Cry Wolf (Alpha & Omega #1)(41)

That was it. He could almost pull the strings together. Anna's wolf wasn't violent...just strong and protective. How had Anna's adjustment to being a werewolf-and to her systematic abuse-affected the wolf?

Thinking aloud, Charles said, "Pain makes a dominant more violent while it does just the opposite to a submissive wolf. What happens to an Omega who is tortured?" If he'd been thinking of Asil rather than Anna, he would never have put it in those terms.

The Moor's face paled and his scent fluctuated wildly. He surged to his feet, knocking over his chair and sending the table spinning until it hit the far wall and crashed onto its side.

Charles rose slowly and set his teacup on the counter nearest him. "My apologies, Asil. I did not mean to remind you of things best forgotten."

Asil stood for a moment more, on the verge of attack, then all the taut muscles went lax, and he looked tired to the depths of his soul. Without a word he left the room.

Charles rinsed out his cup and turned it upside down in the sink. He was not usually so careless. Asil's mate had died, tortured to death by a witch who used her pain and death to gain power. For all that he found Asil irritating-especially his latest and most effective method of torment: Anna-he'd never deliberately use Asil's mate's death to torment him. But more apologies would accomplish nothing.

He muttered a soft plea for blessing upon the house, as his mother's brother had taught him, and left.

* * * *

Anna was glad Charles drove this time. The icy roads gave him no apparent concern, though they slid around enough that she dug her nails into the handle conveniently located above the window of her door.

He hadn't said much to her this morning after he'd returned from consulting with the forest ranger. His eyes were distant, as if the teasing, gentle man she'd woken up with was gone.

Her fault.

She hadn't expected to feel so much after she'd sent her wolf to sleep while she showered. They both needed the break after maintaining that fine balance, and she had just expected that the wolf would take that gut-wrenching need with her. Anna had never felt like that for any man-and it was both embarrassing and scary.

She'd showered for a long time, but it didn't go away. She might have been all right if it hadn't been for his playfulness this morning...but she doubted it. Feeling that strongly left you so very vulnerable, and she was afraid she couldn't keep it from her face.

When she had to leave the shower, she'd been so worried about not letting him know how she felt she hadn't noticed how her awkward shyness...and fear...had affected him. He'd come up with his own conclusions-all the wrong ones, she was afraid.

She glanced at his closed-off face. She had no idea how to fix this. The motion brought her face closer to her borrowed clothing. She lifted her arm and sniffed the sleeve of the shirt she wore and wrinkled her nose.

She didn't think he'd taken his eyes off the road, but he said, "You don't stink."

"It's just weird to smell human," she told him. "You don't think much about what you smell like until it changes."

Before they'd left, he'd taken the clothes that Tag had brought over and had her put on the dirty T-shirt and donned a similarly dirty sweatshirt. Then he'd run his hands over her in a manner not quite impersonal, chanting in a language she'd never heard before, at once nasal and musical. When he was finished, she smelled like the human woman whose shirt she was borrowing, and he smelled like a human man.

He had a little magic, he'd told her, gifts inherited from his mother. She wondered what else he could do, but it felt impolite to ask. She'd never been around anyone who could actually work magic before, and it left her a little more in awe of him than she already was. The Chicago pack had stories about magic-using people, but she'd never paid much attention to them; she'd had more than enough to deal with just being a werewolf.

She fanned her fingers out on her thigh and stretched them.

"Quit worrying," Charles told her, his voice gentle enough, but without the inflection that meant he was talking to her, not someone he'd just picked up off the street. She'd just realized this morning that he'd been talking to her differently-because he stopped.

The snow-covered mountains, taller than the Sears Tower, rose on either side of the road, as cold and solid as the man beside her. She wondered if it was his business face she was dealing with. Maybe he locked down everything in preparation for killing someone he didn't know in order to protect his pack-maybe it wasn't her fault.

* * * *

She was uncomfortable and frightened-and trying to hide it. Asil had told him that everyone was frightened of him. He wished he knew what he could say to fix it. To fix something, anything.

After leaving Asil's, he'd turned the problem over in his head-problems, really, though he was starting to believe that they were two aspects of the same issue. The first was her fear of him this morning-or maybe fear of what they'd done with so much pleasure the night before. He had enough experience to ensure that she had enjoyed it. It hadn't seemed to bother her until she went to the shower. Since there were no monsters lurking in his house (besides him), he was pretty sure that it was something in Anna that had changed.

One of the danger signs they watched for in a new werewolf was a sudden change in personality or mood that seemed to have no obvious cause, an indication that the beast was gaining control of the human. If Anna hadn't been three years a werewolf and Omega besides, he'd have thought her beast was taking control.