Dead Heat (17 page)

“She saved Kage’s children.” He reached out and touched Chelsea’s cheek. She stirred under his touch and then quieted. He left his hand there.

Anna tensed. She was too far away to stop him, assuming she could stop him. But she didn’t think she’d have to.

He bowed his head and then looked over his shoulder at Anna. “You—” His voice broke. Probably because the Marrok was talking to him, too.

Anna, get out of there. The witchborn don’t always make the transition from witch to wolf easily. If she was strong enough to hide herself from Charles’s wolf, then she’s strong enough to be dangerous. Strong enough to hide if she is a dark witch. Charles is coming, but you and Hosteen get out of there right now.

She couldn’t respond to him. The Marrok couldn’t hear her if she talked back to him.

Hosteen looked at her.
“A fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos,”
he quoted back at her softly. “How strongly do you believe that, now? What do you think the Marrok told Charles to do to her? What can he do that you and I could not?”

Anna put her knitting down and walked over to the bed. Chelsea had been restless for the past half hour or so. Bran’s message had spiked the adrenaline in both Anna and Hosteen, and that was enough. Chelsea’s heartbeat was picking up; Anna could smell fear and helpless frustration in a growing wave. That first deep sleep often reset the newly rising werewolves’ memories to the moments right before they were bitten. That was why it was such a dangerous moment.

She took one more deep breath just as magic, a lot of magic, flooded the room. Bran was right; Chelsea Sani was not a weak witch. Not at all.

Chelsea sat up in one explosive movement, staring at Hosteen without recognition or sanity in her eyes. Panicked, she rose to a crouch, crying out involuntarily, a harsh wolflike sound. The magic, which had been strong, suddenly made it hard to breathe in the room, as if the magic had replaced the oxygen.

Anna met Hosteen’s eyes and then showed him what being an Omega really meant as she flooded the room with her own particular and peculiar power.

Charles jumped rather than ran down the stairs, conscious of startling Kage when he landed beside Joseph’s son at the foot of the stairs with more sound than he usually allowed himself. But just now Charles was more interested in speed than stealth.

He threw open the door to the room where Hosteen had stashed Kage’s wife. And jumped back like a scalded cat almost before he felt the touch of Anna’s magic.

“Heyya, Charles,” slurred Hosteen as though he were drunk. He was leaning against the wall on the far side of where Anna had dropped her knitting in a deep red tangle of yarn and needles. “Come join the par-ty.” Then Hosteen giggled.

Anna gave Charles a helpless look, her back to the werewolf and the bed.

Charles grinned at Anna through the open door, but he didn’t approach any closer. Brother Wolf wanted to go in and roll in her power like a cat in catnip, but Charles kept him back. If the attack on Chelsea had been directed at the werewolves, then someone needed to be prepared to defend the people in this house. It wouldn’t be Hosteen, not for a few hours anyway. If he entered the sphere of his wife’s influence, it wouldn’t be Charles, either.

Kage came running down the hallway, not werewolf fast, but human athlete fast. He gave Charles an odd look but didn’t slow as he ran into the room.

Kage was human. He’d probably be okay. Anna’s most deadly weapon worked best on dominant werewolves, especially dominant werewolves whose wolf was kept tied up in little knots because his human half was still, after a century of being a werewolf, convinced that the wolf was something evil. At least Charles thought that might be why Hosteen’s reaction was this extreme.

“Grandson,” Hosteen intoned solemnly. “I’ve decided to let your wife live until she does something evil.”

A woman whom Charles couldn’t see from his hallway position snickered. It wasn’t Anna, who grimaced at Charles because she knew that there would be hell to pay for this tomorrow. They both knew a wolf like Hosteen wouldn’t forgive her lightly for doing this to him.

“Evil,” said the other woman, who could only be Chelsea, though she sounded quite different from the woman he’d heard talk at dinner. She spoke dramatically with a touch of comic flare that might or might not have been intentional. “I’d like to do some evil to you right now, you old bastard. But mostly I’d like to do something evil with my sweetie.” Her voice was relaxed and smoldering.

“Chelsea?” said Kage, in a poleaxed voice.

Charles couldn’t see the woman from his vantage point, and he wasn’t getting any closer until the effect lessened a bit. Hosteen’s stress level could explain the giggling Alpha, but Charles thought Chelsea had been hit hard, too. It was always possible Anna had put more oomph than usual into her “Omega superpower,” as she liked to call it.

