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The nightmare began the usual way. She was in her hut. Now she was a mother, she had been ‘elevated’ from the shared teepees to a more permanent structure that had been purpose built for her. To call it ‘rustic’ would be an understatement but for Leah it was practically palatial. She had her own bed after years of sharing with her siblings, her own fire, and didn’t have to answer to anyone.
It was here, whilst she was rocking Alexander to sleep, that she felt the summons.
The Singer had ensured that his people were always glad to be summoned. Indeed, that there was a frisson of excitement, one that meant they dropped everything to answer him. So, she carefully laid her sweetly dense baby down in his hand-carved cradle. It was a warm afternoon so she left off the blanket and she stood for a moment, making sure that he was sleeping deeply, lovingly watching his tiny chest fill with air and relax.
There was always a whisper of a question whenever she dwelled on Alexander’s existence too much. A whisper that asked, How did I get you? She had been raised in a farming community. She knew without being told that the pig grew fat with piglets because the big boar had mounted her and that a woman only grew large with child after she married.
Leah was not married. Her finger was bare of gold. No man had courted her or asked her father for permission. And yet, here was a child, and he was very much hers – she had grown him, felt his kicks under her palm, labored him through the night.
As usual, that questioning whisper of wonder disappeared as soon as it appeared and Leah dwelled no longer on the matter. The Singer called Alexander a ‘miracle’ so that was what he was.
There were no mirrors in the camp but Leah still ‘checked’ her hair before she left her hut. A habit long-ingrained from her mother, who was a prissy, particular woman, concerned with her appearance and that of her daughters. Leah had now stopped wearing the braids that had been common all her childhood – which, without fail, fell apart and tangled by the time she prepared for bed – and wore her hair up like the married women did. Her fingers felt for the coronet that she wove after each hair-wash and she used a little water from the jug to flatten the flyaways. Then she pulled off her pinafore apron, hung it on the back of her door, and was ready to face society.
As Leah trotted down to the amphitheater, she waved at everyone she met, exchanged passing comments on the day, the weather, light-hearted nothing-nesses that were common in a small community such as theirs. Everyone understood each other – from Leah’s English-speaking family, to the Spanish missionaries, to the old Japanese man who had been a boy on a whaling ship and of course the Native people who made up the bulk of the community.
Leah did not dwell on that too much either, except a passing astonishment and pride that English was so universal and that foreigners so able to learn.
Her Pa was in the amphitheater when she arrived and she stumbled when she saw him, her old clumsiness coming back to her abruptly. He frowned at her, disapproving. “Leah? You should be at home with the baby. You’re a mama now. You have responsibilities.”
“Now, John, I called her here and the babe will be just fine without her for a few minutes.” The Singer emerged, appeared from nowhere as he had a tendency to do. He was shirtless, with smooth, brown skin like the Natives, and he held his hand out to her, smiling that warm, welcoming smile. “Come here, child.”
The Leah of now knew what happened next. Knew that the Singer coaxed her to lie down on one of the stone slabs, even though by then she didn’t want to, a nascent instinct telling her that something was wrong. Knew that he kissed her, knew that she flinched in surprise and shock, pushed at his shoulders as her father had exclaimed in outrage – “Here now! What you do think you’re doing!”
And then, suddenly, she was quiescent beneath him. His hands roamed her and pulled up her skirts and she lay still. Watching, outside of her body, as the Singer used his magic to convince her father that it was not his daughter lying there, but his willing wife. That his new god wished John to lie with his wife before him and Leah, speechless with horror and trapped within her own body, was forced to watch her father’s angry eyes turn dark with lust, to undo his pants and—
A figure blurred in her vision, like a brown-winged bird. Leah’s dream started to break around her. This wasn’t normal. A fist plowed into her father’s head, sending him spiraling away. Then, Bran – her Bran – was beside her, taking her hand gently, helping her from the stone, pulling her skirts back down.
Anxious, Leah looked around for the Singer – concerned that he was still somewhere, still controlling her somehow – but Bran tenderly turned her chin back towards him. He rubbed his thumb over her bottom lip, smiled, and tucked her arm around his, leading her away.
*
It was a weird enough diversion from her normal nightmare that Leah’s consciousness pulled her up and out and she woke up, finding herself staring at her ceiling in surprise. No Singer. No settlement. No brainwashed father.
Just her bedroom in Aspen Creek, dark and quiet but for her heart pounding in her chest and the steady breathing of her mate. She turned her head, almost expecting Bran to be awake himself, surprised as she to have trespassed in her dreams, but he was still sleeping deeply at her side, one hand clenched in her pillow.
She frowned at him. It was the first time Bran had featured in one of her dreams and he’d seemed oddly concrete, somehow. She supposed that could be explained away easily. Of everyone, he was the only ‘present’ day figure who featured. Of course he would feel more real to her. Jarringly out of place, indeed.
She wondered if he had purposefully invaded her dream. She wouldn’t put it past him. She’d seen him do many weird and wonderful things over the course of their mating and sweeping into her nightmare to heroically intervene was a very Bran thing to do. If she was anyone else, that was.
Leah levered herself up onto her elbow, continuing to study his face freely. Asleep, relaxed, his boyish features were never more obvious than they were now. She’d always thought it was his eyes that made him look his age and closed, his lashes dark against his cheeks, all that remained was a handsome boy whose mouth was pouting a little, smushed up against his pillow.
She both did, and did not, want to kiss him. A common refrain at the moment.
Knowing that if she continued to stare, the predator within would wake him up, Leah grabbed her cell phone to check the time. 4AM. The worst time to be so solidly awake, both too early and too late.
She considered her options. Trying to go back to sleep was a no-go. The dream would return, rooted as it was now, creeping at the edges of her subconscious. She had learnt that it would be worse the second time. Less coherent and thus more distressing. She could get up, Change and go for a run. Or she could get a start on some of the food prep she’d planned to do today. The freezer had been depleted this last month, as it always was when they were busy.
Sliding out of bed as quietly as possible, Leah decided on Changing. A bracing run was just what she needed to rid herself of the lingering dream. She began to drag her nightdress over her head, heading for her closet.
“Where are you going?”
Damn. She dropped the nightdress into the hamper. “For a run. I woke up.”
Bran had sat up, drawing one knee to his chest. He rubbed at an eye tiredly, really bringing home the youthful quality he tried hard to exude. She wondered if he was doing it on purpose. If, even here, he was trying to disarm her or this was one of those habits he now had permanently. Like pretending not to love her. “It’s— very early, Leah.”
“I know.”
He grunted and dramatically fell back into his pillow. “Wake me up when you come back.”
“I will.” Then she stood there for another few seconds, watching him, bemused by this whole interaction. There had been a time when she could slip from the bed and he wouldn’t make a comment.
She shook herself out of it and headed off downstairs.
As always, the run did Leah good. She rolled through pillowy snow drifts and skidded over frozen creeks, then made sure to trample through Asil’s back yard knowing how much it irritated him to look out of his kitchen window and see the new blanket of snow ‘untidy’.
She chuckled about this all the way home and was still vaguely pleased with herself when she sat on the edge of her bed and woke Bran up as she had been instructed, though he had never asked this request of her before. “Up and at ‘em,” she murmured, doing a passable impression of the old Leah. She used to wake Kara up this way, when she lived with them.
Bran rolled on his back, grumbling. He was not a morning person, though it felt these last few weeks that he was even less so. “I’m awake. I am.” He rubbed a hand over his face and then scratched behind his ear, blinking wildly like a startled burrowing mammal. “What time is it?”
“Seven. Time to shower.” As an experiment, spurred on perhaps by his heroics in her dreams, Leah leaned over him. Bran froze, eyes widening just a fraction and it was this reaction – an overreaction, surely? – that had Leah questioning herself. Questioning him.
But she was a woman of determination so she forced herself through the hesitation and discomfort and pressed their lips together.
Her husband of two centuries lay still, absolutely still beneath her but under her hand, laid against his bare chest, she felt his heart race like a rabbit’s.
After a moment, Leah drew back. It could hardly have been called a kiss, for neither of them had moved. She licked her lips and stood up, disappointed. She still felt nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.
*
Leah showered and dried her hair. She dressed in comfortable ‘at home’ clothes – a sweater and leggings that she didn’t mind getting dirty as she cooked. Whilst Bran and Tag milled about making breakfast, she began chopping vast quantities of vegetables for the mirepoix, dividing them into three. One for the ragù which would be used in a lasagna and also portioned out as a quick pasta sauce, one for the vat of chicken soup, one to be frozen for use another time.
She started on the ragù, first, listening with one ear to Bran’s and Tag’s desultory conversation. Tag had brought his chainsaw up to the house. There were a couple of trees that needed taking down and whilst this wasn’t typically Bran’s responsibility, she knew he enjoyed the manual labor. Knew, too, that Tag would enjoy the one-on-one time with the Marrok. With the exception of herself, her mate always tried to spend quality time with members of their pack on an individual basis.
“Will you be back for lunch?” she asked automatically when they started to clear their plates.
“Yes,” her husband said at once, even though over his shoulder Tag clearly hesitated in doubt.
“I shall see you then.”
As he left the kitchen, Tag gave Leah a look – one she couldn’t translate. She’d been getting a lot of looks, lately. It was boring.
*
Her morning was a pleasant one. She listened to the radio, found herself singing along twice, stopped herself and then gave herself permission to start again. Bran received three phone calls that she answered, taking notes on the memo pad in the kitchen. She heard his office phone ring twice but that phone was off limits to her so she ignored it.
Kara came by just before midday for no other purpose than to loiter in her kitchen, apparently, poking at things and asking questions but otherwise staring at her phone anxiously. A boy, Leah supposed. Kara was now at Columbia Falls High and, whilst boy fever had hit Kara fairly late, she was making up for any lost time by ‘dating’ a series of underwhelming young men from her class.
At least, Leah assumed they were underwhelming. She’d never met them and had no intention of doing so, unless they reached a significant milestone. She wasn’t sure what that milestone would be. A year, perhaps?
“Someone from school?” Leah asked, checking the chicken stock.
“Yeah. Robbie Andrews.”
The name rang a bell. “Weren’t you seeing him before the summer break?”
“No. Kinda.” Kara ate a slice of carrot, nibbling around it neatly. “Well. He was seeing Katie Greenwood so. We just went for coffee that time. But they broke up at her birthday party.”
Another bell of recognition. “That would be the birthday party you weren’t invited to.”
“Correct. Though, just so you know,” Kara said with no rancor whatsoever, spinning on the bar stool, “that’s one of those things you probably shouldn’t bring up again. Sounds mean.”
Having a werewolf teenager around had been surprisingly helpful for Leah. Her wolf gave Kara far more leeway than she would an adult so Kara’s straight-talking was only ever taken the way it was intended – as constructive. Leah knew she sometimes let words run from her mouth as soon as she thought of them, not particularly considering the repercussions. If she thought about this properly – the way she thought about everything now, with an awareness of what she had come from – she suspected this had something to do with being taught quite early on that lying was pointless. A mixture of God-fearing and then Alpha-fearing. She strove instead to be honest.
Honesty was very different from saying everything she thought out loud, however.
“I’m sorry. I guess—” Leah sighed, the levels of introspection in her new life sometimes a little too much to bear. “I’m afraid because I thought it was so utterly irrelevant at the time, I didn’t consider that it might still be hurtful for you.” She winced. “I didn’t mean that to come out the way it sounded.”
“I know.” Kara smiled winningly. She was very good natured and older than her years, which was what happened when children were forced to come to terms with an inner monster. “And you were right, it was irrelevant. It doesn’t hurt me anymore. The kind of girls who don’t invite you to their parties as some kind of punishment are not the kind of girls I want to be friends with. And I know that in fifty years’ time I won’t remember Katie Greenwood’s name. That everything that happens to me now will be in the past.”
This was almost word for word what Leah had told her in a by-rote attempt to be sympathetic. Of course, that had been before and whilst it was still more or less what Leah believed, she had to admit her most recent experience told her that one’s teenage years could be the most scarring.
Katie Greenwood’s birthday party probably didn’t qualify, however, so the point still stood.
She politely asked a few questions about Robbie Andrews, who was once again not very differentiated from the other boys Kara had ‘dated’ in the past couple of years. Athletic. Good looking. Funny. But Leah held back that comment, correctly interpreting that it would not be welcome. She also held back her belief that human boys would not give Kara what she wanted. It would always bother her wolf that the human was weaker than her. Very, very few female werewolves married, and mated, human men successfully. She had made a study of it, over the years, always morbidly fascinated with other people’s relationships as a comparison to her own.
