Wild Sign

CHAPTER 6

Anna woke with a splitting headache and a body that felt like it had been run over by a truck.

The last time she’d felt like that had been when she had gone to a party hosted by the first violin at the end of her freshman year at college—hosting that annual party was an unofficial requirement of the position of first chair.

They’d played the “Hi, Bob” game—another time-honored tradition. It consisted of watching The Bob Newhart Show and downing tequila shots every time a character from the show said, “Hi, Bob.” She hadn’t even known what The Bob Newhart Show was before that night. The next year she’d done it with orange juice instead of tequila—and she’d never again been able to look at Bob Newhart without feeling vaguely ill.

But she was a werewolf; she wasn’t supposed to get hangovers. She tried to remember what she’d been doing. They’d gone to Wild Sign . . .

She rubbed her head when the memory wouldn’t come.

Charles would have answers for her. She got up, found clothes to wear, and put them on. She wiped the back of her wrist against her nose and grimaced at the smear of blood. That was pretty weird. Had she been hurt? She felt a little dizzy, and her knees, which had been fine a moment ago, tried to buckle. A sense of urgency started to press down on her. Something was wrong. Or had been wrong. Or possibly would be wrong.

Charles, she reminded herself, her head pounding in time with the beat of her heart. Find Charles. She needed to get out of the stuffy tent so she could breathe. So she could push the panic away.

Anna unzipped the tent and stuck her feet into her shoes, which someone had set next to the tent door. It hadn’t been her, because she’d come into camp as a wolf. She remembered that now. She’d gone to sleep, but she didn’t remember shifting back to human. Given the discomfort of the shift, she found that a little disconcerting—but not as much as losing most of a day.

Charles and Tag were sitting in the camp chairs on opposite sides of the folding table that held the propane stove. Tag had a beat-up copy of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight in his lap and Charles had his laptop out—but both of them were looking at her with alert wariness. There was quite a bit of tension in the air, and she wondered what she’d done to put that look on their faces. Or maybe there was something else going on.

Her own growing tension had eased at the sight of her mate. Charles was good at making her feel safe.

“Um,” she said. “Good morning?”

“Afternoon,” said Tag politely. As if they’d encountered each other walking opposite directions on a sidewalk—and only knew each other by face.

“That bad?” she asked.

Charles still hadn’t spoken. He watched her, she realized, with wolf eyes.

“Let’s put it this way,” said Tag. “What’s my name?”

“Colin Taggart,” she said.

“Have I ever hurt you?”

Was this a trick question? “No?”

The query in her voice was directed at his question rather than an indication of any doubt about what the answer was. He flinched, and she rolled her eyes.

“Of course not,” she said impatiently. “What’s wrong?”

As soon as she spoke, she realized that she probably could answer part of that question herself. She felt sick, and all she remembered about yesterday was heading out toward Wild Sign. She had a few vague memories that came and went. Mostly they didn’t make sense—a canvas sink, a baby’s skull that somehow wasn’t a baby’s skull, and the inlaid fretboard of a guitar. The fretboard made her sad, though she didn’t know why. Something was definitely wrong with her.

“You sounded all right this morning, too,” Tag told her, sounding ill-used and a bit whiny. His eyes didn’t fit his voice. His eyes were watchful. “And then you ran, making a noise I don’t ever want to hear coming out of your mouth again.” Tag scowled at her. “I don’t like to scare women. I especially don’t like to scare Omegas. I really, really don’t like it when it’s you I’m scaring.”

Well, hell, thought Anna, feeling guilty. All of the wolves were affected by her being Omega. When she was distressed, they reacted badly.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t remember it. I don’t remember quite a lot.” Tag, she thought, wasn’t the only one who sounded whiny.

The headache felt like someone had grabbed her brain just behind her eyes and was digging in with claws. And wiggling the claws.

“Got that,” said Tag. “What do you remember?”

But Anna was watching Charles, who hadn’t said a word since she’d come out of the tent. He folded the computer in his lap with exaggerated care before setting it on the ground. He got to his feet slowly.

She couldn’t tell what he was thinking with his quiet face and gold eyes. There was intent in his motion. She found herself taking a slow step backward, and her heartbeat picked up speed—

—as it had that night she’d run in the pack’s home grounds when Justin led the hunt against her. The guttural sounds of their cries, inhuman sounds coming from human-shaped throats, rang in her ears. Though she knew that was impossible.

Charles stopped moving.

She aborted her instinctive movement to cover her ears—the sound wasn’t real. That was over and done. Why in the world was she dwelling on that particular event now?

