There was actually a town. Not much of a town, but it had a gas station, a hotel, and a two-story brick-and-stone building with a sign in front that proclaimed it the Aspen Creek School. Beyond the school, tucked back in the trees and barely visible from anywhere but the parking lot, was an old stone church. If not for Charles's directions, she might have missed it.
Anna eased his big green truck through the church parking lot into a spot designed for a much smaller rig. It was the only place left. She hadn't seen any houses, but there were a lot of trucks and other four-wheel-drive vehicles in the lot.
Charles's truck was older than she was, but looked as if it were brand-new. It had been driven less than fifty thousand miles, if she wanted to believe the odometer-about two thousand miles a year. Charles had told her he didn't like driving.
She turned off the engine and watched anxiously as Charles opened his door and slid to the ground. The drop didn't seem to bother him. The stain on his pink bandage had been no bigger this morning than it had been last night. But he still looked worn, and there was a flush under his skin that she worried about.
If they'd been in Chicago, attending a meeting with her old pack, she wouldn't have let him come. Too many of the wolves there would have taken advantage of his weakness. Or at least she'd have tried to stop him a lot harder than she'd tried this morning.
She had expressed her concern, eyes carefully trained on the floor. In her experience, dominant wolves didn't like their prowess questioned and sometimes reacted badly. Not that she really thought he'd hurt her.
He'd merely said, "No one would dare try me. My father would kill them if I didn't manage it first. I'm hardly helpless."
She hadn't had the courage to question his judgment again. All she could do was hope that he was right.
She had to admit he looked anything but helpless, the folds of bandages hidden by the dark suit jacket he wore. The contrast between formal suit and his waist-length beaded-and-braided hair was oddly compelling. Of course his face, beautiful and exotic, and his big, tautly muscled body meant that he would be gorgeous in whatever he wore.
He looked a lot classier than she did. She'd had to wear jeans and a yellow button-up shirt because the only other thing she had was a couple of T-shirts. She hadn't expected she'd be going to a funeral when she'd packed.
She sighed and eased her door open so she wouldn't scratch the Subaru parked next to her. Charles waited for her in front of the truck and held out his arm in what was beginning to be a familiar gesture, however old-fashioned it might be. She tucked her arm into his and let him pick his own pace into the church.
In public he didn't limp, but she knew that sharp eyes would be watching the stiffness of his gait. She glanced up at him as they started up the steps, but she couldn't read anything in his face at all: he already had his public face on, expressionless.
Inside, the church sounded like a beehive, with a hundred voices intermingling so that she got a word here or there but nothing made any sense. She could smell the wolves, but there were humans here, too. The whole congregation bore the distinctive scent of sorrow, overlaid with anger and resentment.
When they walked into the chapel itself, every pew was tightly packed, and a few people even stood around the back. They turned when she and Charles walked in, all of them staring at her-an outsider, the only person in the whole freaking church wearing jeans. Or yellow.
She tightened her grip on Charles's arm. He glanced down at her face, then just looked around. In less time than it took to walk past three pews, everyone seemed to have found something urgent that pulled their attention elsewhere.
She clutched his forearm a little harder in gratitude and looked at the church itself. It reminded her a little of the Congregational church she'd grown up in with its dark woods, high ceiling, and cross-shaped interior. The pulpit was directly in front of the aisle they walked up, raised above the main floor by about two feet. Behind it were several rows of seats facing the congregation.
As they neared the front of the church, she realized she'd been wrong about its being completely packed. The first pew on the left was entirely empty except for Bran.
He sat looking for all the world as if he was waiting for a bus rather than a funeral, despite the designer charcoal suit he wore. His arms were spread to either side of him, elbows hanging over the back of the pew; his legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankle, eyes focused either on the railing in front of him, or on infinity. His face revealed no more than Charles's usual expression, which was wrong. She hadn't known him long, but the Marrok's face was a mobile one, not designed to be so still.
He looked isolated, and Anna remembered that the man the whole town had turned out to mourn had been killed by Bran. A friend, he'd said.
Beside her, Charles let out a low growl that caught his father's attention. Bran looked over at them, and one eyebrow climbed up his face, robbing it of its blankness. He patted the bench beside him as he asked his son, "What? You expected them to be happy with me?"
