He lay back on the floor to enjoy it until his conscience kicked in. They had a job to do. The sooner they got out into the woods, the sooner they'd be back and free to play.
To that end, he tested out his wounds experimentally. They still hurt, and they'd slow him up a little-but as Samuel promised, he was feeling much better. And not just because of Anna.
He was dressed and collecting his winter gear from the closet-he'd have to find someplace else for all of it, so Anna could have half of the closet-when Anna came back in. She was wrapped in a bath sheet, having evidently lost some of her boldness while in the bathroom.
He decided to give her some space. "I'll fix breakfast while you get dressed."
Her eyes were on the floor as she skittered past him. If his ears hadn't been sharp, he wouldn't have heard her nervous "Okay."
But nothing would have kept the rank smell of fear from his nose. He froze where he stood and watched her keep her shoulders rounded in submission as she knelt on the floor by her box of clothes.
He tried to open the link between them...but it was no stronger than it had been yesterday or the day they'd first met.
He'd never been mated before, but he knew how it was supposed to work. Love and sex would bind human to human-then the wolf would choose, or not. Since their wolves had already clearly chosen, since he'd chosen, he'd been sure that their lovemaking would seal the bond.
He looked at her, the knobs of her spine and the sharp edges of her scapula showing clearly that she needed to gain some weight-a visible sign of the suffering that she'd endured in Leo's pack. The worst scars didn't show: werewolves seldom scar on the outside.
He opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. He needed to think some things through before he even knew what to ask. Or of whom to ask it.
* * * *
He fed her breakfast, only a little closer to the answers he sought. But even distracted, it amused him how much satisfaction he got from watching her eat-even though she wouldn't look up at him.
"We're going to get a little later start than I expected," he said abruptly as he rinsed his pans and stored them in the dishwasher. "I've got a few things I'd like Heather to do-and I have another person I need to see."
She was still in the dining room, but her silence spoke for her. She was still too intimidated by him or by last night to ask. For which he was grateful. He had no intention of lying to her-but he didn't want to tell her who he was going to talk to, either.
"I can finish the dishes then," she offered.
"All right." He dried his hands and stopped to kiss the top of her head-a quick, passionless kiss that shouldn't add to her tension, but still enough for Brother Wolf to feel satisfied that she knew who he belonged to. He was hers, whether she wanted him or not.
Heather was still at his father's, sleeping in the room next to her partner's. Bleary-eyed and tired, she made some calls and some suggestions and arranged things to his satisfaction.
Which left him with only one more person to track down. Fortunately, he'd found that most people were easy to locate at five thirty in the morning.
Chapter SEVEN
Asil dreamed of a familiar house: small and well made, a house built for a warm climate with carefully tended orange trees by the door. He paused beside the bench positioned where it would catch the shade of the biggest orange tree when the sun was high in the sky. Running a finger over the clumsy jointing between two of the pieces that formed the back, he wished vainly that he'd had time to fix it.
Even knowing what was going to happen, he couldn't make himself stay by the bench, not when Sarai was in the house. He had no photographs of her, nor had any of the paintings he'd attempted ever done her justice. His artistic talent was plebeian at best. Only in his dreams did he see her.
He took only a step and found himself in the main room. Half shop, half kitchen, the room should have been utilitarian, but Sarai had hung baskets of plants and painted flowers on tiles set in the floor, making it feel welcoming. On the worktable set near the back of the room, his mate ground a cinnamon stick into fine powder with quick, competent hands.
He sucked in the air to savor her scent, flavored by the spice she worked with, as it often was. His favorite was Sarai and vanilla, but Sarai and cinnamon was almost as good.
She was so beautiful to him, even though he knew that others might not find her so. Her hands were callused and strong, with nails trimmed blunt. The short sleeves of her dress showed muscles gained both from her work and from running as a wolf in the wilds of the nearby hills. Her nose, which she despaired of, was long and strong, with a delightful little bump on the end.
He reached out, but he could not touch her. "Sarai?"
When she didn't turn to him, he knew that it was going to be the bad dream. He fought to get free as hard as one of his wild-wolf cousins with a foot caught in an iron trap might have, but he couldn't chew off his leg or force the trap that held him here. So he had to watch, helpless, as it happened again.
