He changed and headed toward camp.

On the trip back, Tag led and Charles fell behind. Anna didn’t let either of them get too close—but she didn’t range away from them, either. It was probably a very good thing that they didn’t run into any hikers along the way. Charles wasn’t sure that either he or Tag would have been capable of civilized behavior.

They arrived at their camp a little after two in the morning. No one had been near it since they’d left. Charles shifted to human to open the bigger tent—which he and Anna would normally have shared alone—and invited Tag in.

Anna seemed a little lost crouched beside the SUV, well back from either Charles or Tag. Charles knelt down and gestured to her.

She padded toward him, not unwilling, just wary in a way that hurt his heart. It had been a long time since she’d looked at him that way. He put his hands on her gently, but worked them into the fur on her shoulders until he had his skin on hers.

As when she had sat on his lap in the amphitheater, he felt nothing. No magic. She didn’t smell of that strange something from Leah’s past. There was no stain on her spirit that he could see.

He would have been happier about it if he had understood why everything had stopped so suddenly in the amphitheater. Magic didn’t just stop, it dissipated—and that battlefield pall should not have disappeared at all.

He kissed her forehead and released her.

“I’m going to be wolf tonight,” he told her. “I can sleep with Tag and you can go sleep in the other tent. Or you can stay with us.”

She scooted past him, into the bigger tent. He would have felt better if she hadn’t so obviously avoided touching him. He shifted to wolf and stretched across the entrance—which was a foolish thing. It would be as easy for an enemy to cut through the tent side as it would be for them to unzip the opening—easier, probably. If he’d really been worried about an attack in the night, he wouldn’t have slept in the tent at all.

He’d resigned himself to a restless night—and then Anna curled up against his back. When Tag lay down beside her, she gave a little sigh and relaxed for the first time since she’d started playing that recorder.

Charles put his head down and slept.

CHAPTER

6

Anna woke with a splitting headache and a body that felt like it had been run over by a truck.

The last time she’d felt like that had been when she had gone to a party hosted by the first violin at the end of her freshman year at college—hosting that annual party was an unofficial requirement of the position of first chair.

They’d played the “Hi, Bob” game—another time-honored tradition. It consisted of watching The Bob Newhart Show and downing tequila shots every time a character from the show said, “Hi, Bob.” She hadn’t even known what The Bob Newhart Show was before that night. The next year she’d done it with orange juice instead of tequila—and she’d never again been able to look at Bob Newhart without feeling vaguely ill.

But she was a werewolf; she wasn’t supposed to get hangovers. She tried to remember what she’d been doing. They’d gone to Wild Sign . . .

She rubbed her head when the memory wouldn’t come.

Charles would have answers for her. She got up, found clothes to wear, and put them on. She wiped the back of her wrist against her nose and grimaced at the smear of blood. That was pretty weird. Had she been hurt? She felt a little dizzy, and her knees, which had been fine a moment ago, tried to buckle. A sense of urgency started to press down on her. Something was wrong. Or had been wrong. Or possibly would be wrong.

Charles, she reminded herself, her head pounding in time with the beat of her heart. Find Charles. She needed to get out of the stuffy tent so she could breathe. So she could push the panic away.

Anna unzipped the tent and stuck her feet into her shoes, which someone had set next to the tent door. It hadn’t been her, because she’d come into camp as a wolf. She remembered that now. She’d gone to sleep, but she didn’t remember shifting back to human. Given the discomfort of the shift, she found that a little disconcerting—but not as much as losing most of a day.

Charles and Tag were sitting in the camp chairs on opposite sides of the folding table that held the propane stove. Tag had a beat-up copy of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight in his lap and Charles had his laptop out—but both of them were looking at her with alert wariness. There was quite a bit of tension in the air, and she wondered what she’d done to put that look on their faces. Or maybe there was something else going on.

Her own growing tension had eased at the sight of her mate. Charles was good at making her feel safe.

“Um,” she said. “Good morning?”

“Afternoon,” said Tag politely. As if they’d encountered each other walking opposite directions on a sidewalk—and only knew each other by face.

“That bad?” she asked.

Charles still hadn’t spoken. He watched her, she realized, with wolf eyes.

“Let’s put it this way,” said Tag. “What’s my name?”

“Colin Taggart,” she said.

“Have I ever hurt you?”

Was this a trick question? “No?”

The query in her voice was directed at his question rather than an indication of any doubt about what the answer was. He flinched, and she rolled her eyes.

“Of course not,” she said impatiently. “What’s wrong?”

As soon as she spoke, she realized that she probably could answer part of that question herself. She felt sick, and all she remembered about yesterday was heading out toward Wild Sign. She had a few vague memories that came and went. Mostly they didn’t make sense—a canvas sink, a baby’s skull that somehow wasn’t a baby’s skull, and the inlaid fretboard of a guitar. The fretboard made her sad, though she didn’t know why. Something was definitely wrong with her.

“You sounded all right this morning, too,” Tag told her, sounding ill-used and a bit whiny. His eyes didn’t fit his voice. His eyes were watchful. “And then you ran, making a noise I don’t ever want to hear coming out of your mouth again.” Tag scowled at her. “I don’t like to scare women. I especially don’t like to scare Omegas. I really, really don’t like it when it’s you I’m scaring.”

Well, hell, thought Anna, feeling guilty. All of the wolves were affected by her being Omega. When she was distressed, they reacted badly.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t remember it. I don’t remember quite a lot.” Tag, she thought, wasn’t the only one who sounded whiny.

The headache felt like someone had grabbed her brain just behind her eyes and was digging in with claws. And wiggling the claws.

“Got that,” said Tag. “What do you remember?”

But Anna was watching Charles, who hadn’t said a word since she’d come out of the tent. He folded the computer in his lap with exaggerated care before setting it on the ground. He got to his feet slowly.

She couldn’t tell what he was thinking with his quiet face and gold eyes. There was intent in his motion. She found herself taking a slow step backward, and her heartbeat picked up speed—

—as it had that night she’d run in the pack’s home grounds when Justin led the hunt against her. The guttural sounds of their cries, inhuman sounds coming from human-shaped throats, rang in her ears. Though she knew that was impossible.

Charles stopped moving.

She aborted her instinctive movement to cover her ears—the sound wasn’t real. That was over and done. Why in the world was she dwelling on that particular event now?

She reached for Charles through their bond—and only then realized that it was closed up tight. Maybe that was the reason her thoughts were so muddled. She would feel better if she could feel him; he might drown out the pain that was making it hard to think. She wasn’t good at manipulating their bond, though she’d gotten better.

Visualizations were sometimes useful, so she tried to imagine herself reaching out and unlocking the door that stood between them. She pulled on it and the bond blazed open with a suddenness that she hadn’t expected. As if she’d pulled hard on a swinging door at the same time that Charles was pushing it.

For a disorienting moment, she was seeing herself from his point of view. Her hair was tangled and there were traces of tears down her cheeks. She had a bloody nose again. Her shoulders were hunched in pain. (Well, she wasn’t used to having a hangover any longer. It had been years.) Her pupils were dilated like a drug addict’s, making her brown eyes look black. She looked small and fragile—something she’d never seen when she looked into a mirror.

Charles did something—it certainly hadn’t been her—and their bond settled down to its usual gentle awareness. The weird feeling of perceiving herself from his viewpoint receded. Charles took a deep breath. She realized that he’d even been careful of his breathing, so he didn’t startle her into running.