I nodded and sat down finally. Even if he wasn't insisting on protocol tonight, it felt awkward to be standing while he was sitting in the chair.
"You were sixteen," he said. "Too young for him-and too young to know what it was that he wanted from you."
When Bran had caught Samuel kissing me in the woods, he'd sent me home, then shown up the next morning to tell me that he'd already spoken with my real mother, and she would be expecting me at the end of the week. He was sending me away, and I should pack what I wanted to take.
I'd packed all right, but not to go to Portland; I was packed to leave with Samuel. We'd get married, he'd said. It never occurred to me that at sixteen, I'd have trouble getting married without parental permission. Doubtless Samuel would have had an answer for that as well. We'd planned to move to a city and live outside of any pack.
I loved Samuel, had loved him since my foster father had died and Samuel had taken over his role as my protector. Bryan had been a dear, but Samuel was a much more effective defense. Even the women didn't bother me as much once I had Samuel at my back. He'd been funny and charming. Lightheartedness is not a gift often given to werewolves, but Samuel had it in abundance. Under his wing, I learned joy-a very seductive emotion.
"You told me that Samuel didn't love me," I told Bran, my mouth tasting like sawdust. I don't know how he'd found out what Samuel had planned. "You told me he needed a mate who could bear his children."
Human women miscarry a little over half of the children they conceive by a werewolf father. They carry to term only those babies who are wholly human. Werewolf women miscarry at the first full moon. But coyotes and wolves can interbreed with viable offspring, so why not Samuel and me? Samuel believed that some of our children would be human, maybe some would be walkers like me, and some would be born werewolves-but they all would live.
It wasn't until Bran explained it all to me that I understood the antagonism Leah had toward me, an antagonism that all the other females had adopted.
"I should not have told you that way," Bran said.
"Are you trying to apologize?" I asked. I couldn't understand what Bran was trying to say. "I was sixteen. Samuel may seem young, but he's been a full-grown adult as long as I can remember-so he's what, fifty? Sixty?"
I hadn't worried about it when I had loved him. He'd never acted any older than I. Werewolves didn't usually talk about the past, not the way humans do. Most of what I knew about Bran's history, I picked up from my human foster mother, Evelyn.
"I was stupid and young," I said. "I needed to hear what you told me. So if you're looking for forgiveness, you don't need it. Thank you."
He cocked his head. In human form his eyes were warm hazel, like a sunlit oak leaf.
"I'm not apologizing," he said. "Not to you. I'm explaining." Then he smiled, and the resemblance to Samuel, usually faint, was suddenly very apparent. "And Samuel is a wee bit older than sixty." Amusement, like anger, sometimes brought a touch of the old country-Wales-to Bran's voice. "Samuel is my firstborn."
I stared at him, caught by surprise. Samuel had none of the traits of the older wolves. He drove a car, had a stereo system and a computer. He actually liked people-even humans-and Bran used him to interface with police and government officials when it was necessary.
"Charles was born a few years after you came here with David Thompson," I told Bran, as if he didn't know. "That was what 1812?" Driven by his association to Bran, I'd done a lot of reading about David Thompson in college. The Welsh-born mapmaker and fur trader had kept journals, but he hadn't ever mentioned Bran by name. I wondered when I read them if Bran had gone by another name, or if Thompson had known what Bran was and left him out of the journals, which were kept, for the most part, more as a record for his employers than as a personal reminiscence.
"I came with Thompson in 1809," Bran said. "Charles was born in the spring of, I think, 1813. I'd left Thompson and the Northwest Company by then, and the Salish didn't reckon time by the Christian calendar. Samuel was born to my first wife, when I was still human."
It was the most I'd ever heard him say about the past. "When was that?" I asked, emboldened by his uncustomary openness.
"A long time ago." He dismissed it with a shrug. "When I talked to you that night, I did my son a disservice. I have decided that perhaps I was overzealous with the truth and still only gave you part of it."
"Oh?"
"I told you what I knew, as much as I thought necessary at the time," he said. "But in light of subsequent events, I underestimated my son and led you to do the same."
