Hunting Ground (Alpha & Omega #2)(14)

Charles took the package he'd brought and handed it to Dana.

Dana's eyebrows rose. "Butcher paper and twine?"

He shrugged. "Da gave it to me that way."

The fae shook her head and opened a drawer in a bird's-eye maple desk and pulled out a pair of delicate sterling silver scissors. Setting the package on the desktop, she cut the string and opened it.

And the alien thing Anna had glimpsed earlier was back in full measure. Dana didn't move, didn't so much as blink, but the portent of... something filled the space they were in. Every muscle, every hair on Anna's body warned her to run.

She looked at Charles. His attention was on the fae, but he wasn't alarmed. Did he not feel it? Or was he so confident that Dana's threat was something he could handle? But his calm helped Anna regain hers. She waited to see what had caused such a strong reaction.

Even before Dana had opened the package, it'd been obvious that a painting was inside. It wasn't large. Ten inches by twelve, maybe, framed in oak a couple of shades darker than the desk's maple, a waterscape of some sort.

"Da said to tell you it was what he remembered," Charles said. "That he might have gotten some of the details a little wrong, but he thought not."

"I didn't know the Marrok painted." Dana's voice was... deeper somehow. Rich and hoary with age. Her hands trembled as she touched the painting. The fae's power that Anna had felt so strongly just a few moments ago was gone as if it had never been.

"He doesn't." Charles shook his head. "But we have an artist in our pack, and he has a gift for painting other people's words-and my father is very good with words."

"I didn't know your father was ever there." The fae sounded... lost.

Charles shrugged. "You know how Da is. No one notices him unless he intends it. And he is a bard. He goes everywhere."

Dana lifted her head, and her eyes were puffy, her nose red, though no tears fell down her cheeks. She looked very human. "How did he know?"

Charles lifted both of his hands. "Who knows how my da figures out anything. He thought it would please you."

She looked at it again, and Anna couldn't tell if she was pleased or not-overcome, certainly. Shocked. "My home. It is long gone. Destroyed by magic and geology, the spring dried up centuries ago. The site it occupied is a city street that bears the name of a hundred other streets in a hundred other cities. I thought all memory of it was lost." She touched the painting the way Anna touched Charles: lightly, cautious of pain but unable to resist the draw of it.

She tipped it so they both could see it better. The side of a lake, Anna thought. A deep lake to catch the color of the sky and darken the blue to a near black. The artwork was plainer than the painting Dana had been working on, and the canvas much smaller. But in simple brushstrokes, the artist had captured an unworldly quality that made the small picture a window into a foreign place. A place that held no welcome for Anna-but somehow it matched the alien look she'd glimpsed in Dana's eyes.

"Tell your father," Dana said, returning her attention to the painting, "that I will see if I can return a gift of equal value to him. And my apologies if I don't."

"WELL," said Anna, once they were safely on their way.

"That was... unsettling."

"You didn't like her?"

She looked at him, then turned her attention back to the road. When the fae's spell had brushed her, Anna had wanted to like her, to fawn at her feet and wait for crumbs of kindness. The rest of the time she'd wanted to kill the fae for flirting with Charles-for having slept with him.

She wanted to crawl in a dark hole so that she never bothered Brother Wolf with her presence again-which she knew was stupid. He hadn't been rejecting her. Not really. But there had been such... dismissal in his admonition. His attention had been on Dana.

Dana who was fae, a Gray Lord, confident and powerful. Not a twenty-three-year-old woman with half an education who didn't even know, after three years of being one, a quarter of what she should know about being a werewolf. She was no fit match for Charles.

None of which she could talk to Charles about without sounding like a stupid twit-a complicated, high-maintenance, stupid twit. Fortunately she could answer his question without betraying what really bothered her about visiting the fae.

"In Chicago, at the Brookfield Zoo, they have a reptile house. I took a school tour of it once, when I was a kid. They have a green mamba. It's the most beautiful snake I've ever seen; not flashy, just this... indescribable shade of green-and so poisonous that if someone gets bitten by it, there's usually no time to administer antivenin."

"You think she's beautiful?" He considered it. "Interesting looking, I would say, but not beautiful. Few of the fae are beautiful with their glamour on. Beauty doesn't blend in very well. And the fae, like us, spent a long time learning to hide in plain sight."

Anna stared ahead. "She's beautiful. Distinctive. In a room of movie stars, everyone would look at her first."

He was watching her intently; she could feel it even if her eyes were busy with the traffic.

"That's dominance," he said. "Not beauty."

"No?" She passed a couple of boys in a Ferrari, and they took offense, roaring up behind her until they were so close she could tell that one of the pair should have shaved better.