Anna cleared her throat. “Sometimes people wake up from the first sleep after the Change and feel a little aroused. Nothing to worry about and it usually goes—”

There was a flash of motion that had Charles moving forward, even though he knew the danger of getting too close to Anna. But Chelsea fell onto the hardwood floor, finally in Charles’s line of sight. She fell softly, muscles relaxed, and lay where she’d landed, looking up at her husband with a pleased smile.

Charles recovered and retreated.

“—away,” continued Anna valiantly, “when they try to move and realize that they have to learn how to deal with muscles that are stronger and respond more quickly than they’re used to. It’s a good distraction, because sex is not a good place to experiment with augmented strength. Most people are back to normal in a day or so.”

Kage crouched down beside his wife and touched her cheek. Charles couldn’t see his expression but had no trouble reading the love and relief in the bend of his head and the softening of his shoulders.

“Hey, little rabbit,” he said huskily. “You okay?”

Chelsea blinked up at him, and then her whole body tightened. “The children … I … the children. Kage?”

“They are fine,” he told her. “Freaked-out. But fine. They are asleep as of ten minutes ago. Ernestine is staying in the suite with them tonight.”

Chelsea fought to stay focused, but Anna’s power was too much. It said something about how dominant her wolf was going to be that Anna affected her nearly as much as she affected Hosteen. Or maybe Anna was getting stronger. Chelsea’s body grew looser and her face softened into a smile. “That bastard wanted to kill me,” she said, pointing a wobbly finger at Hosteen. “I heard him.”

“
Didn’t
want to,” said Hosteen; he sounded as though he were talking to himself. “Never a good thing when you have to kill the mother of your great-grandchildren. Could scar them for life.” It didn’t sound as though it bothered him much. “But it’s like knitting and purling. I don’t have to. Not until you do something evil, witch.”

Kage’s head turned and he looked at Hosteen, hostility in every line of his body.

“Actually,” Anna said quietly, “I think he was trying very hard to find a reason not to kill her. Very hard. He wouldn’t have been so easy to talk out of it otherwise.”

Hosteen giggled again. “The Marrok told me to do it. After I decided not to. Spoke in my head. I hate it when he does that; creepy. I thought, ‘Geez, old man, if you want someone to do your dirty work, you get Charles to do it. I’m not going to follow orders and destroy my family for you.’” He sighed, a happy, contented sound, and slid down the wall until he was seated on the floor, his feet stretched out until they nearly touched Chelsea’s hair.

He looked at Anna and tried to frown. “What did you do to me, little girl? I haven’t felt like this since … since … since I was six and my father gave me a glass of whiskey to drink before he set my wrist. Got tossed off a horse and we lived out in the wild country. My ma, she didn’t trust those white doctors in town, anyway. They didn’t know about the evil spirits, didn’t know how to sing them out of a body. So my dad, he set it. Used to ache something fierce some days. But not since I became a werewolf.”

“What happened to him?” Kage asked Anna. “I’ve never seen him like this. I thought werewolves couldn’t get drunk.”

Chelsea reached up, grabbed her husband by the back of the neck, and dragged his startled head down to hers.

“Charles Cornick,” said Maggie in a soft voice from just behind him.

Charles realized that he’d stepped too close to the room because Maggie caught him by surprise. If he hadn’t been affected by Anna, no one, especially not a human, would have been able to sneak up on him. He turned his head to see Maggie with an odd expression on her face.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you laugh like that,” she said.

Anna woke up blearily, her knitting needles on her lap. It took her a moment to remember why she was sleeping in a rocking chair with Charles, in wolf form, curled up at her feet.

Chelsea slept on. She’d been awake for less than an hour, spending most of that time eating. When she’d fallen back asleep, Kage escorted his still-giddy grandfather upstairs. Maggie had gone back to Joseph’s room as soon as she was certain there was nothing to worry about.

Kage had come down to check his wife, and Anna had driven him gently back to his own room.

“No sex,” she’d told him, again. “Not until Chelsea truly understands her own strength. And that means separate beds, because the Change will increase Chelsea’s libido by a lot.”

He’d nodded, touched his wife’s face, and smiled when she moved toward him without opening her eyes. “You’ll watch over her?”

Charles said wryly, “Since Anna’s incapacitated the only other person who could do that, yes, we’ll stay here.”

“How did you manage that?” Kage asked.

She shrugged. “I’m an Omega wolf. I have a tranquilizing effect on other werewolves, but I have to admit I’ve never seen anything like what happened to Hosteen.”

“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.”