Justin had knocked her out and she was dreaming. It was the sort of scene her subconscious might come up with: the death of her music. But it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt real.

Two men stood on the opposite side of the clearing from her. The larger of the two stood farther away, poised on the balls of his feet as if he were ready to move at any moment, held back by something just barely adequate to keep him where he was. His orange hair hung down in tangled waves over his shoulders. But it wasn’t that one, huge and menacing as he looked, who drew her attention.

About halfway between her and the redheaded man was a Native American man with wolf-gold eyes. She could not look away from him, although she knew quite well what happened when she met the eyes of dominant males, even by accident.

He was big, too, with wide shoulders and graceful hands. He wore his hair in a long braid and, incongruously in a man with such masculine features, gold studs in his ears. In contrast to his rather extraordinary looks, his clothing was mundane: a green flannel shirt, jeans, and worn leather lace-up boots.

Dangerous. She knew that with absolute certainty. This man was dangerous.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Her breath was harsh, her throat sour with bile, as she struggled to accept her current situation and evaluate it while she was still trying to deal with the sudden change of place. She was in danger and she had no idea what to do about it. The urge to run was almost overwhelming, but she fought it back because fleeing would be a terrible mistake.

And some part of her remembered the moment after Justin bit her neck, remembered the harsh hands and the . . . and the . . . She had run then, she knew it. Knew it had done no good. They had outnumbered her.

She fought not to remember it. Not to remember the hands, the greedy mouths—to jump in time to afterward.

Afterward.

Afterward, when she was alone in her apartment, she’d sat fully clothed in her bathtub and pulled up her shirtsleeve. This time, she thought, dragging the silver knife down the inside of her wrist and watching the blood well. This time it would work.

And somehow, Anna knew that memory, of sitting in the bathtub so she wouldn’t cause a big mess for someone else to clean up. That part was true, too. She looked down at her arms and saw long silvery scars. How could there be scars and Justin’s bite still be bleeding?

“Hey,” said the Native American man. He had a deep voice, the one she remembered calling to her in the darkness of her terror. Surely he hadn’t been in the pack meeting room, though that had been where she’d heard him.

“Stay here, sweetheart,” he said. “Stay with me.”

She put her hand to the side of her neck, felt the sting of the open wound and the stickiness of blood. But she didn’t look at her hand. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the man who had spoken to her.

He was scary—she knew people were scared of him. How did she know that? And why did it make her sad? Jeepers, her mind was in a muddle. She had to cling to the present moment because she was in danger—later, when she was safe, she could figure it all out.

Why did she want to go to him?

Someone growled and she jerked her eyes to the second man. Second werewolf, she understood. They were both werewolves. His face was twisted in rage and her breath caught.

“Tag,” said the first man without looking away from Anna. “Go back up to the sign. You are scaring her.”

Tag. She should know that name. She knew that name.

She put her hands up to her face, covering her eyes. Stupid thing to do, the scared woman inside of her said. But there was something wrong with her vision; she was seeing two different things and she didn’t know what was real. “Seeing” was the wrong verb, but she couldn’t find a better one. “Remembering” wasn’t the right word, surely.

“Anna.” His voice was very soft.

She jerked her hands away from her face and saw that the other stranger, the one with red hair, had gone away. Her werewolf had taken a seat on the ground.

Hers.

“What is scaring you?” he asked. Then even more softly, “Why are you afraid of me?”

She knew not to talk to them, to the dominant wolves. That never went well. She’d been taught better. She raised her hand to her jaw, but that had healed a long time ago.

“Anna? Will you tell me? I would like to know what’s going on.”

She made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. She would like to know that, too. She opened her mouth to tell him about where she had been before she’d suddenly found herself here on the side of a mountain. Maybe he knew how she’d gotten here.

But what came out of her mouth was “Justin.”

He half closed his eyes as they flared to an even brighter gold and his whole body twitched, causing her to flinch back. There was a long moment of silence.

“Justin,” he said with deliberate calm she didn’t believe. She knew what rage looked like—and knew that it was more dangerous when it wore a mask of composure. “Justin cannot hurt you ever again. Justin is dead.”

