The man dropped his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to look Charles in the eye anymore. “Thing is…thing is…it got me, too. Infected me with its evil.” He took a step back, wary as an old stag.
“How long have you been a werewolf?” Anna asked. “It’s been three years for me.”
The man tilted his head at the sound of Anna’s voice, as if he was listening to music. And for a moment his agitation slowed down.
“Two months,” ventured Charles, when it became obvious that the other man was too caught up in Anna’s spell to speak. He understood that feeling. The sudden peace as Brother Wolf settled down was as startling as it was addictive. If he’d never felt it before, he doubted he’d be talking, either. “You stepped between the werewolf and the grad student this fall. Just like you stepped between Anna and me when you thought I might hurt her.”
It fit, Charles thought, though it added complications to just what the other werewolf was. Only another werewolf could infect a human. But he was certain that the beast’s tracks stopped as soon as it would have been out of sight.
The sound of Charles’s voice was enough to make the man jerk his gaze away from Anna. He knew who the dangerous one was here.
“I was going to let him die. The student, I mean,” the other man said, confirming Charles’s theory about who he was. “There was a storm coming, and it’d probably have killed him if he’d been in the wild when it hit. The mountains here demand respect, or they’ll have you for lunch.” He paused. “There’s a storm coming soon.”
“So why didn’t you let the werewolf kill him?” Anna asked.
“Well, ma’am,” said the man, staring at his feet rather than looking at Anna. “Dying by the storm, or from a bear attack, those things just happen.” He stopped, evidently having trouble putting the difference into words.
“But the werewolf didn’t belong here,” said Charles, with a sudden inkling about why this wolf was so hard to sense and why he’d received no warning of his attack. From the clothes he wore, he looked as though he’d been living here a very long time.
“It is evil. And it turned me into a monster, too, just like it is,” the man whispered.
If Charles had been a split second faster, he could have kept Anna back. But he was tired, and he’d focused on the other wolf. Before he knew it, Anna was slipping and sliding down the mountainside. She was in a hurry and about four paces from their new acquaintance her snowshoes did an excellent job of acting like skis.
Charles forced himself to stillness as the other man caught his mate by an elbow and saved her from sliding down the mountainside. He was almost certain this man was no threat to her. Charles managed to convince Brother Wolf to stand down and give Anna a chance to work her magic and tame the rogue; this was why his father had sent her, after all.
“Oh, you aren’t evil,” Anna said.
The man froze, one hand still on her sleeve. Then the words poured out of him as if he couldn’t stop them. “I know about evil. I fought with it and against it until blood ran like the rain. I still see their faces and hear their screams as if it were happening now, and not nearly forty years ago.” But the tightness in his voice lightened as he spoke.
He released his hold on Anna, and asked, “Who are you?” He fell to his knees beside her, as if his legs could no longer hold him up. “Who are you?”
He’d moved too fast, though, and Brother Wolf had had enough. As quick as thought, with complete disregard to his injuries, Charles was beside Anna, managing to keep his hands off the rogue only because as soon as he got near her, Anna’s Omega effect spread over him, too.
“She is a wolf-tamer,” Charles told the other man. Even Anna couldn’t keep the possessive anger completely out of his voice. “Peace-bringer.”
“Anna Cornick,” Anna said. He liked the way it tripped off her tongue and smelled like God’s own truth. She knew she was his-and as easily as that, Brother Wolf settled down contentedly. So he didn’t grab her hand when she touched the stranger on the shoulder, and said, “This is my mate, Charles. Who are you?”
“Walter. Walter Rice.” Ignoring Charles as if he was no threat at all, Walter closed his eyes and swayed a little on his knees in the snow. “I haven’t felt like this since…since before the war, I think. I could sleep. I think I could sleep forever without dreaming.”
Charles held out his hand. “Why don’t you come eat with us first.”
Walter hesitated and took another good long look at Anna before taking Charles’s gloved hand with his own and coming to his feet.
The man who introduced himself as Walter ate as if he were half-starved-maybe he was. Every once in a while, though, he’d stop eating to look at Anna with awe.
Sitting between them, Charles repressed a smile-which was something he was doing more often than he ever remembered since he’d found his Anna. Watching her squirm under Walter’s worshipping regard was pretty funny. He hoped he didn’t look at her like that-at least not in public.
“It’s not as if it’s anything I’m doing,” she muttered into her stew with carrots. “I didn’t ask to be an Omega. It’s like having brown hair.”
She was wrong, but he thought she was embarrassed enough right now without him arguing with her over something he wasn’t entirely sure he was supposed to have heard. Or at least she was mostly wrong. Like dominance, being an Omega was mostly personality. And, as his father liked to say, identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.
Anna brought peace and serenity with her wherever she went-at least when she wasn’t scared, hurt, or upset. Some of her power depended upon her being a werewolf, which magnified the effect of her magic. But a larger part of it was the steel backbone that made the best of whatever circumstances she happened to be in, the compassion she’d shown to Asil when he’d tried to scare her, and the way she hadn’t been able to leave poor Walter out in the cold. Those were conscious decisions.
A man made himself Alpha, it wasn’t just an accident of birth. The same was true of Omegas.
“Once,” said Walter quietly, pausing in his eating, “just after a very bad week, I spent an afternoon camped up in a tree in the jungle, watching a village. I can’t remember now if we were supposed to be protecting them or spying on them. This girl came out to hang her wash right under my tree. She was eighteen or nineteen, I suppose, and she was too thin.” His eyes traveled from Anna to Charles and back to his food.
Yes, thought Charles, I know she’s still thin, but I’ve had less than a week to feed her up.
“Anyway,” the old vet continued, “watching her, it was like watching magic. Out of the basket the clothes would come, all in a wad, she’d snap ’em once, and, like that, they’d fall straight and hang just so. Her wrists were narrow, but so strong, and her fingers quick. Those shirts wouldn’t dare disobey. When she left, I almost knocked on her door to thank her. She reminded me that there was a world of daily chores, where clothes were cleaned and everything was in order.”
He glanced at Anna again. “She likely would have been terrified by a dirty American soldier showing up at her door-and like as not wouldn’t have a clue what I was thanking her for, even if she understood what I was saying. She was just doing as she always did.” He paused. “But I should have thanked her anyway. Got me through a bad time and several bad times since.”
They were all quiet after that. Charles didn’t know if Anna understood his story, but he did. Anna was like that woman. She reminded him of winters spent in front of a fire while his da played a fiddle. Times when he knew that everyone was full and happy, when the world was safe and ordered. It wasn’t like that often, but it was important to remember it could be.