“I failed,” she said.
“Did you?” he asked.
She gave him an irritated look, and he smiled. “Let’s get you home, shall we?”
He carried her out to his car because although he had sweats she could wear, he didn’t have shoes. He handed her the leftovers from his vegan-restaurant excursion. She ate the food as fast as she could move fingers to mouth.
He drove up to the sprawling manor that was Bran Cornick’s house. Before he turned off the engine, Leah was there to collect his charge. She didn’t look at him—he’d scared her once, and she had learned her lesson about flirting with the Moor. She smiled at Kara, though, and his irritation with his Alpha’s mate died away. He waited until Kara was safely in the house before he drove off.
He hadn’t quite pulled into his driveway before his phone rang.
“Asil,” said the Marrok’s voice. He wasn’t happy.
“Bran,” replied Asil, who was still fighting down his own temper.
“It does her no good for you to help her to change. She has to be able to do it herself,” Bran said.
Asil took a deep breath and turned off his truck before he answered.
“When she came to my greenhouse and asked me to help, she was in full control of her wolf—even though she was scared because she couldn’t change back.”
“She has to do better than that,” snapped Bran uncharacteristically. He knew as well as Asil that it was a big step for her to be in control. It was a sign that she had finally begun accepting what she was—and it was a bigger sign that she’d be one of the ones who made it.
The people who would be Changed a couple of days before the next full moon would have one year to prove they could control their wolf—which included changing at will from one form to the other. Those who failed would be killed—no one could afford to have werewolves who couldn’t be trusted. Especially not now that the werewolves had revealed themselves to the humans. It was imperative that the public not know just how dangerous werewolves really were.
“Is she in danger?” asked Asil, trying to keep the menace out of his voice. Kara couldn’t afford for him to challenge the Marrok over her, not unless she was truly at risk.
“Not right now,” said Bran after a moment. He sounded exhausted. Asil thought about how he had not been able to face all the impending grief coming—and how the Marrok had to be in the center of it. His rules about Changing had saved countless lives—and probably the werewolves as a species—but it had not been without personal cost.
Bran sighed. “She’s just a baby. But unless she can control her shift and her wolf, I’m going to have to take her out with the new wolves—and that’s going to mean trouble. She’s too dominant to go without challenge, and she’s too young to prevail.”
Asil hissed at the thought of his Kara out in the First Hunt with a double handful of new werewolves out of control and ready to kill each other and anyone else who got in their way. Bran’s rules were good ones—they gave wolves a cage to protect themselves with. That did not mean those rules were without cost.
“Send her out tomorrow, too,” Asil said. “Tell her that I’ll be home around sunset and she can come to me for help if she needs it.”
“No,” said Bran. “She has school tomorrow.”
“This is more important than school.”
Bran sighed. “It is. I’ll send her out, but she needs to do the shift on her own. I might have Leah mention that you’ll be out doing things until sunset tomorrow.”
• • •
She wasn’t as frightened when she showed up the next night. He took her to his roses, where she tried to change back to human—tried very hard. But only with his help could she regain her human shape.
She was examining the sweats she wore doubtfully (today’s were gray and had a hole in the knee) when a car pulled up outside. She stiffened and gave him a panicked look.
“Peace,” he told her.
And Sage came in the door a moment later, looking as though she’d stepped off a walkway in Paris instead of a breezy autumn in near-wilderness Montana. She was tall, cool, and elegant with sun-streaked hair and warm blue eyes, and if he weren’t so old and fragile, he’d have been courting her as none of the idiots in the pack seemed able to do properly.
“Hello, hello,” she said. “How is my favorite evil monster who wants to die?”
Asil made a point of looking over his shoulder and all around before saying, “I don’t know. Had you asked where the handsomest, most noble creature on earth was, I could have told you. Had you asked where the most dangerous wolf in all the world was, I could have told you that as well. But there are no monsters here.”
She grinned at him. “Well, kitten,” she said to Kara, who was watching them openmouthed. “When I told him I was headed up to the big house tonight, Bran asked if I’d mind picking you up and save his Nobleness a trip.”
“Sure,” said Kara.
He closed the door behind them and put his forehead against it. His keen ears picked up a conversation he was not meant to overhear.
“He really likes you,” Kara said. “Really, really.”
“Well,” Sage’s voice was dry. “That’s not news, sugar. But he won’t do anything about it until it dawns on him that though he’s been waiting more than fifteen years for this famous ‘madness’ that is going to break him and turn him into a ravening monster—it just might not happen.”
“Fifteen years,” said Kara.
“Asil,” said Sage clearly, “needs to get over himself.”
Asil smiled at the acid tone that told him that she knew he was listening in. Clearly, she deserved him. If this were fifty years ago, he’d hunt her down and take her as his.
• • •
For a week, he managed to stay away from his home until sunset. When he got home, Kara would be waiting, a smallish half-grown werewolf. First she waited by the door of his greenhouse—but then Devon came and waited with her, his nose turned away and his eyes shut. After that, she came to his front porch and lay on the mat because Devon would not intrude so far into Asil’s territory.
On the seventh day, while she got dressed, he cut a few long-stemmed roses and put them in a pretty vase. Four of the peachy-colored ones because they smelled the best, and one (because that bush had only one rose that wasn’t too old) that was a deep red with a hint of blue or purple along the edge of each petal.