Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(81)

She started off toward where her trail and the track the SUV was taking would intersect. As she approached her chosen vantage point, she was still debating whether or not to approach Charles. She closed her eyes as the SUV came over a rise, shining bright lights that would ruin her night vision. But the track dropped right afterward.

As soon as the lights dimmed, she opened her eyes in time to get a good look inside the cab.

She’d expected to see Charles driving, because Tag would already have wrecked on that track, and Anna would be creeping along at a quarter of the speed the SUV was making. But the face that the dash lights illuminated behind the wheel belonged to none of them.

She froze in her tracks, her eyes briefly meeting Anna’s before the SUV’s direction made it impossible to see anything inside the vehicle.

She heard herself whine, though it wasn’t an intentional sound.

She had seen the face of the driver—and she knew that the man it belonged to was nearly two hundred years dead. There was something scratching in the memories she no longer had.

She took a deep breath and cut across country to the location that she could not have pinpointed on a map but her wolf had no trouble pointing her nose toward. That would be where he was taking her.

Where her father had taken her.

Where she had been summoned to return to. Where he waited. This chapter in her life would finally have a proper ending. She wasn’t sure if the thought terrified her or left her exulted.



* * *



*

    TAG WOKE FOR what felt like the hundredth time that night. He had slept fine out in the woods, but it had been a long, long while since he’d tried to sleep in a hotel next to a highway. Or anywhere the sound of a car was more than an occasional irritant, for that matter.

He rearranged his pillow in preparation to go back to sleep, but unease raised the hairs on the back of his neck and he reconsidered.

There was an odd feeling to this waking. As if he’d been very deeply asleep when the rumble of the semi’s engine had broken into his slumber. He didn’t sleep that deeply unless he was in his own home, and seldom even there. He would never have surrendered his defenses in a strange hotel room next to a weird-ass hoard of grimoires.

He inhaled and caught a trace of magic that seemed to him to be oozing through the wall—the connecting wall between his room and the room where the grimoires ruled. That was a little weird.

They all knew, the pack, that Charles could use magic when it suited him. Though not a one of them had the cheek to ask him about it. His didn’t smell like witchcraft—and this didn’t, either.

Tag was positive that it wasn’t coming from the grimoires. That left Charles. Maybe he’d worked some magic to allow Anna to sleep without nightmares. Strange that it had seeped through the grimoires’ hotel room and into Tag’s, though. Charles usually had better control than that.

The magic made him restless. He was not inclined to try to sleep when someone was trying to make him sleep—even if the magic had not been aimed at him. He got up and dressed, feeling like a cat with its hair brushed backward. It was probably the result of resisting the spell, but it left him unhappy.

He was going to give Charles a bad time for not having better control of his magic. He snorted, aware that the chances of that actually happening were slight. He was more at ease with the Marrok’s son than he’d ever been. With Anna around, the bastard was darn near human. But Tag wasn’t stupid enough to tug that tail anyway.

Not unless he got in a mood.

Getting in a mood was how he’d ended up in Bran Cornick’s pack for the Disorderly and Dangerous in the first place. His last pack had annoyed him . . . he didn’t remember exactly what they’d done, something that had set off his inner berserker. But unusually (it was thankfully the only occasion his berserker had acted this way), it hadn’t ever ratcheted up to killing-spree level, not quite. Instead, the mood had hung around for days. Maybe weeks. Time did funny things when his berserker was out.

He remembered challenging the first wolf who annoyed him—and killing him. And another. And another. Until he was going to have to make up his mind if he wanted to be Alpha pretty damn soon—if there were any more wolves left to rule. He’d killed seven wolves. He had disliked all but one of them, and he still felt guilty about that one.

And then Charles had come and told him to stand down. Tag had tried to eat his face instead—and found himself in the battle of his life. And Charles did not let him land a blow with his (mighty) claws or close his jaws on anything but air. He just put him down and pinned him over and over. Eventually Tag had sweated out whatever had been keeping him at a fever pitch, and when that happened, he’d been so tired he hadn’t gotten up again when Charles released him.

When Tag had woken up, Bran had been there with an offer of sanctuary. Bran had even engineered the move of Tag’s family, a few of the descendants of his sister’s children’s children. The caveat was that he would have to stay in pack territory unless he had permission to be elsewhere. He’d found that acceptable. A relief even, because what if after he’d finished the nasty pack of dishonorable werewolves, he moved on to killing innocents?

That could not happen in the Marrok’s pack. Because Charles was in the pack, and Charles had been the demon who had taken on his berserker wolf and pinned him as if he were a child. No one else had ever defeated Tag when his berserker had the upper hand. He’d seen Charles fight now and again over the years—and he knew something that most people did not. In most fights, that old wolf didn’t even break a sweat.