Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(41)

The woman I am now would never have had to suffer at the hands of Justin. She told herself that, but she couldn’t believe it. The memory of his teeth in her neck, his smell, his hands on her skin, was too near. Maybe tomorrow she would believe in her ability to fend off Justin.

Charles was watching her, his jaw tense and his eyes yellow.

Today, she decided, she wasn’t going to be afraid of a dead man. She was going to flirt with Charles instead.

She put her index finger in her mouth and met her mate’s eyes as the spicy brilliance of Tag’s sauce filled her mouth. Charles flashed her a sudden grin and turned his back so she couldn’t distract him anymore.

She got up and threw away her paper plate. Tag had done both the cooking and the cleaning for the meal and had returned to his Yeats. He was wearing earbuds with the volume low enough she couldn’t hear it. His head was nodding as he read.

“Anna?” Charles said, turning back to her. “Da wants to hear your side of this.”

“Do you have all your memories back, Anna?” Bran asked. She’d been politely ignoring their conversation until then. She couldn’t help overhearing everything, a condition of being a werewolf, but she felt it was polite to pretend she wasn’t.

“No,” she said. Then paused. “I don’t know, really. I remember most of what happened at Wild Sign, I think. I’m a little foggy from the moment I picked up the recorder until I woke up this afternoon. But the only part I don’t remember at all is this morning. After we got back from Wild Sign, I went to sleep as a wolf. Around six in the morning I apparently shifted from wolf to human, panicked when Charles touched me, and made like a track star through the forest. They caught me, kicking and screaming—we are the only people at this campground, which is probably a good thing.”

She’d been thinking about the noise. But she supposed it might also be good in another way. If there had been another group camping here, they could have been fresh victims for the Singer in the Woods. They had, she’d noticed, all adopted the name that she’d produced in the middle of its attack. She didn’t know how she’d gotten it—one of the things she couldn’t quite remember.

“Do you think the Singer poses a danger for others?” Bran asked. “People near you? Or people near Wild Sign?”

She held off her immediate “How should I know?”

“It hasn’t tried for Charles or Tag,” she said. “So maybe not people near me.” She paused and said slowly, “Or not unless it succeeds in taking me over and can reach out to people through me.”

That felt right. And it led her to another thought. Since she’d been wanting to smack Bran for how he’d forced Leah through her first Change, bonding, and then mating ever since she’d heard the full story, there was a bite in her voice when she said, “I think that you were really lucky Leah is mule-stubborn, Bran Cornick, or your mating could have gone quite differently.”

She didn’t give him time to respond—she wasn’t stupid. Her voice was overly chipper as she continued, “Anyway, at the end of this morning’s chase, Charles says he sent me to sleep with some sneaky magic trick. But I don’t remember that, either.”

“I see,” said Bran. After a brief pause, he said softly, “And I have always known I was lucky in my choice of mate.”

Charles’s eyebrows raised.

“Doesn’t mean that you weren’t a bastard,” Anna said. She probably wouldn’t have said that if they hadn’t been communicating by phone.

“Charles says that after you finished playing the recorder, you didn’t know who he or Tag were.”

Clearly he was done with the topic of the events surrounding his mating. Trust Bran to ignore her rundown on what she didn’t remember and hit exactly where she wished she didn’t remember.

“That’s right,” she said. “Whatever it was, while I was playing, it stuck me right in the middle of the worst moment in my life. In Chicago.” Bran would understand. He knew about Chicago. “It did not feel like a memory and I had the bite marks to prove it.”

“Bite marks?” Bran’s voice stayed calm.

“Justin,” Anna said flatly. “While he was still in human form, he bit my neck, blooding me to excite the pack. That was real. When I found myself standing in that gods-be-damned amphitheater facing Charles and Tag, I thought I’d been teleported from Chicago somehow. I didn’t have a clue who either of them were, where I was, or how I got there. The last thing I remembered was the pack house in Chicago. As if all of my memories between that day in Chicago and the moment in Wild Sign had disappeared.” Her voice was tight.

Charles held out his hand and she grabbed it as if it were a lifeline. It was solid, warm, and strong, and it made her feel as if she could breathe.

“The bite wound on her neck was still bleeding,” Charles growled.

“I see,” Bran said. “I’ve heard of magic that could make your body remember wounds it had suffered, calling that damage from memory into flesh. I don’t remember where, or from whom, and I’ve never seen it myself.” He hesitated. “Not that I remember.” The very old wolves had lots of memories they couldn’t instantly recall. “I’ll make inquiries.”

There was the sound of drumming fingers; Anna presumed they belonged to Bran.