Cry Wolf

It fit, Charles thought, though it added complications to just what the other werewolf was. Only another werewolf could infect a human. But he was certain that the beast’s tracks stopped as soon as it would have been out of sight.

The sound of Charles’s voice was enough to make the man jerk his gaze away from A

“I was going to let him die. The student, I mean,” the other man said, confirming Charles’s theory about who he was. “There was a storm coming, and it’d probably have killed him if he’d been in the wild when it hit. The mountains here demand respect, or they’ll have you for lunch.” He paused. “There’s a storm coming soon.”

“So why didn’t you let the werewolf kill him?” A

“Well, ma’am,” said the man, staring at his feet rather than looking at A

“But the werewolf didn’t belong here,” said Charles, with a sudden inkling about why this wolf was so hard to sense and why he’d received no warning of his attack. From the clothes he wore, he looked as though he’d been living here a very long time.

“It is evil. And it turned me into a monster, too, just like it is,” the man whispered.

If Charles had been a split second faster, he could have kept A

Charles forced himself to stillness as the other man caught his mate by an elbow and saved her from sliding down the mountainside. He was almost certain this man was no threat to her. Charles managed to convince Brother Wolf to stand down and give A

“Oh, you aren’t evil,” A

The man froze, one hand still on her sleeve. Then the words poured out of him as if he couldn’t stop them. “I know about evil. I fought with it and against it until blood ran like the rain. I still see their faces and hear their screams as if it were happening now, and not nearly forty years ago.” But the tightness in his voice lightened as he spoke.

He released his hold on A

He’d moved too fast, though, and Brother Wolf had had enough. As quick as thought, with complete disregard to his injuries, Charles was beside A

“She is a wolf-tamer,” Charles told the other man. Even A

“A

“Walter. Walter Rice.” Ignoring Charles as if he was no threat at all, Walter closed his eyes and swayed a little on his knees in the snow. “I haven’t felt like this since…since before the war, I think. I could sleep. I think I could sleep forever without dreaming.”

Charles held out his hand. “Why don’t you come eat with us first.”

Walter hesitated and took another good long look at A

The man who introduced himself as Walter ate as if he were half-starved-maybe he was. Every once in a while, though, he’d stop eating to look at A

Sitting between them, Charles repressed a smile-which was something he was doing more often than he ever remembered since he’d found his A

“It’s not as if it’s anything I’m doing,” she muttered into her stew with carrots. “I didn’t ask to be an Omega. It’s like having brown hair.”

She was wrong, but he thought she was embarrassed enough right now without him arguing with her over something he wasn’t entirely sure he was supposed to have heard. Or at least she was mostly wrong. Like dominance, being an Omega was mostly personality. And, as his father liked to say, identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.

A

A man made himself Alpha, it wasn’t just an accident of birth. The same was true of Omegas.

“Once,” said Walter quietly, pausing in his eating, “just after a very bad week, I spent an afternoon camped up in a tree in the jungle, watching a village. I can’t remember now if we were supposed to be protecting them or spying on them. This girl came out to hang her wash right under my tree. She was eighteen or nineteen, I suppose, and she was too thin.” His eyes traveled from A

Yes, thought Charles, I know she’s still thin, but I’ve had less than a week to feed her up.

“Anyway,” the old vet continued, “watching her, it was like watching magic. Out of the basket the clothes would come, all in a wad, she’d snap ’em once, and, like that, they’d fall straight and hang just so. Her wrists were narrow, but so strong, and her fingers quick. Those shirts wouldn’t dare disobey. When she left, I almost knocked on her door to thank her. She reminded me that there was a world of daily chores, where clothes were cleaned and everything was in order.”

He glanced at A

They were all quiet after that. Charles didn’t know if A

“So,” said Charles, as Walter ate the last of his third freeze-dried di

Walter’s spork stilled for a moment, and he looked at Charles suspiciously. Then he snorted and shook his head. “It’s not like it’s important anymore, is it? Old news.”

He ate another bite, swallowed, and said, “When I got back from the war, everything was okay for a while. I had a short fuse, sure, but not enough to bother about. Until it got worse.” He started to say something but ate another bite instead. “That part matters even less, now, I suppose. Anyway, I started reliving the war-like it was still going on. I could hear it, taste it, smell it-but it would turn out that it was only a car backfiring-or the neighbor chopping wood. Stuff like that. I moved out before I hurt my family more than I already had. Then one day an enemy soldier came up behind me. It was the uniform, you know? I hurt him, maybe killed him…”