THREE
BRAVE
woman, thought Anna, to
thoroughly antagonize us, then show us something that matters to
her. There was nothing in Dana’s face to show that
their opinion was important to her—but Anna could see it in her
body language.
Anna didn’t
know what to expect, but she drew in her breath when she got her
first view of the painting. It was skillfully executed, exquisite
in detail, color, and texture. A robust young woman with reddish
hair and pale complexion leaned her head against a plastered wall
and stared out of the painting at something or someone. There was a
yellow flower, delicate and fine-textured, held in hands that were
neither.
The colors
were wrong, brighter—but there was something familiar in the curve
of the woman’s cheek and the shape of her shoulder.
“It looks
like it was painted by one of the old Dutch masters,” Anna
said.
“Vermeer,”
Charles agreed. “But I’ve never seen this one.”
The fae
sighed and moved to a table. She began cleaning her brushes with
quick, almost fevered movements.
“No one
has, not since it perished in a fire a couple of centuries ago. And
no one ever will because that painting isn’t it.” She looked at
Anna. “Vermeer. Yes. What is the woman looking at?”
And it was
then Anna saw it, the alien beneath the glamour. Alien and . . .
recognizable. She didn’t hurt me too
bad, the troll had said. This woman was a predator, a
top predator.
Uncomfortable under that strange gaze, Anna shook
her head. “I don’t know.”
Dana made a
sharp gesture with her hand. “You aren’t looking at
it.”
True
enough. Anna looked at the woman in the painting, who met her stare
with clear blue eyes, several shades lighter than Dana’s. The only
answer that occurred to her was stupid, but she said it anyway.
“Someone here in this room?”
Dana’s
shoulders drooped and she turned to Charles. “No. You see? When he
finished the original, he dragged a peasant in from the streets—and
even that uneducated fool could see it. Vermeer’s students, the
ones who were there the day the painter finished it, called it
that, what the peasant told the Master: She Looks at Love. Vermeer himself titled it
Woman with Yellow Flower
or something prosaic, as he preferred.”
Anna looked
at the painting, and the more she looked at it, the more was wrong.
Not bad—nothing could take away from the skill that caught the
luscious texture of skin and hair and the cloth of the woman’s
dress—but it was like listening to one of those computer programs
that played sheet music: perfect technical skill . . . and no
soul.
“I don’t
know a lot about paintings,” Anna said to excuse
herself.
Dana shook
her head and gave Anna a rueful smile, the alien predator nowhere
to be seen. “No, it’s all right. My people are cursed with the love
of beautiful things and no ability to create them.” She dried her
hands. “Not all fae, of course. But many of those of us who are
most deeply steeped in magic give up creative abilities of all
kinds. Ah well.”
“Dragons
are like that,” Charles said obscurely.
Did he know
a dragon? Anna gave him an interested look. He smiled a little, but
his attention was on the fae, who had stopped her
scrubbing.
“Dragons
can’t create either?”
He
shrugged. “So my da says. Mostly he only says things he knows to be
true.”
She smiled,
and it was as if the sun came out. “To be like dragons is not such
a bad thing. I’ve only seen the one—out exploring, he said, I
think. We didn’t have much of a conversation, but he was . . . like
the Vermeer. A work of art.”
He tilted
his head. “Exactly.”
Dana tilted
her head the same way and looked at Charles, really looked at him.
“You are the killing arm of the Marrok. Rude.
Dangerous.”
“True,
enough,” Charles said.
Anna found
it interesting that the fae thought “rude” more notable than
“dangerous.”
“I was
drawn to that in you,” Dana told him. “I would have said that I
knew you quite well. But I never knew you could also be kind.” She
put her hands on his shoulders and, with a grin at Anna, she kissed
him on the cheek. Anna could feel the pulse of her magic as she
sent it over Charles like a mantle or net. It slid off, but even
Anna, who had not been the focus, could feel the fascination and
lust she generated.
“There,”
she told Anna. “A sister could not have been more circumspect. Now
didn’t you say you brought something for me?”
She didn’t
lie. Or if she did, Anna couldn’t tell—and the fae couldn’t lie,
could they? The magic could have been involuntary; maybe it
happened every time, and the fae didn’t even notice
anymore.
