Hunting Ground

“There,” she told A

She didn’t lie. Or if she did, A

Charles hadn’t seemed affected, but it would have been difficult to tell. His face was doing its usual public thing. Not even the mate bond helped her, because the co

She touched Charles lightly on the arm. He hadn’t managed to rebuild his barriers against her because she suddenly knew exactly what he felt toward Dana Shea-wariness. Not desire or fear, but wary respect-one predator to another on neutral territory maybe. And then there was Brother Wolf…

She’d heard werewolves talk as if they and the wolves they shared their skins with were one. Some werewolves had nothing more wolfish about them, even in wolf form, than a nasty temper and a need to kill things that ran from them. Other than fighting to keep her sanity in the first few months after her Change, A

Charles sometimes talked about his wolf as if it were a separate being who shared his body: Brother Wolf.

For the first time, perhaps springing from that oddly terrifying moment outside when she’d felt everything he was-too much to be absorbed or witnessed-she could feel the wolf inside of Charles. Two distinct souls. And Brother Wolf felt her, too.

Mate, he told her, not unkindly. Get out of our head so we can deal with She-Who-Is-Not-Kin.

Not-Kin wasn’t the only thing she got from that name. Powerful, ruthless, killer. Bound by rules. Overcivilized. Respected enemy. Brother Wolf’s voice was clearer in her head than even the Marrok’s. And the Marrok spoke in words-Brother Wolf wasn’t hampered by anything so human.

A

Later, murmured Brother Wolf quietly, then she was alone in her head. Alone with the remnants of jealousy and… hurt at Brother Wolf’s rejection. Knowing that she shouldn’t feel either didn’t help at all.

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 A

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 A

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 A

“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 A

She tipped it so they both could see it better. The side of a lake, A

“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 A

“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, A

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.”

A

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