She reached for Charles through their bond—and only then realized that it was closed up tight. Maybe that was the reason her thoughts were so muddled. She would feel better if she could feel him; he might drown out the pain that was making it hard to think. She wasn’t good at manipulating their bond, though she’d gotten better.

Visualizations were sometimes useful, so she tried to imagine herself reaching out and unlocking the door that stood between them. She pulled on it and the bond blazed open with a suddenness that she hadn’t expected. As if she’d pulled hard on a swinging door at the same time that Charles was pushing it.

For a disorienting moment, she was seeing herself from his point of view. Her hair was tangled and there were traces of tears down her cheeks. She had a bloody nose again. Her shoulders were hunched in pain. (Well, she wasn’t used to having a hangover any longer. It had been years.) Her pupils were dilated like a drug addict’s, making her brown eyes look black. She looked small and fragile—something she’d never seen when she looked into a mirror.

Charles did something—it certainly hadn’t been her—and their bond settled down to its usual gentle awareness. The weird feeling of perceiving herself from his viewpoint receded. Charles took a deep breath. She realized that he’d even been careful of his breathing, so he didn’t startle her into running.

Which, she noticed, a part of her was still ready to do.

She had a sickening half memory of running through the woods in the dawn light—the path she had taken lay right over Charles’s shoulder. Her awareness, as she had sprinted through the unfamiliar territory, had bounced back and forth between the present moment and that horrible night when she’d become the prey of the pack. That explained why it had come so easily to mind just now—though not why it had done so this morning.

She reached out her hand. Charles stepped forward and took it at once, his warm hand closing around her cold one. The physical touch helped hold off her imminent panic, though she didn’t quite know why she was panicking. When his arms closed around her, her headache faded as well.

“It had to shut you out to get its fingers into me,” she told him. And then wondered how she’d known that—or if it was true.

“What is it?” he asked, only it was Brother Wolf who asked, not Charles, his voice smooth and dark.

“The Singer in the Woods.” She still wasn’t thinking right—and there was something wrong with Charles. Why was it Brother Wolf who was talking to her?

She shivered and pressed closer to him, feeling as if she would never get warm again. “It’s damaged. Hungry. Lonesome. It needs.”

Something sharp dug into her mind, trying to lock the connection between her and Charles closed again. Anna screamed—she could hear the duet roar of angry wolves, her own and Brother Wolf—and the claws retreated, driven back by the sound.

She didn’t lose consciousness, but it was a close thing. By the time her world righted again, Charles had dragged her into his lap, sheltering her with his body.

“Music,” she said through the fog that was trying to feed on her. That mind-dulling miasma in her head was another kind of attack, she thought.

“What?” asked Tag, his voice very quiet. She looked for him and found him by the SUV nearly twenty feet away. He was crouched down, balanced on the balls of his feet and the fingers of his hands. His eyes were wolf-bright. There wasn’t a lot of human left in him. And she remembered that she was an Omega and he was a dominant wolf—and there was nothing physical he could protect her from to relieve his fury.

She would have apologized, but talking was too much effort—and she had to get through to Charles.

“Sing.” She fought to get the word out. When he didn’t immediately respond, she worried she hadn’t gotten it out in an understandable form. She tried giving him explicit directions. “Sing for me, Charles.”

“Charles isn’t with us,” said Tag in a rough voice as unlike his usual melodious tenor as she’d ever heard him speak. “He hasn’t been here all day.”

For a moment she didn’t understand what he was saying. Charles was wrapped around her—they appeared to be sitting on the ground, though she didn’t remember how they’d ended up there. Her cheek vibrated with his near-silent growls.

Oh. She was usually better at telling which one she was dealing with, but she wasn’t exactly at the top of her game.

“Brother Wolf,” she said. “I need you to sing.”

That had driven it off before, the Singer in the Woods. She remembered that, hearing Charles’s voice, feeling it charge the atmosphere with his love, his power. But Brother Wolf did not respond.

Think, she told herself sternly, but it was getting harder to keep track of what she needed to do. She had not broken under the weight of what had happened to her in the Chicago pack. She was stronger than this. What weapons did she have?

Oh. Of course.

I am a werewolf, damn it, she told herself, and called on the change to take her.

For the first time, the transformation didn’t hurt. Or more precisely, her head hurt so much that the familiar agony of her body reshaping itself barely registered. As the shape of the wolf took over her body, its spirit clothed hers. The wolf flowed over and through her, sliding through her mind and healing the damage done. Midway through the change, her mate’s music, Charles’s music, became part of her magic, lending her energy and purpose.