Charles
hadn’t seemed affected, but it would have been difficult to tell.
His face was doing its usual public thing. Not even the mate bond
helped her, because the connection between them told her nothing.
But it wasn’t possible for a fae with magic like that to kiss him
and he not feel anything, was it? Not affection, admiration, or
lust? Voluntary or not, the fae’s magic had been aimed at him while
the merest shadow of it had brushed Anna—who had never in her life
been attracted to another woman.
She touched
Charles lightly on the arm. He hadn’t managed to rebuild his
barriers against her because she suddenly knew exactly what he felt
toward Dana Shea—wariness. Not desire or fear, but wary respect—one
predator to another on neutral territory maybe. And then there was
Brother Wolf . . .
She’d heard
werewolves talk as if they and the wolves they shared their skins
with were one. Some werewolves had nothing more wolfish about them,
even in wolf form, than a nasty temper and a need to kill things
that ran from them. Other than fighting to keep her sanity in the
first few months after her Change, Anna hadn’t thought about it
much one way or the other.
Charles
sometimes talked about his wolf as if it were a separate being who
shared his body: Brother Wolf.
For the
first time, perhaps springing from that oddly terrifying moment
outside when she’d felt everything he was—too much to be absorbed
or witnessed—she could feel the wolf inside of Charles. Two
distinct souls. And Brother Wolf felt her, too.
Mate, he
told her, not unkindly. Get out of our
head so we can deal with
She-Who-Is-Not-Kin.
Not-Kin
wasn’t the only thing she got from that name. Powerful, ruthless,
killer. Bound by rules. Overcivilized. Respected enemy. Brother
Wolf’s voice was clearer in her head than even the Marrok’s. And
the Marrok spoke in words—Brother Wolf wasn’t hampered by anything
so human.
Anna pulled
her hand away from Charles as if he’d burned her, and stared at her
fingers. Charles’s shoulder bumped her with silent reassurance, a
casual gesture the fae woman probably hadn’t noticed. Or was too
polite to comment on.
Later,
murmured Brother Wolf quietly, then she was alone in her head.
Alone with the remnants of jealousy and . . . hurt at Brother
Wolf’s rejection. Knowing that she shouldn’t feel either didn’t
help at all.
Charles
took the package he’d brought and handed it to Dana.
Dana’s
eyebrows rose. “Butcher paper and twine?”
He
shrugged. “Da gave it to me that way.”
The fae
shook her head and opened a drawer in a bird’s-eye maple desk and
pulled out a pair of delicate sterling silver scissors. Setting the
package on the desktop, she cut the string and opened
it.
And the
alien thing Anna had glimpsed earlier was back in full measure.
Dana didn’t move, didn’t so much as blink, but the portent of . . .
something filled the space they were in. Every muscle, every hair
on Anna’s body warned her to run.
She looked
at Charles. His attention was on the fae, but he wasn’t alarmed.
Did he not feel it? Or was he so confident that Dana’s threat was
something he could handle? But his calm helped Anna regain hers.
She waited to see what had caused such a strong
reaction.
Even before
Dana had opened the package, it’d been obvious that a painting was
inside. It wasn’t large. Ten inches by twelve, maybe, framed in oak
a couple of shades darker than the desk’s maple, a waterscape of
some sort.
“Da said to
tell you it was what he remembered,” Charles said. “That he might
have gotten some of the details a little wrong, but he thought
not.”
“I didn’t
know the Marrok painted.” Dana’s voice was . . . deeper somehow.
Rich and hoary with age. Her hands trembled as she touched the
painting. The fae’s power that Anna had felt so strongly just a few
moments ago was gone as if it had never been.
“He
doesn’t.” Charles shook his head. “But we have an artist in our
pack, and he has a gift for painting other people’s words—and my
father is very good with words.”
“I didn’t
know your father was ever there.” The fae sounded . . .
lost.
Charles
shrugged. “You know how Da is. No one notices him unless he intends
it. And he is a bard. He goes everywhere.”
Dana lifted
her head, and her eyes were puffy, her nose red, though no tears
fell down her cheeks. She looked very human. “How did he
know?”
Charles
lifted both of his hands. “Who knows how my da figures out
anything. He thought it would please you.”
