“He is,” agreed Charles. “He’ll also see you saddle up another horse with a sigh of relief and go back to sleep.”
“Arabians look like carousel horses,” Anna said, still feeling as though she were betraying the amiable gelding who’d taught her so much.
Charles laughed. “That’s true enough. The Arabians might not suit you; they don’t suit everyone. They are like cats: vain, beautiful, and intelligent. But you deal well enough with Asil, who is also vain, beautiful, and intelligent. Still, if they don’t have a good match for you here, we can find a horse nearer to home that suits you.”
“Okay,” Anna said, but in her heart of hearts she was riding a black stallion without bridle or saddle along a beach on a deserted island, and they were galloping full speed.
Charles must have heard it in her voice because he smiled.
Then a nagging thing—that she hadn’t immediately pounced on because she’d been dazzled by the horse part of what he’d said—suddenly caught her attention. “An old friend,” he’d said. Charles didn’t have many friends. Acquaintances, yes, but not friends—and he was very careful in what words he chose. The people he was close to were numbered on the fingers of one hand—Anna; his brother, Samuel; and his da. Probably Mercy, the coyote shapeshifter who’d been raised in his pack, would qualify. But that was it. Charles was nearly two hundred years old and he’d collected very few people to love.
“Tell me,” she said, “about your old friend.”
For a moment his face grew still and her stomach clenched.
“Joseph Sani is the best horseman I’ve ever seen or heard of,” Charles said slowly. “He’s a daredevil with no sense of self-preservation.” Most people would not have heard the half-despairing, affectionate admiration in Charles’s voice. “The more dangerous something is, the more likely he is to throw himself in the middle of it. He sees people—all the way through them—and he likes them anyway.” Cares about me went unspoken, but Anna heard it just the same. This Joseph was a man who knew her husband and loved him.
You love him, too, Anna thought. And I’ve never in three years heard you mention his name.
She didn’t say it out loud, but his eyes flicked to her and then away, so she thought he might have caught her thought through the mating bond that sometimes startled her with its usefulness. Hard to keep secrets from your mate, harder to stay angry when you can feel the other person’s pain … and love. Their bond seemed to communicate their emotions better than words. But it sometimes slid the words in, too.
“Yes,” he said. “Until I met you, he was my best friend. I haven’t seen him for twenty years because the last time I was there, I suddenly realized that he was getting old. He is human, not werewolf.” He stared out at the blue sky. “I didn’t stay away on purpose, Anna. Not on purpose. But visiting him wasn’t a … good thing anymore. I counted on him keeping me … level. What you do for me now, when Da’s assignments are bad.” He let out a shaky breath. “I don’t say good-bye very easily, Anna. Not gracefully or prettily. Good-bye tears your heart out and leaves it a feast for carrion birds who happen by.”
She put her hand on his thigh and left it there until the plane touched down.
Chelsea’s headache redoubled on the way home, and after a few sharp interchanges the children fell silent. She craved home in a way that she hadn’t since she was ten years old, returning from a very long, very bad summer camp.
When she turned the car into the driveway, there was no magical surcease from pain. She got the kids out of the car and into the house. She should have … done something with them, but she worried that in her current state she might hurt their feelings … or worse.
She left them to their own devices while she stumbled through her bedroom to the bathroom beyond. If she could just get rid of this headache, she could regain her balance.
She took three painkillers when the directions told her to take two. The pills were dry and stuck in her throat; she took two more and then put her mouth to the faucet and drank water to get them down.
Too many, she thought, but her head really hurt. She felt like she should take more. Her hand went up to the medicine cabinet where there were some leftover painkillers from when she’d had a root canal done a few months earlier. She hit the glass toothbrush holder, and it fell into the sink and shattered.
She cleaned it up, but her headache made her clumsy. She sliced her finger on a shard she was throwing away. It wasn’t a bad cut. She stuck the finger in her mouth and stared at herself in the mirror over her sink. She looked … wrong. She put her hands to her face and pulled the skin back, flattening her nose a little, but it didn’t change the stranger in the mirror where she was supposed to be.
She washed her face in cold water, and that seemed to help the headache a little. Her finger had quit bleeding.
A glance at the clock showed her it was nearly time for Max to be home. More than ten years older than his half brother and sister, he had … what sport was it? Basketball. He had basketball practice after school.
