Burn Bright (Alpha & Omega #5)(86)

Anna wasn’t going to say anything, but her mouth said, “She called you Charlie.” It had bothered her—that another woman had a pet name for Anna’s mate. She hadn’t realized how much it bothered her until she said it out loud.

Charles put down his fork and nodded. “She had a bruise that covered most of her face when Da introduced us. She was terrified and half-starved—which is why the bruise was still there. I let it go—and she continued to use the name. I thought at the time that it was a prod—a check to see if we were as bad as her first pack. If we would hit her for not following the rules.”

“And now?” Anna asked.

He shook his head and started eating his steak again. “That might still have been the case. She was brutalized—no question about that. Even if she volunteered … and I don’t think a skinwalker asks for volunteers any more than any other witch who uses black magic does.”

Anna thought about that for a while. “So maybe she didn’t want to betray us.”

“Anna,” Charles said in a gentle voice, “she was here for twenty years. She could have come to my father for help at any time. She gave Hester, Jonesy, and Jericho to the skinwalker.”

“And then there was Devon,” Anna said.

They had found Devon’s body when they returned to the cars. Evidently, he’d decided to go stop her. She’d killed him as painfully as she could manage without delaying too long. The Sage that she had known would never have done that.

“There never was a Sage,” Anna told him.

He put his hand on her knee and kept eating.

He was healing as she watched him. Bruises fading, cuts mending themselves.

“It almost killed you,” she said. And she hadn’t meant to say that either. She tried to lighten the stark terror she heard in her voice with a little humor. “No more fighting bears for you.”

He set down his fork and squeezed her knee. “I killed it,” he told her. “It was dead and rotting when I turned my back. It used magic to conceal itself, or it would never have taken me by surprise.”

“No more fighting dead things,” she said, but her voice wobbled on the last word.

He reached for her—and she crawled on his lap, burrowing into his arms. He rested his chin on the top of her head.

“I will probably have gray hairs tomorrow from the moment when I saw you throwing rocks at the bear,” he told her. “No more throwing rocks at bears for you.”

Eventually, she slid back into her seat, and they both ate some more. When neither of them could eat another bite, she left the mess in the kitchen and they leaned on each other all the way to their bedroom.

In the darkness, while he slept, she cried silently on his shoulder—tears that she would never have allowed herself had he been awake. He worried too much over her tears. But in the darkness of their room, surrounded by his warmth and his scent, it seemed the proper time for tears.

They could have lost him today. She wondered if the skinwalker had taken him, would she have noticed. Would she have, like his grandfather’s uncle, lived for months without understanding that Charles was dead?

Skinwalker, the Old Medicine Man’s voice rolled through her head. Though she didn’t think he’d ever used that word in the … in the vision that Brother Wolf had sent her.

She cried because she didn’t know what else to do with the roil of fear and just-missed grief that was bound up in the thought of what the skinwalker could have done.

And when she was done with that, she cried for the woman she had thought was her friend. Thinking back over all the time she’d known Sage, Anna couldn’t decide if Sage had been very good at deception or just very good at avoiding things that were lies. Maybe Charles would know. Maybe it didn’t matter anymore.

She cried for Asil. For the romance with Sage that had been something else and for the friend that he had lost.

When they had found Devon, Asil went very still. He picked up Devon’s body without a word. He laid the bloody mess on the leather of the backseat of his Mercedes without any hesitation. Then he’d sat in the back with Devon’s head on his lap. He had not protested when Anna got in the driver’s seat, with Charles taking shotgun.

They had taken both of them, Asil and Devon’s body, to Bran’s house, where the rest of the pack would take care of them. Then she and Charles had gotten into Bran’s car and driven home.

Anna cried for Devon, too, though she hadn’t known him well. She’d never seen his human form—only known him through the stories of others. Asil had liked and respected him—and goodness knew Asil didn’t respect very many people on the planet. Bran. The mysteriously amnesiac Sherwood Post. She couldn’t think of anyone else offhand.

Jericho, the real Jericho, she had never met. Charles said that he was pretty sure that he’d been taken the same time all of the enemy soldiers had died. Hard to tell if those men had been killed by Jericho or by the skinwalker, to draw Charles to Jericho’s home. She thought that they would probably never know for sure.

Hester, Jonesy, Jericho, and Devon—they’d lost so many in a very short time. Anna put her ear to Charles’s chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart.

Suddenly, every muscle in his body tensed, and he sat up. He gave her a wide-eyed look. It seemed like an overreaction to her tears.