His voice melted into her bones, a staccato warrior’s song that thrummed in her chest with its battle cry. There were words, powerful words that lent themselves to combat. She didn’t understand them but understood their import all the same. Those words formed both shield and sword for her battle. Which did not come.

The thing that had its fingers sifting through her memories fled in the wolf’s wake, in the face of her mate’s song. She was left panting, sane, and, as far as she could tell, free of the Singer, whatever the hell the Singer was.

The raspy martial lyrics of a folk metal band in her ears, she closed her eyes and rested her still-aching head against her mate’s shoulder as he sang the Hu’s “Wolf Totem” in a land thousands of miles and eight centuries from the steppes of Genghis Khan.

As with the last Hu song he’d performed for her, Anna was pretty sure he would tell her he wasn’t getting the pronunciation right with this one, either—but if he’d been at the head of a Mongol horde, they would have known exactly what he meant when he sang.

WHAT WITH ONE thing and another it was late afternoon before everyone was back to their human selves. Boneless in her chair, Anna licked her fingers clean of the last of Tag’s spicy barbecue sauce. It wasn’t sanitary, probably, but she wasn’t letting any of it go to waste.

Besides, it made Charles’s eyes heat up as he went over the last day with his da on the phone. And Anna would do almost anything to wipe the ragged expression off her mate’s face. Her success at that lasted until her hand went to her neck to make sure Justin’s bite mark was really gone.

One of the things that being plunged into the single worst memory of her life had done was to make very clear how hard Charles worked to empower her. Not only because Charles would always back her, but because he had taught her how to defend herself.

She could fight now, in whatever shape she wore. And she knew how to weaponize the natural abilities being an Omega gave her. If she ever found herself the prey of a crazed band of damaged werewolves again, they could not hurt her. She was almost sure she knew how to quiet their beasts. How to make them hers.

The woman I am now would never have had to suffer at the hands of Justin. She told herself that, but she couldn’t believe it. The memory of his teeth in her neck, his smell, his hands on her skin, was too near. Maybe tomorrow she would believe in her ability to fend off Justin.

Charles was watching her, his jaw tense and his eyes yellow.

Today, she decided, she wasn’t going to be afraid of a dead man. She was going to flirt with Charles instead.

She put her index finger in her mouth and met her mate’s eyes as the spicy brilliance of Tag’s sauce filled her mouth. Charles flashed her a sudden grin and turned his back so she couldn’t distract him anymore.

She got up and threw away her paper plate. Tag had done both the cooking and the cleaning for the meal and had returned to his Yeats. He was wearing earbuds with the volume low enough she couldn’t hear it. His head was nodding as he read.

“Anna?” Charles said, turning back to her. “Da wants to hear your side of this.”

“Do you have all your memories back, Anna?” Bran asked. She’d been politely ignoring their conversation until then. She couldn’t help overhearing everything, a condition of being a werewolf, but she felt it was polite to pretend she wasn’t.

“No,” she said. Then paused. “I don’t know, really. I remember most of what happened at Wild Sign, I think. I’m a little foggy from the moment I picked up the recorder until I woke up this afternoon. But the only part I don’t remember at all is this morning. After we got back from Wild Sign, I went to sleep as a wolf. Around six in the morning I apparently shifted from wolf to human, panicked when Charles touched me, and made like a track star through the forest. They caught me, kicking and screaming—we are the only people at this campground, which is probably a good thing.”

She’d been thinking about the noise. But she supposed it might also be good in another way. If there had been another group camping here, they could have been fresh victims for the Singer in the Woods. They had, she’d noticed, all adopted the name that she’d produced in the middle of its attack. She didn’t know how she’d gotten it—one of the things she couldn’t quite remember.

“Do you think the Singer poses a danger for others?” Bran asked. “People near you? Or people near Wild Sign?”

She held off her immediate “How should I know?”

“It hasn’t tried for Charles or Tag,” she said. “So maybe not people near me.” She paused and said slowly, “Or not unless it succeeds in taking me over and can reach out to people through me.”

That felt right. And it led her to another thought. Since she’d been wanting to smack Bran for how he’d forced Leah through her first Change, bonding, and then mating ever since she’d heard the full story, there was a bite in her voice when she said, “I think that you were really lucky Leah is mule-stubborn, Bran Cornick, or your mating could have gone quite differently.”