She looked
at it again, and Anna couldn’t tell if she was pleased or
not—overcome, certainly. Shocked. “My home. It is long gone.
Destroyed by magic and geology, the spring dried up centuries ago.
The site it occupied is a city street that bears the name of a
hundred other streets in a hundred other cities. I thought all
memory of it was lost.” She touched the painting the way Anna
touched Charles: lightly, cautious of pain but unable to resist the
draw of it.
She tipped
it so they both could see it better. The side of a lake, Anna
thought. A deep lake to catch the color of the sky and darken the
blue to a near black. The artwork was plainer than the painting
Dana had been working on, and the canvas much smaller. But in
simple brushstrokes, the artist had captured an unworldly quality
that made the small picture a window into a foreign place. A place
that held no welcome for Anna—but somehow it matched the alien look
she’d glimpsed in Dana’s eyes.
“Tell your
father,” Dana said, returning her attention to the painting, “that
I will see if I can return a gift of equal value to him. And my
apologies if I don’t.”
“WELL,”
said Anna, once they were safely on their way.
“That was .
. . unsettling.”
“You didn’t
like her?”
She looked
at him, then turned her attention back to the road. When the fae’s
spell had brushed her, Anna had wanted to like her, to fawn at her
feet and wait for crumbs of kindness. The rest of the time she’d
wanted to kill the fae for flirting with Charles—for having slept
with him.
She wanted
to crawl in a dark hole so that she never bothered Brother Wolf
with her presence again—which she knew was stupid. He hadn’t been
rejecting her. Not really. But there had been such . . . dismissal
in his admonition. His attention had been on Dana.
Dana who
was fae, a Gray Lord, confident and powerful. Not a
twenty-three-year-old woman with half an education who didn’t even
know, after three years of being one, a quarter of what she should
know about being a werewolf. She was no fit match for
Charles.
None of
which she could talk to Charles about without sounding like a
stupid twit—a complicated, high-maintenance, stupid twit.
Fortunately she could answer his question without betraying what
really bothered her about visiting the fae.
“In
Chicago, at the Brookfield Zoo, they have a reptile house. I took a
school tour of it once, when I was a kid. They have a green mamba.
It’s the most beautiful snake I’ve ever seen; not flashy, just this
. . . indescribable shade of green—and so poisonous that if someone
gets bitten by it, there’s usually no time to administer
antivenin.”
“You think
she’s beautiful?” He considered it. “Interesting looking, I would
say, but not beautiful. Few of the fae are beautiful with their
glamour on. Beauty doesn’t blend in very well. And the fae, like
us, spent a long time learning to hide in plain
sight.”
Anna stared
ahead. “She’s beautiful. Distinctive. In a room of movie stars,
everyone would look at her first.”
He was
watching her intently; she could feel it even if her eyes were busy
with the traffic.
“That’s
dominance,” he said. “Not beauty.”
“No?” She
passed a couple of boys in a Ferrari, and they took offense,
roaring up behind her until they were so close she could tell that
one of the pair should have shaved better.
“Beauty
isn’t always easy,” she said. “Take Paganini for
instance.”
“That’s
music.”
“You know
what I mean.”
He didn’t
fall into easy, agreeable conversation, and she liked the way he
considered what she’d said instead of just letting her run with
it.
“I’ve seen
her without her glamour,” he told her finally. “Maybe it blinded me
to more subtle things. When we became lovers, I did it because I
found her interesting.” He was watching her reaction.
That
morning she would have told him exactly how hearing him describe a
former lover made her feel. But since then she’d had that little
glimpse of him, raw and bare—although she’d done her best not to
look. No one should stand completely naked before another person.
But she’d noticed something . . . unexpected. She knew who she
was—and she knew who he was. It wasn’t that she didn’t value
herself; she did. But Charles was . . . a force of
nature.
And he
worried that she might not ever be able to see who he was and love
him—because he looked in the mirror and saw only the killer. It was
the reason he kept the bond between them tightened down. He loved
her beyond all reason and didn’t expect her to love him back. He
was just waiting for her to wise up.
She felt
terrified—as if she had been given a delicate and valuable glass
ornament, and any wrong move would break it. She felt as though it
should have been given to stronger, more capable hands so it would
not be harmed. Not that she hadn’t staked out her claim in front of
Dana quickly enough.
