Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(39)

Charles and Tag were sitting in the camp chairs on opposite sides of the folding table that held the propane stove. Tag had a beat-up copy of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight in his lap and Charles had his laptop out—but both of them were looking at her with alert wariness. There was quite a bit of tension in the air, and she wondered what she’d done to put that look on their faces. Or maybe there was something else going on.

Her own growing tension had eased at the sight of her mate. Charles was good at making her feel safe.

“Um,” she said. “Good morning?”

“Afternoon,” said Tag politely. As if they’d encountered each other walking opposite directions on a sidewalk—and only knew each other by face.

“That bad?” she asked.

Charles still hadn’t spoken. He watched her, she realized, with wolf eyes.

“Let’s put it this way,” said Tag. “What’s my name?”

“Colin Taggart,” she said.

“Have I ever hurt you?”

Was this a trick question? “No?”

The query in her voice was directed at his question rather than an indication of any doubt about what the answer was. He flinched, and she rolled her eyes.

“Of course not,” she said impatiently. “What’s wrong?”

As soon as she spoke, she realized that she probably could answer part of that question herself. She felt sick, and all she remembered about yesterday was heading out toward Wild Sign. She had a few vague memories that came and went. Mostly they didn’t make sense—a canvas sink, a baby’s skull that somehow wasn’t a baby’s skull, and the inlaid fretboard of a guitar. The fretboard made her sad, though she didn’t know why. Something was definitely wrong with her.

“You sounded all right this morning, too,” Tag told her, sounding ill-used and a bit whiny. His eyes didn’t fit his voice. His eyes were watchful. “And then you ran, making a noise I don’t ever want to hear coming out of your mouth again.” Tag scowled at her. “I don’t like to scare women. I especially don’t like to scare Omegas. I really, really don’t like it when it’s you I’m scaring.”

Well, hell, thought Anna, feeling guilty. All of the wolves were affected by her being Omega. When she was distressed, they reacted badly.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t remember it. I don’t remember quite a lot.” Tag, she thought, wasn’t the only one who sounded whiny.

The headache felt like someone had grabbed her brain just behind her eyes and was digging in with claws. And wiggling the claws.

“Got that,” said Tag. “What do you remember?”

But Anna was watching Charles, who hadn’t said a word since she’d come out of the tent. He folded the computer in his lap with exaggerated care before setting it on the ground. He got to his feet slowly.

She couldn’t tell what he was thinking with his quiet face and gold eyes. There was intent in his motion. She found herself taking a slow step backward, and her heartbeat picked up speed—

—as it had that night she’d run in the pack’s home grounds when Justin led the hunt against her. The guttural sounds of their cries, inhuman sounds coming from human-shaped throats, rang in her ears. Though she knew that was impossible.

Charles stopped moving.

She aborted her instinctive movement to cover her ears—the sound wasn’t real. That was over and done. Why in the world was she dwelling on that particular event now?

She reached for Charles through their bond—and only then realized that it was closed up tight. Maybe that was the reason her thoughts were so muddled. She would feel better if she could feel him; he might drown out the pain that was making it hard to think. She wasn’t good at manipulating their bond, though she’d gotten better.

Visualizations were sometimes useful, so she tried to imagine herself reaching out and unlocking the door that stood between them. She pulled on it and the bond blazed open with a suddenness that she hadn’t expected. As if she’d pulled hard on a swinging door at the same time that Charles was pushing it.

For a disorienting moment, she was seeing herself from his point of view. Her hair was tangled and there were traces of tears down her cheeks. She had a bloody nose again. Her shoulders were hunched in pain. (Well, she wasn’t used to having a hangover any longer. It had been years.) Her pupils were dilated like a drug addict’s, making her brown eyes look black. She looked small and fragile—something she’d never seen when she looked into a mirror.

Charles did something—it certainly hadn’t been her—and their bond settled down to its usual gentle awareness. The weird feeling of perceiving herself from his viewpoint receded. Charles took a deep breath. She realized that he’d even been careful of his breathing, so he didn’t startle her into running.

Which, she noticed, a part of her was still ready to do.

She had a sickening half memory of running through the woods in the dawn light—the path she had taken lay right over Charles’s shoulder. Her awareness, as she had sprinted through the unfamiliar territory, had bounced back and forth between the present moment and that horrible night when she’d become the prey of the pack. That explained why it had come so easily to mind just now—though not why it had done so this morning.

She reached out her hand. Charles stepped forward and took it at once, his warm hand closing around her cold one. The physical touch helped hold off her imminent panic, though she didn’t quite know why she was panicking. When his arms closed around her, her headache faded as well.