She didn’t give him time to respond—she wasn’t stupid. Her voice was overly chipper as she continued, “Anyway, at the end of this morning’s chase, Charles says he sent me to sleep with some sneaky magic trick. But I don’t remember that, either.”

“I see,” said Bran. After a brief pause, he said softly, “And I have always known I was lucky in my choice of mate.”

Charles’s eyebrows raised.

“Doesn’t mean that you weren’t a bastard,” Anna said. She probably wouldn’t have said that if they hadn’t been communicating by phone.

“Charles says that after you finished playing the recorder, you didn’t know who he or Tag were.”

Clearly he was done with the topic of the events surrounding his mating. Trust Bran to ignore her rundown on what she didn’t remember and hit exactly where she wished she didn’t remember.

“That’s right,” she said. “Whatever it was, while I was playing, it stuck me right in the middle of the worst moment in my life. In Chicago.” Bran would understand. He knew about Chicago. “It did not feel like a memory and I had the bite marks to prove it.”

“Bite marks?” Bran’s voice stayed calm.

“Justin,” Anna said flatly. “While he was still in human form, he bit my neck, blooding me to excite the pack. That was real. When I found myself standing in that gods-be-damned amphitheater facing Charles and Tag, I thought I’d been teleported from Chicago somehow. I didn’t have a clue who either of them were, where I was, or how I got there. The last thing I remembered was the pack house in Chicago. As if all of my memories between that day in Chicago and the moment in Wild Sign had disappeared.” Her voice was tight.

Charles held out his hand and she grabbed it as if it were a lifeline. It was solid, warm, and strong, and it made her feel as if she could breathe.

“The bite wound on her neck was still bleeding,” Charles growled.

“I see,” Bran said. “I’ve heard of magic that could make your body remember wounds it had suffered, calling that damage from memory into flesh. I don’t remember where, or from whom, and I’ve never seen it myself.” He hesitated. “Not that I remember.” The very old wolves had lots of memories they couldn’t instantly recall. “I’ll make inquiries.”

There was the sound of drumming fingers; Anna presumed they belonged to Bran.

“Sherwood Post doesn’t remember his past,” Bran said. “I thought—we all thought—it was because he couldn’t bear to remember the way in which the witches removed his leg so it could not be regrown.”

“You did not speak to Sherwood after he sent you back to Montana with Leah beside you,” said Charles. “What if he came back here? To make sure the Singer was dead?”

“It does raise some questions,” agreed Bran. “He was, in his own way, one of the most powerful magic users I’ve ever known.”

That hung in the air.

“I always wondered how the witches got him,” Charles said neutrally.

“Exactly,” said Bran. After a moment he said, “Well—”

“You called it the Singer in the Woods.” Leah’s voice cut through Bran’s. “The one who attacked you.”

Anna hadn’t known she was listening. From Charles’s face, he hadn’t known, either. Anna wondered if her dig at Bran would have gone differently if he’d been alone.

“Yes,” Anna agreed. “I don’t know where I got that—it doesn’t feel like something I made up, though.”

“No,” agreed Leah. “I don’t think you did.” Her voice was tight. “I wish I could help. I don’t remember a lot about that time, and most of it would not be useful to you.” She made a soft sound and then said, “There is something about memories. We fed it with music, I think.” Her voice grew hesitant, soft. “Not just with music. That was part of it. It did something with memories, too. But”—her tone turned ironic—“I don’t remember exactly what that was.”

“Were there witches?” asked Charles.

“Like you think there were in Wild Sign? I don’t know,” Leah said. “I’m not witchborn.” She sighed. “It doesn’t feel like being witchborn mattered very much to the Singer, but I can’t be sure.”

Silence fell and lingered.

“If I remember more, I’ll let you know,” Leah said finally, sounding . . . Anna wished she could see Leah’s face so she could read it. She sounded odd. “I’ll call Anna.”

“All right,” said Charles. “Thank you, Leah. Da. We’ll keep you apprised.”

“Be careful,” Bran said. “Remember Sherwood.”

“Yes,” Charles said, and ended the call.

He looked at Anna. “I think we should have you contact Dr. Connors.”

Tag looked up from his book and grinned wolfishly at Anna. “Charles and I are the muscle. You are our communications expert. By that we mean that you get to do all of the investigative work. We just get to kill things or, less interestingly, intimidate people.”

Anna stuck her tongue out at him.

“He’s not wrong,” said Charles, deadpan. “Annoying, but not wrong.” He still carried a bit of Brother Wolf in his eyes and the set of his shoulders, but if he was teasing, he would be okay.