I've always hated it when he chose to become obscure. I started to object sharply-then realized he was looking away from my face, his eyes lowered. I'd gotten used to living among humans, whose body language is less important to communication, so I'd almost missed it. Alphas-especially this Alpha-never looked away when others were watching them. It was a mark of how bad he felt that he would do it now.
So I kept my voice quiet, and said simply, "Tell me now."
"Samuel is old," he said. "Nearly as old as I am. His first wife died of cholera, his second of old age. His third wife died in childbirth. His wives miscarried eighteen children between them; a handful died in infancy, and only eight lived to their third birthday. One died of old age, four of the plague, three of failing the Change. He has no living children and only one, born before Samuel Changed, made it into adulthood."
He paused and lifted his eyes to mine. "This perhaps gives you an idea of how much it meant to him that in you he'd found a mate who could give him children less vulnerable to the whims of fate, children who could be born werewolves like Charles was. I have had a long time to think about our talk, and I came to understand that I should have told you this as well. You aren't the only one who has mistaken Samuel for a young wolf." He gave me a little smile. "In the days Samuel walked as human, it was not uncommon for a sixteen-year-old to marry a man much older than she. Sometimes the world shifts its ideas of right and wrong too fast for us to keep up with it."
Would it have changed how I felt to know the extent of Samuel's need? A passionate, love-starved teenager confronted with cold facts? Would I have seen beyond the numbers to the pain that each of those deaths had cost?
I don't think it would have changed my decision. I knew that because I still wouldn't have married someone who didn't love me; but I think I would have thought more kindly of him. I would have left him a letter or called him after I reached my mother's house. Perhaps I'd even have gathered the courage to talk to him if I hadn't been so hurt and angry.
I refused to examine how Bran's words changed my feelings about Samuel now. It wouldn't matter anyway. I was going home tomorrow.
"There were also some things I didn't know to tell you." Bran smiled, but it wasn't a happy smile. "I sometimes believe my own press, you know. I forget that I don't know everything. Two months after you left, Samuel disappeared."
"He was angry at your interference?"
Bran shook his head. "At first, maybe. But we talked that out the day you left. He would have been more angry if he hadn't felt guilty about taking advantage of a child's need." He reached out and patted my hand. "He knew what he was doing, and he knew what you would have felt about it, whatever he tells himself or you. Don't make him out to be the victim."
Not a problem. "I won't. So if he wasn't angry with you, why did he leave?"
"I know you understand most of what we are because you were raised among us," Bran told me slowly. "But sometimes even I miss the larger implications. Samuel saw in you the answer to his pain, and not the answer to his heart. But that wasn't all Samuel felt for you-I doubt he knew it himself."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"He pined when you left," Bran said, the old-fashioned wording sounding odd coming from the young man he looked to be. "He lost weight, he couldn't sleep. After the first month he spent most of his time as a wolf."
"What do you think was wrong with him?" I asked carefully.
"He was grieving over his lost mate," said Bran. " Werewolves aren't that different from our wild cousins in some respects. It took me too long to figure it out, though. Before I did, he left us without a word. For two years, I waited for the newspapers to report his body discovered in the river like Bryan's had been. Charles tracked Samuel down when he finally started to use the money in his bank account. He'd bought some papers and gone back to college." Samuel had been through college at least once before that I knew of, for medicine. "He became a medical doctor again, set up a clinic in Texas for a while, then came back to us about two years ago."
"He didn't love me," I said. "Not as a man loves a woman."
"No," agreed Bran. "But he had chosen you as his mate." He stood up abruptly and put on his coat. "Don't worry about it now. I just thought you ought to know. Sleep in tomorrow."
CHAPTER 7
I ventured out to the gas station the next morning in my borrowed coat and bought a breakfast burrito. It was hot, if not tasty, and I was hungry enough to eat almost anything.
The young man working the till looked as though he'd have liked to ask questions, but I cowed him with my stare. People around here know better than to get into staring contests. I wasn't a were-anything, but he didn't know that because he wasn't either. It wasn't nice to intimidate him, but I wasn't feeling very nice.
