Wild Sign

by Briggs, Patricia

  CHARLES CAUGHT HER before she hit the ground. Doing it when he’d had to start from a sitting position meant he mostly just managed to put himself under her rather than keeping her from falling.

  Though he could hear her heartbeat, feel the life in her body, he still put his hand on her pulse for reassurance. He avoided touching the bite marks.

  She’d had them when she turned around after the music had died. She hadn’t had them when she put the recorder to her lips, and he didn’t know where she’d gotten them from. He hadn’t smelled the blood until she’d turned around. They were human teeth marks, healing now, but they had been deep. The blood was smeared all over her neck and shirt.

  He didn’t understand what was happening. Justin had been dead for years, and if he had to pick out regrets from his long life, the fact that someone else had killed Justin before Charles had had the chance to do it was first on the list.

  He pulled her limp body into his lap, curling around her protectively. Shuddering with the effort not to go kill something, someone, anyone. If there had been a physical enemy present, he would not have been able to hold Brother Wolf back.

  Because Charles wanted to kill someone, too. He just didn’t know who or what his enemy was. Was the recorder some sort of artifact? Whatever had happened to Anna had had something to do with the music, that much was obvious. He was very aware Ford had told them that the symbol on the stones and trees around this place, the one that kept the very guardians of the forest away, represented a musical instrument being played. It didn’t take a genius to make a connection.

  Brother Wolf warned him that Anna was recovering consciousness. He knew that he should set her down and give her space. She’d been afraid of him.

  Of him.

  He could not make himself let her go. She would have to push him away herself. If she pushed him away, if she was frightened, even Brother Wolf would release her. Charles only hoped that he could force himself to do the same.

  She stirred. He made himself look away from her, giving her as much space as he could, knowing that it was not enough. He was going to scare her again.

  He felt the sudden tension of her muscles as she woke. Felt a tremendous shiver travel through her body and the instinctive way she drew into the fetal position.

  Brother Wolf howled inside him. They would find this thing that had hurt their mate and make it very, very sorry. He waited for her to struggle.

  Instead, she burrowed against him with a wild sob, wiggling to get closer to him with frantic need. She made a noise, a guttural heart-wrenching sound that he couldn’t understand. He wasn’t sure that she was using words.

  He held her while she buried her face against him and shook, grabbing his shirt so hard that she ripped the shoulder. He rocked her gently. Had they not been in the middle of this place that he distrusted, he would have sung to her.

  Gradually she relaxed against him, her body shuddering now and then, like a child who had cried too hard to stop all at once.

  “Anna?”

  She pressed her head more tightly against him, but she didn’t say anything.

  He jerked his head up as a scent came to his attention, this one more real than the one he’d started to identify with their unknown enemy. This one he smelled, but it was the same scent. When he took in a deep breath, he could not smell it again. But he knew he hadn’t imagined it.

  Deciding that he wanted to get Anna out of Wild Sign, he stood up, holding her tightly to him, and headed back up the trail.

  Tag was waiting for them at the sign at the top of the trail. He had shifted to wolf, which Charles appreciated. Tag’s wolf could be counted on—not to be less ferocious or less crazy, but the wolf obeyed orders. Sometimes Tag had trouble with that when he walked on two feet. Charles could deal with Tag, but he’d rather not have to while he was trying to protect Anna. He didn’t want to kill Tag by accident.

  “I don’t know,” he told Tag, who was staring at Anna. “I think she’s okay now. She’ll tell us what happened when she’s ready.”

  He hoped he was right.

  He set her down briefly to secure the pack on Tag’s back. As soon as his hands were off her, she began the change to wolf.

  Charles waited. When he sensed that she was absorbed in her transformation, he gestured for Tag to watch Anna. While she completed the change, Charles ran back to the amphitheater and found the recorder. It looked ordinary enough and it felt inert in his hands. He took it anyway. He was back before Anna was aware he’d been gone.