“Do you want to stay for lunch?”
Kara shook her head and looked over at the clock. “I’m having lunch with Anna and the baby.”
“Oh, that will be nice.”
It was clear from Kara’s face that this was not something she believed personally. “She’s cute, I guess. But she doesn’t do much.”
“No, she’s a little young to be interesting to anyone other than her parents.” And, though she smiled reflexively, just like that she had a flashback to her dream. To watching her own baby, sleeping in his crib, her never-ceasing fascination with everything to do with him, no matter how minor.
It was a shock; her dreams, her memories, had not leaked so abruptly into her real life before. Her heart hurt, badly.
It must have been visible. Kara reached for her hand. “You okay?”
“Yes. Of course.” Leah shook her off, automatically, before finding her smile again, making it real. “I’m fine.”
*
Lunch with Bran was normal. She relayed the messages, they hypothesized what they might be about, and afterwards he returned calls from his office. She heard him on the phone to Adam, heard Sherwood’s name but she did not want to eavesdrop. He’d tell her if she needed to know.
Then he headed back out to rejoin Tag, not before telling her that he would be back in time for dinner.
Peggy dropped by that afternoon, her normally cheerful face woeful. Leah didn’t need to ask to know she was missing her mate, who was on the road again. Leah fed her cups of cocoa and peanut butter cookies and they watched re-runs of Desperate Housewives, mostly talking about the outfits and whether they would stand up to today’s fashion. They did not talk about Peggy’s mate – Leah had learnt that this would not be appreciated.
In some senses, Leah had kinship with Peggy beyond their rarity as female werewolves. She’d spent most of her life missing her mate, too.
Peggy knew her place, as well. That helped.
She left before six, about two minutes before Bran and Tag returned, both of them coated in a fine layer of sawdust and mud. They both took turns in the downstairs bath because she would be damned if Bran was going to deposit that sawdust in a trail upstairs. She knew she’d be finding splinters in bed for weeks to come in any case.
“Stay for dinner?” she offered Tag, when he was sitting in a fresh pair of sweats, squeaky clean.
Tag was pleased. He always looked pleased when she offered – as if there was ever going to be the slightest chance that she wouldn’t. She knew her duty to their wolves. “You bet. Thanks.”
*
Given the sawdust situation, by silent agreement they slept in Bran’s bed that night. Or Bran slept, flat out on his front like he didn’t have a care in the world, and Leah had the nightmare again.
‘The’ nightmare was more like variations of the same. Snippets of her past haunting her. The amphitheater, yes, over and over again the amphitheater. But there were other moments. The moment when, the congregation brought together in song, Leah’s mother suddenly started screaming and screaming. No one knew what triggered it. Perhaps it was Zander, the spitting image of Leah’s brothers when they were that age, dancing and giggling with his tambourine. Perhaps it was Leah’s thickening waist.
Now Leah knew that it was probably all of those things. And that her mind, unlike Leah’s, hadn’t been as strong and had broken under the repeated mental strain.
Her mother was never the same again after that night. She’d sit outside the hut, staring into the distance, her lips wet, and everyone knew Mrs. Fenwood couldn’t be relied upon to watch the children anymore, even her own.
Tonight, this nightmare, Leah was in for a special treat. The night the Beast ripped through the community and attacked the Singer.
Nothing had gone like they planned. There was a growing group of rebels amongst the women, Leah being something of a ringleader, and the Singer had already been on the defensive, finding it harder and harder to control their minds. He’d snatched one of the Yuki people, White Moon, the night before and imprisoned her as a warning. Sherwood – which hadn’t been the name he’d called himself then, not that ‘Alastair’ had been his real name either – had commanded them all to remain strong. The Singer was weakening. Their disobedience was disempowering him.
Which was when the Singer had taken the children. Called them to him. Those that could walk slipped their minders or, like Zander, had become desolate when Leah had prevented him from leaving her. His fists had struck her chest in an almighty tantrum. At four years old, he was a strong little boy, unnaturally so, and it had been a hard winter. Like the Singer, Leah was weaker now. His furious fists had broken a collarbone and, flinching, she dropped him. He had scurried off, heading for the cave system, her chasing his heels.
As well as restricting food from his rebellious people, the Singer had limited fire so not only were they freezing cold but there was no light. When the sun set, they lived in total darkness, huddled together like mice. No tinder would strike flame no matter the condition so no torches lit the paths to the cave entrance and in her desperation Leah stumbled over undergrowth, over jutting rocks, cutting her knees, her hands.
When a man grabbed her, she fought, crying out both from the pain of his grip and from frustration until she realized he was no danger to her. “My son, Alastair, my son.” In all their plans, Leah had never dreamed that she would not be walking away with both her children. “I have to get him.”
“Going in there is sure death, Leah. You must leave. You must lead the rest of the women and children out the way we planned,” Alistair had growled at her, his unnatural eyes shining like gems in the night. She’d known he was magic in that way she’d once believed in God, in that she wholly and utterly believed it without having the tangible proof to back it up. But of all the men, he was the only one who had shaken off the Singer’s hold, and she was certain there was something monstrous about him from his strength, the sounds he made when he was angry.
In that moment, Alastair’s penetrating gaze on hers, willing her to obey him, Leah’s destiny was set and her son was lost to her forever. Her decision put her on the path to a future where she became a werewolf, the unloved mate to the Marrok, a woman with many advantages but a past so unbearable she did not want to remember it even if she could.
Undoubtedly, Alastair had been right. If she’d gone into the cave system, she would have died.
Worse still, as Leah stumbled away, tears streaming down her face, she knew that Bran – who was, right then, hundreds of miles away, racing unknowingly towards them – would have run instead straight to his suicide. Towards the coast, perhaps, thrown himself off cliffs in the middle of a storm, tossed against rocks until the waves took him under. Without her, that would have been his fate.
But she had abandoned her child, which was all her dream self could think of. She had sacrificed him – not for the first time, as it would happen – and it broke her heart. She had become the very antithesis of a mother. And it would be for nothing. The Singer wouldn’t die today. Zander would grow up without her, warped by that monster, becoming a vessel, a rapist himself, for the monster he called ‘father’.
As she tripped and fell her way down the dark path, Leah heard hideous screams in the distance as the Beast began to tear through those protecting the Singer. Her father was amongst them. Her son. She sobbed.
Feet ran towards her and she didn’t need to see properly to know it was Bran. In this dream her body recognized him the way she would recognize him in reality. Like Alastair/Sherwood, his eyes glowed with his wolf nature. He lifted her, his arms were gentle, his cheek pressed to hers briefly, rubbing the way his wolf often did. She cried into his neck, surprised and relieved to be held by him, the one man from whom she wanted comfort. “I left him. I left him,” she cried brokenly. She had left him. She had killed him. Her baby.
Bran’s breath gusted against her ear. He kissed her cheek as he drew back, wiping his thumbs over her tears. “I’ll find him,” he whispered, his voice hoarse like sandpaper. Then he let her go, running up the path from whence she had come.
*
Leah sat up, her heart full to bursting. Her cheeks were wet with real tears and she wiped them with the backs of her hands, then turned them to look at the gloss of wetness, this blurring of dream and reality confusing her. It had felt so real. Her chest ached from weeping.
Bran slept on, much as he had done the night before, and just as before she was equally surprised that he did so. His fist was bunched in her pillow again, his face mashed half into the mattress. She was tempted to wake him, sure he was somehow doing this on purpose.
Her hand lifted, ready to shake his shoulder when she hesitated, fingers curling. The situation between them was delicate and she played the conversation through with him and didn’t like the way it sounded. Like she needed a hero, in her dreams. Needed him.
Or like she was losing her mind.
Of course, they had talked, when they had returned from Wild Sign. He’d forced the issue by making a dramatic statement – the Great Unveiling of his Feelings – and then, when Charles had debriefed him further on what he knew, Bran had forced the issue some more.
But he didn’t know everything. And there were some things she wasn’t ready to share. Perhaps never would.
Besides, it was hardly as if Leah could complain. If indeed Bran was a figment of her imagination, her White Knight come to rescue her from her own memories, long may it continue. The real Bran didn’t need to know.
Checking her cell, she lay back down again and folded her arms across her torso. It wasn’t even three yet. She would wait another hour before she got up.
*
So it continued for several days. More often than not, Bran intervened in the amphitheater. Though the Singer preferred using her father as his vehicle – something about his unusual coloring, Leah believed – after Zander was born, he was more interested in frequency than consistency. Bran’s fist met many a man’s face. Sometimes more than one fist. Sometimes it was a pummeling, Leah sitting on the stone slab and watching with her mouth open, stunned into inactivity. She’d seen her Bran violently react in her defense before but this felt far more personal. Far more visceral.
It always ended the same way, with Bran helping her down, brushing at her skirts and fussing. He’d thread her arm through his and lead her back to the camp, like they were taking a pleasant stroll.
And then she’d wake up.
With some extensive Googling, Leah surmised that her subconscious was working things through. Not just with her memories, but with her mate. She thought it was particularly trite of her subconscious to want to put Bran in this unlikely position of nighttime hero but after weeks of being abused in her sleep, it was nice to have a rest.
And in a way, though her mornings were early ones, it really was a rest. She began to dread sleeping less. It felt easier, during the day, and this was apparently noticeable to others who now made it their job to check on Leah’s well-being.
Anna’s smile was determined. “You seem more upbeat.”
One of the challenges of having Anna as a daughter-in-law was her incessant commentary on how Leah seemed. To be fair to her – oh, how Leah struggled with being fair – this commentary had begun only recently, as if Anna felt they had crossed over some invisible boundary of formality where now she had permission to comment.
She supposed seeing one’s mother-in-law murder her surprisingly alive offspring and feed his heart to a squid monster might do that. A bonding experience, if you will.
Leah didn’t like it. More to the point, she wasn’t used to it. As Bran’s mate, she had long lived in an elevated, untouchable position. She wasn’t approachable, like he was, at least not in a friendly way. So now she braced herself every time she saw Anna on her own.
Worse still, and perhaps this was a quality of an Omega, perhaps it was simply a quality of Anna, Leah couldn’t soundly disabuse Anna of the habit of speaking her mind to her. Doing so would make her wolf – her coldly vindictive, coldly violent wolf – unhappy. Instead she tolerated it. In a fashion.
“What does upbeat mean?” Leah asked, tilting her head to the side.
This annoyed Anna because she thought Leah was being deliberately obtuse. Which she was.
“Well. You look well,” Anna said firmly. She leaned on the counter, crossing her arms across her chest, fixing Leah with her most stubborn I’m not going away look. On the counter, still in the car seat, Ava threw her arms into the air impatiently and thunked them back down. Then looked generally quite surprised by this.
Probably she was bored by the conversation, too. Leah gave her a finger to suck.
*
As they approached full moon, Bran started to sleep elsewhere. She winced, the first night she realized what that meant. She was causing his wolf trouble in a way she never had before. She’d always been receptive to Bran’s advances, desperately so, before she’d ever really understood the complex magic of the mating bond. And once she’d thought sex a way to be intimate with him. Now she knew better.
Or she thought she had. That was confusing, too.
“I’m sorry,” Leah managed at breakfast, awkward in the extreme that she was causing him discomfort. That she was shirking her duty. Not just as his mate but in all the ways she had been brought up to understand marriage.
He shrugged. “Don’t be. It’s fine.”
Sometimes, when Bran lied, he did it so she would catch it. A manipulation of her emotions by giving her an insight he pretended he didn’t want her to have. It was a cruel trick and she had taught herself to ignore it.
Leah did not catch the lie this time but she knew there was one. Bran used the bond to control his wolf and, at its most basic, the mating bond was about trust. The ultimate reinforcement of trust between a man and a woman – at least, this man and this woman – was sex. Giving him access to her body, in the most intimate of ways, said that she trusted him.
She tentatively reached out to touch him, to offer some kind of reassurance that at some point the thought of giving him ‘access’ wouldn’t feel like an invasion, because she loved him, she was sure of that, but he flinched away, then looked truly alarmed to have done so. “I beg your pardon,” he said quickly, putting down the spatula and drawing upon that deep, endless well inside him to manufacture an expression of utter calm. “But that is not… wise.”
Leah raised her eyebrows, hurt by his reaction and scrambling to cover it as she had always done. “Oh? What would happen?”
“Leah.” It was a warning. Abruptly Bran walked out of the kitchen, out of the conversation.
Feeling burnt, she took the eggs off the heat.
