Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(38)

“I don’t know,” he told Tag, who was staring at Anna. “I think she’s okay now. She’ll tell us what happened when she’s ready.”

He hoped he was right.

He set her down briefly to secure the pack on Tag’s back. As soon as his hands were off her, she began the change to wolf.

Charles waited. When he sensed that she was absorbed in her transformation, he gestured for Tag to watch Anna. While she completed the change, Charles ran back to the amphitheater and found the recorder. It looked ordinary enough and it felt inert in his hands. He took it anyway. He was back before Anna was aware he’d been gone.

It was a good sign that Anna had decided to change to her wolf, he told himself as she rose, somewhat unsteadily, to her feet. Anna’s wolf was how Anna had survived the hell of the Chicago pack in the first place.

But he didn’t like the way her ears were lowered submissively—his Anna didn’t have a submissive bone in her whole body. The defensive hunch of her body threatened his control of Brother Wolf. Tag wasn’t in a much better state. Anna wasn’t his mate—but Omega wolves were to be cherished.

He put the recorder in Tag’s pack. Then Charles went down on one knee beside Anna.

“Are you okay to travel?” he asked.

She met his eyes, gave an affirmative yip. He could feel her through their bond, a roiling incoherent mess of emotions and adrenaline. Movement, he judged, would help her work through everything.

He changed and headed toward camp.

On the trip back, Tag led and Charles fell behind. Anna didn’t let either of them get too close—but she didn’t range away from them, either. It was probably a very good thing that they didn’t run into any hikers along the way. Charles wasn’t sure that either he or Tag would have been capable of civilized behavior.

They arrived at their camp a little after two in the morning. No one had been near it since they’d left. Charles shifted to human to open the bigger tent—which he and Anna would normally have shared alone—and invited Tag in.

Anna seemed a little lost crouched beside the SUV, well back from either Charles or Tag. Charles knelt down and gestured to her.

She padded toward him, not unwilling, just wary in a way that hurt his heart. It had been a long time since she’d looked at him that way. He put his hands on her gently, but worked them into the fur on her shoulders until he had his skin on hers.

As when she had sat on his lap in the amphitheater, he felt nothing. No magic. She didn’t smell of that strange something from Leah’s past. There was no stain on her spirit that he could see.

He would have been happier about it if he had understood why everything had stopped so suddenly in the amphitheater. Magic didn’t just stop, it dissipated—and that battlefield pall should not have disappeared at all.

He kissed her forehead and released her.

“I’m going to be wolf tonight,” he told her. “I can sleep with Tag and you can go sleep in the other tent. Or you can stay with us.”

She scooted past him, into the bigger tent. He would have felt better if she hadn’t so obviously avoided touching him. He shifted to wolf and stretched across the entrance—which was a foolish thing. It would be as easy for an enemy to cut through the tent side as it would be for them to unzip the opening—easier, probably. If he’d really been worried about an attack in the night, he wouldn’t have slept in the tent at all.

He’d resigned himself to a restless night—and then Anna curled up against his back. When Tag lay down beside her, she gave a little sigh and relaxed for the first time since she’d started playing that recorder.

Charles put his head down and slept.





CHAPTER





6


Anna woke with a splitting headache and a body that felt like it had been run over by a truck.

The last time she’d felt like that had been when she had gone to a party hosted by the first violin at the end of her freshman year at college—hosting that annual party was an unofficial requirement of the position of first chair.

They’d played the “Hi, Bob” game—another time-honored tradition. It consisted of watching The Bob Newhart Show and downing tequila shots every time a character from the show said, “Hi, Bob.” She hadn’t even known what The Bob Newhart Show was before that night. The next year she’d done it with orange juice instead of tequila—and she’d never again been able to look at Bob Newhart without feeling vaguely ill.

But she was a werewolf; she wasn’t supposed to get hangovers. She tried to remember what she’d been doing. They’d gone to Wild Sign . . .

She rubbed her head when the memory wouldn’t come.

Charles would have answers for her. She got up, found clothes to wear, and put them on. She wiped the back of her wrist against her nose and grimaced at the smear of blood. That was pretty weird. Had she been hurt? She felt a little dizzy, and her knees, which had been fine a moment ago, tried to buckle. A sense of urgency started to press down on her. Something was wrong. Or had been wrong. Or possibly would be wrong.

Charles, she reminded herself, her head pounding in time with the beat of her heart. Find Charles. She needed to get out of the stuffy tent so she could breathe. So she could push the panic away.

Anna unzipped the tent and stuck her feet into her shoes, which someone had set next to the tent door. It hadn’t been her, because she’d come into camp as a wolf. She remembered that now. She’d gone to sleep, but she didn’t remember shifting back to human. Given the discomfort of the shift, she found that a little disconcerting—but not as much as losing most of a day.