Burn Bright (Alpha & Omega #5)(22)

“Why are we taking time now?” she asked. “I mean, you don’t usually talk while there are things to do.”

Things like bringing Hester’s body back to her mate.

“I’m giving him time,” Charles said. “Jonesy.”

“He knows she’s gone,” Anna said.

It hadn’t been a question, but he nodded anyway. “The earthquakes. Those were him, I think. We should wait here a little longer. Old creatures are dangerous when they are grieving.”

Anna nodded and untangled her hands from Hester’s fur. “Why did they kill Hester?”

Her voice sounded too small, but she couldn’t help it. Hester wasn’t the first dead person, dead werewolf, she’d been around. Anna had killed another person today. Shouldn’t she be getting over death by now? She was a werewolf, right? She didn’t get to be shaken by the deaths of near strangers.

She cleared her throat and tried to sound … unshaken. Or at least less shaken. “They tried so hard to take her away with them. Why not wait to see if they could capture her later?”

The question he answered wasn’t the one she had voiced. “It is all right to mourn Hester. She is worth the weight of your sorrow.”

“I didn’t know her,” Anna said. “How can I be so sad when I didn’t know her? I mean, why mourn her and not that guy I killed? I didn’t know her any better than I knew him.”

Charles raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you mourning him, too?” he asked perceptively. But he didn’t wait for her to answer his question.

He looked at Hester, and said, “I don’t know why they killed her. I don’t know why they came here or what they wanted. But they were looking for her—for a female werewolf. Maybe because she was female, maybe because she was Hester—and maybe because she and Jonesy were up here isolated. They knew too much, our enemy. They knew that Jonesy is fae, though they didn’t have any idea how powerful he is. My da has been worried about the threat Hester and Jonesy represented—maybe he should have been a little worried about how vulnerable they were. If Jonesy hadn’t called us, it would have been months before someone came up to check on them.”

“We need to know if this was an isolated incident, if it was aimed at Hester and Jonesy, only. Or if someone—the moneyman, maybe—is targeting werewolves living in isolation,” Anna said, grateful for something to focus on besides the dead werewolf, the man she’d killed, and Jonesy, whose mate was dead.

“Yes,” Charles told her gravely. “All of that.” He frowned. “I could have captured the last one. He was human. But Brother Wolf—” He looked at Hester’s body and shook his head. “Brother Wolf thought that it was better to make sure they were all dead.”

He raised his chin and looked around them, his head tilted a little as if he could hear something she did not.

“I think we can go now.” Charles rose to his knees and hefted Hester’s body until he had her in a fireman’s carry. He backed out of the underbrush and stood as soon as he could. He waited until Anna was beside him, then started back toward the cabin.

Her mate had grace in the steep terrain, never faltering as he stepped over downed timber or around rocks. He didn’t slip, didn’t make an unintentional noise, while carrying the huge old wolf.

Anna had been raised in suburban Chicago. The closest she’d gotten to mountains were the hills in Wisconsin, where she’d gone to a few summer camps in middle school. In wolf form, she was almost competent. But her human toes liked to stick themselves under tree roots and thunk into rocks, especially when she couldn’t see because stupid tears kept welling up whenever she let her eyes linger on the dead werewolf.

“Should we be worried about Jonesy?” asked Anna. “As we approach the cabin, I mean?”

Charles hesitated, then said, “We should always worry about anyone as old and worn as Jonesy.”

Any other day, Anna would have pursued that not-answer. But she was feeling as though she’d been knocked off her feet and couldn’t quite find her balance, so she let it pass.

But he clarified his answer anyway. “You should probably stick close. As much for me as for you. Leah was right, bringing you was a good idea. It seemed to help Jonesy.”

“How is that?” she asked his back. “I noticed it, too. Usually, I only have that kind of an effect on werewolves.”

“No,” Charles said. “I would have said that you affect werewolves most strongly. But watching Jonesy with you—you affected him as much as you affect any werewolf. It might be because he’s the mate of a wolf. Or some of the fae are shapechangers …”

Anna looked ahead to see what had distracted him. They had just topped a rise, and the trees had thinned, so she could see the valley with Hester and Jonesy’s cabin.

The happy sunflower-looking flowers that had been only in the flower boxes had now popped up all over the valley, not densely, like the poppies in The Wizard of Oz, but in small patches here and there. Maybe she just hadn’t noticed them.

“Are those flowers new?” she asked.

“Yes.”

They were pretty, gathered together like natural bouquets, not elegant enough to be beautiful but sort of homey and lovely. Warm and welcoming. They shouldn’t have caused the dread in her stomach.