*
Four, maybe five nights after they had returned from Wild Sign, Bran had made a move on her. They hadn’t been intimate for weeks, not that she’d really noticed. Things had been strange for so long that all the normal routines of their life had passed her by. No doubt Bran had thought—well, who knew what Bran had thought.
He’d leaned over her in bed and there had been nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with the hand he’d laid over her stomach, over the exposed strip of skin between her pajama shorts and shirt. She remembered his smile, though, that was strikingly different. She wasn’t certain she’d ever seen anything other than dark lust on his face before and she’d been so transfixed by this new expression that she hadn’t noticed how the rest of her body was reacting.
Then he’d kissed her and she’d thrown him across the room.
He’d been understanding. She’d seen the sympathy in his eyes. The sorrow. Bran thought she was traumatized by her memories of what had happened.
Leah rejected that. Yes, she remembered everything the Singer had made them forget but it wasn’t as if it was yesterday. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t known. Deep down inside, she’d known that something was—not right. Like her memories had always been on the tip of her tongue, ready for her to speak them, ready for her to scream out loud.
After he’d politely asked if she would prefer it if he slept elsewhere, she’d insisted on trying again, this time under her own steam.
Bran had declined, formally. “Leah, your heart is racing,” he’d said gently, lying next to her, a polite distance between their bodies. “I can feel how anxious you are. Let’s just go to sleep.”
There was absolutely no point denying it. As soon as he’d said it she felt it. She felt sick with panic, which had an unfamiliar, vile taste here, in this bedroom, in this bed. In desperation, she’d said the first thing that had come to her mind, that was the new unspeakable on the tip of her tongue, “I just don’t know who you are any more.”
Which was weird because that hadn’t been what she’d meant to say at all. Leah hurried to correct herself as his eyes flared in surprise. “I mean I. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
The damage was done, though. Bran felt the truth of the first statement, as did she.
*
Obviously, Bran was no stranger to her. She knew him. Deeply.
But for two centuries he’d made sure she believed she was a far, far distant second to his first mate, that had he been given a choice it would not have been to make her his or to even Change her. That he disliked her. Perhaps hated her.
Consequently Leah had been waiting forever for him to set her aside, always afraid that any mistake she made – and she made many – would lead to that decision from him. Sometimes she’d courted mistakes deliberately, struck out at those he loved, moved by her own bitterness to bring an end to it all, even though that wasn’t what she wanted.
She’d visualized the end a few times, to torment herself with the pain out of a desire to inure herself to it. He’d do it privately, Leah decided, he’d give her that courtesy at least. He’d have her stand before him in his office to give it an air of a business transaction, to remind her that it had only ever been that. Time and time again, Leah imagined Bran too furious to be angry, his words clipped and cool, and then he would cleave her from him. It wouldn’t be difficult for him. He had never allowed her to get close to his heart.
But it would break hers.
Until the moment he had opened up to her and revealed his apparently long-denied feelings, Leah had not realized quite how fundamental Bran’s emotional distance from her was to her center of normality. In the oddest possible way, it was the cornerstone of their relationship. She revolved around it. Around what would make him love her.
When he declared himself, out of the blue, it wasn’t a question of a missing puzzle pieces slotting into place with this great unveiling. There weren’t any ‘missing’ puzzle pieces. She’d made sure of that. To avoid daily disappointment, she’d hard-wired herself to believe there was nothing wrong with her relationship. She carefully, after years of trial and error, etched out the edges of his limits so that she knew to what degree she could rely upon him and to what degree she could only rely on herself. He’d been helpful with that. He’d wanted them to work well together, to respect one another, for there to be no confusion between them.
She was not prepared for him to sincerely care about her. She didn’t know what to do with that.
*
Raising children in a small community had many benefits. The day Sherwood – Alastair – came, Leah left her unhappy, colicky baby with White Moon, who had been blessed with twin girls a few weeks before Leah’s second son. They giggled as Leah laid her squirming pale child between the two more naturally tanned babies, a striking contrast. White Moon was quite the most beautiful girl Leah had ever met, really quite awe-inspiring with her long, glossy dark hair and her deep brown eyes. She had a natural grace, being small and delicate, that Leah always felt she lacked. With any luck, White Moon’s daughters would grow to be as beautiful and graceful as she.
Zander toddled off to play with his friends – under the watchful eye of another dutiful mother, one whose daughter was oddly fair as Zander himself was – whilst Leah rushed down to the commotion. There was always a commotion when a newcomer arrived. She patted her hair; in her hurry she had quite forgotten to make herself tidy.
Her first unusual thought was that their new arrival was a handsome man. She did not often think of men in that fashion. He was taller than her and he had a fine head of sandy hair that curled a little. His eyes were green and his skin pale, as pale as her babies’. He was speaking English with a strange accent, shaking hands, bowing his head to the women. Yes, very handsome, indeed.
And mannerly, Leah decided quickly, which was a more appropriate thought. Mannerly was a far better character trait that mere handsomeness. As with all newcomers, she was inclined to be positive – willing them to be good additions to the community. Hoping that they would be able to help.
Eventually, the stranger’s eyes met hers – crinkling warmly – and she opened her mouth to introduce herself, only for her father to intervene, appearing from behind her. He put his arm about her waist and pulled her away, chastising her viciously for being forward, his fingers digging into her hip. He had become very physical with all his daughters since her mother had begun to fade, but Leah had noticed it was particularly thus with her. She often had bruises.
Whispering crossly in her ear, her papa returned her to her hut and—
*
Leah sat bolt upright, gasping in shocked revulsion.
Beside her, Bran did the same, his hand gripping the sleeve of her T-shirt, his eyes scanning the room for danger. “What is it?”
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. She shoved the sheets down her body and then when that wasn’t enough, the feel of the mattress closing in on her skin too much, she scrambled from the bed and pushed the window open. Cold air rushed into the room.
Sucking in deep breaths, trying to rationalize her over-reaction, Leah supposed it had been some time since dream Bran hadn’t intervened. It was a shock, that was all. A shock for the dream to reach its inevitable conclusion without him sweeping in to save her. She leaned forward, her head outside. The frigid air hurt her face, sent goosebumps rushing down her skin.
Bran turned on a light. A moment later, he put a glass of water down on the windowsill.
“Would you like to tell me about it?” he asked, faux-casual.
Leah reminded herself that he knew, some of it. He knew what the Singer had needed to get his Walkers. Knew that human taboos had been almost meaningless to him. Whilst she might not have explicitly ever said that her father had been the Singer’s preferred tool, she had seen from the way his eyes darkened that he had understood. There was nothing he could do about that. Her father was long, long dead.
She licked her lips. “I hoped he only did it because the Singer convinced him I was my mother,” Leah said in a rush. She pressed the backs of her fingers to her cheeks. They felt chill, damp, from the outside and yet she felt feverishly hot. She took a grateful sip of water. “I remembered—that was not always the case.”
Bran slid down the wall to the floor, his T-shirt scraping against the painted wall, a drawn out susurration. “I’m so sorry.”
Now that he was lower than her, it was easier for her, which was no doubt why he had done it. Her shoulders relaxed. “I think I forgot that one on purpose.” Rape was rape but there had been a possibility, for a moment, of forgiveness, if he had done it under a magical influence he could not resist. She could come to terms with that.
“No doubt.”
The Singer had easily exploited the weakness in her father. Her papa had always sought glory. That had been what the whole journey west had been about. He’d been feted by the church, by their community, for his great ‘sacrifice’, his commitment to God. It had been a damning blow to him when his God had not recognized him as worthy for success or greatness. When instead he had suffered.
The Singer, however, had seen right through him. He had raised her father to a position of authority in the settlement. Inflated his ego. Given him what his once-God could not. Power. The respect of many. And he did not want that power to be wrested away from him. Not by anyone.
Leah thought back to the rest of the dream, the implications beyond her own abuse. More memories crystalizing. “He didn’t like Al—Sherwood,” she said, mostly for her own benefit. “We would have to meet in secret.”
Bran’s voice was very carefully controlled. “Oh?”
She looked down and gently touched a whorl of Bran’s hair. It, like Sherwood’s, had a tendency to curl when it was longer. She had never made the connection before. She traced one. “To plan the uprising, Bran.”
“You’ve not said much about the uprising.”
“Hasn’t Sherwood told you?” She was well aware that there had been many conversations between the two. She was not the only person who’d had their memories returned.
She noticed she had started to stroke Bran’s head. She pulled her hand away, embarrassed by the betrayal of her body.
Bran’s chin lifted from his chest, tilted up so she could see his face clearly. He was unreadable, which told her great emotions were swirling within him. “He told me you were very brave. That you warned him, as soon as you could. And that you had been testing the limits of the Singer’s boundaries long before he had arrived. You and a small group of women.”
“Yes. That’s true.” Leah closed her eyes, mournfully thinking of White Moon. She’d been closer to her than she had ever been to her own sister, in part because she’d been forced into role of mother for her siblings as well. In part because White Moon had gone through the same experience as Leah. They had shared their horrifying suspicions with each other, even as they had talked about their children marrying, one day, the way young mothers do to cement the bonds of a friendship that felt like it was near-familial.
She did not want to think about White Moon. “What time is it?”
“Just before two, I think. Do you think you can go back to sleep?”
Leah looked at the bed, unhappily. “No.”
Bran pushed himself up. “Jigsaw puzzle it is.”
*
They had a closet of jigsaw puzzles, one of the few ‘games’ that the pack could play together. Leah had never partaken of the activity herself – considered it damn close to watching paint dry – but Bran regularly sat at the dining table with one or two of their wolves as company, pieces cascaded before him.
As she sat looking for corner pieces, Leah recalled her suspicion that Bran used the puzzles as a way of manipulating people into talking and now it was her turn. She eyed him suspiciously when he wasn’t looking.
“Ah-hah, here it is.” Bran found the fourth corner and laid it into position. He was quietly pleased.
This puzzle was new. A gift from George for Christmas. One-thousand pieces and the subject matter wasn’t that interesting. Houseplant leaves. Fifty-one of them.
Well. She wasn’t going to give in and talk. She knew his ways.
Using the insert as guidance, she proposed sorting the pieces into broadly similar colors first. “Unless there’s a better way to do it?”
“That’s normally what I do.”
Leah – a product of her upbringing – had long fought against her natural inclination to think all men cleverer than she because time and time again this had proven to be wrong. But no one could deny that this wasn’t the case with the Marrok, a master of logic. She was well satisfied to find that her thinking process was the same as his.
It was unfortunate how absorbing she found the puzzling process. Twenty minutes passed in companionable silence, then thirty, at which point she had to admit perhaps she’d been wrong. That this was an activity worthy of her time.
“That’s definitely a piece of fern,” Leah said, pushing a piece to the ‘probably fern’ pile.
Nodding, Bran slid another piece over. “This too.”
Though they were still in the sorting phase, she couldn't help but begin to put the fern together since it had a nice edge piece and was satisfyingly quite tall, effectively creating a spine to their construction. She liked the soft little snick the puzzle pieces made as they clicked together.
“You’re humming.”
Leah froze, a prickle of hot-cold running down her neck. “What?”
“Not—that.” Even Bran seemed to pale. “I mean, normal humming. Taylor Swift, if I’m not mistaken.”
She exhaled. “You scared me.”
“I’m sorry. It was a surprise, that’s all.”
Recalling her desire to keep the conversation away from any topics that might be part of his game plan, Leah smiled. “The choice of music, perhaps?”
The corner of his mouth lifted in answer. “A Swifty, like Kara.”
“More like my musical choices are influenced by whatever is on her Spotify playlist.” She had spent a lot of time driving Kara places before she’d got her first car and been judged responsible enough to drive. Their experience had initially been that putting a teenage werewolf behind a wheel was not a safe construct. Once she’d pulled the steering wheel off making an over-enthusiastic turn.
Bran hummed in understanding, returning to sorting out the pieces. It looked like he was starting to tackle the Heart Leaf Philodendron. “I really must look into Spotify.”
“Kara claims you’d love it. Something about an algorithm enabling you to discover new music.”
“New music. Who’d have thought.”
*
Curiously, Leah’s nightmares abated for the next few days. Her head hit her pillow each night and a blissfully dreamless sleep followed. She wondered if the revelation of her dream had been something her subconscious had been trying to bring to the fore. One of those nebulous, psychological things. She wondered, too, if talking about it had been useful.
Talking to Bran had always been the obvious option, however the prospect of continuously burdening him with the awfulness of her past did not sit well with her. Not a question of trust, particularly. More the fear that it might change how he felt about her. He loved the woman who had proven to him time and time again how strong she was, not the one riddled with a past.
