In a hungry and rough voice, he said, “Hester says not to kill anyone.” His hands fell to the earth and dug into it. “That is the first rule if we are to stay here. I cannot kill anyone.”
And there it was, revealed, the predator that Brother Wolf had sensed from the time they’d gotten out of the car.
Anna held Jonesy’s gaze as carefully as she had held his hands. It was something another werewolf would never have done. Looking a stranger in the eyes was the first habit new wolves learned to break.
No matter how tough you are, there are other people who are tougher. Even Charles didn’t meet a stranger’s eyes unless he had a very good reason—and there wasn’t a werewolf outside of his immediate family he’d ever found who could stare him down. But Anna was an Omega wolf who could meet the eyes of any without arousing another to challenge, her gaze warm and caring, like a blaze of peace in a world of war.
Under Anna’s peculiarly effective sympathy, Jonesy’s body relaxed, and his hands stilled, though he was still bent low in a posture that would be awkward if anyone less graceful had held it.
“These people weren’t frightened off?” Anna asked.
Jonesy shook his head. “There was something about them that made Hester say they were connected to the people who’ve been flying over us.”
“Flying over you?” Anna repeated.
He nodded, a gesture that began with his head but continued to his shoulders and traveled through his body to his knees.
“Hester has been worried lately.” He turned his face, pulling away from Anna’s gaze as if it took a little effort. When he had freed himself, he met Charles’s eyes. “She says that there have been too many flying things. Spying things watching our woods.”
Maybe it was that Brother Wolf lived inside him, or that his mother had been a magic handler and his da witchborn, or just the summer sun’s illumination, but in the fae man’s eyes, Charles could see Jonesy revealed for what he was.
The outer man, who was simple and . . . sweet, and the creature that lived inside him, who was not sweet. And that something inside Jonesy was powerful, his magic a dense ball of fire imprisoned within. How much power, Charles could not fathom. A lot. The monster saw Charles looking and grinned a bloodthirsty grin, though Jonesy’s rather anxious expression didn’t change at all.
“Too many aircraft?” asked Anna, glancing at Charles. Either she was oblivious to the monster she spoke with or unfazed by him. With Anna it was a toss-up.
“Normally, there isn’t any air traffic up here,” Charles told her. He used her words, her gaze, to allow him to change the focus of his attention from Jonesy to Anna—to drop Jonesy’s eyes. Brother Wolf had no reaction to that other than relief. Jonesy and what Jonesy was would be his da’s problem as soon as Bran returned. “Too remote and the air currents are rough.”
But, like Hester, Charles was bothered that they had been getting flyovers. Mostly because if it had been someone just randomly flying over the camp, they would probably have passed over Aspen Creek, too. And Charles would have noticed if there had been an unusually high amount of air traffic over town.
There was a certain amount of drug running that tried to get through to Canada via the back roads of Montana. Sometimes that engendered a few unexpected flights over their territory. But Charles kept track of such things and hadn’t heard any chatter from his contacts at the DEA since they broke up a drug-trafficking ring out of Spokane two years ago. There were a few pot farmers, but that was legal in the state now—and no one was currently hounding them.
“Helicopters or airplanes?” he asked Jonesy.
“Flying things,” said Jonesy, sounding stressed. “I don’t know ‘helicopter’ or ‘airplane.’”
“Okay,” Anna said, and Brother Wolf wanted to roll over and bask in the wave of comfort and quiet she sent out. “That’s okay.”
He didn’t think she meant to direct it at him. Anna was still working on controlling that aspect of her Omega powers. There were times when Charles needed Brother Wolf to be alert, especially when his mate was standing so close to Jonesy.
When she got worried about someone, she tended to soothe them whether she wanted to or not. Even nonwerewolves felt the effects if they got too close to her.
Jonesy’s face lost the lines that had gathered around his eyes, and the monster inside him became less ferocious.
“How long has Hester been worried about the flying things?” Charles asked.
“A month,” Jonesy said. “Maybe a little more.”
Shortly before his father had left.
“So what happened?” Anna asked. “Where is Hester?”
Jonesy’s face was suddenly twisted and inhuman, and the monster who lived inside the innocent said in a voice that could have come from the throat of a mountain, “WE LEFT HER. WE COULD HAVE STOPPED THEM. STOPPED ALL OF THEM, AND SHE SENT US AWAY.”
Jonesy dropped to all fours, and Charles thought that perhaps his real fae form was something with four feet. On Hester’s mate, that posture was a position of strength.
Anna was too used to living with monsters to do more than flinch at Jonesy’s volume, and even that had been very slight. The spirits that had been slowly gathering closer as Anna and Jonesy spoke vanished, frightened by the monster’s raw appearance.
Charles didn’t move, though he felt the vibrations of that voice rising from the ground beneath his feet. Jonesy was too close to Anna, and even Brother Wolf knew better than to increase Jonesy’s stress when she was vulnerable.
“Hester sent you home?” said Anna in a soft voice. “That’s rough. We need to go help her, right? You need to tell us the rest, so we can do that.”
And just as quickly as it had come, the beast left Jonesy’s face.
He nodded and rose to his feet ungracefully. When he spoke, it was a half mumble. “She said, ‘Go home, Jonesy. Go home. Call Bran. No, he’s gone. Call his number and tell whoever answers to come up here. Then you wait behind your glamour for them to come. You go, Jonesy.’”
Charles was aware, because Bran had told him, that Hester could talk to her mate when she was in wolf form. What he found most interesting was that her words—he had no doubt he’d been given what she said word for word—didn’t sound like a wolf who had gone feral after she’d killed a bunch of intruders who had invaded her territory.
“Why couldn’t she come?” asked Anna. She was still sending waves of comfort—it would take a while before she could get it under control again.
Charles had learned to deal with that. Her power made Brother Wolf rest, leaving the human part of him completely in charge. Sometimes it was wonderful. Sometimes, like when he was in the middle of a fight, it was very inconvenient. But it was no longer enough to throw him for a loop. He wondered if she was helping Jonesy’s control, wondered what would have happened if Charles had come here without his mate.