Hooves rang on the cobbles he'd laid outside the door to keep the mud at bay. Sarai clicked her tongue lightly on the roof of her mouth in displeasure-she had always hated to be interrupted in the middle of mixing her medicines.
Still, she set her mortar and pestle aside and brushed off her apron. Irritated or not, he knew she would never turn up her nose at business. Money was not to be sneezed at, not in those days. And, for Sarai, there should have been nothing dangerous about a visitor.
A human soldier was no threat to a woman who was also a werewolf, and Napoleon's rise to power had interrupted that other, more dangerous, warfare. The few witchblood families left in Europe had quit killing each other at last, forced instead to protect themselves from the ravages of more mundane fighting. She had no reason to worry, and she couldn't hear Asil's frantic attempts to warn her.
The door opened, and for a moment, Asil saw what Sarai had.
The woman in the doorway was slight-boned and fragile-looking. Her dark hair, usually unruly and curly, had been tamed and rolled into a bun, but the severe style only made her look younger. She was sixteen years old. Like Sarai she was dark-haired and dark-eyed, but unlike her foster mother, her features were refined and aristocratic.
"Mariposa, child," Sarai exclaimed. "What are you doing riding so far on your own? There are soldiers everywhere! If you wanted to visit, you should have told me and I'd have sent Hussan out for you to keep you safe."
It had been two hundred years since anyone had called him by that name, and the sound of it hurt his heart.
Mariposa's mouth tightened a little. "I didn't want to bother you. I'm safe enough." Even in his dreams he knew that her voice sounded odd, unlike herself: cold. His Mariposa, his little butterfly, had been emotional above all, dancing from anger to sullenness to sunshine with scarcely a breath between.
Sarai frowned at her. "No one is safe enough. Not in these times." But even as she scolded her, she enfolded the girl she'd reared as her own in her arms. "You've grown, child, let me look at you." She took two steps back and shook her head. "You don't look well. Are you all right? Linnea promised she'd take care of you...but these are dark times."
"I'm fine, Sarai," Mariposa told her, but the girl's voice was wrong, flat and confident-and she was lying.
Sarai frowned at her and put her hands on her hips. "You know better than to try lying to me. Has someone hurt you?"
"No," Mariposa replied in a low voice. Asil could feel her power amass around her, different now than it had been when they'd first sent her to her own kind for training. Her magic had been wild and hot, but this power was as dark and cold as her voice had been.
She smiled, and for a minute he could see the child she'd once been instead of the witch she had become. "I've learned a lot from Linnea. She taught me how to make sure no one can ever hurt me again. But I need your help."
The doorbell woke Asil up before he had to watch Sarai die again. He lay in his empty bed and smelled the sweat of terror and despair. His own.
* * * *
Charles made himself at home on the old wolf's porch swing and tried to lose himself in Indian time. It was a trick he'd never quite mastered-his grandfather had always grumbled that his father's spirit was too strong within him.
He knew Asil had heard the doorbell, he could hear the spit of the shower-and he'd never expect Asil to do him the courtesy of a quick appearance, especially when his visit had come at such an ungodly early hour in the morning. He and Anna would be getting a late start, but their prey wasn't a fish who was best caught in the dawn's light anyway. And this was more important to him than catching a rogue, even if that rogue was killing people.
He'd almost gone to his father instead of Asil after he'd talked to Heather at Bran's house. It was only the scent of his stepmother that kept him from knocking on Bran's bedroom door. This morning, Charles hadn't been up to the dance Leah would insist he perform. When she had driven him to being rude (and she would), his father would intervene; no one, not even one of his sons, was allowed to be disrespectful of the Marrok's mate. And then there would be no discussion anyway.
So he went to the only other person who might understand what had happened, why the bond between him and Anna wasn't complete: Asil, whose mate had been an Omega. Asil, who disliked him almost as much as Leah did, though for different reasons.
Brother Wolf thought that there might be a lot of amusement to be found in this morning's talk. Amusement or fighting-and the wolf relished them both.
Charles sighed and watched the fog of his breath disappear into the cold air. It might be that this was a wasted effort. Part of him wanted to give it more time. Just because the slow part of the mating process, when wolf accepted wolf, had been finished almost as soon as he first saw her, didn't mean that the other half would work so fast.
But something told him that there was more wrong than time alone could solve. And a man who had a werewolf for a father and a wisewoman for a mother knew when he ought to listen to his intuition.