So she picked up the phone and called the only one who knew anything about her. Who had known her first. Sherwood, as he was called now.
They had spoken only once since her memories had been returned. The conversation had been reasonably short because she’d answered the phone automatically, memo pad at her fingers, not anticipating that he would be at the other end and that he was calling to tell them that he’d had his memories returned as well. That they were linked.
After that – his explanation, his apologies for starting her Change – she’d been too shell-shocked by her growing appreciation for the monumental role Alastair had played in her life to do anything but make murmuring noises. And then Bran had come in and taken the phone from her numb fingers.
“You said I could call you if I wanted to talk,” Leah said, because he had indeed said that, though he’d made the offer to Bran in her hearing. “Is now a good time?”
“Now is a fine time, Leah Fenwood.”
That’s what he had called her, before. Leah Fenwood. Like it was all one word. Names had power and he had wanted to reinforce hers to her, over and over again, so she didn’t forget who she was. She’d had no idea what he meant at the time. She did now.
“Leah Cornick,” she corrected, though without much heart to it. “I haven’t been Leah Fenwood for a long time.”
“Of course. I’m sorry I couldn’t come to the wedding.”
Leah laughed. He sounded just like Bran did, when he was being dry. “Well. It wasn’t that kind of a wedding.” Just her, Bran, the pastor and his wife, and Bran’s two deeply unhappy sons. At least she’d had a new dress for the occasion.
“No? Perhaps you should do it again.”
She smiled at this whimsy, briefly imagining it, and then dismissing it. She addressed the reason for her call, “I keep having these dreams. They are incredibly realistic. Like I’m right back there. During the day it’s fine. It feels like any old memory. But at night—” She blew out a breath. “Technicolor.”
Sherwood was quiet for a moment. In her memories, he had been a man of many quiet moments. Like Bran, he chose his words carefully. “I find myself in a similar position. I suspect it’s quite hard for the brain to reconcile the newly formed past,” he mused. “Must make the timeline quite challenging.”
She drew her thumbnail across the kitchen table, growing closer to what she wanted to ask. “I don’t suppose Bran is in your dreams?”
“Not until the end.” Sherwood grunted. “I’ve had a couple of dreams where he takes me to task for Changing you. Trying to Change you. I apologize.”
“You’ve already done that. So has he. Endlessly,” Leah murmured, reading into this that Bran was only the White Knight in her own dreams and she would be forced to come to terms with her own unique situation. She wasn’t certain why she imagined it might be otherwise. “I forgive you, as I forgive him. And I certainly appreciate being alive to do so.”
“Well, it’s the principle of the thing, Leah Fen—hmm, that’s apparently a habit that’s hard to break.”
Leah decided she didn’t mind it, and said so. “I have spent so long forgetting her.” She winced. She suspected that was a telling statement.
“You remembered your childhood, before, of course?”
“I—” Leah paused, pursing her lips in an exaggerated fashion, staring across the kitchen at the calendar on the wall that was still set to last April. “Tried not to. It wasn’t an easy childhood.”
“He was a bully.”
She didn’t need to ask who ‘he’ was. “Yes.”
“And a narcissist.”
Tears sprung, fully formed, into her eyes. “Yes,” Leah repeated. Her mother had been no help, of course.
“Your little brother and sister, I remember they looked up to you. They loved you.”
Leah nodded, not certain her voice would hold if she spoke again. Sherwood did not know of James, whom they lost on the journey west to an infection, who had cried feverishly in her arms as he departed this mortal plane. Nor the baby, Luke, left with her aunt and uncle. Forgotten. He might have lived a long and happy life, never knowing what truly happened to his parents and siblings. She wondered if there was a way to find out. If she wanted to.
Leah sniffed, pressing the heel of one hand against a burning eye. “Sherwood, why can I hear meowing?”
*
Though Leah knew the pack had not been fully debriefed on the situation, she still felt they had garnered the key points through some form of osmosis. Naturally, no one dared to ask her and they certainly wouldn’t ask Bran. Not if the topic was about her. Even before, this was forbidden.
A pack was a funny, amorphous beast. Not family, not quite, but similar. There were internal politics within the more standardized hierarchy, of course. All those moving pieces of dominance, of one-upmanship, that made every gathering a game of maintaining the peace. On top of this, there were the usual frictions you would find in any group of people. Those who didn’t like each other. Those who loved each other. Those who stood away from the pack, fiercely independent and private, those who needed it daily, those who stepped in and out.
The pack structure itself was there to do exactly that: give structure. At the top of that structure was the Alpha. Until Anna, Leah would have said that Bran was the ‘heart’ of the pack. A reflection of the character he put on like a favorite sweater – drawing people to him with his charisma and charm – and then just as quickly took off that sweater when he was crossed, revealing the monster within. These days, he was more appropriately their compass. And there was no greater pleasure in a pack than making the Alpha happy.
By extension, for most of their wolves she was included in that. An overspill of ‘make Bran happy by making Leah happy’ and today, now, the pack had decided what would make them happy was each other.
Apparently, nothing was a clearer demonstration of this than the seating arrangements of movie nights.
In their living area, there was an overlarge corner couch, bought to take as many affectionately overlapping bodies as it could. Adjacent to this, there was a matching four seater and dotted on the floor three soft beanbags which could take two very friendly bodies at a squeeze. Within this set-up, sitting next to the Alpha was a coveted privilege and Bran would always take the corner of the corner couch to give as many people the opportunity.
Leah, on the other hand, would sit on the other couch, her back against the arm. It was a less coveted role to be seated next to the Marrok’s mate. In the past, Sage would usually be her companion, whispering in her ear, being witty and borderline wicked.
Tonight, the corner couch was already crammed full of their pack, with Tag sitting in the corner, an enormous bowl of popcorn in his lap and his eyes stubbornly fixed on the opening credits of the movie, paused for her belated arrival. On either side of him were George and Hector, also with fixed looks, resolutely ignoring the implications of their actions.
Bran, ousted from this position of privilege, was instead in her space and then there was an obvious gap between him and Peggy on the other side. The beanbags were full, as well. She would have no choice in her seating position this evening.
Her mate raised his eyebrows at her, amused at this blatant manipulation.
It was funny. She felt a swell of affection for their people as she took a seat, squeezed in next to her husband. Someone pressed play and the movie began, the pack well satisfied with a plan worthy of a high school dance. Obviously Leah didn’t think much of it. Sitting next to Bran was no different than sleeping next to Bran. Not to her.
But, as always, she supposed the real point was that this wasn’t about her. The pack didn’t have insight into their relationship and so weren’t to know that there were bigger issues at play. This was about what made the pack feel secure. If the Alpha and his mate on visibly good terms did that, then so be it.
Bran obviously felt the same way because after a while he pulled his arm from between them and draped around the back of the couch, resting his fingers on her other shoulder. She leaned more fully against him. It was nice, of course it was nice. She let very few people into her personal bubble.
That night, though, Leah brought it up. They talked about the pack. That was what they did. “Is everyone anxious about us?”
“They know something is up.” Bran climbed into his side of the bed, holding a book he’d brought from his room.
“Something.” Leah changed into a fresh pair of pajamas from the stack in her closet, ignoring the more flimsy, silky items once more for long-sleeved sets and overlarge T-shirts. She turned out the light in the bathroom and joined him. “A nebulous something.”
“We have been behaving differently.”
She didn’t like this. Consistency was part of leadership. “Not that much, surely.”
Bran glanced at her. “You don’t think?”
She picked up her eReader and turned it on. “What? Having lunch together more often?” She had noted that he made a point of that – she appreciated the effort – but it wasn’t as if they didn’t share meals before. They lived with each other, after all. It was not so comment-worthy a difference.
Bran continued to look at her, in a manner that suggested he thought she was saying something extraordinary.
Leah rested her eReader on her chest, waiting for him to elaborate. To explain.
Her wait was without payoff. Bran looked away, blinking rapidly, and then put his book down. “I’m going to sleep.” So saying, he rolled onto his side, his back to her, and did just that.
*
After that infuriating conversation, it was no surprise that she dreamed that night. She dreamed of White Moon. Picking wildflowers when they were both heavily pregnant, walking away from camp with their arms intertwined. Zander had been with her, only just talking coherently, and it had been a beautiful Spring day, the sound of his burbling a backdrop to their chatter and gossip.
The dream moved on in that way dreams often did, or moved backwards in this case. She was sitting at old Kame’s feet whilst he told stories of his youth, as a boy on a Japanese whaling ship. The ship had drifted far, far, off course, which was how he had ended up here. Of course she didn’t know about Japan, then, or even much about whales. She, and the other children, though she was no longer truly a child by then, had thought his tales were fantastical. She remembered holding her little sister, clutched at her side, terrified of the great monsters of the deep. Shrieking with that joyous, childish fear. Kame had a way with words.
From Kame, she was once again in the amphitheater, though not for the rite. She and Tally were racing to reach the violin first, their preferred choice of instrument. She was taller and faster and she scooped the instrument up, laughing in triumph. Her brother was milder mannered than she and his resentment was short-lived. He smiled a crooked, sheepish smile and picked the tambourine instead, shaking it expertly.
“Why don’t you try something else, Leah?” the Singer asked her, gesturing to the arrangement of instruments on offer.
“I don’t know how to play something else, sir,” she explained, running her finger over the bow strings of the violin. “Just this and the piano.”
“Try,” he insisted, smiling his white teeth, holding out an oboe to her.
Leah felt compelled to obey. With fumbling fingers, flushed to be under his eye so intently, she curled her hands around the keys. It felt good. Familiar, even. She put the reed in her mouth, rounded her lips as if to whistle and blew out, creating a long, low note. Her fingers moved through some practice scales - B flat major, then F major.
Surprised at the cohesive sound she was making, Leah pulled the reed from her mouth and looked at the instrument quizzically. Tally was similarly perplexed. His tambourine dangled forgotten at his side. “I didn’t know you could play the oboe,” he said.
Leah’s fingers moved against the keys, tapping out a piece of music she didn’t remember. “Neither did I.”
*
Leah woke. Not with tears. Not with shame or anger. With burning, fearful worry.
Silently, she slid out of bed and out of the bedroom, moving quickly through the dark house. She headed for the music room.
Naturally, Leah had never spent much time in the music room. Neither did Bran particularly, as he usually took what he wanted to wherever in the house he wanted it. Their home was littered with instruments, expensive pieces tossed casually about. A Stradivarius in the dining room. A Muramatsu flute tucked between the couch cushions. She had learnt to turn a blind eye to them, the only disorder she allowed in her home. Picking an instrument up had always led to intrusive thoughts so she simply didn’t.
The music room was mostly used by the pack, those who privately sought comfort from the familiar, and for storage of all the various instruments that Bran could play, or he wanted to learn how to play, or he had once played and maybe might take it up again. There was also a veritable library of sheet music spread across a double bookcase, endlessly added to, and they were at the point now where she might need to get another bookcase because it was crammed full.
Aesthetically, it was actually one of the nicest rooms in the house. Large and airy, there was a big bay window that faced southwards so it was usually very light whatever the time of year. In the spring and summer, it really came into its own - the forest cast a delicious, cool green calm into the room. She would often glimpse members of the pack slouched on the couch, noise cancelling headphones plugged into the speaker system, blissed out and watching the trees.
Leah had been born into a musical family. She’d been handed a violin before she could properly talk, and of course she could play the piano, and sight read, but it was her singing voice that had really made her stand out in their small town. She had been regularly asked to perform at church functions, at weddings and funerals, harvest festivals, all those rituals that were the backbone of a rural community. She’d loved it. Loved the attention, loved the praise, because it filled a void of what she lacked in her childhood home. This talent was encouraged. Had she not inherited her singing voice from her father, had her glory not been reflected back on him, she suspected it would have been a different story.
After the Singer, even memoryless as she had been, Leah had associated everything to do with music with bad. Capital B, Bad. Which, incidentally, was as sophisticated as she had ever allowed her brain to process it.
Very Bad.
This sensation of Bad had applied to everything and everyone, not just herself. The first time she had heard Bran sing, a chill had shivered down her spine and she’d hurried into the woods to Change, to seek comfort from her wolf. Within the wolf’s fur, she’d felt safe from the music. He could not reach her. And it was a He. The danger she had felt had always been masculine in nature.
Over time, hearing other people’s music grew less difficult – thank God, because the Aspen Creek pack was a musical pack and the Cornicks were at the heart of that music. It would have been truly torturous otherwise. Besides music was everywhere nowadays. It was on TV, the soundtrack to all the shows she watched, the movies, it was played through tinny loudspeakers in the mall, on the radio in the car.