Charles turned on his heel, so Anna was abruptly face to chest with him. But he wasn't looking at her, he was looking at everyone else in the sanctuary-who once again looked away. As his power swept the church in a boiling rush, silence fell abruptly.
"Fools," he said, loud enough that everyone in the church would hear him.
Bran laughed. "Come sit down before you scare them all silly. I'm not a politician to worry about what they think of me, as long as they obey."
After a moment, Charles complied, and Anna found herself sitting between them.
As soon as Charles was facing the front of the church, the whispering began, built up speed, and regained its previous level. There were undercurrents here, thick enough to choke on. Anna felt distinctly like an outsider.
"Where's Samuel?" Charles looked over her head at his father.
"He's coming in right now." Bran said it without looking behind him, but Charles turned around so Anna did, too.
The man strolling up the aisle was almost as tall as Charles, his features a rougher version of Bran's. That roughness made them not so bland or young-looking as his father. She found him oddly compelling, though not handsome like Charles.
His ditch-water brown hair was cut carelessly, but somehow he managed to look neat and well dressed anyway. He held a battered violin case in one hand and a dark blue Western-cut jacket in the other.
When he was nearly at the front, he turned around once, taking in the people in a single glance. Then he looked over at Anna, and his face broke into a singularly sweet smile-a smile she'd seen an echo of on Charles's face. With that smile she could see past the superficial differences to the underlying similarities, a matter of bone and movement rather than feature-by-feature likeness.
He sat next to Charles and brought with him the crisp scent of snow over leather. His smile widened, and he started to say something, but stopped when a wave of silence swept through the crowd from the back to the front.
The minister, bedecked in old-fashioned clerical robes, walked slowly up the central aisle, an ancient-looking Bible resting in the crook of his left arm. By the time he reached the front, the room was silent.
His obvious age told her that he wasn't a werewolf, but he had a presence that made his "Welcome and thank you for coming to pay your respects to our friend" sound ceremonial. He set the Bible on the podium with obvious care for graying leather. He gently opened the heavily embossed cover and set aside a bookmark.
He read from the fifteenth chapter of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. And the last verse he spoke without looking down. " 'O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?' "
He paused, letting his eyes trail over the room, much as Charles had, then said simply, "Shortly after we moved back here, Carter Wallace came to my house at two in the morning to hold my wife's hand when our retriever had her first litter of puppies. He wouldn't charge me because he said if he charged for cuddling pretty women, he'd be a gigolo and not a vet."
He stepped away from the pulpit and sat on the thronelike wooden chair on the right-hand side. There was the sound of shuffling and the creaking of wood, then an old woman stood up. A man with bright chestnut hair escorted her down the aisle, a hand under her elbow. As they walked by her pew, Anna could smell the wolf in him.
It took the old woman a few minutes to make it all the way to the top of the stairs to the pulpit. She was so small that she had to stand on a footstool, the werewolf behind her with his hands on her waist to steady her.
"Carter came to our store when he was eight years old," she said in a breathy, frail voice. "He gave me fifteen cents. When I asked him what it was for, he told me that a few days before, he and Hammond Markham had been in, and Hammond had stolen a candy bar. I asked him why it was he and not Hammond who was bringing the money. He told me that Hammond didn't know he was bringing me the money." She laughed and wiped a tear from her eye. "He assured me that it was Hammond 's money, though, stolen from his piggy bank just that morning."
The werewolf who had escorted her raised her hand to his mouth and kissed it. Then he lifted her into his arms, despite her protests, and carried her back to where they'd been sitting. Husband and wife, not the grandson and grandmother they appeared to be.
Anna shivered, suddenly fiercely glad that Charles was a wolf like her and not human.
Other people stood up and told more stories or read verses from the Bible. There were tears. The dead man, Carter Wallace-or rather Dr. Carter Wallace, since he evidently was the town's vet-had been loved by these people.
Charles stretched his feet out in front of him and bowed his head. Beside him, Samuel played absently with the violin case, rubbing at a worn spot on the leather.
She wondered how many funerals they'd been to, how many friends and relatives they'd buried. She'd cursed her ageless, regenerative body before-when it had made it darned hard to commit suicide. But the tension in Charles's shoulders, Samuel's fidgeting, and Bran's closed-down stillness told her that there were other things that made virtual immortality a curse.