When Anna
didn’t say anything, he continued. “She took me as her lover
because, once she knew her ability to make anyone lust after her
didn’t work on me, she was curious what sex would be like without
bespelling her partner.”
Anna
snorted. “I’m sure the packaging didn’t bother her much
either.”
Charles
sighed. “I did this wrong, didn’t I? I owe you an
apology.”
She glanced
at him.
“I didn’t
mean to bog this down in ancient history—but I didn’t stop her
doing so soon enough either. And then . . . words are not always my
best means of communication. Let me make things clear: there was
nothing between us except mutual appreciation—and that a century
ago or more.”
“It’s all
right,” she told him. “I understand.” Humor, she thought, it has to be just right. Dry humor. “You’ve
had a very long time to acquire former lovers I can blame you
for.”
A warm hand
closed over her knee, and a warm, wordless voice curled around her
even as Charles said, “I liked it today, when you claimed me in
front of her.” He hesitated. “I think it hurt my feelings that you
were able to talk about her without being jealous.”
She took
her right hand off the wheel and ran her hand down his arm. “You
need to check your nose, Kemo Sabe.” If he could be honest, so
could she. “I don’t like you talking about her. I wanted to rip her
face off when she kissed you. And when Brother Wolf pushed me
out—”
“He didn’t
mean it that way.” Charles’s free hand tapped on the door frame.
“He’s not . . . not capable of subterfuge, not even to make things
easier. He’s very straightforward.”
The boys in
the Ferrari were still on her tail, and she tapped her brakes once
in warning.
“Well,” she
said. Straightforward. “I
suppose that explains it all.” But it didn’t bother her anymore. It
wasn’t Charles’s explanation that soothed her, it was the way she’d
felt Brother Wolf’s straightforward agreement with Charles’s
pleasure in the way she’d faced up to Dana and claimed him at the
fae’s boat. She couldn’t read everything. Not much from Charles at
all now—but Brother Wolf, it seemed, was willing to be more
forthcoming.
“You two
have a great deal more in common than sharing the same body,” she
said.
Charles
started to laugh and slid down in his seat. “I suppose we do, for
good or for ill, eh? He doesn’t like the fae, not even Dana. And he
. . . we are still adjusting to having you. We protect our pack,
that’s what our job has always been. Especially the submissives who
are our heart.”
“And he . .
. you feel me as an über-submissive,” she said. What she was, was
Omega, not submissive at all. But she served somewhat the same
purpose in the pack. The dominant wolves could . . . relax around
her because they knew that she would never challenge them—not
because she couldn’t, but because she wouldn’t. Omegas didn’t care about pack
position, they just cared about the pack.
“You are
ours,” he said unequivocally, humor gone. “Brother Wolf’s and mine.
Ours to be kept safe. Dana is many things, but safe isn’t one of
them. You were distracting us—and if we’d talked to you too long,
she’d have sensed it and been offended. It is not difficult to
offend most fae, and Dana is not an exception.”
“Her
reaction to the painting Bran sent her was odd,” Anna
said.
“Powerful,”
agreed Charles. “But it would not have done to give her a gift that
was less than the gifts others will bring her during this
conference. Staying on the right side of the fae is an interesting
dance, and I’ll leave it to my father to know exactly how to
step.”
“The
Vermeer . . . Why did she copy it instead of painting something of
her own?”
“Her own
paintings . . . are worse. Do you remember the sad clown paintings?
Or are you too young? They were everywhere for a while.
Bright-colored and flat-feeling. Empty.”
Anna
shivered. “My dentist had them all over his office.”
“Like
that,” Charles said.
“Maybe she
should paint scenery,” Anna suggested.
“The
background of the Vermeer was very well done.”
“I
suggested that once, but she wasn’t interested. She wants to paint
the kinds of subjects she likes to view—lovers and
dreamers.”
“Do you
think the pack has good auto insurance?” Anna asked, looking in the
rearview mirror again.
Charles
glanced behind them and narrowed his eyes.
The Ferrari
suddenly dropped back.
“Jeez,”
Anna said. “You are handy to have around.”
“Thank
you.”