And if he was almost home, she’d been in the bathroom an hour, left a four-year-old and a five-year-old without supervision for an hour. She hurried out and down the stairs. The sound of the TV led her to the family room, where the kids were watching a cartoon. Michael didn’t look up, but Mackie gave her a wary look.
“Sorry,” she told them. “I have a bad headache. Will you two be okay for a while more? I have to get dinner started.”
“Okie-dokie,” said Michael, without looking away from the TV.
Because he couldn’t be bothered. TV was more important than his mother.
Mackie didn’t say anything. Just watching her with her father’s eyes and judging what she saw, always judging her and finding her lacking.
Chelsea turned and went to the kitchen. She got random things out of the refrigerator with shaking hands: carrots, celery, summer sausage, and radishes. The cutting board hadn’t been put back where it belonged and she had to search for it. She found it among the pots and pans instead of in the narrow cupboard next to the stove, and by then she was in a fine rage.
Max came in the kitchen door, letting it bang carelessly against the wall. He took after her, tall and blond, rather than her first husband, who’d died in a car wreck, leaving her to raise her two-year-old son on her own. For a moment Max’s presence cleared her head like a breath of fresh air.
“Hey, Mom,” he said cheerily, sounding so much like his father that it sometimes made her heart ache. She loved Kage, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t loved Rob, too. “What’s for dinner?”
He was always hungry these days. Always expecting her to feed him when he was old enough to get his own food. She clenched her fingers around the chef’s knife, so cool and powerful in her hand.
“Would you do something for me?” she said through gritted teeth, unable to look away from the bright silver promise of the knife.
“Sure,” Max said, snitching a carrot from the bag she’d put on the counter.
Bad manners to steal food before the cook was ready. Bad.
Anna blocked the tires while Charles finished tying down the plane to the anchors he’d driven into the ground. The plane wasn’t that small, but it was designed to fly. That meant that a strong wind would move it unless it was tied down. They’d done this enough times now that Charles didn’t have to tell her what to do or how.
A battered truck charged up the dirt road in a cloud of dust and stopped next to their airplane without slowing much in between. The driver was young, Native American, and dressed in a cross between cowboy and First People: jeans, boots, cowboy hat, T-shirt, turquoise necklace, earrings. He held up his pants with a leather belt decked with silver and turquoise.
Young meant that he was not the man she and Charles were coming to see.
Charles didn’t look up from his task as the stranger rounded the end of his truck and walked toward them, his steps rapid and businesslike. If this man had been a stranger, Charles would have looked up.
The expression on the approaching man’s face was a bit grim, as if he was engaged in a necessary but not enjoyable task. He watched Charles until he came within easy talking distance and then glanced, almost absently, at Anna. He staggered, rocked back on his worn boot heels, and let out a gasp of air like a man hit in the stomach.
He was a werewolf, Anna divined more from his actions than from his scent, as he was downwind. A dominant werewolf, if his reaction was anything to judge by. Less-dominant wolves tended not to react so strongly to her presence.
Omega werewolves were rare as hens’ teeth. Anna knew of one other Omega wolf in Europe. As far as she knew, they were it. Bran said it was because there weren’t many werewolves crazy enough to attack and so Change a person who had the qualities of an Omega. Samuel, Charles’s brother, called her “Valium for werewolves.”
Charles, satisfied the plane would be there waiting for them when they came back, looked at the stranger and raised his eyebrows. She knew he was amused at the other man’s reaction to her, but she didn’t think that the stranger would notice—most people didn’t. A lot of Charles’s expressions were more … micro-expressions, especially when he was in public.
“Hosteen,” Charles said, “this is my mate and wife, Anna. Anna, this is Hosteen Sani, full-blooded Navajo, Alpha of the Salt River Pack, and breeder of fine Arabian horses for the past three-quarters of a century, give or take a decade.”
Sani meant that he was related to Charles’s Joseph. Anna was going to sit her husband down as soon as she got him in private again and make him talk.
“Good to meet you,” Anna said.
Hosteen inclined his head but didn’t say anything, just stared at her while Charles tossed their bags into the back of the truck. Her mate didn’t seem to be worried about Hosteen’s lack of response, no matter how awkward. He opened the passenger door in open invitation for Anna to sit in the middle.