“Our father will kill us,” Sam said, his voice slow and thick with Welsh intonation. “I . . . We don’t want to make him do that.” He took a deep breath. “And I don’t want to die.”
“Good. That’s good,” I croaked, suddenly understanding just exactly what his first words to me had meant. Samuel had wanted to die, and his wolf had stopped him. Which was good, but left us with a nasty problem.
There is a very good reason that the Marrok kills any werewolves who allow the wolf to lead and the man to follow. Very good reasons—like preventing-mass-slaughter sorts of reasons.
But if Samuel’s wolf didn’t want them to die, I decided it was better he was in charge. For a while. Since he didn’t seem to want to kill me yet. Samuel was old. I don’t know exactly how old, but sometime before the Mayflower at least. Maybe that would allow his wolf to control himself without Samuel’s help. Maybe. “Okay, Sam. No calls to Bran.”
I watched out of the corner of my eye as he tilted his head, surveying me. “I can pretend to be human until we get to your car. I thought that would be best, so I held this shape.”
I swallowed. “What have you done with Samuel? Is he all right?”
Pale ice blue eyes examined me thoughtfully. “Samuel? I’m pretty certain he’d forgotten I could do this: it has been so long since we battled for control. He let me out to play when he chose, and I left it to him.” He was quiet a moment or two, then he said, almost shyly. “You know when I’m here. You call me Sam.”
He was right. I hadn’t realized it until he said it.
“Sam,” I asked again, trying not to sound demanding, “what have you done with Samuel?”
“He’s here, but I cannot let him out. If I do, he’ll never let me get the upper hand again—and then we will die.”
“Cannot” sounded like “never.” “Never” was bad. “Never” would get him killed as surely as suicide—and maybe . . . probably a lot of other people along the way.
“If not Bran, what about Charles’s mate, Anna? She’s Omega; shouldn’t she be able to help?”
Omega wolves, as I understand them, are like Valium for werewolves. Samuel’s sister-in-law, Anna, is the only one I’ve ever met—I’d never heard of them before that. I like her, but she doesn’t seem to affect me the way she does the wolves. I don’t want to curl up in a ball at her feet and let her rub my belly.
Samuel’s wolf looked wistful . . . or maybe he was just hungry. “No. If I were the problem, if I were ravaging the countryside, she might help. But this is not impulse, not desperation. Samuel just feels that he no longer belongs, that he accomplishes nothing by his existence. Even the Omega cannot fix him.”
“So what do you suggest?” I asked helplessly.
Anna, I thought, might be able to put Samuel back in the driver’s seat, but, like the wolf, I was afraid that might not be a good thing.
He laughed, an unhappy laugh. “I do not know. But if you don’t want to be trying to extract a wolf from the emergency room, it would be good to leave very soon.”
Sam rocked forward to get up and stopped halfway with a grunt.
“You’re hurt,” I said as I scrambled up to give him a hand.
He hesitated but took it and used me to give him better leverage so he could get all the way to his feet. Showing me his weakness was a sign of trust. Under normal circumstances, that trust would mean I was safer with him.
“Stiff,” Sam answered me. “Nothing that won’t heal on its own now. I drew upon your strength to heal enough that no one would know how bad the injuries were.”
“How did you do that?” I asked, suddenly remembering the fierce hunger that had resulted in a rabbit-and-quail dinner on top of the salmon I’d had with Adam. I’d thought it had been someone in Adam’s pack—for the very good reason that borrowing strength was one of those things that came with apack bond. “We aren’t pack,” I reminded him.
He looked directly at me again, then away. “Aren’t we?”
“Unless you . . . Unless Samuel’s been conducting blood ceremonies when I was asleep, we’re not.” I was starting to feel panicky. Claustrophobic. I already had Adam and his pack playing with my head; I didn’t particularly want anyone else in there.
“Pack existed before ceremonies,” Sam said, sounding amused. “Magic binds more obviously, more extensively, but not more deeply.”
“Did you mess with my head on my date with Adam?” I couldn’t keep the accusation out of my voice.
“No.” He tilted his head, then snarled, “Someone hurt you?”
“No,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
“Lies,” he said.
“Right,” I agreed. “But if it wasn’t you who did it, the incident is something for Adam and me to handle.”
He was still a moment. “For now,” he said.
I held the door open for him, then walked beside him through the emergency room.
As we moved through the walkway and out the door, Sam kept his eyes on me, and his regard had a weight to it. I didn’t protest. He did it so that no one would see the change in his iris color—but also because when a werewolf as dominant as Samuel meets someone’s gaze with his wolf in the fore, even humans bow their knees. That would be pretty awkward and hard to explain. At this point, we were operating with the hope that it would matter to Samuel that he could come back and practice medicine here again.
I helped him into the backseat of the Rabbit—and noticed that the towel-wrapped book was still there. I wished that getting it back to its owner was the extent of my troubles. I grabbed it and put it in the far back, out of harm’s reach. Hopping in the front, I drove out from under the parking-lot lights as soon as I could. It was still the wee small hours, but Samuel was a big man, and it would be hard to miss him stripping in the back of my little car.
It didn’t take him long to dispose of the clothes and begin his change. I didn’t look, but I could tell when he started because the noises turned from shredding fabric to pained whines. What the wolves go through when they change is one of the many reasons I am very grateful to be what I am instead of a werewolf. For me, the change from coyote to human or back is virtually instantaneous. The side effects are nothing more annoying than tingles. For a werewolf, change is painful and slow. From the grunts he was making, he hadn’t yet fully finished his shift by the time I drove into my driveway.
Home wasn’t the safest place to bring him. No werewolf who saw him would miss what had happened, and Adam’s house—visited often by members of his pack—was just behind my back fence. But I couldn’t think of anyplace better.
Eventually, we’d have to tell Bran—I knew it, and I suspected that Samuel . . . Sam knew it, too. But I’d give him what time I could—assuming he didn’t go on a rampage and start eating people.
That meant keeping him out of sight of Adam and his pack.
My pack. My mate and my pack.
It felt wrong to hide things from him. But I knew Adam, and one thing he was very good at was honor and duty. It was one of the reasons I’d grown to love him—he was a man who could make the hard choice. Duty and honor would force him to call Bran. Duty and honor would force Bran to execute Samuel. Samuel would be dead, and two good men would suffer as well.
Luckily for all of them, my sense of duty and honor was more flexible.
I got out of the car and turned in a slow circle. I caught Ben’s scent, fading. Otherwise, we were alone with the more mundane creatures of the night: bats, mice, and mosquitoes. The light was on in Adam’s bedroom, but it went dark as I was watching. Tomorrow, I’d need to come up with a better place for Sam.
Or a good reason to avoid the pack.
I opened the back door of the Rabbit, keeping it between Sam and me in case he came out of the change in a bad mood. The pain of the change does not make for a happy wolf—and Sam was already hurt when he started. But he seemed okay. When he hopped out, he waited politely for me to close up the car, then followed me to the door.