He’d taken off his boots at the door of the tent, but he stripped off his jeans and shirt so he could move better.

His brother, Samuel, was the healer—their da’s mother’s magic taking that path in him. Samuel wasn’t a miracle worker; he couldn’t raise the dead or cure old age or heart disease. But he used his magic to help people. Their da said it was the reason that Samuel spent so much time on his own out in the world with the humans—because it was the humans who needed his touch. Their da wasn’t happy about it.

Charles couldn’t do what Samuel could do. But if his contrary powers were willing, he could ease his mate’s pain. He knelt beside her and put his hands flat on her shoulders.

“Do you need me to take off the T-shirt?” she asked, taking in his lack of dress.

“No,” he said. He didn’t need the distraction. “Just relax if you can.”

He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, reaching for the well of dormant power that he seldom touched. This wasn’t his mother’s wild magic. This magic was hungry, violent, and raw; it came from the other side of his family line. Witchborn. But it wasn’t the pristine magic of white witches, though he’d never fed it with anyone else’s trauma. It had always felt like this. Not tainted, but not good, either, as if this magic was forever damaged by the blackness of his paternal grandmother’s heart. It had taken Brother Wolf to show Charles that it was not evil.

He knew his da would have been repulsed by it, and so he had always been careful to hide this magic from Da. Charles was very, very careful about the kinds of things that he used it for. Like Brother Wolf, it could be difficult to control, and out of control it was dangerous to others. Mostly he tried to forget about it.

But it was good for this.

Under his hands, Anna’s tight muscles began to soften. Charles wasn’t really healing her, but Anna’s sore muscles hadn’t come from overuse. They had come from Anna’s struggle to drive the Singer—to steal Anna’s name for it—away. Her wolf had borrowed energy from her body to shield her mind. It was the way wolf magic worked.

Generally the pack never noticed the drain—most of their kind of magic was something they used for a few minutes or less. The kinds of things that took longer than that, like the constant magic used to make humans see dogs where there were werewolves, tended to be shared among the pack as a whole.

But Anna’s wolf had battled for the better part of a day. And it had not been an easy battle. Efficiency only came when you understood what you fought. She had used a huge amount of energy, and it had damaged her body.

She would have healed with some rest combined with eating well—both he and Tag had been putting food in front of Anna. But he saw no reason that she should wait when he could do something about it.

If Brother Wolf had settled down sooner, he could have done this earlier in the day.

“Mmmpf,” Anna said, her voice drowsy. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but it feels good.”

He fed energy into his mate’s body until it began washing back at him. He stopped—and was very, very careful not to take any of that energy back into himself, in case some of it was not his. He’d done that once when he had been very young, and he’d felt as though he was going to turn into the Hunger that Devours. Except that he wasn’t hungry for flesh, not even human flesh.

He’d gone to his grandfather because going to his da would have been disastrous. It had taken days of the old man’s prescription of fasting and sweats to make Charles feel normal again.

“Gray witchcraft,” his da would have called it. “Poison” was what his grandfather had said. Charles just knew he never wanted to feel like that again.

Anna fell asleep with a happy sigh. Likely she’d have been asleep earlier if she hadn’t been hurting. Charles moved away from her, found a comfortable position, and sat cross-legged, hands loose, eyes closed, and sought balance as a precursor to binding the witchcraft away again. If Anna hadn’t been there, he’d have sung one of his grandfather’s songs. He used those songs to heal his spirit and cleanse his mind the way a shower cleansed his body.

He paused. Had that been what Anna had done when the Singer caught her? She had played a lament to the broken land—which is exactly how his grandfather would have begun to heal it. It was a way of connection, of opening up to the damaged spirit.

He examined his memories of the events in the amphitheater and decided that was probably what had happened. Anna, like most people, was mostly blind to the spirits in the world around her, which didn’t mean the reverse was true. A lesser musician might have simply been playing a folk song. But Anna didn’t play music that way. She had opened herself to her audience—and something had taken her up on her invitation.

He considered the amphitheater with its haunted atmosphere, and wondered if Anna’s actions had only been an accident. Brother Wolf had examined that recorder with all of their collective senses. He had discovered nothing that suggested it was anything other than a rather well-made instrument. But it had survived in the open air for months, even if it hadn’t survived Brother Wolf.

Music, he considered, as a trap. Had Anna picked up that recorder from her own impulse? Or had there been something more sinister at work?

His patrilineal witchborn magic had taken advantage of his distraction and was leaking out into the tent, seeping into the ground. Likely a real witch would have considered this a result of failing to contain their abilities. He understood the magic was curious and bent on exploration. He centered himself and began the process of coaxing it back.

Charles was sweating and tired when he had his grandmother’s legacy wrapped safely away again, the ground and the air in the tent free of inquisitive magic. He glanced at Anna, who had rolled over and was limp with the sleep of the exhausted.

He shifted to wolf and back to human, grimacing with the exquisite pain of the change. Had Tag not been on guard, he wouldn’t have risked tiring himself out. But he didn’t want to sleep beside Anna still covered with the sour sweat that he’d accumulated with one thing and another today.

He glanced again at Anna—but this time she was awake. She sat up and pulled off her shirt.

“No,” he said. “You need to rest.”

She gave him an imperious look that made Brother Wolf want to roll with joy. She wasn’t afraid of him. The terror on her face before she’d run this morning . . . he would happily go to his grave if he never saw her look at him with that expression again.

“I need you,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve felt good all day. All that I need now, to feel like myself, is for you to wipe away the feel of Justin’s hands.” She covered herself and shivered, looking away, whispering, “I have been smelling him on my skin all day.”

He gathered her up and rearranged the sleeping bag so that they were both on the soft inner surface. Then he laid her back down with care.

“Where do you smell him?” he asked, instead of telling her that she only smelled of herself. He’d smelled Justin last night, too. If she could still scent that old hurt, he would not argue with her.

She raised her right hand and showed him her wrist.

He brought it to him and brushed his cheek against it before kissing it gently. He touched her wrist with his nose, watching her as he took in the scent of her skin. Just them. He brought it to her nose for inspection.

“Better?” he asked.

She closed her eyes, concentrating. Then she looked at him and nodded.

It took time. He would have thought it to be a seduction game had it not been for their mating bond, because by the time she acknowledged that she could neither smell nor feel Justin on her skin, they both were flushed and taut with desire. But they were mated, and he could feel her distress, feel it lessen gradually as he touched, kissed, and licked his way over her body.

He did not enter her until their bond was free of the shadow of spirit, and that tested his patience to the breaking point. Hers, too. As he slid into her, wet and swollen for him, he felt her delight break free and was forced to bite his cheek hard not to follow her immediately.

He was not some pup who thought only of his own pleasure. He was an old wolf. Controlled. But it was a near thing.

When they were finished, she lay on top of him, as limp and wrung out as he himself felt. Brother Wolf, satisfied at last, slept deep so that it was only Charles who held their mate.

Only Charles who growled low in his throat at the memory of the thing that had tried to take his Anna away. It would not hurt her ever again.

He would make sure of it.

CHAPTER

7