Anna
thought of Dana as she weaved her way through the traffic, her
opinion more charitable than she’d been able to manage
earlier.
What would
it feel like to love music as she did and not be able to sing or
play? Or worse, to be proficient but never cross the line between a
collection of notes and pitch and rhythm to real music? To know that you were missing it by
just a hair but have no idea how to take it from metronome
correctness to power and true beauty.
She’d known
a few people like that in school. Some of them had made the
transition, some of them hadn’t.
At
Northwestern, before her Change had forced her to drop out, she’d
been a music major. Her primary instrument had been the
cello.
The first
violin in the quartet she’d played in at school had been a precise
master of technique who was so good he fooled the professors into
thinking he was playing music. A regular wunderkind.
She’d
thought he was oblivious to it until one night, after a
performance, when they’d all gone out to a local bar and toasted
the concert in beer and ale. The others were dancing, but she’d
stayed at the table with him, worried about the serious way he was
attempting to drink the pub dry when it had been his more usual
habit to declare himself the designated driver and stick to ice tea
or coffee.
“Anna,”
he’d said, staring into the amber liquid in his cup as if it held
the wisdom of the age, “I don’t fool you, do I? Those others”—he
waved a vague hand to indicate their missing comrades—“they think
I’m all that—but you know better, don’t you.”
“Know
what?” she’d asked.
He leaned
forward, smelling of beer and cigarettes. “You know I’m a fraud. I
can feel the beast inside me, screaming to get out. And if I loose
it, it will pull me up to greatness despite myself.”
“So why not
let it free?” She hadn’t been a werewolf then. The world had been a
gentler place, the monsters safely in their closets, and she had
been brave in her ignorance.
His eyes
were old and weary, his voice slurring a bit. “Because then
everyone would see,” he told her.
“See
what?”
“Me.”
To make
great art, you had to expose your soul, and some things should be
left safely in the dark. For a while, after she’d been forcibly
Changed, Anna hadn’t made music at all—and not just because she’d
had to sell her cello.
“Anna?”
She moved
her grip on the steering wheel. “Just thinking about Dana and why
she can’t paint as she’d like to.” She hesitated. “I wonder if it
is because she has no soul—like some of the churches claim. Or if
it’s because what is inside her frightens her too much to expose
it.”
HE’D chosen
the hotel because he wanted Anna to be comfortable. There were
fancier places in downtown Seattle, glittering jewels of steel and
glass.
He could
afford them.
In other
cities, the Marrok’s company even owned a few, and they had hefty
investments in some others. But he remembered how intimidated she’d
been by his house only a few weeks ago, which was not extravagant
or particularly large, so he thought she’d be more comfortable in
this hotel, which was his favorite anyway.
Sometimes
it embarrassed him. This need to show her the things he treasured
in the hope that she would love them, too. He was too old to be
indulging himself this way: showing off in the plane—taking her to
this hotel. He’d have to tell her about the investment portfolio
he’d started for her sometime. But he was an old hunter and knew
better than to startle his prey. He’d wait until she was more
comfortable with him, with the pack . . . with
everything.
Anna
stopped in front of the curb and he could feel her stress when the
parking attendant came to take her keys from her. She hugged
herself while Charles gave his name and handed the young man a tip
for not looking taken aback by the battered Toyota.
He took
their luggage, and, still watching Anna, who was looking down at
her feet, refused help with them. She’d feel better without anyone
serving them.
Maybe he
should have taken her to something more impersonal? Someplace where
you parked your own car and no one asked if you needed help? Maybe
she was still upset by Dana’s attempt to make her jealous. Or maybe
she was worried about Brother Wolf.
Brother
Wolf had never talked to anyone but him like that. Not even Da.
Maybe it upset her? Or maybe it was the way Brother Wolf had opened
them to her outside the fae’s house. Had she seen something that
disgusted her? Frightened her? Maybe the distance she’d put between
them when they left Dana’s house had nothing to do with jealousy at
all.
He wasn’t
used to the emotional roller coaster he’d been on since he met her.
It was a good thing she was an Omega, who could soothe everyone
around her—and not a dominant. Brother Wolf was on edge as it was;
only when she touched him or when she was happy did he have
complete control.
