Hunting Ground

Tom was consulted about fit and color while Moira fingered fabrics and dickered with the shopkeepers. The result was that for less than she’d spent on a couple of pairs of jeans in high school, she had the begi

“Calm down,” he told her. “Charles is good for it.” The last statement seemed to amuse him.

She also acquired a whole slew of Christmas presents as ordered. Last year she’d been afraid (and too broke) to send presents to her father and brother. This year she… she and Charles had them and all of Charles’s family and a double handful of others to buy for.

The conference would run through Christmas-she had the impression that there had been some incident that had stepped up the Marrok’s timetable. Charles had been gone for a couple of days and returned even more grim than usual. He hadn’t volunteered where he’d gone or what he’d done, and she’d been too intimidated by his oppressive silence to ask. It had been the next day that the Marrok began pla

She’d found a pair of small gold hoop earrings with round bits of rough amber for Charles-to replace the one he’d given to the troll. And at the same shop, she broke down and bought a cheaper, more dangly pair for herself. She felt guilty about it-but maybe she could pay him back for them. They had been cheaper than they would have been in Chicago.

She came out of a little shop the proud new owner of three silk shirts-and her gaze caught on the display window of a store a few doors down.

“What?” Moira said urgently. “What is it, Tom?”

“A quilt, I think,” he rumbled. “Jeez, Moira, if the two of you buy anything more, I’m going to have to help carry stuff-and that makes me a lousy guard.”

The quilt was trimmed with narrow strips of red and green, the colors of the old Pendleton blankets. On the interior, there were four squares and a center section that was round. The square panels were abstract mountain scenes of the same mountain, the top two were daylight, spring and summer. The bottom were night, fall and winter. The center panel was deep mottled green with the red silhouette of a wolf howling.

“I don’t think we face anything worse than a pickpocket here,” Moira was saying to Tom. “I trust you to handle them with a few bags on one arm.”

Moira touched A

A

They went back to the hotel after that, A

“You can put them down on the bed,” Tom said, sounding amused. “They won’t break-or run away.”

“I’m in shock,” A

“And she kept finding more quilts,” said Moira to the air, her amusement evident.

“I couldn’t help it,” A

“Do you sew?” Moira asked.

“Not yet.” A

Tom laughed. “A

His statement gave her an odd feeling. She touched the package she’d had wrapped for Charles, then turned with a smile when Moira told them both they needed to get moving because there were shoes to be found, and the day was wasting.

A

It wasn’t until they were standing in front of the elevators that she found her balance. So he would fly her to England if she asked him to-she’d followed him up a frozen mountain buried in the depths of a Montana winter, hadn’t she? It made them equals.

“Hey.” Moira snapped her fingers in front of A

The elevator had opened.

“Sorry,” she said. “Revelation, here.”

“Ah.” Moira appeared to consider that for a moment. “Nope. Shoes are more important. Especially if you’re going to have that British snob eating at your feet.”

And so A

To the hotel, the witch insisted firmly, not the auditorium.

Moira leaned around Tom as if she needed to see A

They stormed out of the darkness of a basement apartment stairwell and brought a spell of silence and shadow with them. A spell that had hidden them from Tom’s sharp senses as well as A

They hit Tom first, but not by much. A

Magic moved and settled around them all, a familiar spell, one used by packs to conceal fights or kills or anything else they didn’t want the rest of the world to know about. But the attackers didn’t smell like wolves.

As she fought to free her throat, she could see one of their attackers, a woman, run into the witch like a linebacker, knocking her down, off the curb and into the street.

A scream cut short, and a body hit pavement hard from Tom’s direction. She couldn’t see him, but it wasn’t Tom who had screamed; she’d be willing to bet Tom had never made a sound that high-pitched in his life. Moira’s attacker left the blind witch to help the others with Tom.

“Pretty A

And, the immediate shock of the attack over, A

The woman screamed into her ear-a sharp, high-pitched noise that deafened and hurt and drove A

Her wolf took over then. Not in wolf body but in her human form, A

A