She wondered if Charles had had a wife before. A human wife who aged as he did not. What would it be like when people she'd known as children grew old and died while she never got her first gray hair?
She glanced at Charles. He was two hundred years old, he'd told her, his brother and father even older. They'd been to a lot of funerals.
A rising nervousness in the congregation interrupted her thoughts. She looked around to see a girl walking up the aisle. There was nothing about her to suggest why she caused such a stir. Though she was too far away to scent over this many people, something about her shouted human.
The girl climbed the stairs, and tension sang in the air as she paged through the Bible, watching the audience under her lashes.
She put her finger on a page and read, " 'For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous.' "
"Shawna, Carter's granddaughter," Charles murmured to her. "This is going to get ugly."
"She didn't study too hard," said Samuel just as quietly but with a faint touch of humor. "There are sharper-tongued writers than John in the Bible."
She continued a few more verses, then looked straight at the Marrok, who obliged her by meeting her eyes. Anna didn't feel any of the Alpha's power, but the girl dropped her gaze after no more than a half second.
"She's been away at school," said Charles in that almost silent voice. Anyone, werewolf or not, who was much farther from him than Anna wouldn't have been able to hear it. "She's young and full of herself-and has resented the hold Da has on Aspen Creek long before our Doc Wallace made the fatal decision to become a werewolf. But bringing that to his funeral is inexcusable."
Ah. Suddenly the tension and the anger made sense. Carter Wallace had been Changed. He hadn't made the transition well, and Bran had been forced to kill him.
Carter had been Bran's friend, he'd said. Somehow, she thought as she glanced up at his shuttered face, she didn't think he had many friends.
She reached up by her shoulder, where his hand dangled oh-so-casually, and she took the Marrok's hand in hers. It was an impulse thing; as soon as she realized what she had done she froze. But by then, he had taken her hand in a tight grip that belied his casual pose. It hurt, but she didn't believe it was on purpose. After a moment, his grip gentled.
At the pulpit, Shawna began talking again, her bitterness apparently unchecked by her inability to stare Bran down. "My grandfather was dying of bone cancer when the Marrok talked him into the Change. Gramps never wanted to be a werewolf, but, weakened and ill, he allowed himself to be persuaded." Her speech sounded memorized to Anna, like she'd practiced it in front of a mirror.
"He listened to his friend." She didn't look at Bran again, but not even Anna, who hadn't known the dead man, was uncertain whom she meant. "So instead of dying from illness, he died from a broken neck because Bran decided he didn't make a good enough werewolf. Maybe Gramps would have thought it a better death." Her "I don't" remained unsaid, but it rang through the room after she left the pulpit.
Anna was prepared to hate her, but as the girl walked past them with a defiant tilt to her chin, Anna noticed her eyes were red and puffy.
There was a moment when she thought Charles was going to explode to his feet, she could feel that boiling rage building, but it was Samuel who rose. He left the violin case behind him as he walked up to take the podium.
As if blind to the atmosphere, he launched into a story about a very young Carter Wallace who evaded the keeping of his mother to go for a walk and ended up some three miles into the woods before his father finally found him not two feet from an irritated rattlesnake. Carter's werewolf father killed the snake-enraging his son. "I never saw Carter that mad before or since." Samuel grinned. "He was sure that snake was his friend, and poor old Henry, Carter's da, was too shaken to argue the point."
Samuel's smile died away, and he let the silence build before speaking again. "Shawna was away when the debate took place, so I'll excuse her misinformation," he said. "My father did not think it was a good idea that Carter face the Change. He told all of us, Doc included, that Doc was too softhearted to thrive as a wolf."
The pulpit creaked ominously under Samuel's hold, and he opened his hands deliberately. "To my shame, I took his son Gerry's part, and between the two of us, his doctor and his son, we persuaded Carter to try it. My father, knowing that a man as ill as Doc was a poor risk, took the task of Changing him-and he managed it. But he was right. Carter could neither accept nor control the wolf inside. Had he been anyone else, he would have died in February with the others who failed the Change. But Gerry, whose task it most properly was, would not do it. And without his consent, my father felt he could not."
