Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(15)

“I think if I had been less broken,” Bran said, “or less moonstruck, I would have made other choices, but I cannot know that. I could simply have let her die. I could have helped her along. Sherwood would have died, too—but that was a choice he had made.”

His voice trailed off and his body went very still. “I have done a lot of things I am ashamed of,” Bran said. “This was not the worst.”

“You bound her as your mate,” said Charles, who had seen where this was leading—had grown up with the result of that decision. “But you couldn’t have done it without her consent.”

He knew that, remembered the tension of waiting to see if Anna would accept him. A person could be forced into the Change. Could be forced into a pack. But the mating bond could not be forced—it required acceptance by both parties.

“Could I not?” asked Bran, his mouth twisting. “She had been forcibly Changed, left in agony, then forcibly bound to a pack. I don’t think she was capable of giving consent.”

Bran shrugged his shoulders as if he were trying to shed some burden. “I knew it then, and I know it now. I am not proud of what I did. I bound her wolf to mine by force. She was dying. She was dying and taking Sherwood with her.” He met Charles’s eyes. “I could not bear it, not after Blue Jay Woman. My wolf spirit was looking for surcease, and Leah’s was trying to survive.” He paused, then said, “I do not regret taking Leah as my mate, only that I did it without giving her an alternative.”

Charles gave him a formal nod, though both of them could hear the lie in Bran’s voice. Leah was not Blue Jay Woman, who had been fierce—but from all accounts also brilliant and charming. Leah was cold and methodical.

Charles remembered the cold-eyed, brittle woman his da had brought home and thought of her, for perhaps the first time, from his adult perspective instead of the perspective of the child he had been. He considered that woman now in the light of his da’s revelations—a survivor. A victim. Not a jealous woman, perhaps, so much as a broken one. He could see it. No wonder his da had been so protective of her; guilt could drive a person harder than love.

“As soon as the mate bond fell into place . . .” Bran hesitated only a bare moment and continued, “Sherwood’s magic fell away and I was able to pull her all the way into the Change. They both survived.”

Bran took up a pencil and touched it to the map at the edge of the silver line marking Leah’s lands. “I think they were somewhere in here when I came upon them. It was a clearing on the shoulder of a mountain. Sherwood didn’t tell me much, but I got the impression he had dragged his little group of survivors as far as they could travel before stopping.

“We buried the dead while Leah recovered enough to travel.” He hesitated. “She never said, but I am quite sure one of the children we buried was hers. After the first day, after Sherwood recovered his senses, he would not say a word about what he had fought, about why he worried when Leah sang. He told me only that it was dangerous to speak of. I believed him, believe him still. Leah told me once that she remembers that time in her life in snapshots of memories.” He paused. “She remembers some faces, a few moments. But nothing concrete. She thinks Sherwood made her forget.”

“And now something is happening and we can’t ask Sherwood,” said Charles. “Because Sherwood doesn’t remember anything before the day the Emerald City Pack found him in the witch’s cage, and Leah doesn’t remember anything because of Sherwood.”

“And I can’t send him with you because he belongs to Hauptman now,” agreed Bran. “Though I’ve got half a mind to make him go anyway. Maybe something about the trip would jog his memory loose.”

His da, Charles believed, thought Sherwood’s amnesia was something he could have overcome if Sherwood had been willing to try to remember who and what he had been. Charles wasn’t so sure—he’d been there when they’d dragged him out of the silver cage, more skin and bones than flesh. Da had known the old wolf longer, but Charles thought that might be giving his da unrealistic expectations.

Bran had finally had it out with Sherwood one night behind the closed doors of his study. Charles didn’t know what had happened there, but magic had leaked from the room and a dark voice that did not belong to his da spoke in tones that rattled the bones of the house, though no one who heard it could understand what it said.

The next day, Da had given the old wolf a new name: Sherwood Post, a name he’d claimed to have taken at random from a pair of books he’d had on his desk. Charles thought it was more calculated than that; he hadn’t even known his da had a copy of Emily Post’s book in his library. Bran had then forbidden any of his wolves who had known Sherwood before from speaking the wolf’s old name. There hadn’t been very many of them—the old Sherwood Post hadn’t sought out werewolf company, and when he had, he’d often used names other than his own.

“I’m not sending you alone,” Bran said. “I spoke to Tag, told him the pertinent parts of this story, and he has agreed to go.”

“Tag,” Charles said warily. Taking the berserker out in public was a risk.

Bran nodded. “Sherwood Post almost died. He thought he’d defeated it—I know this because he never went back, and he would have. But if he’d been sure, he wouldn’t have worried about telling the story of what he’d faced. I need to send you with backup.”