"Looks like you had a mess on your hands,” said a friendly voice. “Did you run into a bear?”

She sounded friendly enough. Anna turned to look at the woman who’d come out of the trees after watching her for too long to be entirely trustworthy.

Like Anna, she was wearing snowshoes, but she had ski poles in each of her hands. Deep brown eyes peered out from under her hat, but the rest of her face was covered in a woolen scarf. Underneath her gray hat, dark brown curls fell to her shoulders.

Anna took a deep breath, but all her nose told her was that the woman was human. Would a human’s hearing be poor enough that all the noise of the fight might have been made by a bear rather than a pair of werewolves? Darned if she knew.

“A bear. Yes.” Anna gave her a smile she hoped would cover up the amount of time it had taken her to reply. “Sorry, I’m still a little off. I’m a city girl, and I’m not used to Mother Nature in all her glory. Yes, a bear. We scared it off, then discovered it had one of our-” What would they need so badly that a human man would have to go chasing after a bear? “-small packs. The one with the lighter in it.”

The other woman threw back her head and laughed. “Isn’t that the way it always works? I’m Mary Alvarado. What are you doing out here in the middle of winter if you’re not used to the wild country?”

“I’m Anna…Cornick.” Somehow it seemed right to use Charles’s name. Anna gave Mary Alvarado another wry smile. “We haven’t been married long. I’m not used to a new last name. You must be out looking for the hunter, too. We were told that no one else was going to be this far out. I may be green as grass, but my husband knows his way around.”

“Search and Rescue, that’s me,” said Mary.

“Isn’t everyone supposed to go by twos?” Anna asked. She wasn’t about it, but it only seemed sensible. Heather and Jack had been hunting together.

Mary shrugged. “I have a partner around here somewhere. We had an argument, and she took off in a huff. But she’ll get over it soon and let me catch up.” She grinned conspiratorially. “She’s pretty hot-tempered.”

The woman took a step closer to Anna, but then stopped abruptly and looked around. Anna felt it, too, like a great wind of evil flowing through the trees.

Something growled.

NINE

In his hothouse, Asil trimmed dead blooms from his roses. They weren’t as glorious as the ones he’d had in Spain, but they were a vast improvement over the commercially grown flowers he’d started with. His Spanish roses had been the result of centuries of careful breeding. It hadn’t bothered him to leave them at the time, but now he regretted their loss fiercely.

Not as fiercely as he regretted losing Sarai.

He hoped that someone had taken them over, but the state he’d left his property in almost ensured his flowers had died before anyone figured out what to do with the estate. Still, he’d been exchanging cuttings and rootstock with other rose aficionados for several decades before he’d been forced to leave, so his work had not all been in vain. Somewhere in the world there were probably descendants of his roses. Maybe if Bran made him live a few more years, he’d go out looking for them.

Someone knocked briskly at the inner door, then opened it without waiting for a reply. He didn’t even bother looking up. Sage had been invading his hothouse almost since he’d built it. He would have long ago reduced anyone else to shreds for interrupting his solitude. Slapping down Sage was as rewarding as beating a puppy: it accomplished nothing except to make him feel abusive.

“Hello, hello?” she called out, though her nose certainly told her exactly where he was.

It was her usual greeting-he thought that it was to make sure that he wasn’t feeling homicidally reclusive that day. He’d had a few of those right after he’d come to Aspen Creek. When she first started showing up, he’d wondered if the Marrok wasn’t sending her to make sure he was still sane enough to leave alive. If so, it had been only prudent, and he’d long since quit caring one way or the other.

“I’m here,” he told her, not bothering to raise his voice. She’d hear him if he whispered, and he was finished pretending to be human.

He didn’t look up from his work when she walked up behind him. His standards of beauty had broadened over the years, but even if they hadn’t, Sage would have hit every chime he had.

Sarai had often thumped him soundly on the head for looking at other women, though she’d known he’d never stray. Now that she was gone, he seldom even looked. Flirting didn’t make him feel disloyal to his dead mate, but he’d found he missed that thump too badly. Of course, given the opportunity to irritate the so-composed Charles, he had happily dealt with his memories.

“Hey, ’Sil. You’re smiling-someone die?” She obviously didn’t expect him to answer that, but continued, “You have something I can do?”

“I’m deadheading,” he told her, though she could see that for herself.

Sometimes he was so impatient with all of it-meaningless conversations that mimicked ones he’d had a thousand, thousand times. Just as he got tired of people who had to work out the same issues over and over.

He wondered how Bran kept his air of bemused interest at his people’s petty problems. Still, thought Asil with a thread of self-directed, bitter amusement, I must not be so tired of life, because I grabbed at the ring when Bran offered a chance at it, didn’t I?

Sage ignored his shortness with relentless cheer. It was one of the things he liked about her, that he didn’t have to constantly apologize for his volatile mood swings.

She took off her coat and settled in just to his right to start on the next row of bushes, so he knew she was in the mood for a good talk. Otherwise, she’d have started on the other side of the bushes, where she wouldn’t get in the way of his work.

“So what do you think of Charlie’s mate?” she asked.

He grunted. It had been wicked of him to tease Bran’s boy, but he had been unable to resist; it wasn’t often Charles was off balance. And Anna reminded him so much of his own Sarai, not in looks-Sarai had been almost as dark as he was-but they both had the same inner serenity.

“Well, I like her,” Sage said. “She has more backbone than you’d think given the way her old Alpha abused her.”

That shocked him. “Abuse an Omega?”

She nodded. “For years. I guess Leo was a real piece of work-killed off half his pack or let his crazy mate do it. He even ordered one of his wolves to force the Change on Anna. What I don’t understand is why Charles didn’t slaughter the whole pack; none of them did anything to protect her. How hard is it to pick up the phone and call Bran?”

“If Leo ordered them not to, they wouldn’t be able to call,” Asil said absently. He’d known Leo, the Chicago Alpha, and liked him, too. “Not unless they were nearly as dominant as Leo-which is unlikely.”

Leo had been a strong Alpha, and, he would have sworn, an honorable man. Perhaps Sage was mistaken. Asil clipped a few brown-edged roses, then asked, “Do you know why Leo did these things?”

She looked up from her own task. “I guess his mate was going age-crazy. She killed all the females in the pack out of jealousy, then went out and turned a bunch of good-looking men, just for fun. Apparently Leo hoped that having an Omega like Anna in the pack would keep his mate stable. It worked, more or less. He had Anna brutalized, though, to keep her under his thumb.”

Asil paused, a cold chill running down his back. When speaking of an unmated female in a pack, “brutalized” was a terrible word, much worse than “abused.” This modern era’s definition of “abuse” was different than the one he’d grown up with. “Brutalized” hadn’t changed a bit.

“Brutalized how?” he asked hoarsely, suddenly remembering the rare rage he’d left Charles in when he’d brought Anna flowers. He had a brief image of a glimpse he’d had of Anna over Charles’s shoulder. Had she been frightened?