He gave me a small smile. “If you wait until afternoon, Adam will be ready to travel, and Samuel should know something about how your young man . . . Alan MacKenzie Frazier died. He’s staying up tonight to perform the autopsy and run tests in the lab.”
He leaned forward. “It’s not your fault, Mercy.”
I spilled the cocoa all down the front of my T-shirt. “Sh—” I bit off the word. Bran didn’t approve of swearing. “You can read minds.”
“I know the way your mind works,” Bran said, with a little smile that managed to be not quite smug. But he was quick enough retrieving a roll of paper towels stored under the sink and handed them to me as I held my shirt away from my body. The cocoa was still hot, though not scalding.
As I mopped myself up at the sink, he continued, “Unless you’ve changed more than I can believe, if something happens, if someone gets hurt, it must be your fault. I had the story from Adam, as far as he knows it, and it had nothing to do with you.”
“Hah—you can read minds. He’s in wolf form, and can’t talk,” I said. I’d done the best I could with the shirt, but I wished I had an extra change of clothing.
Bran smiled. “He’s not now. Sometimes the change helps us heal faster. Usually we change from human to wolf, but the other way works as well. He was not happy with Samuel.” Bran’s smile deepened. “He spent his first words chewing him out. Told him that second-guessing the man in the field was an amateur’s mistake. He said he’d rather not have someone who didn’t know what they were doing ‘mucking about’ with his wounds. He also said that you had more guts than sense sometimes.” Bran tipped his styrofoam cup in my direction. “As it happens I agree—which is why I asked Adam to keep an eye on you for me when you moved into his territory.”
Ah, I thought and tried not to look as devastated as I felt. So Adam had been ordered to look after me? I had rather thought that the odd relationship we had was based on something else. Knowing that Bran had told him to watch me changed the shading of every conversation we’d ever had, lessened it.
“I don’t like lies,” said Bran, and I knew I’d failed to keep the pain of his revelation from my face. “Not even lies of omission. Hard truths can be dealt with, triumphed over, but lies will destroy your soul.” He looked as though he had personal knowledge of it. “That distaste leads me to meddle where perhaps I should step back.”
He paused, as if to let me speak, but I had no idea where he was going with this.
He sat down and took another sip of cocoa. “There were those who thought the truth of Bryan’s death should be kept from you.” Bryan had been my foster father.
I remembered waking up shortly after Christmas to Bran’s low-key voice in the kitchen. When I came out of my room, Bran told me that the police had found Bryan’s body in the Kootenai River.
Suicide is difficult for werewolves. Even silver bullets don’t always defeat the wolf’s ability to heal itself. Decapitation is effective, but rather difficult to achieve in a suicidal situation. Drowning works very well. Werewolves are very densely muscled; they tend to have a difficult time swimming even if they want to, because, like chimpanzees, they have too much muscle and not enough fat to float.
“Some of the pack would have told you that Bryan had an accident.” Bran’s voice was contemplative. “They told me that fourteen was too young to deal with a suicide, especially on top of the death of Bryan’s mate.”
“Her name was Evelyn,” I told him. Bran had a tendency to dismiss the humans around him as if they didn’t exist. Samuel once told me that it was because humans were so fragile, and Bran had seen too many of them die. I thought that if I could handle Evelyn’s death when I was fourteen, then, by hang, Bran could, too.
He gave me a quelling look. When I didn’t look down as protocol demanded, his lips turned up before he hid them with the cup.
“Evelyn, indeed,” he said, then sighed. “When you chose to live alone, rather than go to your mother, I agreed to that, too. You had proven your mettle to me; I thought you had earned the right to make your own choices.” His eyes roved around the room. “Do you remember the last time you and I talked?”
I nodded and sat down finally. Even if he wasn’t insisting on protocol tonight, it felt awkward to be standing while he was sitting in the chair.
“You were sixteen,” he said. “Too young for him—and too young to know what it was that he wanted from you.”
When Bran had caught Samuel kissing me in the woods, he’d sent me home, then shown up the next morning to tell me that he’d already spoken with my real mother, and she would be expecting me at the end of the week. He was sending me away, and I should pack what I wanted to take.
I’d packed all right, but not to go to Portland; I was packed to leave with Samuel. We’d get married, he’d said. It never occurred to me that at sixteen, I’d have trouble getting married without parental permission. Doubtless Samuel would have had an answer for that as well. We’d planned to move to a city and live outside of any pack.
I loved Samuel, had loved him since my foster father had died and Samuel had taken over his role as my protector. Bryan had been a dear, but Samuel was a much more effective defense. Even the women didn’t bother me as much once I had Samuel at my back. He’d been funny and charming. Lightheartedness is not a gift often given to werewolves, but Samuel had it in abundance. Under his wing, I learned joy—a very seductive emotion.
“You told me that Samuel didn’t love me,” I told Bran, my mouth tasting like sawdust. I don’t know how he’d found out what Samuel had planned. “You told me he needed a mate who could bear his children.”
Human women miscarry a little over half of the children they conceive by a werewolf father. They carry to term only those babies who are wholly human. Werewolf women miscarry at the first full moon. But coyotes and wolves can interbreed with viable offspring, so why not Samuel and me? Samuel believed that some of our children would be human, maybe some would be walkers like me, and some would be born werewolves—but they all would live.
It wasn’t until Bran explained it all to me that I understood the antagonism Leah had toward me, an antagonism that all the other females had adopted.
“I should not have told you that way,” Bran said.
“Are you trying to apologize?” I asked. I couldn’t understand what Bran was trying to say. “I was sixteen. Samuel may seem young, but he’s been a full-grown adult as long as I can remember—so he’s what, fifty? Sixty?”
I hadn’t worried about it when I had loved him. He’d never acted any older than I. Werewolves didn’t usually talk about the past, not the way humans do. Most of what I knew about Bran’s history, I picked up from my human foster mother, Evelyn.
“I was stupid and young,” I said. “I needed to hear what you told me. So if you’re looking for forgiveness, you don’t need it. Thank you.”
He cocked his head. In human form his eyes were warm hazel, like a sunlit oak leaf.
“I’m not apologizing,” he said. “Not to you. I’m explaining.” Then he smiled, and the resemblance to Samuel, usually faint, was suddenly very apparent. “And Samuel is a wee bit older than sixty.” Amusement, like anger, sometimes brought a touch of the old country—Wales—to Bran’s voice. “Samuel is my firstborn.”
I stared at him, caught by surprise. Samuel had none of the traits of the older wolves. He drove a car, had a stereo system and a computer. He actually liked people—even humans—and Bran used him to interface with police and government officials when it was necessary.
“Charles was born a few years after you came here with David Thompson,” I told Bran, as if he didn’t know. “That was what . . . 1812?” Driven by his association to Bran, I’d done a lot of reading about David Thompson in college. The Welsh-born mapmaker and fur trader had kept journals, but he hadn’t ever mentioned Bran by name. I wondered when I read them if Bran had gone by another name, or if Thompson had known what Bran was and left him out of the journals, which were kept, for the most part, more as a record for his employers than as a personal reminiscence.