They needed
to talk, but not in public.
The hotel
was older: brick instead of steel, and eleven stories, not thirty.
But it was old-world upscale, decorated with a whimsy that appealed
to him, the aim to delight rather than impress in a
Mediterranean-influenced Art Deco style. When they walked into the
lobby, Anna—who was still quiet—stopped just inside the door. She
looked up, looked at the Christmas tree decorated in huge maroon,
deep purple, and silver cloth bows instead of bulbs, with an even
more enormous gold and deep green bow on top.
Anna smiled
at him and took his arm. And he knew he’d picked right. She loved
it. Brother Wolf basked in the satisfaction of pleasing their
mate.
Their room
was on the seventh floor, something that Brother Wolf disapproved
of. He’d rather have been able to use the windows as a convenient
second exit rather than a risky escape route. But Charles preferred
to have a room more difficult for unexpected visitors to enter, and
the wolf had conceded the point.
The
elevator opened, and in front of them was a mirror to make the hall
look bigger and lighter—and a goldfish in a clear bowl on a little
table.
“A
goldfish?” she asked.
“Tough
creatures, goldfish,” he said.
She
laughed. “No argument. I knew someone who rescued a goldfish from a
frat house where it had been living in a bowl of beer. But why
goldfish at a hotel?”
He
shrugged. “I’ve never asked anyone. Though if you come by yourself,
they put a goldfish in your room for company.” He didn’t tell her
that this was the only time he’d ever been here that he wouldn’t
have a goldfish in his room.
He’d been
alone a long time, despite the pack, despite the lovers he’d taken
and who’d taken him. He’d had to be because he was, as Dana said,
his father’s killing arm. He’d had to be alone: acquaintances were
easier to kill than friends.
And now he
wasn’t. He loved it, he reveled in it—though he was sometimes
halfway convinced that the bond between them would be his death.
For her sake, he would destroy the world.
Probably it
wouldn’t come to that.
He opened
the room and waited at the door while she explored her new
territory.
She
wandered through it, touching the table and the couch in the
sitting room. She tugged lightly at a tassel on the tapestry drapes
that separated the bedroom from the rest.
“It looks
like a set from The
Sheik,” Anna said. “Complete with striped wallpaper
to look like tent sides and the fabric divider. Cool.”
She sat on
the bed and groaned. “I could get used to this.” Then she turned
her warm brown eyes to his, and said, “I think we have to
talk.”
That he
agreed with her didn’t stop the cold churning in his stomach. Talk
was not his specialty.
She scooted
back and sat with her legs crossed on the far side of the bed,
patting the mattress beside her.
“I won’t
bite,” she said.
“Oh?”
Anna
grinned at him, and suddenly all was right with his world—yes, he
had it bad.
“Or at
least I’ll make sure you enjoy it if I do.”
Charles
left their baggage in front of the bathroom, blocking the door to
the hall, and Brother Wolf didn’t even object to the obstruction
between them and escape. The warmth in her drew him like a fire in
winter, and there was no escape for him or his brother in flesh.
And neither of them cared.
He stripped
off his leather jacket and dropped it on the floor. Then he sat
down on the bed and pulled off his boots. He heard her tennis shoes
hit the floor as he stretched out on the bed next to her without
looking at her. Talk. She’d said
“talk.” And he’d do that best looking at the
wall.
He waited
for her to begin. If he started asking the questions he had, Anna
might not ask him what she needed to know. It was something he’d
learned a long time ago with less dominant wolves.
After a
while, she flopped down on the bed beside him. He closed his eyes
and let her scent surround him.
“Is this
bonding thing as weird for you as it is for me?” she said in a
small voice. “Sometimes it’s overwhelming and I wish it would shut
down, even though it hurts when it does. And when it is narrower, I
miss the intimacy of knowing what you’re feeling.”
“Yes,”
Charles agreed. “I’m not used to sharing with anyone but Brother
Wolf.” His mate, he thought. She’d had a rough time, and she needed
everything he could give her. So he used the words that he didn’t
trust himself with to tell her what he could. “I don’t care what
Brother Wolf thinks of me. You . . . I care. It’s . . .
difficult.”
She moved
until her breath touched the back of his neck. Very quietly she
said, “Do you ever wish it hadn’t happened?”