Whilst she had become almost inured to that, Leah herself had never been able to make music again. She hadn’t so much as hummed. Until she and Anna had been singing the songs of defiance in the Singer’s cave, Leah hadn’t known how much music she had naturally absorbed in her life. That she knew the words, the melody to popular songs. That it felt good to sing.
For the first time, she nervously wondered if there was more to it than that.
As she looked around the music room, at the displays on the walls, on the shelves, she picked out what she thought she had once been able to create music with. A variety of woodwind instruments – the oboe, of course, the flute and the clarinet. Some percussion. Bran had a limited collection of Native instruments – drums, whistles, wood flutes. She’d handled those a few times.
There were a few guitars. Some expensive, some sentimental. The ones she had used before were a different shape to the more classical guitars of the modern world but she imagined the principles were the same. Leah selected one she had always admired, double-checked that the door was closed, and went to sit on the window seat.
It felt familiar, holding the guitar, and Leah paused for a moment, bracing herself, and then quickly strummed her fingers over the strings. She flattened her hand immediately over the vibrations, allowing the sound to only briefly fill the room.
It sounded good. There was no sense of Bad here. She didn’t think.
Carefully, eyes still on the closed door, Leah plucked out an easy melody she had presumably once been taught. She didn’t remember learning it. That was the troubling thing. As her dream had suggested, she had been handed an instrument and could simply play it. She did not remember who taught her how to hold a guitar, how and where to place her fingertips on the frets, to create melody. She just recalled one day picking up a guitar and joining in with the ensemble that gathered whenever the Singer wanted them to. She just knew.
Most of the music they had played in the Singer’s camp had been unfamiliar to Leah, whose childhood had been filled with the traditional Christian hymns and folk songs common of the time, hymns brought over from Britain and Holland by her great-grandparents, shared within their community. With the Singer, they sang in languages she didn’t understand but somehow knew the words to, like a congregation with a hive mind, powered by the Singer’s magic.
Which explained why the Singer liked newcomers - for the different music they brought with them. Though women were practically more useful to him, if a man arrived from somewhere new, he was welcomed with open arms. The Singer had, initially, liked Alastair/Sherwood very much. The music he had brought with him had carried ancient weight and history.
Leah put the guitar down and took one of the flute cases from a shelf. She knew this instrument was much like the one she had last used, all those years ago – an eight-key wood flute, made of rosewood. She put it together, admiring the glow of the wood. Juste could play this instrument and often did. He took care of it. She could smell the oil he used to maintain it.
This time she simply held it to her lips and played a quick arpeggio, her fingers moving surely across the keys. She remembered a Mozart piece, the music easily forming in her mind, but she was struck by a sudden moment of fear, her arms tensing, as what she had suspected became a reality.
How? How did she still know it?
The Singer’s magic, of music and memories, should have died with him. Why had her memories returned but her musical abilities not disappeared? Did this somehow mean he was still alive?
Losing her nerve, Leah hurriedly put the flute away, fingers trembling.
She shoved the case back and folded her arms, stuffing her fisted hands under her armpits and clenching down. Her eyes restlessly raked across the other instruments. A clarinet. A French horn. An ocarina. An oboe. She imagined playing them. Easily imagined her confidence. There was even a cello, in its case, resting in the corner. There had been no cello in the settlement but someone had known how to play one.
Leah, the last surviving member of that settlement, remembered too.
*
She stood over her mate, in the dark, and willed him to wake up without her needing to speak. It didn’t take long. Bran lifted his head, his hair flopping into his eyes, and looked at her. “What is it?” he asked, his voice gruff.
“I have to show you something.” Even as Leah said it, she felt a moment of sheer terror. Not simply at the prospect of the Singer living on, somehow, within her but at what Bran would have to do about it. Her knees trembled.
Bran clambered up and took her hand between both of his, rubbing it. He felt very warm. “Whatever it is, it will be all right.”
“Yes, of course.” It would have been a more convincing statement if her teeth hadn’t chattered. She firmed them, and her jaw, and tugged him towards the door.
It was a testament to how preoccupied she had been that she hadn’t noticed there were three wolves sleeping in their living room, all of whom lifted their heads in their direction, ears pricked. Bran jerked his head at them and as a one they scurried off to use the ‘dog’ door that was installed on the side porch, nails clipping on the floorboards.
She pulled him into the music room and closed the door behind them. Bran made to touch her again, his hands going for her hips, but she slipped his attempted grasp. “No, no, I have to show you first.” Leah couldn’t bear the thought of his misplaced affection being wrenched away afterwards when he realized what was wrong. She headed towards the oboe and then at the last minute returned to the flute she had played before. The oboe had been in her dream. It was too close.
With shaking hands, Leah began to put it together again. “When I was a child, I could play the violin. And the piano, when I was older. I took lessons, in the church, since we didn’t have our own.”
“Leah…”
She felt him get closer. Her shoulders hunched. “No. Let me tell you, first. I have to explain,” she demanded, her voice rising in plaintive pitch.
Bran rested his hands on her shoulders ever-so-lightly. “That’s fine. I want you to explain. But it would help me greatly if you calmed down. Please.”
She looked behind her. His eyes were gold, glowing in the darkness. She tasted the crisp edge of his wolf in the air. “I’m afraid.”
“I know.” Gently, Bran turned her and equally gently he coaxed her closer until their chests brushed, until she could see nothing but the gold of his eyes. It was almost hypnotic, being captivated by him and afraid of his reaction at the same time. Her heart raced between them.
“I can play every instrument in this room,” she whispered.
“So can I,” was his reply.
He didn’t understand. Leah shook her head. “No, I mean—I was never taught. He just gave us the knowledge.” She lifted the flute that had been dangling between her fingers. “I think he took it from everyone’s minds. Because of Ala—Sherwood, I could play Tag’s damn bagpipes if I wanted to.”
It was ridiculous. She shouldn’t have said it and more importantly Bran shouldn’t have found it funny. “Don’t laugh,” she told him, as his shoulders shook and his wolf descended. “I’m—he’s still in me.”
Bran wrapped his arms more firmly about her shoulders, drawing her closer. He used his fingers to tip her head onto his shoulder. “No. He’s not. You said it yourself, he gave you the knowledge.”
She was forced to breathe in the smell of his neck. It was an intimate scent, the smell of sleep and sweat and their bed. It was automatically soothing, even if she wanted to resist it, wanted to convince him of the seriousness of the situation and not be hugged whilst she did so. “But that’s impossible.”
“Is it? His powers were purely mental. He worked with memory. Planting them, taking them away.”
“Then shouldn’t it have gone with his death? Like my other memories?”
He stroked the back of her head. He sighed. “Maybe not.”
“I don’t want maybe, Bran.”
“I know you don’t.” She could hear him smiling. “And it’s reasonable for you to be worried. But he is dead. I know it. You know it.”
Leah’s head lifted so abruptly that she clipped his chin. “Do I? I saw—Charles bring lightening from the sky. But he was a god, or close to it. What if something remained? We should go back there, to check.”
“Leah.” Bran gripped her chin between his thumb and forefinger. His eyes flickered once again. “Charles checked. Charles is certain. I am certain. It’s late and you haven’t been sleeping well for weeks. Your worry is understandable but you are wrong.”
She wrenched her chin from his hands and shoved herself from him. Or he from her. She tossed the flute onto the couch before she crossed her arms, wounded and somehow embarrassed. He might be right but she still felt her fears were well founded. “You don’t understand. For two centuries he was in me. Holding me captive. Making me—long to go back there,” she whispered, miserable to admit it.
Just as quietly, and just as miserably, Bran asked, “And do you feel like that now?”
“I don’t want to go back there. It’s not—” She touched her stomach, where the tugging west had always been, nebulous and indecipherable as it was. “It’s not there anymore. But I didn’t know it was there before, not really. What if this is something like that?” She gestured around, to the instruments. The knowledge she held. “It feels like a trick.”
He nodded. He moved, suddenly, to the bookcase. “Then let’s test it. Here.” Bran pulled a booklet out, turning the pages. “A flute solo written in the 1900s. Play it.”
“Well, I don’t know this. It’s modern. More modern,” she amended. Debussy was hardly contemporary.
Bran smiled. “Exactly. This is knowledge you don’t have. Because he didn’t have it.”
Reluctantly, she saw what he was getting at. She rested the music on a stand and accepted the flute she had so casually tossed away earlier. Leah scanned the music, then read it properly, hearing the notes in her head. It was a short piece but intricate, based on a simple, repetitive motif developed in a variety of ways. She lifted the flute and played the opening two bars. It was an eerie piece, in the dark. She continued, restating the first bar and then moving on, dropping an octave lower. She made a mistake and, frowning, tried again.
Bran murmured, “So you don’t know it.”
She shook her head. “No.” Earlier, the music she had played had come to her immediately, as if she had practiced them time and time again. “This is new to me.”
“But you can still play the flute. Very well, I should think.”
Leah lifted and dropped a shoulder. “Someone could. I don’t know who.”
“And now you can. It’s—just possible all he gave you was the condensed experience needed to develop a talent you already had. You said you could play the violin and the piano. You are musical.”
“We—were a musical family.” For the first time, she prepared to give Bran a piece of information that was not hurtful but it did make her feel vulnerable admitting it, “I liked singing, best. That was what I was truly passionate about.”
His smile was sweet. Hopeful. “You liked singing.” Then, “I like singing.”
“I know.” She looked down. “It was awful. For a long time. Your singing. Everyone’s.”
He was silent. Of course he was. She had ruined the moment with an unpleasant truth. She regretted it.
“Thank you for telling me,” Bran said, stiltedly formal. “I want to know all these things. Everything, Leah.”
She nodded tightly. She knew that. She began to take the flute apart.
*
Leah felt strange in the morning. Empty. She heard him get up before her to shower, using her bathroom instead of his. He’d been doing that a lot recently. Her shampoo, her shower gel. His toothbrush was next to hers, his comb on the shelf.
There were books on the table on his side of the bed, a glass of water. She lifted the pillow and saw he had folded his pajamas underneath. It seemed her husband had moved into her bedroom without her noticing.
He walked out of the steamy bathroom, naked, rubbing a towel over his hair. He couldn’t see her so she had the opportunity to study him. Parts of him. Well, a specific part of him. She missed sex, in some senses. It had always been easy and it felt good.
“I want to try something,” she announced, sitting up on her knees.
Bran pulled the towel off, his hair sticking up all ways. “Hmm?”
She beckoned him over and he came, readily, a half smile about his mouth. He sat. She noted he draped the towel neatly over his lap. He knew what she was about. “We don’t need to,” Bran said, confirming this.
“Do you plan to wait forever?”
“Yes.” He could not have appeared more earnest.
She sighed as her heart squeezed. “Where was this romantic side of you all my life?”
“Hidden behind my stubborn side, I think.”
It shouldn’t have been funny. It wasn’t. But they both smiled nevertheless and she leaned forward, spurred by determination, and the spirit of the moment, and kissed the quirked corner of his mouth.
Leah stayed where she was for a moment, listening to her body.
Not bad, she decided. No intrusive thoughts.
She didn’t hesitate and tried again, tilting her head to get a better angle, kissing his mouth proper. He resolutely had his lips closed, his eyes open. The whole thing was kind of awkward – the angle, his obvious tension – which she supposed was better than feeling nothing.
Leah sat back on her heels thoughtfully, frustrated. “This was always the part we were good at.”
“All that practice,” Bran said, then appeared to regret saying. “I mean. You know what I mean.” He looked away and took a deep breath. “Leah, are you attracted to me?”
“Of course,” Leah said quickly, without really thinking about it. Then she had to think about it because it was a question she had simply not posed to herself. Ever. She had always been attracted to Bran. Before even she knew what that meant.
But it had been helped, hadn’t it, by the mating bond he had forced upon her? Which was a damn fool way to look at it. The mating bond existed. It would always exist. She wanted to be with Bran. She wanted to be attracted to Bran. She wanted— she wanted this part to be over with. She wanted to get over it.
Leah pushed at his chest and he went backwards easily, still holding the towel over himself like his virtue might be at risk. This time, poised above him, when she kissed him, his mouth parted and she threw her whole heart into the kiss, the way she used to, the way she would when she wanted to convey to him her love without speaking it.
She was in charge of this kiss. Her tongue, her lips sought his response and he did respond, pushing up at her face, biting back when she bit, his slick tongue meeting hers, mouth soft and eager. Heat pooled low in her belly, followed by a burst of excitement and heart-soaring relief. It was there. It was still there.
