The beat of the witch’s chant changed, and he felt her control tighten around him until he couldn’t breathe…No.

He tuned the witch out entirely and set about minimizing the damage as best he could.

He constricted the connections he had to his pack until he could barely feel them. If he’d had a normal pack, he might have chanced dropping the reins entirely-but there were too many who could not stand on their own for long. Constricting them would help hide them from a witch’s magic-and make it difficult for her to use them if she tried.

Through Asil she had him, but if he could help it, she wouldn’t access any more of his pack. If Asil managed to keep her thinking he was Tag, she wouldn’t even know where to look.

There were a few old ones whose control had become delicate; those he gave to Samuel, cutting them from him entirely. It would be a jolt to Samuel, but the wolves knew his son and wouldn’t protest. Samuel could handle them for a while.

He didn’t know if a witch who so obviously had some of the attributes of a werewolf would know enough about wolves to untangle what he did, but he would make it as difficult as he could. At the very least he would slow her down.

But the real reason for his urgency was so that when…if he went mad, he wouldn’t take the whole pack with him immediately. Someone-Charles was his best hope, though Asil might manage it-would have a chance to kill him.

He finished his work before the witch finished hers. It had been centuries since he was so alone in his own head. Under different circumstances, he might almost have enjoyed it.

He didn’t fight the witch when she snapped her fingers and told him to heel. He walked at her left side while Asil, in human form, escorted her from the right.

Somehow he didn’t think that she perceived the shadow-creature that almost paced beside Asil. He wouldn’t have noticed himself if he hadn’t seen the snow dent ever so slightly under wolf paws he couldn’t see-but he could smell her and the magic on her.

Guardians, they once called such things. A charismatic name for such abominations, he’d always thought. He had been pleased when he’d heard that the family with that spell had at last been eliminated. Obviously his information hadn’t been completely accurate. Even at the peak of their power, though, he’d never heard of them making a guardian from a werewolf.

Bran looked at Asil, but he couldn’t tell if the Moor knew part of his mate accompanied them-as if she’d been called into being so often she almost had a presence outside of her creator’s call. Guardians, he recalled, were destroyed every seven years to prevent just such an occurrence. Sarai’s wolf had been around for two hundred years-he wondered how much autonomy she had.

“Tell me, Asil,” the witch commanded, her arm tucked into the Moor’s as if he were some long-ago gentleman and she a lady strolling through a ballroom rather than two-foot-deep snow. “How did you feel when Sarai chose to protect me rather than stay true to you?”

There was truth in her words; she believed that Sarai had made a choice. From the hesitation in Asil’s steady footfall, he heard it, too.

“Was that what she did?” he asked.

“She loved me better than she loved you,” the witch said. “I am her little butterfly, and she takes care of me.”

Asil was silent for a moment, then he said, “I don’t think you’ve been anyone’s Mariposa for a long time.”

The witch stopped and switched abruptly to Spanish. “Liar. Liar. You don’t know anything. She loved me. Me! She stayed with me when you went off on your journeys. She only sent me away because of you.”

“She loved you,” he agreed. “Once. Now she is no more. She cannot love anyone.”

Looking out of the corner of his eye at the faint paw prints that were set into the snow so close to Asil’s hip, Bran wasn’t so sure.

“You were always stupid,” the witch said. “You made her send me away. She would have kept me home where I belonged.”

“You were a witch, and you had no control of your powers, ” Asil said. “You needed to be trained.”

“You didn’t send me to be trained,” she shouted, tears glistening in her eyes as she jerked her arm free and backed away. “You sent me to prison. And you knew. I read the letters you wrote to her. You knew what kind of training that witch provided. Linnea wasn’t a teacher, she was a prison guard.”

Asil looked down at the witch, blank-faced. “It was send you to Linnea or kill you. Linnea had a reputation for rehabilitation. ”

“Rehabilitation? I did nothing wrong!” She stamped her foot as if she were still a child rather than a witch fully a hundred years older than she should have ever been.

“Nothing?” Asil’s tone was cool. “You tried to poison Sarai, twice. Villagers inexplicably lost pets. And you tried to pretend you were Sarai and came to my bed. I think Sarai would have forgiven you everything except that.”

The witch screamed, a wordless, almost inhuman scream of rage-and in the distance there was an explosion.

The witch froze in her tracks, then bowed her head, grabbing her temples. Bran felt her control loosen. In that moment he attacked. Not physically. She still had control of his body.

He used the bonds as she had, throwing his rage through the link to Asil and to Sarai and beyond. If he’d had five minutes, or maybe even three, he’d have broken free. He did something to the link she held to Sarai, but it wasn’t enough.

The witch recovered too soon-but he cost her. She pushed him out of the link and spelled the bindings to prevent him doing it again. When it was over he was still her wolf-but she had blood trickling out of her nose.

“You told me this was a lesser wolf,” she spat, and if she hadn’t been so hurt, Bran thought she might have killed Asil then and there. “And I believed you-just as I believed you were sending me away for my own good. I should know better. He is smarter than that. When you failed, you and that other wolf-Bran would send only the best. You lie and lie as if it were the truth.”

“You don’t want to believe me,” Asil said. “But you can taste truth-your link to Sarai is strong enough. You were a danger to yourself and us. We did it for your own good. It was that or kill you.”

She flicked a trembling finger at him. “Shut up.”

Asil’s face lost its cool composure, and he grimaced. As he continued, his voice was breathless with pain. “What you have done is an abomination. This thing you have turned Sarai into doesn’t love you, she serves as a slave serves, without the ability to choose, just as I do. Bran is more than you can handle. He will kill you-and it is your own fault.”

“I won’t die,” she shouted at him. “I didn’t die when Linnea tried to kill me-she didn’t know how powerful I was or how much my mother had taught me. I killed her and her pet students and studied the books she left behind-for months I wrote to you and signed the letters from her while I studied. But I knew that I would die without protection. Even my mother died. So I took Sarai as my guardian, and she gave me her long life so that she would never live without me. You can’t do that to someone against her nature. You can’t. She had to love me for it to work.”

Not true for the guardian spell, thought Bran, but perhaps for the binding that allowed Asil’s witch to share in a werewolf’s immortality. Maybe that was why his mother had used him, rather than the pet she used to Change him and Samuel.

“Did you love her?” Asil asked.

“Of course I loved her!”

He grimaced, and whispered, “I would have given my life for hers-and you stole it for yours. You don’t know what love is.”

Suddenly she was calm. With a queenly lift of her chin, she said, “I’ll live longer than you. Come along, I have business to attend to.” She looked down at Bran. “You, too, Colin Taggart. We have things to attend to.”