I needed to do something, anything, and I was stuck waiting here all morning. Waiting meant worrying about what Jesse was suffering at the hands of her captors and thinking of Mac and wondering what I could have done to prevent his death. It meant reliving the old humiliation of having Bran tell me the man I loved was using me. I wanted to be out of Aspen Creek, where the memories of being sixteen and alone tried to cling no matter how hard I flinched away; but obedience to Bran was too ingrained- especially when his orders made sense. I didn't have to be nice about it, though.
I'd started back to the motel, my breath raising a fog and the snow crunching beneath my shoes, when someone called out my name.
"Mercy!"
I looked across the highway where a green truck had pulled over-evidently at the sight of me, but the driver didn't look familiar. The bright morning sun glittering on the snow made it hard to pick out details, so I shaded my eyes with my hand and veered toward him for a better look.
As soon as I changed directions, the driver turned off the truck, hopped out, and jogged across the highway.
"I just heard that you were here," he said, "but I thought you'd be long gone this morning or else I'd have stopped in earlier."
The voice was definitely familiar, but it didn't go with the curling red hair and unlined face. He looked puzzled for a moment, even hurt, when I didn't recognize him immediately. Then he laughed and shook his head. "I forgot, even though every time I look in a mirror it still feels like I'm looking at a stranger."
The eyes, pale blue and soft, went with the voice, but it was his laugh that finally clued me in. "Dr. Wallace?" I asked. "Is that really you?"
He tucked his hands in his pockets, tilted his head, and gave me a wicked grin. "Sure as moonlight, Mercedes Thompson, sure as moonlight."
Carter Wallace was the Aspen Creek veterinarian. No, he didn't usually treat the werewolves, but there were dogs, cats, and livestock enough to keep him busy. His house had been the nearest to the one I grew up in, and he'd helped me make it through those first few months after my foster parents died.
The Dr. Wallace I'd known growing up had been middle-aged and balding, with a belly that covered his belt buckle. His face and hands had had been weathered from years spent outside in the sun. This man was lean and hungry; his skin pale and perfect like that of a twenty-year-old-but the greatest difference was not in his appearance.
The Carter Wallace I'd known was slow-moving and gentle. I'd seen him coax a skunk out of a pile of tires without it spraying everything, and keep a frightened horse still with his voice while he clipped away the barbed wire it had become tangled in. There had been something peaceful about him, solid and true like an oak.
Not anymore. His eyes were still bright and kind, but there was also something predatory that peered out at me. The promise of violence clung to him until I could almost smell the blood.
"How long have you been wolf?" I asked.
"A year last month," he said. "I know, I know, I swore I'd never do it. I knew too much about the wolves and not enough. But I had to retire year before last because my hands quit working right." He looked down, a little anxiously, at his hands and relaxed a bit as he showed me he could move all his fingers easily. "I was all right with that. If there is anything a vet gets used to-especially around here-it is aging and death. Gerry started in on me again, but I'm stubborn. It took more than a little arthritis and Gerry to make me change my mind." Gerry was his son and a werewolf.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Bone cancer." Dr. Wallace shook his head. "It was too far gone, they said. Nothing but months in a bed hoping you die before the morphine quits working on the pain. Everyone has their price, and that was more than I could bear. So I asked Bran."
"Most people don't survive the Change if they're already too sick," I said.
"Bran says I'm too stubborn to die." He grinned at me again, and the expression was beginning to bother me because it had an edge that Dr. Wallace's, my Dr. Wallace's, had never had. I'd forgotten how odd it was to know someone from both sides of the Change, forgotten just how much the wolf alters the human personality. Especially when the human wasn't in control.
"I thought I'd be practicing again by now," Dr. Wallace said. "But Bran says not yet." He rocked a little on his heels and closed his eyes as if he could see something I didn't. "It's the smell of blood and meat. I'm all right as long as nothing is bleeding." He whispered the last sentence and I heard the desire in his voice.
He gathered himself together with a deep breath, then looked at me with eyes only a shade darker than the snow. "You know, for years I've said that werewolves aren't much different from other wild predators." Like the great white, he'd told me, or the grizzly bear.