Leah pulled back, smiling. Triumphantly, she prepared to share this success with him but Bran had his eyes squeezed shut. His chest was heaving. He looked stricken, not triumphant.
She heard it then. The low rumble of his wolf.
Very slowly, Leah leaned backwards. “What is it?”
He held up a hand, a finger. Wait.
Leah kept herself still as Bran brought himself back under control. It didn’t take long. Maybe a minute. Then he rose, still clutching that damn towel to his hips, and sat up, blinking. “Okay,” he said. “That was nice.”
Then he damn well stood up and walked out of her room.
*
It was one of those days where, despite her desire to start a conversation she couldn’t help but feel would be paralyzingly difficult, they were thwarted at every turn. After he left her – after her stunned few minutes of inactivity – she had started for his room, intending to ask what the heck was that when the door downstairs had opened loudly, their names shouted with boring urgency.
Bran, partially dressed by this point, had hurried past her to find out what the fuss was.
The morning spun from one emergency to another. A problem with the Viking brothers in the north-west of their territory, who had decided to ‘invade’ their neighbors. Then the phone rung: a roof had caved in at the Shields. The Marrok owned all the properties in and around Aspen Creek, so it was their responsibility to organize both repairs and alternative accommodation. Leah took on that task whilst Bran, Tag and Asil went to deal with the Vikings.
Whilst she was on site, a team of hastily summoned werewolves clearing debris from the Shields’ kitchen, Kara called her. Her little truck had broken down at school. Yes, she’d called the recovery service. No, it was apparently not immediately salvageable. Yes, she needed a ride. But only Leah would do. She sounded unusually distressed, more distressed than a broken down car would suggest.
As she drove to get her, Leah thought it was remarkably witty of the universe to give them several weeks of reasonable peace – when she could really have done with some activities to get her teeth into to distract herself from her own concerns – only to turn around and throw things at them when she finally wanted to deal with those concerns.
Kara was waiting in the parking lot of the school, swamped in her padded black overcoat, her hood up, her face small and pale within. Her car was nowhere to be seen, presumably having been towed to the garage.
As she rolled up, Kara started moving. She climbed into the car and her face crumpled.
Alarmed, Leah reached for her arm. “What’s happened?”
Through broken sobs, Kara explained that the unremarkable Robbie Andrews turned out to be a deeply unpleasant individual who had colluded with his ‘ex’ girlfriend to try to establish if the rumors were correct and that Kara herself was a freak werewolf from a freak werewolf town.
Though she had started to drive off, impatient to be back to town to meet the contractor who would be by later, Leah had to stop the car when the bare bones of this story became clear to her. Partly because she was too angry to drive, partly because she needed absolute clarity, and quickly, and for that she had to focus.
“Did you tell him anything?” she asked directly.
Kara shook her head so hard that tears actually flung from her face. “No. No.”
There had always been rumors about Aspen Creek. Rumors that they had tried to put to bed with George Brown’s big dog breeds, by Bran making a few, discrete visits to individuals in the night that led to them ‘forgetting’ their concerns. For school, Kara had a doctor’s letter, crafted by Dr. Samuel Cornick, that signed her off sports so she wouldn’t accidently slip-up in a moment of adrenalin and reveal the scale of her physical strength.
She was sensible girl. Intelligent. Her friends, the few she did have who were at the same school, were from Aspen Creek themselves and there was an understanding there. But there was always going to be a distance between them.
Looking at her, fat tears rolling down her face, Leah was struck with a burst of unusual empathy of how unfair it was. How cruel life had been to Kara, whose childhood had been made all the harder by an act she’d had no part or responsibility in. How she tried and tried to fit in, accepting all her limitations. How nice she was.
For some pathetic human boy to be the one to make this harder was categorically unacceptable.
“You have done nothing wrong,” Leah stated, because she knew she had to. “This is not your fault and you do not deserve it.”
Kara sucked in a shaky breath and let it out, just as shaky. She nodded fiercely, like she was willing herself to believe Leah.
“I am very angry, but not with you.” Sometimes this had to be made clear, too. Particularly from Leah whose past had been filled with reactions towards people who were not the true target of her ire. She was trying to get better at that. A long time coming, she suspected. “Kara, I tell you now, I want to rend this boy to pieces for hurting you.” She could feel her wolf, bubbling under the surface. The Change itched at the tips of her fingers and toes. She had no doubt her eyes had turned icy blue.
Kara sniffed and dragged in a breath that hitched. “Thanks.”
“Children are—afraid of what they don’t know or understand. Which is probably no help to you,” Leah mused, almost to herself. What did Kara care about the rationale behind it? Someone had hurt her and she was sad. “Do you want me to comfort you? Or do you want me to do something? I will have to do something, I will have to involve Bran but is there anything I could do, right now, that would be of value to you? Just tell me.”
This brought on a new stream of waterworks, which was not the desired response. Leah cringed at her own ineptitude. Anna would have known what to say, or do. Bran. Even Asil, unlikely though that thought would have been.
“I’d like a hug, please,” Kara managed, eventually, wiping her hand across her face, her sobs not abating in the slightest.
“Oh, God, of course.” With over-enthusiastic alacrity – indeed, desperation – Leah threw her arms around her and squeezed her tight. She tried to imagine this was her sister she was hugging, comforting her from the fright of Kame’s tales. “You’re safe,” she whispered into Kara’s padded shoulder. “You’re safe with me.”
*
The rest of the day, Leah had a silent, clingy shadow. She met with her contractor who walked around the Shields property and cast considerable doubt about the structure of the rest of the house, let alone the collapsed roof. Alarming. He was too busy to do the job immediately but gave her a recommendation of someone who might.
Or, he offered, they could wait a couple of weeks for his availability.
Leah had spent decades crafting her list of preferred suppliers and she was inclined to do the latter rather than take a risk on someone new which was why she suspected the roof was in the state it was already. Which meant the Shields had to be put up somewhere temporary that wasn’t the motel.
The obvious alternative was Sage’s old house, sitting empty and cursed – according to the pack and the townspeople – which no one was happy about. Eventually Leah lost her temper. “It’s that or the motel,” she snapped to Andy.
Andy, a werewolf of not inconsiderable dominance, visibly withheld his desire to snap back at her and Leah braced herself for an argument where the end result was always the same – he would do what he was told because she was his Alpha’s mate. But he glanced over Leah’s shoulder at Kara and his expression softened. “You’re right. I know it’s not cursed,” he muttered.
“Charles has done his thing and so has Bran.” Leah wiggled her fingers, werewolf speak – at least in this town - for ‘weird witchy magic’ which people found reassuring or alarming depending on the context.
Andy clearly decided he was going to be reassured on this occasion. He rubbed at his cheek, scratching his fingers through his beard. “Okay. I might need some help moving some things over there so we can be more comfortable.”
Leah was no princess afraid of some heavy lifting and she had already taken advantage of the few wolves who were available that day to clear out the rubble from the house. Besides, she had a feeling Kara would appreciate some work to clear her mind. As indeed would she.
She nodded. “Kara and I are at your disposal.”
*
It was past dinner time by the time Leah returned to the house, Kara still in tow. She hadn’t lived with them for a couple of years but Leah had kept a room for her, which she scuttled up to, to shower and change with the instruction that she should come down quickly to be fed. The rest of the house was dark and still. Presumably Bran was out.
Leah showered, dressed in comfortable loungewear and settled on pasta as the solution to their rumbling stomachs. “This will not be gourmet,” she informed Kara bluntly. She took down a jar of marinara sauce from the pantry.
If anything, Kara looked more pleased. “I can make a salad.”
They ate silently at the kitchen island until their hunger was abated, filled by carbs, protein and fats.
“Where’s Bran?” Kara asked, grating more cheese into her bowl.
“Problem with the Viking brothers. Territory dispute.”
Kara’s eyes widened. Like any sensible person, the Viking brothers alarmed her. She had met them once, when Bran had introduced them for the express purpose of making it absolutely clear that he would rip their heads off if they went near her.
“I will talk to him about your situation when he gets back.”
She half-nodded. “Do you…have to tell him?”
“Yes. He will want to speak to you. So be prepared for that.” Leah put her fork down and sighed, pleasantly full.
“I don’t mind talking to Bran.” Kara pulled a face. She ate a piece of cucumber from their shared salad bowl. “It’s the subject matter I’m not so keen on. Will he do anything to Robbie?”
“I don’t know. Bran is less vindictive than I so if he does it probably won’t be violent.” Probably. She thought that, of everyone, Kara’s youth might impact that. He’d had daughters, once.
Kara huffed out a laugh. “Pity.”
Despite this bolshie statement, Kara began to look a little teary again. Leah didn’t think she was emotionally up for a second round of tears. She felt wrung out by the entire day – by Bran, the Vikings, the Shields and now Kara. An emotional and physical whirlwind. She was more capable of dealing with the latter.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” knowing full well that she hadn’t at all, that it had just come to her in the spur of the moment, fueled by the movie night and Tag’s questioning looks and a desire to change the subject, “but what does the pack think about me and Bran at the moment?”
Panic was Kara’s first reaction. Followed by a helpless, stalling noise. “Er…”
Leah lifted her eyebrows. Now that she had chosen this path, she would push it through. She was interested, particularly given how evasive Bran had been the night before. Perhaps she was missing something. “I trust you to be honest.”
The remains of Kara’s pasta received a very intense study, her fork pushing the rigatoni around. “Well. Um. Things seem different, I guess.” Her cheeks tinged pink with embarrassment, rightly so. Commenting on adult relationships was not going to be in her comfort zone.
Inviting, and allowing, others to comment on hers wasn’t in Leah’s, either. “Good different? Bad different?” she prompted.
“I don’t—” Kara put her fork down and jutted her chin out, a recognizably stubborn look. “Look. We think you’re driving Bran crazy.”
Leah clawed back her first reaction – a squawk of what? – and gave herself a moment to put on her best game face. Calm. Reasonable. Logical. “What makes you think that?”
“He’s just weird about you now. I mean, he was weird before,” Kara flushed an even brighter pink, “but now he’s, like, sort of obsessed. And distracted by you. It’s—if you walk into the room he stops talking.”
Leah didn’t know what to say. She felt she would have noticed Bran being ‘weird’ but then she had been fairly absorbed in her own situation. The Bran of her dreams, if anything, had occupied more of her thoughts. The music. She mulled it over. “There are some things going on between us, that is certainly true, but we are trying not to be destabilizing. Is it causing concern?”
“Not in the way you’re worried about. Not concern, exactly. I guess, you guys were… all about being one way and now it’s sort of not working, is it? Or—no one knows what happened. So we’re curious. I’m curious,” Kara stumbled over the words, hurriedly. “You’re not, like, splitting up?”
“No! God, no, certainly not.” Now Leah was truly concerned. “Is that the prevailing view?”
“Some…people wondered if maybe you were— planning to leave?” Kara’s voice lifted querulously.
“Me?” This time her eyebrows for certain climbed past her hairline in surprise. “You thought I would leave him?”
“Yeah. Maybe. Some people did think that.”
“Kara.”
The stubborn chin returned, as did her attack on the last of her pasta. “I lived here. I know what he’s like.” Then, passionately, “Boys are stupid.”
Leah laughed. Loudly, shocking herself with the outburst. “Yes. Yes, they are very stupid. Even the really, really clever ones.” She jumped off her stool and put her arm about Kara’s shoulders in a half-hug. An improvement on earlier today when Kara had to ask for one. “I’m not leaving. I’m sorry we worried you.”
“Other people. Other people might have been worried about this,” Kara insisted, blatantly lying now, sheepish with embarrassment. She leaned into Leah. “A little bit.”
“Fine. Other people. Please reassure other people that we are fine. We are, as I said, working some things through. Things that should probably have been worked through a long time ago.” Kara tilted her head up, a clear question on her face. “No, I can’t talk about that with you.”
Leah let go of Kara, giving her one last, affectionate squeeze. “This was a good conversation. Thank you.”
*
Bran still wasn’t home by the time she climbed into bed. There was no point sending him a message – he wouldn’t have taken his cell with him, following his own edict about carrying phones into wildling territory. A less bothersome act for him, given he could communicate with anyone he chose to. A real pain in the ass for everyone else.
Without him by her side, or even in the next room, she found it difficult to go to sleep. Worry about what was happening out there. Thoughts about Kara. Concerns about her own behavior, whether she was at fault. Around and around these thoughts went until she finally, eventually, drifted off to sleep.
