“Run?”
He nodded. “It will do your wolf good to get rid of some of that energy.”
• • •
Kara taught him algebra and science and he taught her how to bed down plants with straw to protect them from the storm. He did not go on that moon hunt, as he had not gone on any since he’d moved from Spain to Montana.
But he shadowed them, making sure she was all right, even as he called himself an old fool: Bran would not allow harm to come to her any more than he would. Devon, who had come one more time to lurk with the roses while Kara taught Asil Montana geography, ran beside him for a mile or two before heading off to go wherever Devon went when he wasn’t in Asil’s greenhouse. Asil should have left as well—Kara was doing fine—but he didn’t. All the self-directed imprecations in the world could not make him go home until she was safely back at the Marrok’s home.
October dawned with a heavy snowstorm and strangers who came to Aspen Creek to be Changed. Asil avoided town. He avoided the Marrok’s house specifically, as the inductees—the Marrok’s word for the humans who wanted to become werewolves, not Asil’s—filled the Marrok’s home to bursting. The wolves and, in some cases, the human relatives who had come to support the inductees, took over the small motel in town.
The Marrok required anyone who wanted to be Changed to come two weeks beforehand. He told them it was so he could make sure they knew what they were getting into. He’d told Asil it was to give Bran one last chance to talk them out of it.
Asil wasn’t worried about how his wolf would react to all the strangers—not this year. But too many of the humans would die rather than be Changed as they wished, and their loved ones who came here with them would grieve. He had had enough grief and mourning, even secondhand, to last a thousand lifetimes.
Avoiding town meant driving to Missoula to resupply—which wasn’t a bad thing as Missoula had real grocery stores, bookstores, and restaurants. He ate lunch at his favorite Indian-vegan restaurant because the food was good and because it amused him—an ancient werewolf eating New Age vegan. And it was petty of him, but one of the waitresses was terrified of him and another one was vaguely disapproving—as if she could smell the meat on his breath. He enjoyed both reactions. He always made a point of leaving a big tip.
The roads were icy, but he was a good driver. Werewolves have very good reflexes, and he’d had years to perfect his ability to drive in the snow. He got home before dark. Once he’d unloaded and stored the results of his shopping trip, he went out to his greenhouse to play. Work. The challenge of growing things in this climate was invigorating—and expensive. He enjoyed the first and had no issues with the latter. He’d been poor—any number of times—but not in the last five hundred years.
He was repotting an African violet when someone scratched at the greenhouse door and whined. He opened the door and let Kara’s wolf in. She was wet and shivering, but not with the cold. Her eyes were miserable, and she whined at him piteously.
He’d never seen her take her wolf’s shape when it hadn’t been forced upon her by the moon’s call. Just last week, he’d suggested that the Marrok encourage her to do so because she wasn’t having much luck controlling her wolf without a more dominant wolf around. But the moon’s call made the wolf more difficult to deal with. Maybe she would have better results if she tried when the moon was in hiding.
“I told her that,” Bran had responded. “We’ve been trying to get her to attempt a change, but unless the moon forces her, she won’t do it.”
“You can make her do it,” Asil had told him.
Here, he thought, kneeling down to pull the pitiful, half-grown wolf against the warmth of his body, is the result of your meddling.
“Can’t change back?” he asked.
She moaned at him and shivered again. Partly, he thought, it had worked. It wasn’t a wolf who was looking up at him with such misery. Kara was in charge.
“No worries,” he told her. “You can do it.” He could force her change, and he would if he had to. But a forced change—like what the Marrok had done—hurt even worse than when the moon called the wolf from human shape. Better if she managed it herself.
He coaxed her into his rose room, where the sweet scent of his mate’s favorite flower filled the air with memories, and sat on the dirt floor with his back to the foot-high stone wall that edged his raised rosebush beds.
He patted the ground beside him, and she curled up in a miserable ball, wiggling and restless until finally she put her muzzle on his leg and sighed. He put a hand on her back and sang to her.
He didn’t have the Marrok’s voice—at various times Bran Cornick had made his living as a bard—but he could carry a tune. He crooned a child’s lullaby his father had sung to him. It wasn’t Spanish, but African, a Moorish tune his father had learned from his grandmother. Like Asil, it was old and worn, the words in a language that no one, to his knowledge, had spoken for a thousand years. Even he had forgotten what the words meant, but the song was for children. Its intent was to let them know that it was the job of adults to keep the young ones safe from harm. When he was finished with the song, he switched to stories he had told his own children; maybe she’d heard them from her parents in happier times.
She relaxed against him—and he thought she was more than half-asleep. But she was still caught in wolf form. Instead of letting her scare herself again, he coaxed her wolf to let the girl back out. It was still a use of force, of the dominance of his wolf over hers, but it wasn’t brutal or abrupt.
When she began changing back, he slid out from under her and quit touching her because he didn’t want to hurt her—and touching something made the shift hurt more. Quietly, because she was caught up in the change, he slipped out to his house to gather sweats for her to change into. It took her the better part of a half hour to emerge from the rose room garbed in clothes that were much too big for her.
“Thank you,” she told him, eyes averted. “I couldn’t change back. He called me to his study, made me change, then pushed me outside. Told me to come home in my human skin. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t change back.”
“Miss Kara,” he said after weighing his words. Not from him would she get any criticism of the Marrok, especially when he’d suggested it to Bran in the first place. There was no reason for him to be angry with Bran—though he was. “My greenhouse is flattered to have been your refuge from the storm.”