“I’ve never seen anything like that, either.” He hesitated at the door. “She’ll be okay?”
Charles nodded. “For tonight, all is as it should be.”
He’d left then. She’d turned out the lights and Charles changed into Brother Wolf’s form, settling himself by her feet and keeping them warm with his dense fur. She knitted for a while; her eyes were good enough for it even in the dark. Eventually she must have fallen asleep.
Charles stirred, standing up and stretching.
“I hear them,” Anna assured him, because the sounds of someone getting serious in the kitchen was what had awakened her in the first place. She checked Chelsea, but the new wolf was sleeping deeply.
“Is it safe to leave her long enough to change and freshen up?” she asked Charles.
In answer he led the way out of the room and up to their own. While she showered, he changed and dressed in his preferred fashion statement of battered jeans and bright-colored T-shirt. This one was pumpkin orange and clung to his bone and sinew and made her want to pet him.
Instead she braided her damp hair and dressed herself.
“Wear something comfortable,” Charles told her. “We’ll probably go out to the barns again this morning.”
They walked into the kitchen just as Ernestine put a tray piled high with bacon on the table. Kage, his three kids, and a stranger were already seated at the table.
“Good,” said Ernestine. “I was about to send Max to find you and see if you wanted to come down. You can sit where the clean place settings are.”
“Good morning,” said Kage. “This is Hosteen’s second, Wade Koch. Hosteen brought him in to help with Chelsea. Wade, this is Charles and Anna Cornick.”
“I know Charles,” Wade said. “I’m pleased to meet you, Anna. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
He was a soft-spoken man, neither tall nor short. His eyes were intense when he looked at her.
“Wade,” said Charles, his tone of voice telling Anna that he liked this man.
“I’m going to call Chelsea’s work this morning,” Kage said. “Do you know how long it will take before she’s ready to go back to work?”
Charles shook his head. “That depends on her, and how stressful her work is. Not this week, but maybe next week.” He hesitated. “I’d keep all the kids around here for a week or so. Not because of Chelsea, but because whoever bespelled her in the first place is still out there.”
“That work okay for you and school, Max?” asked Kage.
Max nodded, swallowed, and then said, “I was going to stay home for the first few days of the show anyway. It’s only another couple of days on top of that. Most of my teachers post their assignments on the computer. You’ll have to call it in for me, though.”
“Okay,” said Kage. “I’ll make the calls, and then if you’d like, we can go out and try a few more horses.”
“Where’s Hosteen?” asked Charles.
“That man got up about two hours ago, saddled a horse, and rode off into the desert,” said Ernestine. “He told me he had some thinking to do.” She looked at Charles. “He said you were to keep his family safe until he got back.”
“He did, did he?” said Charles softly.
Ernestine had been walking toward the table. She stopped.
“Do you remember exactly what Hosteen said?” asked Kage.
“He said that the family would be safe with Charles here,” she said slowly. “He told me to ask you to keep an eye out for them.”
Charles nodded. “That’s fine.” He went back to eating.
Ernestine gave him a cautious look that he didn’t see. Anna smiled at her. “This is very good,” she said. “I don’t know when Chelsea will get up, but she’ll be hungry again. It might be a good idea to put together some food for her. Well-fed werewolves are easier to deal with than hungry ones.”
Anna rode three more horses. Her favorite of the morning was a quick-moving gelding named Ahmose who had a long scar down the length of his shoulder.
When Anna, Charles, and Kage, sweaty and smelling like horses, got back to the house, Chelsea was sitting at the table and eating ravenously. She looked up when they came in.
“Hey,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about yesterday. I felt just fine driving to the day care. But by the time I was belting the kids into the car, I had a killer headache. I don’t get headaches as a rule, and it seems to me that it was part of the whole compulsion that eventually pushed me to try to hurt the kids.”
“You are witchborn,” said Charles. “Trust your instincts. It happened at the day care?”
“Yes.”
“There’ve been some other bad things happening at the day care lately,” Anna said. “I had a long talk with Max about it yesterday. He said that they had a teacher commit suicide. And they also had a family killed in a car wreck.”
Chelsea nodded. “People do commit suicide, and they die in traffic accidents, but I am not naturally inclined to kill my children and then myself. If one of those was a spell, maybe all of them were?”
“I think,” said Charles, “that Anna and I will go visit the day care. If there is a fae there, one of us should be able to figure out who it is.”
“Should be?” asked Kage.
“This fae is strong,” Charles answered. “A powerful fae can disguise itself from a werewolf.”
“I’ll stay here,” Wade said. “I’ve taken the next few days off work.”
CHAPTER
7
There were kids everywhere. Kids slid down miniaturized slides and climbed plastic play forts in bright colors, and a few plastic play forts in dull, sun-bleached colors. Kids in sandpits dug with plastic shovels or threw sand on one another. One little boy in jeans and a pale blue T-shirt was running as fast as he could as two little girls chased him with death on their faces. Anna hoped he could run fast or he was in for it.
Adults fluttered among the chaos of children. Some of them brought order with them like the best Alphas did. Some of them elicited excitement and happiness. Some of them made the kids scatter before them like chickens in front of a fox.
She left her hand on her husband’s arm, feeling the tension in him, knowing it was her fault. She would never do anything to harm her husband in any way—not on purpose.
Yet she was unwilling to sit around and wait a hundred years for the opportunity to have children. It wasn’t impatience, no matter what Charles thought. Werewolves could live forever, but on average lived far shorter lives than their human originally could have expected to.
Charles did not live quietly. More even than the Marrok, he lived with a target painted on his chest. As the werewolves crept further out of the shadows and into the daily lives of ordinary people, the list of his enemies increased.
Anna hadn’t died the day she’d been involuntarily Changed, had in fact been made less mortal rather than more. But she had lost her old self as surely as if she had died, and it had taught her not to be complacent. She was not impatient, but she no longer trusted life to be good. She had become more conscious, not less, that people died: that she might die, that Charles might die. Death was real to her in a way that it had never been real when she had been human.
She was a long way from defeated. His arguments that any child of his would be a target were unassailable. Within the supernatural community, Charles, as the Marrok’s son and hatchet man, was very well-known. Eventually even the humans would know about him. Any child of his would be perceived as a weakness. She could not argue that point, but she did not feel as though that necessitated refusing to have a child.
His other stated objection, that there was no current possibility for them to conceive, was more open to argument. She didn’t want to argue with him, shouldn’t have to argue with him. She’d thought that he’d been willing to listen to the possibilities.
The key, she thought, was to pick through her husband’s complicated and mostly unspoken issues with children or with his own children or being a father. She didn’t know exactly where his absolute refusal was finding its power. When she found something real, she’d work at the knot of his resistance until she had it unraveled. Then she would go back to the next tangle and do the same thing.