She dreamed, no surprise, but this time it was a memory that wasn’t immediately apparent to her. She was walking into a clearing in a wood. Two boys were before her, crouched around an immaculately arranged fire. She didn’t immediately recognize them – she would estimate the older boy to be early to mid-teens, the younger certainly no older than seven or eight. They were both tow-headed and wearing homespun clothes, very similar to the sorts of things her younger brothers had worn. Smocks with pants, in natural shades of brown and green. The older boy had a neckerchief in a dark red.
Leah didn’t recall extensive details of the location of her childhood home, or the rural town she had grown up in, which she had always put down to time passing and the possibility that it was extremely mundane. Some endlessly flat part of the mid-west perhaps. Ubiquitous fields of grain and livestock.
She remembered more distinctly their church, some parts of their small home. She remembered the hall where she had sung for festivities. The schoolroom. She remembered – vaguely – a general store where their Ma might be persuaded to occasionally buy them licorice. But all these memories were foggy with the natural passing of time. Could easily have been taken from television shows or movies.
Leah wondered if this dream had brought her back to some other childhood memory. Perhaps these were boys she knew or even grew up with. Perhaps these dense woods were a feature of childhood play. It was a bizarre diversion but no more bizarre than her present-day husband turning up to fight her battles.
“Try again,” the older boy was saying, very much in tones of the belabored older brother.
The younger scowled down at the wood and kindling, his face crumpled with concentration. “I’m trying.”
“Hello,” Leah said, announcing herself.
The two children looked at her askance. The little boy stood up from his crouch, mouth parting in shock. “What are you doing here?”
She smiled at him, automatically. He was adorable. “I have absolutely no idea. Where are we?”
The older boy gave Leah what could only be described as a saucy look which had her laughing before he even followed this up with a suitably flirtatious attempt, “Wherever you’d like us to be, miss!”
This led to the younger solidly furiously punching his brother in the arm. “Be quiet, Alawn.”
Somewhat inevitably and, indeed, once again much like her brothers, the two boys descended into a fistfight. The neat fire was kicked aside, fists flew, as did knees and feet. Leah heard something tear, then a howl of outrage. The smaller child was flung far, landing with a solid thunk on his back, demonstrating that the older had been holding himself back until he lost his temper.
“Hey, now, that’s enough,” she said belatedly, hurrying over to help the little boy. He was struggling to breathe, winded and pale with shock. “You’re all right.” Leah sat him up, rubbing his back. He was very thin. She could feel the knobs of his spine through his rough smock. “There’s no need for that, is there?”
Alawn was scowling blackly at them both, worrying his torn neckerchief between his fingers. “He started it.”
“And you’re older,” she pointed out, much as she would have done if this was Tally and James. The boy didn’t like this but took his scowl off to rebuild the fire. She saw there were bags and bedrolls, tied up, and a large metal pot. She guessed they were sleeping here. She wondered where their parents were.
“You have to go. It’s not safe,” the little boy said to her in a small voice, his fingers reaching for the placket of her shirt, tugging to get her attention. “Please go.”
She cuddled him, gave in to the urge to kiss his head, the messy whorls of blonde and brown. His hair needed a good brush. “It’s all right. It’s just a dream.”
“You don’t understand. She can still get you here.”
A creepy-crawly sensation trickled down her spine. She. Leah looked over her shoulder, into the dense trees. Far denser than their own forest, lush and dark. “Who is she?”
He scrambled out of her arms and started to pull at her, tugging her to her feet and shoving her back the way she had come. She resisted. “You have to go. You have to go. Alawn! Help me! Make her go!”
“She can stay if she wants to. I don’t care,” came the sulky response.
Leah continued to resist. The little boy wasn’t strong, not compared to Leah. “Calm down,” she said, grabbing his arms and holding him still so she could look into his desperate face. “Tell me what’s happening? Who is it you’re afraid of?”
“Me, I suspect,” a laughing voice said.
Leah spun, automatically hiding the child. A young woman was before her, with long, tangled dark hair and even darker eyes. She was quite beautiful. Leah inhaled instinctively. And a black witch.
The young woman cocked her head to the side, a self-satisfied smirk about her berry-red lips. “What are you doing in my woods, girl?”
The little boy was trying to get in front of her, fighting the rigid hold Leah had on him. He was making desperate, grunting noises. “She’s no one. She’s no one, Mother.”
“Mother?” Leah began to have an inkling then. Just a hint. Just enough.
The woman began a working – she’d been around enough witches to know what that looked like – and, fueled by suspicion, fueled by a sudden upwelling of absolute rage, Leah acted quickly, the only way one could around witches. With a blur of speed, she delivered a solid punch to the woman’s jaw, the kind of strike that would obliterate a human. Bones and blood spewed from the witch’s mouth and she collapsed backwards, moaning.
“Leah,” the little boy said, tugging at her hand, plaintively, “you can wake up now.”
*
“Wake up. Leah, wake up.”
She grabbed the hand on her shoulder and opened her eyes, leaving the dream in that abrupt but also treacly way. She focused on what she could see. Her ceiling. Her husband. “I was in your dream,” she said.
Bran nodded. He sat her upright. “You punched my mother in the face.”
“I did. I did do that.” Not that it was something that would have been truly effective with a real witch, rather than a dream construction. But still. “I have always wanted to do that.”
Her husband laughed silently, his eyes glowing not with the fervor of his wolf but with happiness. “It was glorious.” He cupped her hands between his and lifted them to his mouth. He kissed them, twice, three times, and then drew them against his chest. “Thank you.”
She studied him, the untidy whorls of hair, the smooth skin. The hazel eyes. Amazing, to have seen him, who he was. “You were the little boy. And—was that Sherwood?” Alawn. His true name, presumably. Bran had always been Bran, as far as she knew. She’d looked up his name, once, and found it was perfectly feasible that it could be his true name as well – short for Branwaladr, perhaps, or a simplification of Brân.
Bran nodded, though it was tentative. Sharing information about his brother had always been difficult between them.
“It was very real. Was that Wales? How extraordinary.” Of course, Leah was missing the main point. If she had been in his dream, then logic would dictate— “You’ve been in my dreams.”
Slower this time, Bran nodded again.
Leah was simultaneously triumphant and infuriated. All this time. Of course it was him. She was tempted to sock him in the arm, as he had done to his brother. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“Why didn’t you?” he returned with equal annoyance.
“I thought I’d sound like a crazy person. That my subconscious had decided—” Leah shook this off unnecessarily explanation off, eager to get an answer to something that had been bothering her for some weeks. “What was it? Were you warding my sleep? Was it a spell?”
Her husband did not seem to share the same eagerness as she did. Instead, he was cautious. He laid her hands down between them. “I am… not sure. Until this moment, I wasn’t absolutely certain I was in your dream. Because you didn’t mention anything, I assumed it was a construct of my own. Some,” he exhaled, “desperate desire to help you in your past.”
She was touched. She reached out instinctively, her fingers fluttering against his cheek. His eyelids trembled. “You were. You did. You—so you didn’t make this happen?”
“No.”
“Then how?”
The corner of Bran’s mouth lifted, wryly. “I would guess it’s a gift of our mating bond.”
The mating bond, a thing that lay still and quiet between them. Bran had opened it, levered it wide to give her an insight into his feelings but then had closed it almost entirely. ‘Almost’ because – his words – he never intended to close it again.
She had felt nothing from him since, certain that he was controlling the flow of information. It hadn’t bothered her. She had lived without it all this time. However, the situation was different now.
“I didn’t think we had any specific gifts from the mating bond.” Not like Anna and Charles, who could talk between them.
“I can find you,” Bran said, again carefully, “You can find me.”
She took a beat as this strange thought unwrapped in her mind. “Is that so?”
Bran lowered his head, acknowledging her ire. “Yes. If it’s open, it’s possible for us to do that.”
She hadn’t known but it was clear he had, that he always had. “Anything else?” she asked, drily.
“I don’t know. That was just the thing I noticed before,” he said with quiet sincerity.
With the memory of the little boy he had been, Bran’s behavior now was all the more bittersweet. He was ashamed of himself and unhappy.
“Useful,” Leah eventually decided, not in the mood to look for an apology or even to forgive him for the latest in a series of secrets he had kept. They had never had the mating bond open, in any case. Knowing wouldn’t have helped.
But now it was open. Now they could look to the future. That was what this was about, wasn’t it? Having a future. “I could have found you tonight, then? Instead of wishing for a cell phone.”
“With practice.”
“I’d like that, if you please.”
Bran readily – if not happily – agreed, head nodding like a marionette and then he headed back to his side of the bed, folding himself under the covers. He turned to face her. “Dream-walking. That’s what it’s called.”
Following his lead, Leah shuffled down onto her side, tucking her arm under her head. “Does it have to be bad dreams, do you think?”
“No idea. Presumably we can do it on purpose. We’ll have to work on that,” Bran said, almost vaguely, the way he often did when he was thinking out loud. He began to comb his fingers through his hair, tugging at it as he thought. “It fits, with the finding each other. It’s in a similar, magical vein.” He began to hypothesize. Wondering about ways they could communicate in this dream landscape. Wondering the hows and the wheres and could it be done without sleep, could they be awake, could it be a side-effect of his lost telepathy.
His low voice rumbling beside her, soothingly present, Leah was lulled to sleep before he finished. If he came to any conclusions, she did not hear them.
*
Leah woke well past an acceptable hour to rise, annoying for several reasons, not least because she hated the feeling of wasting the daylight. Bran was gone and for some time, when she reached out, the side of his bed was quite cold. She dressed quickly and a glance down the hallway told her Kara was still asleep, the door closed.
Good.
She could hear Bran was in the kitchen, the sound of his low voice in conversation with two others. Tag, she thought. Asil. Ugh. She pushed through the door and the conversation came to an abrupt halt. Or, more specifically, Bran’s conversation came to an abrupt halt.
Well, that was just politeness, Leah decided, not immediately going to believe Kara’s story. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she greeted, trying for casual warmth and probably missing the mark.
In the silence that followed, Leah made her breakfast. Oatmeal with sliced banana and brown sugar. She could feel Bran watching her and glanced over to confirm this. Her husband immediately looked away, by no means exerting the subtlety she usually expected from him. She couldn’t see Asil’s or Tag’s faces, their backs were to her, but she could tell no one was comfortable with this situation. As she stirred the warming oats briskly, she sought for some answer to this. Was she making Bran crazy? Truly? Her Bran?
It seemed so unlikely that she could have this effect on him. And over what? They were – as she had said to Kara – working through things. It was taking time. He had told her to take her time.
Leah slid down next to him on the bench seat and decided to do her best to be pleasing, not normally a tactic she employed. “How did the situation with our favorite Vikings resolve itself?”
Tag answered. “We had a hell of a time tracking them all down.”
Yes, this time of year it wouldn’t be a pleasant business. In some senses, their wildlings knew best how to work with the snowy conditions. Even Bran probably didn’t know their particular territories as intimately as they did. “But you did. And all is well?”
Tag grunted. His eyes slid to their silent Alpha and then to Asil. “Once Bran butted a few heads together.”
“Excellent.”
She made herself look at Bran, staring intently at his own breakfast, pushing bacon around with his fork. Objectively speaking, this was odd behavior. She tried to imagine a time before, when she had sat with him and others and felt for sure he would be chatting casually. Not ignoring her – he was never that blatant – but not inviting her comment.
Sighing internally, Leah wished Asil and Tag gone, longing to interrogate him. He was her only confidante, unwilling though he may have once been.
Since being alone together wasn’t immediately possible, she would need to make use of Tag’s and Asil’s presence instead. If anything having them there, showing them that everything was fine, would be part of the job.
“I have to talk to you about Kara. And it’s as well you’re here, Asil.” She said this, looking just left of Asil’s ear, which was about as close as she ever got to looking at him.
Asil was immediately alert, the usual slightly sneery expression disappearing. “What’s wrong?”
Leah outlined the situation with as much neutrality as she could. “She assures me the boy knows nothing, that he is simply cruel.” She swallowed, feeling a sense of the rage from yesterday returning. “But of course this would need to be addressed.”
“I could break his neck and hide the body,” Tag suggested.
Bran had stopped fiddling with his food to pinch his nose as he listened. “Thank you for the offer. I shall make a visit.”
“May I come?” She’d never asked before. Assuming Bran’s witch-weird-powers were his business alone. But she wanted to meet the boy who had hurt her foster daughter.
“Of course,” Bran answered. Then, “No violence.”
Disappointing. But not unanticipated.
*
They sat watching Robbie Andrew’s house, waiting for the lights to turn off upstairs. He and his family lived in the Lower Northside of Great Falls, a comparatively wealthy area to live. This was one of the older parts of the city, though he didn’t reside in one of the older properties built during the building boom of the late 1800s. She and Bran owned property around here. She thought it was a B&B.