Anna rolled her eyes. “Okay, Brute Squad, give me the phone number. Getting information means giving some back. What do we want Dr. Connors to know? And what do we absolutely not want her to know?”

“Why don’t you play it by ear,” Charles suggested. “Tell her we have some letters addressed to her and see where it goes from there.”

“It occurs to me that I’d feel better about this if we hadn’t opened those letters,” Anna said. “In the household I grew up in, opening someone else’s mail just wasn’t done. I think my father would have forgiven murder before he’d have forgiven us interfering in the US mail.”

“That’s why we’re making you call her,” said Tag. “You can blame us if you’d like. In the household I grew up in, opening letters without ruining the seal was an art form. It’s harder to make a modern letter look as though you haven’t opened it. Not impossible—but I generally don’t bother.”

Charles consulted his laptop and gave Anna the number.

The phone went to voice mail, which was a bit anticlimactic.

“This is Anna Cornick,” Anna said. “I have your number from Special Agents Fisher and Goldstein of the FBI. My husband and I have been up to Wild Sign and we found some letters addressed to you that we’d like to talk about.” She left her number, repeated it, and disconnected.

“What was the name of the place that check for Daniel Green was written to?” asked Anna. “If I’m making calls, I might as well try them, too.”

“Angel Hills,” said Charles.

“There’s an Angel Hills Assisted Living in Yreka,” said Tag. He had evidently started looking it up while Anna had been leaving a message for Dr. Connors. “You have about ten minutes before their regular hours are over. There’s an after-hours number.”

Anna called and asked after Daniel Green.

“Are you a member of his family?” asked the receptionist.

Anna looked at Charles, who shrugged. Tag nodded vigorously.

“Yes,” she lied. “This is Anna Cornick. I’m Carrie Green’s . . . sister-in-law.”

“Ms. Cornick, if you will stay on the line? I will get someone who is authorized to speak with you.”

Elevator music played with static-aided awfulness. The person who’d turned Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into elevator music should have been shot.

Eventually a deliberately mellow voice came on the line. “Ms. Cornick, this is Dr. Sheldon Underwood. Letty tells me that you are calling about Daniel Green?”

“That’s right,” Anna said. “Look, we were going through Carrie’s papers and found a check—” It had been enough to buy a new car.

“Has something happened to Carrie?” he interrupted, losing the mellow tones.

“We don’t know.” Anna managed to make her voice sound weary. “That’s what we are trying to find out. But no one has heard from her since this spring, and you know she lived out in the middle of nowhere. We can’t find her.”

There was a long pause. “Daniel is—well, if you are a member of the family, Daniel has good days and bad. But they were very close; she came here every month to spend time with him. We were concerned when she stopped. It is possible that she told him something. He told us, you see, that Carrie wasn’t going to be coming around anymore. He might tell you more.”

She opened her mouth to refuse—Daniel Green would know that she wasn’t related to him. But Dr. Underwood had continued speaking.

“Daniel’s memory isn’t good, and some days he doesn’t know anyone. But if you come in the morning on a good day, he’s very nearly himself.”

“I can come tomorrow,” Anna said. “I’ll bring the check. What time in the morning, do you think?”

“Tomorrow won’t work,” the doctor said firmly. “He’s having a procedure in the morning. Perhaps the day after?”

She hung up the phone having confirmed a time.

Tag said, “So why are we visiting an old man with a faulty memory?”

Charles replied before Anna could. “Because witchborn is a genetic condition. If, as we suppose, Wild Sign was a witch colony, then there is a chance that Daniel Green is also a witch. He might be able to tell us more about Wild Sign—and possibly what happened there.”

“He knew that Carrie— Do you suppose she was his daughter? Anyway, he knew that Carrie would not be visiting him anymore,” Anna said. “Maybe he knows why not.”

They were packing up the camp for a quick departure in the morning when Anna’s phone rang.

“This is Dr. Connors,” said a woman’s voice.

“Anna Cornick,” Anna returned. “We have some letters—”

“So you said,” interrupted Dr. Connors. “Who are you and what were you doing at Wild Sign?”

“Wild Sign was located on property owned by my family, Dr. Connors,” Anna said.

There was a little pause.

“Fair enough,” she said. “What was in the letters?”

“We have no idea,” Anna told her. “They were in code.”

“You did open them,” Dr. Connors said coolly.

“Your father and his friends built a town on my family’s land,” Anna said, her voice neutral. “Then they all disappeared—without reappearing anywhere else that the FBI can find them. Yes, we opened letters we found in a bag that had been discarded by the side of the trail.”