At that he
sat up and turned to her, examining her face for hints of just how
she’d meant the question. His sudden move made her flinch, and if
the bed hadn’t been so big, she’d have fallen off in her scramble
to get away from him.
He closed
his eyes and controlled himself. There were no enemies here to
slay. “Never,” he told her with utter sincerity he hoped she heard.
“I will never regret it.
If you could have seen my life before you came into it, you would
not ask that question.”
He felt her
warmth, smelled her closeness before she touched him. “I cause you
a lot of trouble. I’ll probably cause you more before we’re
done.”
Charles
opened his eyes and let himself drown in her scent, in her
presence, and kissed a freckle that graced Anna’s cheek. Then the
one on the side of her nose and another just above her lip. “For a
long time, my brother Samuel has been telling me that I needed
something to shake me up.”
She kissed
him—a rare enough occurrence that he held perfectly still and
savored it for the gift of trust it was. She’d been tortured by
monsters, and sometimes they still held sway over her.
Anna pulled
herself away. “If this keeps up, there won’t be any
talk.”
Good, he
thought. But he knew there were things she still needed to discuss,
so he lay back down and pillowed his head on his hands though there
were at least three layers of pillows on the bed.
“I keep
feeling like we’re doing it wrong,” she said. “That this bond
between us is meant to be much more than we’re allowing it to
be.”
“There is
no wrong between us,” he
told her.
She made a
frustrated noise, so he supposed that wasn’t the answer she was
looking for. Charles tried again. “We have time, love. As long as
we are careful to set our feet on the path we want to follow, we
have a very long time to get it right.”
He could
feel her focus her attention on him. “Okay,” she said finally. “I
can live with that. Does that mean I get to tell you when I think
you’re walking in the wrong direction?”
He grinned.
“Could you help yourself?”
“There is
no wrong between us,” she repeated his words with more
satisfaction. “That means yes, right?”
He looked
at her again, “That means yes. Right.”
“And you
are as confused about this as I am?”
It seemed
important to her that they were on equal ground. But he could not
lie to her. “No. Differently confused, I think. And possibly more
confused. You haven’t had the better part of two hundred years to
decide who you are and who you aren’t. When that all changes . . .”
Charles shrugged.
He wasn’t
used to all of this emotion. He’d taken the feelings and desires of
his human half and stuffed them somewhere so they wouldn’t
interfere with the things he had to do. And now they were all back,
and he had no tools to deal with them—and he wasn’t stupid enough
to think that they would ever allow themselves to be stuffed away
again.
“Differently confused,” she said. “Okay. That’s
okay.”
She reached
out and touched his arm, drawing a finger down. “When I touched you
today . . . it feels as though you have two souls in one body. Is
that how I am?”
“Anna,” he
told her. “You are how you are. Brother Wolf and I . . . You know I
was born werewolf and not Changed. That has left some differences,
I think. To function, most werewolves have to make their wolf
obedient if not completely subservient. After a while, the wolf
spirit is reduced to a part of the man’s spirit. An unthinking,
violent part full of instincts and desires but no true
thoughts.”
He looked
at her pale hand on the green silk shirt he wore. “I am not my
grandfather, to look into the heart of man,” he told her. “I don’t
know that what I’ve told you is truth. It is just what I’ve seen
and felt.
“Brother
Wolf and I reached a different compromise. In situations where I am
better able, he allows me full control—and I extend him the same
courtesy.”
“Two
souls,” she said.
“No,” he
shook his head. “One soul, one man, two spirits. We are one,
Brother Wolf and I. Inseparable. If he died, so would
I.”
“Have I
crippled my wolf?”
He rolled
on his side, drawn closer to her by her concern. “It isn’t
something to be mourned. It is simply survival. But if it helps, I
think you and your wolf have reached a different compromise
altogether.” He smiled. “I think that’s why Brother Wolf chose you
in the first place—before we’d had much more than a chance to say
hello. We balance, you know. You to me, your wolf to mine. She’s
shy unless you are threatened, but she’s all there.”
Anna closed
her hand on his arm. “Okay. I can deal with that better than the
alternatives.”
“Do you
need any more words between us?” he asked, her touch making his
voice go husky.