It also gave her a quick escape-so many dominant wolves... Even with Charles, she couldn't help remembering what the dominant wolves in her first pack had done to her. And her heartbeat picked up. Not panicked. Not yet. But not comfortable either.
The room looked like nothing so much as a scene from a reenactment of West Side Story or, with slightly different props and costuming, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Four men stood on one side of the room, six on the other. A few paces in front of either group stood a man, ready to fight. The testosterone level was so high that she was amazed it hadn't triggered the little sprinklers in the ceiling.
There was a thirteenth man still seated in the corner of the room. He had his back to the wall and was cleaning his hands with a damp towelette. He noticed Charles's entrance first and tipped his head in a casual salute. "Ah," he said in a beautiful upper-class British accent, "I was wondering when the cavalry would arrive. Good to see you, Charles. At least the Russians aren't here, eh? Or the Turks."
Action froze for a moment as everyone realized a new player had entered the game.
"You know how to see the bright spot in a cloudy day," said a dark-skinned man in the larger group. "I've always liked that about you, Arthur." His accent made him, and therefore the group of wolves he stood with, the Spaniards.
Which meant that the man who'd been tossing insults could be none other than Jean Chastel, the Beast of Gevaudan.
He wasn't handsome, precisely, but there was a power to his features and in the way he carried himself that made her first Alpha, Leo, look like a half-grown pup. He made an impression, as most of the Alphas she'd met did; he took up more space in the room than he should, as if he were weightier, both physically and metaphysically, than he ought to be.
He was aware of Charles, but his pale eyes stayed firmly on his opponent. Neither tall nor short, Chastel had a lean build. His hair was longish and brownish, brushing his shoulders. His beard was several shades darker than his hair and close-trimmed. But the physical details didn't matter nearly as much as the force of who and what he was.
His opponent didn't stand a chance against him-and the Spaniard knew it. Anna could see it in his stance, in the way he wouldn't look at the Frenchman's eyes. She could smell it in the scent of his fear.
"Sergio, mi amigo," said the dark Spaniard who'd spoken before. "Stand down. The fight is over. Charles is here."
The Spanish fighter hadn't noticed Charles's approach, and his startled look was very nearly his undoing. Jean Chastel's right arm shot out and would have connected with his opponent's neck, but Charles had already been moving-as if he'd known what the French wolf would do before Chastel had known it himself.
Charles intercepted the blow and jerked Chastel around, using the other's momentum to propel him into his own people. A quick glance at the Spanish wolves had them all backing up a step, then his attention was focused on the first wolf.
"Fools," Charles snarled. "This is a public place. I'll not have you disturbing the peace while you are guests on Emerald City Pack grounds."
"You'll not have us, pup?" murmured the Frenchman, who'd recovered quickly from the unplanned impact with his wolves. He tugged on the sleeves of his long-sleeved, button-up shirt, a gesture that looked more habitual than effectual. "I'd heard the old wolf had sent his puppy for us to feast on, but I thought it was merely wishful thinking."
There was something abject about the way the rest of the French contingent stood that told Anna that none of them liked what their leader was doing, that they followed Jean Chastel out of fear. It made them no less dangerous-maybe more so. Her wolf knew them for Alphas, every one of them, and all afraid.
Beneath all the aggression and posturing in the room, there was an undercurrent of fear: hers, the Spaniard's, and the French wolves', so thick that she sneezed at the smell of it, drawing unwanted attention. Jean Chastel's eyes met hers, and she held them, despite the violence they promised. Here, she thought, here was a monster worse than the troll under the bridge. He stank of evil.
"Ah," he said, sounding almost gentle. "Another story I'd dismissed. So you found yourself an Omega, half-breed. Pretty child. So soft and delicate." He licked his lips. "I bet she's a tasty morsel."
"You'll never find out, Chastel," said Charles softly. "Back down or leave."
"I have a third choice," Chastel whispered. "I think I might take that one."
There was no good outcome for this, Anna realized, the push bar of the door digging into her lower back. Charles might have allies among the Spaniards, and maybe even the British wolf. But even so, if they stepped in, they'd be showing that Charles was weak. She had boundless faith in Charles's abilities to wipe the floor with the French wolf, but even that would be a failure of sorts. This was a public place-a fight would mean police and exposure of quite a different sort than what Bran wanted.