Oh, how she wished that were true.

“No,” she said. “I just . . . He was . . . He was . . .” She reached up to touch the wound on her neck, this time for reassurance. It hurt—he had just bitten her. She wasn’t wrong. She had proof.

“I just saw him,” she told the seated man. “He was just here—I mean, I was just there. With him.” She remembered the smell of him, could still smell him on her skin, and it made her sick.

“Anna,” the man said, “Justin is dead.” There was finality in his tone. “Can you hear the truth when I speak it?”

She started to shake her head, then realized that she could. That he was not lying, or at least he believed what he said.

“Yes,” she said. But how could Justin be dead? Had whatever magic that transported her to wherever she was now, had that killed him? And how would this man know? Had this stranger teleported her here somehow?

Deep in her gut, something was trying to tell her she had this situation wrong. But she didn’t know how or in what way—and she had to deal with the present danger first. The present danger who was sitting twenty feet away from her, doing the best that he could to look nonthreatening. It wasn’t a good act, but it mattered that he was trying.

The seated man caught and held her gaze again. Instead of scaring her, as all of her previous experience told her it should, for some reason his regard made her feel better, more centered.

“Justin is dead,” he said again. “Leo is dead. They cannot hurt you anymore.”

And from the certainty in his voice, she knew that to be true. Even if she’d just seen Justin, just seen Leo. She knew they were dead because this man told her it was so. How did this stranger know about Justin and Leo?

“I killed Isabelle,” Anna said, her mouth so dry she could barely force the words out. Her head hurt with a sudden, eye-watering pain. She didn’t know where the words had come from.

“Anna?” he said, and she focused on his voice. One true thing in a sea of jumbled events.

“You sang for me,” she whispered, knowing it was true, though not what it meant.

“Yes,” he agreed.

She opened her mouth to say something else, and that flash of pain struck her again.

CHARLES CAUGHT HER before she hit the ground. Doing it when he’d had to start from a sitting position meant he mostly just managed to put himself under her rather than keeping her from falling.

Though he could hear her heartbeat, feel the life in her body, he still put his hand on her pulse for reassurance. He avoided touching the bite marks.

She’d had them when she turned around after the music had died. She hadn’t had them when she put the recorder to her lips, and he didn’t know where she’d gotten them from. He hadn’t smelled the blood until she’d turned around. They were human teeth marks, healing now, but they had been deep. The blood was smeared all over her neck and shirt.

He didn’t understand what was happening. Justin had been dead for years, and if he had to pick out regrets from his long life, the fact that someone else had killed Justin before Charles had had the chance to do it was first on the list.

He pulled her limp body into his lap, curling around her protectively. Shuddering with the effort not to go kill something, someone, anyone. If there had been a physical enemy present, he would not have been able to hold Brother Wolf back.

Because Charles wanted to kill someone, too. He just didn’t know who or what his enemy was. Was the recorder some sort of artifact? Whatever had happened to Anna had had something to do with the music, that much was obvious. He was very aware Ford had told them that the symbol on the stones and trees around this place, the one that kept the very guardians of the forest away, represented a musical instrument being played. It didn’t take a genius to make a connection.

Brother Wolf warned him that Anna was recovering consciousness. He knew that he should set her down and give her space. She’d been afraid of him.

Of him.

He could not make himself let her go. She would have to push him away herself. If she pushed him away, if she was frightened, even Brother Wolf would release her. Charles only hoped that he could force himself to do the same.

She stirred. He made himself look away from her, giving her as much space as he could, knowing that it was not enough. He was going to scare her again.

He felt the sudden tension of her muscles as she woke. Felt a tremendous shiver travel through her body and the instinctive way she drew into the fetal position.

Brother Wolf howled inside him. They would find this thing that had hurt their mate and make it very, very sorry. He waited for her to struggle.

Instead, she burrowed against him with a wild sob, wiggling to get closer to him with frantic need. She made a noise, a guttural heart-wrenching sound that he couldn’t understand. He wasn’t sure that she was using words.

He held her while she buried her face against him and shook, grabbing his shirt so hard that she ripped the shoulder. He rocked her gently. Had they not been in the middle of this place that he distrusted, he would have sung to her.