  It was a good sign that Anna had decided to change to her wolf, he told himself as she rose, somewhat unsteadily, to her feet. Anna’s wolf was how Anna had survived the hell of the Chicago pack in the first place.

  But he didn’t like the way her ears were lowered submissively—his Anna didn’t have a submissive bone in her whole body. The defensive hunch of her body threatened his control of Brother Wolf. Tag wasn’t in a much better state. Anna wasn’t his mate—but Omega wolves were to be cherished.

  He put the recorder in Tag’s pack. Then Charles went down on one knee beside Anna.

  “Are you okay to travel?” he asked.

  She met his eyes, gave an affirmative yip. He could feel her through their bond, a roiling incoherent mess of emotions and adrenaline. Movement, he judged, would help her work through everything.

  He changed and headed toward camp.

  On the trip back, Tag led and Charles fell behind. Anna didn’t let either of them get too close—but she didn’t range away from them, either. It was probably a very good thing that they didn’t run into any hikers along the way. Charles wasn’t sure that either he or Tag would have been capable of civilized behavior.

  They arrived at their camp a little after two in the morning. No one had been near it since they’d left. Charles shifted to human to open the bigger tent—which he and Anna would normally have shared alone—and invited Tag in.

  Anna seemed a little lost crouched beside the SUV, well back from either Charles or Tag. Charles knelt down and gestured to her.

  She padded toward him, not unwilling, just wary in a way that hurt his heart. It had been a long time since she’d looked at him that way. He put his hands on her gently, but worked them into the fur on her shoulders until he had his skin on hers.

  As when she had sat on his lap in the amphitheater, he felt nothing. No magic. She didn’t smell of that strange something from Leah’s past. There was no stain on her spirit that he could see.

  He would have been happier about it if he had understood why everything had stopped so suddenly in the amphitheater. Magic didn’t just stop, it dissipated—and that battlefield pall should not have disappeared at all.

  He kissed her forehead and released her.

  “I’m going to be wolf tonight,” he told her. “I can sleep with Tag and you can go sleep in the other tent. Or you can stay with us.”

  She scooted past him, into the bigger tent. He would have felt better if she hadn’t so obviously avoided touching him. He shifted to wolf and stretched across the entrance—which was a foolish thing. It would be as easy for an enemy to cut through the tent side as it would be for them to unzip the opening—easier, probably. If he’d really been worried about an attack in the night, he wouldn’t have slept in the tent at all.

  He’d resigned himself to a restless night—and then Anna curled up against his back. When Tag lay down beside her, she gave a little sigh and relaxed for the first time since she’d started playing that recorder.

  Charles put his head down and slept.

  C H A P T E R

  6

  Anna woke with a splitting headache and a body that felt like it had been run over by a truck.

  The last time she’d felt like that had been when she had gone to a party hosted by the first violin at the end of her freshman year at college—hosting that annual party was an unofficial requirement of the position of first chair.

  They’d played the “Hi, Bob” game—another time-hon
ored tradition. It consisted of watching The Bob Newhart Show and downing tequila shots every time a character from the show said, “Hi, Bob.” She hadn’t even known what The Bob Newhart Show was before that night. The next year she’d done it with orange juice instead of tequila—and she’d never again been able to look at Bob Newhart without feeling vaguely ill.

  But she was a werewolf; she wasn’t supposed to get hangovers. She tried to remember what she’d been doing. They’d gone to Wild Sign …

  She rubbed her head when the memory wouldn’t come.

  Charles would have answers for her. She got up, found clothes to wear, and put them on. She wiped the back of her wrist against her nose and grimaced at the smear of blood. That was pretty weird. Had she been hurt? She felt a little dizzy, and her knees, which had been fine a moment ago, tried to buckle. A sense of urgency started to press down on her. Something was wrong. Or had been wrong. Or possibly would be wrong.

  Charles, she reminded herself, her head pounding in time with the beat of her heart. Find Charles. She needed to get out of the stuffy tent so she could breathe. So she could push the panic away.