He took a deep breath and looked at Carter's grand-daughter. "He almost killed your mother, Shawna. I took care of her afterward, and I'll attest that it was luck, not any impulse on Carter's part, that spared her life-you can ask her yourself. How would a man whose life had always been devoted to the service of others have borne it if he had killed his own daughter? She asked the Marrok, in my hearing, if he would take care of the duty that her brother would not. By that time, the wolf in Carter was far enough gone he couldn't ask for it. So no, my da did not try to persuade Carter to Change-he was just the one who stepped up to the plate to handle the resultant mess."
When Samuel finished speaking, he let his eyes drift slowly over the room as heads bowed in submission. He nodded once, then took his seat next to Charles again.
The next few people kept their eyes off the Marrok and his sons, but Anna thought it was embarrassment rather than the sullen anger that had been so prominent a quarter of an hour ago.
At last the minister stood up. "I have here a letter that Carter gave me several weeks ago," he said. "To be opened in the event of his death-which he felt would be soon, one way or another." He opened the letter and put on a pair of glasses.
" 'My friends,' " he read. " 'Do not mourn my passing, I will not. My life this past year has shown me that interfering with God's plans is seldom a good idea. I go to join my beloved wife with joy and relief. I do have one last request. Bran, you old bard you, sing something for me at my funeral. ' "
The church was very still. Charles felt a reluctant affection for the dead man. Bless Carter, who was as much a healer as Samuel. He had known what was coming, and how folks would take it, too-the Marrok included.
He stood up and held out his hand for his father's, as Bran, uncharacteristically, seemed to be taken totally by surprise. Bran didn't take it, but he released Anna and came to his feet. Anna pulled her hand to her lap and flexed it as if it hurt.
"Did you know that Doc was going to do that?" Charles whispered to Samuel, with a nod at the battered violin case as they followed Da to the front. If he'd known, he'd have brought something to play as well. As it was, he'd been relegated to the piano-which had three off-pitch keys to improvise around.
Samuel shook his head. "I'd planned on playing something rather than talking." Then a little louder as he opened the case and took out his violin, "What are you singing, Da?"
Charles glanced at his father, but couldn't read his face. Too many funerals, too many dead friends, he thought.
" 'Simple Gifts,' " Bran said after a moment.
Charles sat down at the piano while Samuel tuned the violin. When his brother nodded, Charles played the introduction to the Shaker tune. It was a good choice, he thought. Not sad, not overtly religious, and it fit Carter Wallace, who had been, mostly, a simple man-and it was a song that they all knew well.
'Tis the gift to be gentle, 'tis the gift to be fair,
'Tis the gift to wake and breathe the morning air,
To walk every day in the path that we choose,
Is the gift that we pray we will never never lose.
As his father's quiet voice finished the second verse, Charles realized that it fit his father, too. Though Bran was a subtle man, his needs and desires were very simple: to keep his people alive and safe. For those goals he was prepared to be infinitely ruthless.
He glanced over at Anna, where she sat alone on the bench. Her eyes were closed, and she mouthed the words with Bran. He wondered what she sounded like when she sang-and whether her voice would fit with his. He wasn't sure she sang at all though she'd told him she'd been working at a music store selling guitars when she met the wolf who attacked her and Changed her against her will.
She opened her eyes and met his. The impact was so strong he was amazed that his fingers continued playing without pause.
His.
If she knew how strongly he felt, she'd have run out the door. He wasn't used to being possessive, or to the savage joy she brought to his heart. It ate at his control, so he turned his attention back to the music. He understood music.
Anna had to make an effort not to hum along. Had the audience been purely human, she'd have done it. But there were too many people around her whose hearing was as good as her own.
One of the things that she'd hated about being a werewolf was she'd had to give up on so many of her favorite musicians. Her ears picked out the slightest waver in pitch or fuzz in the recording. But those few singers she could still listen to...
Bran's voice was clean and dead on pitch, but it was the rich timbre that made the hair on her neck stir in awed appreciation.
As he sang the last note, the man who was sitting on the bench behind her leaned forward until his mouth was almost against her neck.
"So Charles brought a toy home, eh? I wonder if he'll share." The voice was lightly accented.
