Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(14)

Only in his own thoughts did Charles use his mother’s name. He thought that was safe, that it wouldn’t call her back from the land of the dead.

“You could not stay,” Charles said softly. “I know.”

Their eyes met—and it was Bran who looked away.

“I was running as wolf in the mountains, the wolf in charge, when I heard the call.”

“A summons?” Charles asked.

Bran shook his head, thought about it a moment, then, unexpectedly, grinned as he nodded. “Yes. I suppose. I have no idea how he knew I was nearby. That was very early on—there were maybe ten werewolves west of the Mississippi. Possibly only two.” He looked at the wall of books behind Charles. “All that territory and there we were with less than twenty miles between us. Sometimes I have to admit I believe in fate.”

He looked at Charles again. “I had decided not to come back for fear of what I would do. Had that wolf not called me . . .”

The room hung in silence for a moment.

“I know,” Charles said.

His da’s wolf was not like Brother Wolf, who reasoned as well as Charles himself did, though sometimes with a wholly different perspective. His da’s wolf would have destroyed the thing that took his mate from him, and his da had been running out of the willpower to stop him. The only option his da had was a final one. “I knew. Brother Wolf told me.”

Bran nodded. “Of course.”

Silence lingered between them. Charles had the feeling his da wanted to say something more but couldn’t find the words. When Bran spoke again, it was to continue the story.

“My wolf spirit and I were battling, the wolf ascendant when I heard my . . . heard him call me.” Bran pounded a closed fist on his chest.

“Heard whom?” Charles asked, though Da had dropped enough hints.

Bran smiled faintly. “Sherwood Post.”

Charles nodded.

“He didn’t call himself that then, of course,” Bran said.

The smile, barely there in the first place, died away. “There wasn’t much left of him when I found him—hide, bones, and determination. He had this girl . . . this woman with him, who was in worse shape. He was half-delirious and mostly incoherent, and it didn’t help matters that I was still more wolf than man. Much of what he said made no sense to me, and so I did not make an effort to remember it.

“More than a hundred people dead, he said. Of those he’d escaped with, the majority were women and children.” Bran shook his head. “He’d somehow managed to kill or subdue whatever was killing them or holding them—though he wasn’t clear on either of those points. I understood it had something to do with music and wild magic. The woman who was dying was the last of the group of people he’d initially managed to save. I found the bodies of the rest later—children, mostly. A couple of babies looked to be very nearly newborn. After all the rest died, when Leah was the last survivor, Sherwood decided that she would live whether she wanted to or not. I think he was probably half-mad by then. He wasn’t a healer like your brother, but he had power. I had the impression that he’d drained himself to the edge of death trying to save the others, and that affected his reason, too. Bereft of other, better choices, he Changed her—and then held her to life with his magic when the Change didn’t seem like it had taken. It was killing him.”

Charles sucked in a breath at the awful parallel. A stranger held to life by magic that was killing someone Bran loved. Just as Charles had killed Blue Jay Woman.

“I am not the mage he was,” Bran said. “Even if the wolf had not been so near, I could not break into the spell he’d worked. I—the wolf I was—determined the only way to save Sherwood was to save the woman also. I needed to form a pack again, to pull one of them into my pack so I could feed them strength.”

Bran had been running without a pack for a long time by that point, Charles knew, since long before he and Samuel had left Europe for the New World. Neither his da nor his brother had ever told him why, and Charles had never asked.

“Sherwood was too far gone, and too bound to the woman. If I tried to make him pack and he chose to fight, and I had reason to believe that he might, he would die.” Bran almost smiled again. “So, for that matter, might I have done. Instead, I performed the blood and flesh exchange with her. With Leah.”

He paused, his eyes on the map in front of him but his mind obviously on that long-ago day. His voice carried a note of wonder Charles was fairly certain his da didn’t know was there.

His voice a bare whisper, Bran murmured, “Of all of those people, she was the last survivor, Charles. When I bound her to my pack, the first of all that pack, I understood why. Her spirit . . . so strong.” He half closed his eyes and breathed in as if he were still in that desperate moment. Under the lowered eyelids, Charles could see the glimmer of gold. “Such determination, so much fight in her.” He let out a breath and smoothed a fold in the map with a flattened palm. “But not, alas, enough strength to allow her to survive without help. And making her pack was not enough. She’d been ill for a long time, and fighting for her life through the Change for several days.”

Surviving the Change was not something one usually did for days—or even hours. In Charles’s experience, the Change from human to werewolf happened in under an hour or it didn’t happen at all. He imagined the agony of it, to be hung suspended in the middle of a Change from human to wolf, neither one nor the other. The confusion would make the pain all that much worse.