  Anna unzipped the tent and stuck her feet into her shoes, which someone had set next to the tent door. It hadn’t been her, because she’d come into camp as a wolf. She remembered that now. She’d gone to sleep, but she didn’t remember shifting back to human. Given the discomfort of the shift, she found that a little disconcerting—but not as much as losing most of a day.

  Charles and Tag were sitting in the camp chairs on opposite sides of the folding table that held the propane stove. Tag had a beat-up copy of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight in his lap and Charles had his laptop out—but both of them were looking at her with alert wariness. There was quite a bit of tension in the air, and she wondered what she’d done to put that look on their faces. Or maybe there was something else going on.

  Her own growing tension had eased at the sight of her mate. Charles was good at making her feel safe.

  “Um,” she said. “Good morning?”

  “Afternoon,” said Tag politely. As if they’d encountered each other walking opposite directions on a sidewalk—and only knew each other by face.

  “That bad?” she asked.

  Charles still hadn’t spoken. He watched her, she realized, with wolf eyes.

  “Let’s put it this way,” said Tag. “What’s my name?”

  “Colin Taggart,” she said.

  “Have I ever hurt you?”

  Was this a trick question? “No?”

  The query in her voice was directed at his question rather than an indication of any doubt about what the answer was. He flinched, and she rolled her eyes.

  “Of course not,” she said impatiently. “What’s wrong?”

  As soon as she spoke, she realized that she probably could answer part of that question herself. She felt sick, and all she remembered about yesterday was heading out toward Wild Sign. She had a few vague memories that came and went. Mostly they didn’t make sense—a canvas sink, a baby’s skull that somehow wasn’t a baby’s skull, and the inlaid fretboard of a guitar. The fretboard made her sad, though she didn’t know why. Something was definitely wrong with her.

  “You sounded all right this morning, too,” Tag told her, sounding ill-used and a bit whiny. His eyes didn’t fit his voice. His eyes were watchful. “And then you ran, making a noise I don’t ever want to hear coming out of your mouth again.” Tag scowled at her. “I don’t like to scare women. I especially don’t like to scare Omegas. I really, really don’t like it when it’s you I’m scaring.”

  Well, hell, thought Anna, feeling guilty. All of the wolves were affected by her being Omega. When she was distressed, they reacted badly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t remember it. I don’t remember quite a lot.” Tag, she thought, wasn’t the only one who sounded whiny.

  The headache felt like someone had grabbed her brain just behind her eyes and was digging in with claws. And wiggling the claws.

  “Got that,” said Tag. “What do you remember?”

  But Anna was watching Charles, who hadn’t said a word since she’d come out of the tent. He folded the computer in his lap with exaggerated care before setting it on the ground. He got to his feet slowly.

  She couldn’t tell what he was thinking with his quiet face and gold eyes. There was intent in his motion. She found herself taking a slow step backward, and her heartbeat picked up speed—

  —as it had that night she’d run in the pack’s home grounds when Justin led the hunt against her. The guttural sounds of their cries, inhuman sounds coming from human-shaped throats, rang in her ears. Though she knew that was impossible.

  Charles stopped moving.

  She aborted her instinctive movement to cover her ears—the sound wasn’t real. That was over and done. Why in the world was she dwelling on that particular event now?

  She reached for Charles through their bond—and only then realized that it was closed up tight. Maybe that was the reason her thoughts were so muddled. She would feel better if she could feel him; he might drown out the pain that was making it hard to think. She wasn’t good at manipulating their bond, though she’d gotten better.

  Visualizations were sometimes useful, so she tried to imagine herself reaching out and unlocking the door that stood between them. She pulled on it and the bond blazed open with a suddenness that she hadn’t expected. As if she’d pulled hard on a swinging door at the same time that Charles was pushing it.