“Letters,” said Dr. Connors, and for the first time Anna heard something other than rigid self-control.

“Two from a woman named Carrie Green, both of them payments. Six from your father to you, dated sequentially from April fourteenth through the nineteenth. We didn’t try to break the code, but they seem to be identical letters.”

“I see.”

Anna said, “Look, we are going to be down here for a couple more days. When I get home, I can scan the letters and email them to you. Or you can give me an address and I’ll send them to you.”

“You are looking for them, too, aren’t you?” Her tone made it not a question. Dr. Connors gave a sigh. “I am staying in Happy Camp for the time being. Assuming you are still nearby, I can drive to wherever you are—or you can come here.”

Happy Camp, Anna remembered, was the town nearest to Wild Sign. They hadn’t driven through it on the way from Yreka, so it was presumably located farther down the highway.

“We’re camping tonight,” Anna said. “We can drive to Happy Camp tomorrow if that’s convenient?” She glanced at Charles to double-check and he nodded.

“Is there something other than my father’s letters you wish to talk about?” Dr. Connors asked.

What Anna could tell Dr. Connors really depended upon a lot of things that she wouldn’t know until they met face-to-face.

“Maybe,” Anna said. “Let’s meet and”—she chose Charles’s phrase—“we can play it by ear.”

“Fine,” Dr. Connors said. “Call me when you get to town.” And she disconnected without further ado.

“Hardball player, that one,” murmured Tag approvingly.

CHARLES FELT EDGY, uncomfortable in his skin. He had to work not to pace. Anna had tightened their mate bond back down when she realized that her inner turmoil was affecting Charles. He’d allowed it because she had enough to deal with without also brushing up against his agitation. She didn’t need to know that blocking the easy flow of emotional communication only allowed him to hide his own struggles more effectively. Let her believe she was helping him.

Brother Wolf had been enraged that they had not perceived that Anna was still caught in that thing—whatever it was Anna had called it—in the Singer in the Woods’ net. As a consequence, Brother Wolf had refused to let Charles direct their actions after Anna had run from them this morning. He hadn’t trusted Charles to be able to keep her safe.

Because of that, they had almost lost her again, this afternoon. If she had not played it smart, if she had not been able to fight—she would . . . he didn’t know what their enemy would have been able to do to his Anna. He was supremely grateful he hadn’t had to find out. Brother Wolf, though, was ashamed.

He, Brother Wolf, had been ineffectual against it. He was not used to being helpless, but that had not been the kind of battle won with tooth and claw. If he had given way to Charles sooner, they would have been able to give Anna the help she had asked for when she’d asked them. By the time Charles wrested control from Brother Wolf, Anna had already saved herself.

Charles could feel Brother Wolf’s guilt. But he couldn’t do anything to help until his own anger at the wolf settled a bit. So it was good that Brother Wolf chose to be quiet.

He hated to see the bruised expression in Anna’s eyes now, when she didn’t think anyone was watching. He’d hated seeing it the first time he’d met her, in the busy Chicago airport. He’d wanted to kill whoever had put that look there then—and that had been before she was his. Before he knew her—his indomitable, intrepid Anna.

To keep from hovering over her, he buried himself in work. The Suburban had an Internet uplink and a place to plug in his laptop. So he’d started the SUV and sat in the passenger seat, where he wouldn’t have to contend with the steering wheel.

He couldn’t manipulate their accounts on an insecure system—insecure by his standards, anyway. But he could research and watch the world markets to make sure that he did his part to keep the pack safe. Fangs and sinew were all well and good—but money was a better weapon. He lifted his head to look out to the campground where Anna and Tag were playing blackjack with pine needles.

Money was a better weapon against most things, but not all.

It grew dark and they wrapped up their card game. Anna took a flashlight into the bigger tent. Tag busied himself with putting away the folding table and camp chairs. Charles turned off the SUV.

Tag came up to Charles as he finished closing his laptop case. Charles could feel the other wolf’s trepidation. Tag was an old wolf. He knew that Brother Wolf was unhappy, and Tag was smart enough to be worried about that.

“I’m going wolf tonight,” Tag told Charles. “There’s a nice patch of grass up there on that knoll—I found it while we were chasing Anna this morning. That will leave me close enough to come if something happens. But it should give you some privacy, too.”

Charles caught his arm as Tag started to turn away. He pulled him into an embrace, kissing his cheek before letting him go. Letting Tag know that Brother Wolf was not unhappy with him. And that Charles appreciated his generosity and perceptiveness.