Maybe she could help defuse it. She'd been working with Asil, an old wolf in her new pack, to try to come to some understanding of what she could do. His dead mate had been an Omega just like Anna, so he knew something about how her abilities worked-which was more than anyone else did. Even Bran, the Marrok, had only vague ideas. With Asil's help, she'd managed a few interesting things.
Charles didn't say anything to Chastel. He just stood, his arms loose at his sides, his weight on the balls of his feet, as he waited for Chastel to make a decision.
Only Charles allowed her to put her fear aside-Charles, her wolf, and the door.
She imagined a place in her mind, deep in the forest where the snow lay lightly on the ground and her breath frosted in the air. It was quiet there, and sheltered. Peaceful. A creek full of fat trout trickled under a thin layer of misty ice. In her mind's eye she followed a trout as it slid, a silver shadow, through the fast-moving water.
When she had it clear and perfect in her head, she pushed that feeling out.
Her power hit the British wolf first; she saw it in the relaxing of his shoulders. He recognized what she was doing, raised an eyebrow at her, then took his coffee cup (or maybe he drank tea-didn't the British all drink tea?) and sipped from it. A few of the Spaniards began breathing slower, and the tension in the room ratcheted down a full notch.
Charles turned, his eyes pure blinding gold-and growled. At her.
Leaving Anna standing alone in a room filled with dominant wolves and violence. The smells of it were so familiar that her body flashed with phantom pains, and it hurt to breathe.
She fled through the door she'd been holding closed, fled before her blind terror became the tinder that caused an orgy of violence. She'd seen that happen, too, though never in such a public place.
The Frenchman said something rude as the door swung shut behind her, but she wasn't paying attention. Panic, raw and ugly, made it hard to breathe as her conditioning tried to overwhelm her common sense.
She needed to find something else to focus on. So she looked around.
The patrons in the main restaurant were still unnaturally quiet-and there were a lot fewer of them than there had been when she and Charles first came into the restaurant. Most of them were looking down, an involuntary reaction to so many Alphas, she thought. Even the humans could feel it, though hopefully they didn't know what it was that made them so uneasy.
Even though they were all in the next room, there was a weight to their presence, just like there was a weight to the Puget Sound. While Charles had been at her side, she'd been able to push it away-but now it ate at her. The sound of her heart beat loudly in her ears.
But the wolves were on the other side of the door-and Charles wouldn't let them touch her.
She paused in front of the outside door.
She could go back to their hotel room and wait. The city at night held no terrors for her-all the bad guys were here. But that would be cowardly. And Charles would get the wrong idea.
Away from the drama and the first impulse to flee attack, she figured out the reason he'd growled at her: he needed to stop her. He couldn't afford to let her quiet Brother Wolf.
Charles might be naturally more dominant-but he was the only wolf in the room who was not an Alpha of a pack. She knew that there were less dominant wolves coming to the conference, but none of them were here.
So many Alphas put Charles in a bad position. They had to fear him, they had to know that he would kill them if they moved against him-or they would smell weakness and attack him together, like a pack of wolves taking down a caribou. She'd been taking away his edge.
There was a battered piano on a small stage in the corner of the room that beckoned to her like an oasis in the desert. She could wait if she found something to think about other than old memories of pain and humiliation. Anna caught the eye of a passing waitress.
"Do you mind if I play?"
The waitress, looking a little stressed, paused midstride and shrugged. "It's fine, but if you don't play well, the cook may come out and ask you to stop. He makes a big production of it. Or the crowd will boo you off. It's kinda tradition."
"Thanks."
The waitress looked around the room. "Play a happy tune, if you can. Someone needs to liven up this place."
The piano was an ancient upright that had been old a long time ago. Someone had painted it black, but the paint had faded to a dull gray, scuffed on the corners and sprinkled with initials carved into it. Most of the edges of the ivory keys were broken, and the highest E key popped up an eighth of an inch higher than the rest.
Something happy.
She played the theme from Sesame Street. The piano had a much better tone than it looked as though it should-and it was mostly in tune. She segued into "Maple Leaf Rag," one of two ragtime pieces that every second-year piano student learned. The piano wasn't her instrument, but after six years of lessons, she was moderately competent.
The lively feel and fairly easy music lines of the piece made it tempting to play too fast. "Ragtime is not fast" was a favorite rant of one of her teachers. She disciplined her fingers to keep a steady beat. It helped that she was a little out of practice.