She slid forward on the bench as far as she could and stared fixedly at Charles, but he was closing the cover over the keys to the piano and had his back toward her.
"So he leaves you like a lamb among wolves," the wolf murmured. "Someone so soft and tender would do better with another man. Someone who likes being touched." He put his hands on her shoulders and tried to pull her back toward him.
Anna jerked out of his hold, forgetting the funeral and audience. She was done with letting just anyone touch her. She stumbled to her feet and whirled to face the werewolf, who leaned back on his bench and smiled at her. The people on either side of him slid away to give him as much room as they could-that was a better judgment of what he was than the easy curve of his lips.
Anna had to admit he was lovely. His face was refined and elegant, his skin, like Charles's, was teak and sunlight. His nose and black eyes said Middle East, though his accent had been pure Spanish-she had a good ear for accents.
He looked her age, twenty-three or -four, but for some reason she was absolutely certain he was very, very old. And there was a hint of wildness, of some sickness, about him that made her wary.
"Leave her alone, Asil," Charles said, and his hands settled on her shoulders where the other man's had been. "She'll gut you and leave you for the crows if you bother her."
She leaned back against his warmth, more than a little surprised that he was right-or at least that her first reaction hadn't been fear, it had been anger.
The other wolf laughed, his shoulders jerking harshly. "Good." He said. "Good. Someone should." Then the odd humor left his face, and he rubbed it tiredly. "Not long now." He looked past Anna and Charles. "I told you the dreams are back. I dream of her almost every night. You need to do it soon, before it's too late. Today."
"All right, Asil." Bran's voice sounded flat and tired. "But not today. Not tomorrow. You can hold out a little longer."
Asil turned to look at the congregation, who had been a silent witness to it all, and spoke in a clear, ringing voice. "A gift you have, someone who knows what needs to be done and will do it. You have a place to come home to, a safe place, because of him. I had to leave my Alpha to come here because he'd have let me rot in madness out of love." He turned his head and symbolically spat over his left shoulder. "A weak love that betrays. If you knew what I feel, what Carter Wallace felt, you'd know what a blessing you have in Bran Cornick, who will kill those who need killing."
And that's when Anna realized that what the wolf had been asking Bran for was death.
Impulsively, Anna stepped away from Charles. She put a knee on the bench she'd been sitting on and reached over the back to close her hand on Asil's wrist, which was lying across the back of the pew.
He hissed in shock but didn't pull away. As she held him, the scent of wildness, of sickness, faded. He stared at her, the whites of his eyes showing brightly while his irises narrowed to small bands around his black pupil.
"Omega," he whispered, his breath coming harshly.
Behind her, Charles stepped closer, but he didn't touch her as the cool flesh under her fingertips warmed. They all stood frozen in place. Anna knew that all she had to do to end this was to remove her hand, but she was strangely reluctant to do so.
The shock on Asil's face faded, and skin around his eyes and mouth softened into sorrow that grew and deepened before tucking itself away, where all private thoughts hid from too-keen observers. He reached out and touched her face lightly, ignoring Charles's warning growl.
"More gifts here than I'd believed." He smiled tightly at Anna, eyes and mouth in concert. "It's too late for me, m�� querida. You waste your gifts on my old self. But for the respite, I thank you." He looked at Bran. "Today and tomorrow, and maybe the next day, too. To see Charles, the original lone wolf, caught with a foot in the trap of amor- this will amuse me for a while longer, I think."
He freed himself with a twist of his wrist, captured her hand in his and, with a sly look at Charles, kissed her palm. Then he let her go and slipped out of the church. Not hurrying, but not dawdling, either.
"Be careful around that one," Charles cautioned her, but he didn't sound displeased.
Someone cleared his throat, and Anna looked around to meet the eyes of the minister. He smiled at her, then looked at the church. The interruption of his service didn't seem to bother him in the slightest. Maybe he was used to werewolves interrupting things. Anna felt a blush rise up her face and sank back down on the bench...wishing she could sink even farther. She'd just interrupted the funeral of a man she didn't even know.
"It is time to bring this to a close," the minister said. "Our mourning is done here, and when we leave, we must remember a life well lived and a heart open to all. If you would all bow your heads for a final prayer."