“Da chose well when he sent you with us,” Charles told him. “Thank you for coming.”

Tag huffed, but he looked pleased. “Well enough,” he said. “But I’m expecting a fight where I can dig my fangs into someone and taste some blood. Otherwise, I’ll count this as a wasted trip.”

“I expect that we aren’t going to get out of this without bloodshed,” said Charles.

“Hopefully no more of Anna’s blood,” said Tag as he began to strip off his clothing. “I don’t want to ever see that again.”

Charles was in total agreement.

Anna looked around when he joined her in the tent. She was moving stiffly and held her head in a way that told him she still had a headache. But she welcomed him with a happy smile.

He thought she might be the only person in the world who was always happy to see him. Some of the tension between him and Brother Wolf faded away—and only a very little of that was the natural effect that an Omega’s presence always brought.

She had their sleeping bags zipped up together and had stripped out of her daytime clothing. She wore an oversized T-shirt that hung halfway to her knees. It was emerald green, a color that made her hair look more red than usual. Giant white letters across her chest read Werewolf?

“New shirt?” he asked.

“Not that new,” she said. “Mercy sent it to me a while back because she thought it was funny. I just haven’t worn it yet.” She turned around so he could see the back, where a ferocious Hollywoodized werewolf bared its fangs. Below the werewolf, across her lower back and butt, it read Ware Wolf! Where Wolf? There W—agh!!!!

He laughed. He hadn’t expected to, not after the day they’d had. He closed the space between them and pulled her against him, her back to his front. He buried his face in her hair and just breathed in. They felt like the first easy breaths he’d taken since they’d walked into Wild Sign yesterday.

“Why don’t you lie down on top of the sleeping bag and I’ll see what I can do about your headache,” he murmured, stepping back so she could do just that.

He’d taken off his boots at the door of the tent, but he stripped off his jeans and shirt so he could move better.

His brother, Samuel, was the healer—their da’s mother’s magic taking that path in him. Samuel wasn’t a miracle worker; he couldn’t raise the dead or cure old age or heart disease. But he used his magic to help people. Their da said it was the reason that Samuel spent so much time on his own out in the world with the humans—because it was the humans who needed his touch. Their da wasn’t happy about it.

Charles couldn’t do what Samuel could do. But if his contrary powers were willing, he could ease his mate’s pain. He knelt beside her and put his hands flat on her shoulders.

“Do you need me to take off the T-shirt?” she asked, taking in his lack of dress.

“No,” he said. He didn’t need the distraction. “Just relax if you can.”

He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, reaching for the well of dormant power that he seldom touched. This wasn’t his mother’s wild magic. This magic was hungry, violent, and raw; it came from the other side of his family line. Witchborn. But it wasn’t the pristine magic of white witches, though he’d never fed it with anyone else’s trauma. It had always felt like this. Not tainted, but not good, either, as if this magic was forever damaged by the blackness of his paternal grandmother’s heart. It had taken Brother Wolf to show Charles that it was not evil.

He knew his da would have been repulsed by it, and so he had always been careful to hide this magic from Da. Charles was very, very careful about the kinds of things that he used it for. Like Brother Wolf, it could be difficult to control, and out of control it was dangerous to others. Mostly he tried to forget about it.

But it was good for this.

Under his hands, Anna’s tight muscles began to soften. Charles wasn’t really healing her, but Anna’s sore muscles hadn’t come from overuse. They had come from Anna’s struggle to drive the Singer—to steal Anna’s name for it—away. Her wolf had borrowed energy from her body to shield her mind. It was the way wolf magic worked.

Generally the pack never noticed the drain—most of their kind of magic was something they used for a few minutes or less. The kinds of things that took longer than that, like the constant magic used to make humans see dogs where there were werewolves, tended to be shared among the pack as a whole.

But Anna’s wolf had battled for the better part of a day. And it had not been an easy battle. Efficiency only came when you understood what you fought. She had used a huge amount of energy, and it had damaged her body.

She would have healed with some rest combined with eating well—both he and Tag had been putting food in front of Anna. But he saw no reason that she should wait when he could do something about it.

If Brother Wolf had settled down sooner, he could have done this earlier in the day.

“Mmmpf,” Anna said, her voice drowsy. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but it feels good.”

He fed energy into his mate’s body until it began washing back at him. He stopped—and was very, very careful not to take any of that energy back into himself, in case some of it was not his. He’d done that once when he had been very young, and he’d felt as though he was going to turn into the Hunger that Devours. Except that he wasn’t hungry for flesh, not even human flesh.