  For a disorienting moment, she was seeing herself from his point of view. Her hair was tangled and there were traces of tears down her cheeks. She had a bloody nose again. Her shoulders were hunched in pain. (Well, she wasn’t used to having a hangover any longer. It had been years.) Her pupils were dilated like a drug addict’s, making her brown eyes look black. She looked small and fragile—something she’d never seen when she looked into a mirror.

  Charles did something—it certainly hadn’t been her—and their bond settled down to its usual gentle awareness. The weird feeling of perceiving herself from his viewpoint receded. Charles took a deep breath. She realized that he’d even been careful of his breathing, so he didn’t startle her into running.

  Which, she noticed, a part of her was still ready to do.

  She had a sickening half memory of running through the woods in the dawn light—the path she had taken lay right over Charles’s shoulder. Her awareness, as she had sprinted through the unfamiliar territory, had bounced back and forth between the present moment and that horrible night when she’d become the prey of the pack. That explained why it had come so easily to mind just now—though not why it had done so this morning.

  She reached out her hand. Charles stepped forward and took it at once, his warm hand closing around her cold one. The physical touch helped hold off her imminent panic, though she didn’t quite know why she was panicking. When his arms closed around her, her headache faded as well.

  “It had to shut you out to get its fingers into me,” she told him. And then wondered how she’d known that—or if it was true.

  “What is it?” he asked, only it was Brother Wolf who asked, not Charles, his voice smooth and dark.

  “The Singer in the Woods.” She still wasn’t thinking right—and there was something wrong with Charles. Why was it Brother Wolf who was talking to her?

  She shivered and pressed closer to him, feeling as if she would never get warm again. “It’s damaged. Hungry. Lonesome. It needs.”

  Something sharp dug into her mind, trying to lock the connection between her and Charles closed again. Anna screamed—she could hear the duet roar of angry wolves, her own and Brother Wolf—and the claws retreated, driven back by the sound.

  She didn’t lose consciousness, but it was a close thing. By the time her world righted again, Charles had dragged her into his lap, sheltering her with his body.

  “Music,” she said through the fog that was trying to feed on her. That mind-dulling
miasma in her head was another kind of attack, she thought.

  “What?” asked Tag, his voice very quiet. She looked for him and found him by the SUV nearly twenty feet away. He was crouched down, balanced on the balls of his feet and the fingers of his hands. His eyes were wolf-bright. There wasn’t a lot of human left in him. And she remembered that she was an Omega and he was a dominant wolf—and there was nothing physical he could protect her from to relieve his fury.

  She would have apologized, but talking was too much effort—and she had to get through to Charles.

  “Sing.” She fought to get the word out. When he didn’t immediately respond, she worried she hadn’t gotten it out in an understandable form. She tried giving him explicit directions. “Sing for me, Charles.”

  “Charles isn’t with us,” said Tag in a rough voice as unlike his usual melodious tenor as she’d ever heard him speak. “He hasn’t been here all day.”

  For a moment she didn’t understand what he was saying. Charles was wrapped around her—they appeared to be sitting on the ground, though she didn’t remember how they’d ended up there. Her cheek vibrated with his near-silent growls.

  Oh. She was usually better at telling which one she was dealing with, but she wasn’t exactly at the top of her game.

  “Brother Wolf,” she said. “I need you to sing.”

  That had driven it off before, the Singer in the Woods. She remembered that, hearing Charles’s voice, feeling it charge the atmosphere with his love, his power. But Brother Wolf did not respond.

  Think, she told herself sternly, but it was getting harder to keep track of what she needed to do. She had not broken under the weight of what had happened to her in the Chicago pack. She was stronger than this. What weapons did she have?

  Oh. Of course.

  I am a werewolf, damn it, she told herself, and called on the change to take her.

  For the first time, the transformation didn’t hurt. Or more precisely, her head hurt so much that the familiar agony of her body reshaping itself barely registered. As the shape of the wolf took over her body, its spirit clothed hers. The wolf flowed over and through her, sliding through her mind and healing the damage done. Midway through the change, her mate’s music, Charles’s music, became part of her magic, lending her energy and purpose.