Gradually she relaxed against him, her body shuddering now and then, like a child who had cried too hard to stop all at once.

“Anna?”

She pressed her head more tightly against him, but she didn’t say anything.

He jerked his head up as a scent came to his attention, this one more real than the one he’d started to identify with their unknown enemy. This one he smelled, but it was the same scent. When he took in a deep breath, he could not smell it again. But he knew he hadn’t imagined it.

Deciding that he wanted to get Anna out of Wild Sign, he stood up, holding her tightly to him, and headed back up the trail.

Tag was waiting for them at the sign at the top of the trail. He had shifted to wolf, which Charles appreciated. Tag’s wolf could be counted on—not to be less ferocious or less crazy, but the wolf obeyed orders. Sometimes Tag had trouble with that when he walked on two feet. Charles could deal with Tag, but he’d rather not have to while he was trying to protect Anna. He didn’t want to kill Tag by accident.

“I don’t know,” he told Tag, who was staring at Anna. “I think she’s okay now. She’ll tell us what happened when she’s ready.”

He hoped he was right.

He set her down briefly to secure the pack on Tag’s back. As soon as his hands were off her, she began the change to wolf.

Charles waited. When he sensed that she was absorbed in her transformation, he gestured for Tag to watch Anna. While she completed the change, Charles ran back to the amphitheater and found the recorder. It looked ordinary enough and it felt inert in his hands. He took it anyway. He was back before Anna was aware he’d been gone.

It was a good sign that Anna had decided to change to her wolf, he told himself as she rose, somewhat unsteadily, to her feet. Anna’s wolf was how Anna had survived the hell of the Chicago pack in the first place.

But he didn’t like the way her ears were lowered submissively—his Anna didn’t have a submissive bone in her whole body. The defensive hunch of her body threatened his control of Brother Wolf. Tag wasn’t in a much better state. Anna wasn’t his mate—but Omega wolves were to be cherished.

He put the recorder in Tag’s pack. Then Charles went down on one knee beside Anna.

“Are you okay to travel?” he asked.

She met his eyes, gave an affirmative yip. He could feel her through their bond, a roiling incoherent mess of emotions and adrenaline. Movement, he judged, would help her work through everything.

He changed and headed toward camp.

On the trip back, Tag led and Charles fell behind. Anna didn’t let either of them get too close—but she didn’t range away from them, either. It was probably a very good thing that they didn’t run into any hikers along the way. Charles wasn’t sure that either he or Tag would have been capable of civilized behavior.

They arrived at their camp a little after two in the morning. No one had been near it since they’d left. Charles shifted to human to open the bigger tent—which he and Anna would normally have shared alone—and invited Tag in.

Anna seemed a little lost crouched beside the SUV, well back from either Charles or Tag. Charles knelt down and gestured to her.

She padded toward him, not unwilling, just wary in a way that hurt his heart. It had been a long time since she’d looked at him that way. He put his hands on her gently, but worked them into the fur on her shoulders until he had his skin on hers.

As when she had sat on his lap in the amphitheater, he felt nothing. No magic. She didn’t smell of that strange something from Leah’s past. There was no stain on her spirit that he could see.

He would have been happier about it if he had understood why everything had stopped so suddenly in the amphitheater. Magic didn’t just stop, it dissipated—and that battlefield pall should not have disappeared at all.

He kissed her forehead and released her.

“I’m going to be wolf tonight,” he told her. “I can sleep with Tag and you can go sleep in the other tent. Or you can stay with us.”

She scooted past him, into the bigger tent. He would have felt better if she hadn’t so obviously avoided touching him. He shifted to wolf and stretched across the entrance—which was a foolish thing. It would be as easy for an enemy to cut through the tent side as it would be for them to unzip the opening—easier, probably. If he’d really been worried about an attack in the night, he wouldn’t have slept in the tent at all.

He’d resigned himself to a restless night—and then Anna curled up against his back. When Tag lay down beside her, she gave a little sigh and relaxed for the first time since she’d started playing that recorder.

Charles put his head down and slept.