He’d gone to his grandfather because going to his da would have been disastrous. It had taken days of the old man’s prescription of fasting and sweats to make Charles feel normal again.

“Gray witchcraft,” his da would have called it. “Poison” was what his grandfather had said. Charles just knew he never wanted to feel like that again.

Anna fell asleep with a happy sigh. Likely she’d have been asleep earlier if she hadn’t been hurting. Charles moved away from her, found a comfortable position, and sat cross-legged, hands loose, eyes closed, and sought balance as a precursor to binding the witchcraft away again. If Anna hadn’t been there, he’d have sung one of his grandfather’s songs. He used those songs to heal his spirit and cleanse his mind the way a shower cleansed his body.

He paused. Had that been what Anna had done when the Singer caught her? She had played a lament to the broken land—which is exactly how his grandfather would have begun to heal it. It was a way of connection, of opening up to the damaged spirit.

He examined his memories of the events in the amphitheater and decided that was probably what had happened. Anna, like most people, was mostly blind to the spirits in the world around her, which didn’t mean the reverse was true. A lesser musician might have simply been playing a folk song. But Anna didn’t play music that way. She had opened herself to her audience—and something had taken her up on her invitation.

He considered the amphitheater with its haunted atmosphere, and wondered if Anna’s actions had only been an accident. Brother Wolf had examined that recorder with all of their collective senses. He had discovered nothing that suggested it was anything other than a rather well-made instrument. But it had survived in the open air for months, even if it hadn’t survived Brother Wolf.

Music, he considered, as a trap. Had Anna picked up that recorder from her own impulse? Or had there been something more sinister at work?

His patrilineal witchborn magic had taken advantage of his distraction and was leaking out into the tent, seeping into the ground. Likely a real witch would have considered this a result of failing to contain their abilities. He understood the magic was curious and bent on exploration. He centered himself and began the process of coaxing it back.

Charles was sweating and tired when he had his grandmother’s legacy wrapped safely away again, the ground and the air in the tent free of inquisitive magic. He glanced at Anna, who had rolled over and was limp with the sleep of the exhausted.

He shifted to wolf and back to human, grimacing with the exquisite pain of the change. Had Tag not been on guard, he wouldn’t have risked tiring himself out. But he didn’t want to sleep beside Anna still covered with the sour sweat that he’d accumulated with one thing and another today.

He glanced again at Anna—but this time she was awake. She sat up and pulled off her shirt.

“No,” he said. “You need to rest.”

She gave him an imperious look that made Brother Wolf want to roll with joy. She wasn’t afraid of him. The terror on her face before she’d run this morning . . . he would happily go to his grave if he never saw her look at him with that expression again.

“I need you,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve felt good all day. All that I need now, to feel like myself, is for you to wipe away the feel of Justin’s hands.” She covered herself and shivered, looking away, whispering, “I have been smelling him on my skin all day.”

He gathered her up and rearranged the sleeping bag so that they were both on the soft inner surface. Then he laid her back down with care.

“Where do you smell him?” he asked, instead of telling her that she only smelled of herself. He’d smelled Justin last night, too. If she could still scent that old hurt, he would not argue with her.

She raised her right hand and showed him her wrist.

He brought it to him and brushed his cheek against it before kissing it gently. He touched her wrist with his nose, watching her as he took in the scent of her skin. Just them. He brought it to her nose for inspection.

“Better?” he asked.

She closed her eyes, concentrating. Then she looked at him and nodded.

It took time. He would have thought it to be a seduction game had it not been for their mating bond, because by the time she acknowledged that she could neither smell nor feel Justin on her skin, they both were flushed and taut with desire. But they were mated, and he could feel her distress, feel it lessen gradually as he touched, kissed, and licked his way over her body.

He did not enter her until their bond was free of the shadow of spirit, and that tested his patience to the breaking point. Hers, too. As he slid into her, wet and swollen for him, he felt her delight break free and was forced to bite his cheek hard not to follow her immediately.

He was not some pup who thought only of his own pleasure. He was an old wolf. Controlled. But it was a near thing.

When they were finished, she lay on top of him, as limp and wrung out as he himself felt. Brother Wolf, satisfied at last, slept deep so that it was only Charles who held their mate.

Only Charles who growled low in his throat at the memory of the thing that had tried to take his Anna away. It would not hurt her ever again.

He would make sure of it.