“They are werewolves,” he said, taking her bait.
She’d learned to argue from her father, a very good lawyer. “Let them argue themselves into your court if you can manage it,” he’d told her. “They’ll do a better job of convincing themselves than you ever could.”
Anna looked up at the Salt River Alpha blandly. Then she looked at Chelsea, who was beginning to look younger. The crow’s-feet were fading from around her eyes, and her skin, formerly Arizona tan, was paler. She couldn’t see any of the cuts Chelsea had made; most of those had been on her body and were covered with a quilt. But if the lycanthropy was healing the marks of aging, Anna assumed it would have already healed the other marks, too.
Anna didn’t state the obvious.
“Old werewolves,” he snarled. “Not new made.”
“Who were once young werewolves—witchborn,” she told him. “And not evil.”
“Evil is going against the nature of things, the way things should be,” he told her with painful exactness. “Evil twists and turns and smells of blood and disease and death. I am evil, too. I fight it every day, the evil inside me. But I fear that it has a hold on my heart, tempts me to force my son so that I won’t be alone. I fight it. But I don’t know if she will. How can anyone fight two monsters in their heart and win?”
He looked faintly surprised at his own words, but more dismayed that he’d told her so much. Anna had, well, not grown used to the peculiarity of having normally taciturn or repressed wolves suddenly spill their inner thoughts to her, exactly, but she was no longer surprised. They talked to her of their pain or sorrow because their wolves knew that she was no threat.
Looking at Hosteen’s dismay, she decided that in addition to quilting and knitting, she needed to learn something about counseling, too. If people were going to air their darkest sorrows to her, she ought to know how to help them. All she could do now was run with her instincts and gather the wisdom her twenty-odd years on the planet had given her to counsel a man five times her age.
“We all carry within us the seeds of the child we were,” she said slowly. “The ideas of right and wrong and proper behavior. Charles will not speak the name of the dead if he can help it.” For Charles, she fervently believed, that taboo was a good one. His ghosts were dangerous. “The ways of the culture we were born into stay with us, even if we live as long as Bran or the Moor have. Some of those ideas are right and good, but others are modes of survival outdated by the passing of time. Like the idea that men shouldn’t weave or knit, or … wear pink and flowers unless it’s on a Hawaiian shirt. The trouble seems to be sorting one from the other.”
“You think the monster I see in Chelsea is a remnant of some outmoded cultural leftover,” he said neutrally.
“Oh, no,” Anna said, her voice so definite she almost winced. She continued more carefully. “Most people carry a monster within. Not just werewolves or fae, most people. That monster has nothing to do with our wolf except that the wolf makes it more dangerous. It’s a monster born of our own selfish desires and the wounds that life leaves on all of us. Whether those lives are a couple of decades or a couple of centuries long, living means that we get hurt, and some of those wounds don’t heal or they don’t heal completely.”
She had her own monster, didn’t she? Her own darkness that she tried to keep out of sight. A monster that would surprise her mate with its ferocity. Born of helplessness that was made worse by the understanding that there had been help just waiting for her if she’d known how to reach for it.
She hid that monster from everyone because it would hurt Charles if he knew that she carried those scars still. But since she was admitting her weaknesses here, if only to herself, she also worried that it would interfere with his image of the person he thought she was. He thought she was brave and true and good, and she wasn’t. Inside, she was dark and ferocious. If he truly understood that she had this twisted and broken part, maybe he could not love her.
But this wasn’t about her. Hosteen needed to see what she carried, so he’d understand he was not alone. And so he would not remember this conversation and feel humiliated because he’d told her so many things and she had not left herself as vulnerable to him. So she let that darkness fill her and looked him in the eye.
He stepped back, involuntarily.
She stopped it, swallowing her broken pieces until she had them tucked out of sight, where she kept them unless she needed to draw on that rage and viciousness.
“We all fight to be better than our base instincts, Hosteen,” she told him, her voice a little rough.
“What happened?” he asked. She saw the protective instinct that made his Alpha kick in: it wasn’t the response she’d expected.
“Do you think that Charles would not have taken care of any problems I might have faced?” she asked.
He nodded solemnly. “Chicago. I heard that Charles killed Leo over his treatment of a newly Changed wolf.” He paused. “That’s what he was talking about over dinner.”
She was losing control of the conversation; time to put it back where it belonged. “Leo didn’t fight his monster. It is not only witches who are tempted by darkness. When we werewolves fail to contain that monster, then it is up to our pack to make sure we don’t hurt anyone. Up to our Alpha, really. For Chelsea, that will be you.”
He nodded. His responsibility. Alphas, she had noticed, were very responsible people. That was it, that was the key. The reason he felt he had to take care of Chelsea, in the hit-man sense of the phrase.
“But we don’t all fail, do we?” Anna said softly. “Too many of us, yes, but not all.” She looked at the unconscious woman. “Brother Wolf doesn’t think that she will fail. That’s why Charles Changed her. It was not impulse, it was inspiration that drove him. His inspiration is more accurate than most people’s.”
Hosteen rose to his feet and looked down upon his daughter-in-law. “She is strong-minded,” he said, then smiled a little. “I’ve never had anyone argue with me by listening before. You must drive Bran wild. You listen and tug a little, and listen and push a little, and in the end you persuade me not to do—”
“—something you never wanted to do.” Anna finished winding her yarn and began knitting again, paying special attention to which side of her knitting the yarn fell on. “My dad always says it’s easier to convince someone of something they already want to believe.”
“She saved Kage’s children.” He reached out and touched Chelsea’s cheek. She stirred under his touch and then quieted. He left his hand there.
Anna tensed. She was too far away to stop him, assuming she could stop him. But she didn’t think she’d have to.
He bowed his head and then looked over his shoulder at Anna. “You—” His voice broke. Probably because the Marrok was talking to him, too.
Anna, get out of there. The witchborn don’t always make the transition from witch to wolf easily. If she was strong enough to hide herself from Charles’s wolf, then she’s strong enough to be dangerous. Strong enough to hide if she is a dark witch. Charles is coming, but you and Hosteen get out of there right now.
She couldn’t respond to him. The Marrok couldn’t hear her if she talked back to him.
Hosteen looked at her. “A fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos,” he quoted back at her softly. “How strongly do you believe that, now? What do you think the Marrok told Charles to do to her? What can he do that you and I could not?”
Anna put her knitting down and walked over to the bed. Chelsea had been restless for the past half hour or so. Bran’s message had spiked the adrenaline in both Anna and Hosteen, and that was enough. Chelsea’s heartbeat was picking up; Anna could smell fear and helpless frustration in a growing wave. That first deep sleep often reset the newly rising werewolves’ memories to the moments right before they were bitten. That was why it was such a dangerous moment.
She took one more deep breath just as magic, a lot of magic, flooded the room. Bran was right; Chelsea Sani was not a weak witch. Not at all.
Chelsea sat up in one explosive movement, staring at Hosteen without recognition or sanity in her eyes. Panicked, she rose to a crouch, crying out involuntarily, a harsh wolflike sound. The magic, which had been strong, suddenly made it hard to breathe in the room, as if the magic had replaced the oxygen.