It was late and it was quiet, all good citizens in bed. They had been watching the house for an hour, for the most part in silence. Every so often, Bran received a text – information from Charles on the family. Parents’ careers. Income. The older sibling’s DUI. There were no links to werewolves that Charles could see. No nefarious criminal activity or links to known anti-werewolf groups.
For most of the hour, however, Leah’s thoughts had not been dutifully focused on this stakeout. Nor had they dwelled particularly on Kara, whom they had dropped off at Peggy’s this evening, as her mate was away once again. They were doing facemasks and giving each other pedicures and watching the new series of Doctor Who with the female Doctor.
No, Leah had been wondering how best to talk to her husband. In the past, blunt honesty had served her. Not well, perhaps, but it had served her. There had been no point in her being subtle. Bran was the master of subtlety in this relationship. He could see straight through her so where was the point in that? Better to be straight-forward.
However, she’d never had to be straight-forward about them. There had been no discussion about them. She had given up on that, oh, a handful of years after they had met, mated and married in short order. He’d been quite clear on that. As it turned out, Bran hadn’t exactly been clear with himself but she wasn’t to know that. She didn’t think – though she had wondered – she could have influenced him there.
The lights in the house finally went out. Bran made a small, acknowledging noise.
Still they waited. Lights-out didn’t mean the occupants were asleep. Another hour would do it.
“Whatever it is,” Bran said eventually, “will you spit it out already?”
Leah blew out a breath, annoyed. “It must be so wearying knowing everything all the time.”
He smiled without amusement. “Indeed.”
“Fine. I want to talk about us and I have no idea how to go about it.”
“Oh?”
He wasn’t making this easy. She stared out of her window, away from him. “I asked Kara. She says the pack thinks I’m making you crazy. Am I making you crazy?”
“Obviously.”
She flung a hand in the air, which was a definite stake-out ‘no no’ so then she sat on it. “No, not obviously, Bran. How am I making you crazy?”
“I don’t know, Leah.” His voice was testy. “Your pretense that everything is normal, for one. Your absolute refusal to talk to me, about anything, unless forced. You call my brother instead—”
Leah spun to glare at him, outraged. “He was there! Are you saying I can’t talk to him?”
“Of course you can talk to him. But I want you to talk to me, as well. I am your partner.” Bran’s eyes glittered furiously. “This is not a one way street, Leah. I am trying to change. You need to, too.”
Leah hated everything about this conversation. Absolutely everything. The injustice of it. The hypocrisy. The burning behind her eyes and in her cheeks. The very slightest concern that he might be a little bit right, because he was always right, or she thought he had been.
She resumed staring out of her window, couldn’t bear to look at him and her jaw so tight it was actually painful. She certainly couldn’t speak either, a host of angry and hurt words blocking up her voice-box so the silence stretched, sparkling with ill-feeling. It was his fault, all of it. His fault.
Bran broke the silence, calmly, with that streak of new-found earnestness he’d unearthed, “I know I have a long way to go, to make up for, or right, the wrongs that I have done to you. And I know that you have healing to do, with regards to your past, our shared past, and that will take time. These things are both separate but intertwined. It is difficult, I absolutely acknowledge that. For both of us. Neither of us are used to being…vulnerable with each other.”
She cringed in reaction, shoulders hunching. That was very true. Even the thought of it was uncomfortable for her.
“I would just like you to try to talk to me.” His voice was soft but it felt like he was containing something sharp-edged and dangerous. “I promise you, it will get less difficult to do so.”
Having had enough of this lecture, and wishing to defend herself, Leah snapped, “I started this conversation, didn’t I?”
Bran didn’t return her tone. “You did. And I thank you.”
They sat, then, in another endless silence. With difficulty, Leah stopped staring out of her side window and instead looked straight ahead, pride demanding that she try to appear as if she was overcoming her reaction. His presence to her left burned cold and she couldn’t tell whether that was her imagination or an expression of his anger. For he was angry.
Which was unfair, wasn’t it? His accusations – that she was pretending everything was normal – made no sense. What was she supposed to be doing? Flouncing about the house announcing her feelings? Not carrying on? She had a job to do. She was trying to do it to the best of her abilities, despite everything. Exactly as she had always done.
Bran sighed and reached for his door handle. “I’ve had enough of this. Let’s go.”
*
Leah knew she was a monster. She was practical about it. Being a monster had many benefits – strength, invulnerability, magic, the freedom of the wolf. Being alive. Despite having the Change forced upon her, she was not one of those werewolves who resented it. Nor did she resent her wolf, who lay calmly within, an accompaniment to Leah’s life rather than a detriment.
She had seen inside the monster that was her husband more than a few times. Beyond his too-powerful wolf – a creature of nightmares alone – there was another monster that lurked within him, in his blood. The woman with wild-tangled hair had gifted him with a monstrous power that Leah knew he had rejected, as a human, but was now woven within his wolf, an intrinsic layer to his sheer Marrok-ness. A powerful witch he might once have been. Now he was a powerful werewolf that could tap into that monstrous power when he needed to.
Witnessing him ‘adjust’ Robbie was a reminder of that. She watched dispassionately as a trickle of blood leaked from the boy’s nose. A handsome boy – tall, tanned, healthy, with sharp cheekbones and an aristocratic nose. No wonder Kara had been smitten.
They left the house through the back, Bran’s fingers lingering on the handle, the lock snicking back into place. There was a fog around them, not a real fog but the remnants of a spell he had wrought. No one could see them.
She drove, not by agreement but because she reached the driver’s side first. Bran slid into the passenger seat silently. It had been an awful night. Their argument and his accusations weighed heavily on her. She knew too that Bran hated the side of him, the witch he brought out for necessity. To protect them. To protect Kara. She hurt for him, too. She did not like to see him wounded. Despite everything.
“Perhaps we should take her out of that school,” Leah suggested, opening what she knew would be a safe topic of conversation.
“That’s up to her.”
A fine statement. But he had been a parent once. He knew sometimes you made decisions for children that they might not like. “I’ll ask.”
Kara could be homeschooled. Some children were, in their town, once they aged out of the little school they had. It was hard to be the child of a werewolf, too.
Though it was still dark, it was late enough that it might better be called morning by the time they got home. Bran went to his office first and she up to her room. She prepared for bed, slowly, her limbs heavy. Now that the flush of anger had abated, new emotions were sneaking up on her. Guilt. She knew she hadn’t been talking to him. She had held back. She was used to holding back and being told that things were different was not the same as knowing it. She did think she was trying but perhaps she wasn’t trying hard enough.
Leah listened to his tread on the stairs, in the upstairs hallway. He headed for his bedroom. She heard him rustle around. His bathroom light turn on. After a minute, it turned off. She held her breath – afraid that maybe he wouldn’t come to her, that he didn’t want to be with her – and the relief when she heard his door open and close was so palpable she made a noise.
Bran – dressed in a fresh set of pajamas – gave her a small nod when he saw her, heading to her bathroom. He started to brush his teeth.
She sat back in bed, trying to relax. She didn’t think they had often slept together when there were things unsaid between them. Though, to be more accurate, they’d never really ‘slept’ together, either. Sharing a bed only happened because they fell asleep after sex.
And now he’d all-but moved into her bedroom. He had come to her, not waited for her to come to him.
“How did you know I’d spoken to Sherwood?” Leah asked, when he closed the bathroom door. See, she wanted to say, I can communicate.
“I saw you were on the phone so I pressed re-dial when you were done.” He pulled back the covers and slid between the sheets, lying on his back with his hand bent under his head. “It was his number.”
Suitably paranoid. “You could have just asked.”
“I wanted you to tell me.”
She winced. She had walked into that one. “I wanted to know if he was having dreams, with you in them. He wasn’t.”
Exasperated, he demanded, “And you asked him instead of me?”
“Yes. Because I thought it was connected. In retrospect, I can see that would be…hurtful.” For he was hurt, wasn’t he. She had hurt him. What a novelty to be on this side of the fence for once - her hurting him instead of the over way around.
Leah had frequently imagined causing him pain, turning the tables on him after he had hurt her. Her vindictive mind once relished this prospect, creating a variety of dramatic scenarios. See what it feels like, Bran.
It would have disappointed the old her to discover that it didn’t make her feel particularly good. There was no sense of righteousness, here. She supposed there was something to be said for finally learning it was possible to hurt him, that he was invested to a degree she had longed for. But it didn’t make her happy.
“I am sorry for hurting you,” Leah said quickly, as it had always been better to get apologies out of the way. “As I said, I thought it was connected. And Sherwood knew me at a different time.”
His jaw moved as he clenched and unclenched. “I’m not saying you can’t talk to him.”
“No, I know, I know that. But I should have spoken to you first.” As Bran had done, the moment she had stepped into his dream.
“Agreed.”
She was tempted to sneer. It was an annoying response when she was trying. Agreed. You were wrong, he was saying. I am right.
Fine. Maybe he was right. About this one thing.
Leah rolled onto her side, her back to him. She closed her eyes, well aware that any attempt to go to sleep would be futile until she stopped feeling so torn up by guilt and resentment. It was all so infuriating. The night before they’d had a moment, a good moment it felt like, and twenty-four hours later, here they were not speaking, both of them bubbling with anger.
God, she wished they could have sex and get it over with like they used to. Endorphins did a hell of lot to smooth over the edges. That would be normal. Easy.
She sat up with a gasp. “Is that why you don’t want to have sex?”
Bran made an extraordinary noise, half snarl, half laugh. “What?”
“The other day, yesterday? The day before?” It was all merging into one. “Whenever. You walked out on me. ‘Nice’ you said. Is it because you thought it was part of the ‘pretense’?” Good God, she was pissed off with him for that. That was nice. It had been momentous and he had dismissed it, her, and just walked off like it didn’t bother him.
If Bran had started breathing fire then, she wouldn’t have been surprised. His hands flew to his hair and he pulled, scrunching his face up. “You have got to be joking, Leah. You cannot be this obtuse.”
Nearly mute with rage at this reaction, she pointed at the door and summoned every inch of ice she could, “Get out.”
Bran threw back the covers and clambered out of bed. “I know what you look like when you want me, Leah. That was not it.” He slammed the door, hard, as he left. The paintings on either side shook.
*
Wide awake, Leah stewed.
Bran had slammed his way into his bedroom and then about half an hour after that she’d heard him leave it. She imagined he’d gone to his office to work. Neither of them were sleeping tonight.
Good.
Well. Not good. Not good at all.
Once again, the flush of anger had left her. He had it wrong. This time she was sure of it. But she was now beginning to see that maybe she wasn’t approaching this in the right way. She wasn’t communicating. How was he supposed to know what she was thinking? He couldn’t mind read.
Annoyed – at herself, at him, at the circumstances, at the fact that she didn’t seem to get a good night’s sleep any more – Leah got up and put on her robe. She checked her hair, eyes widening at what the tossing and turning had done it to, and brushed it out fiercely enough that it crackled with static. She pinched her cheeks to give color to them.
So armed, she went downstairs to find her husband.
As anticipated, Bran was in his office, though not at his desk, working, but slumped on his couch watching his fire. His preferred contemplative exercise.
“I used to imagine hurting you,” she said, because it seemed to be in the right vein of communicative, where they revealed awful things about themselves to each other. A true test of love. Look at what rot lies within me. “Like you used to hurt me. It’s not remotely enjoyable.”
Bran blinked at her. “I suppose I’m glad to hear that.” Then he sat up and held out his hand.
Leah took it, automatically, and was pulled towards the couch. He kissed her fingers, a courtly gesture that she very much liked, gave her a little shiver of delight. It was very Bran. She smiled down at him, some of her heartache easing.
He spoke first. “I’m aware that this situation we find ourselves in is of my own doing. I taught you not to talk to me. I didn’t ask you personal questions. I didn’t inquire after your family. I avoided the whole topic of our meeting.”
Leah sat down next to him, folding her arms across herself. “I can’t recall particularly wanting to talk about those things. With anyone.”
His eyebrows rose. “Sage?”
She shook her head. “No. It wasn’t that kind of relationship.”
“My doing, too.” Bran sat back, head dropping heavily to the back of the couch. “I isolated you.”
She was isolated, that was true, but she’d always put this down to her status. Leaders always were isolated, unless they made an express effort to be otherwise. Bran did that, whereas Leah had always been standoffish. She really wasn’t certain this responsibility could entirely be laid at his door. “I’m not a warm person,” she admitted, not telling him anything he didn’t already know.
“I’m not so sure about that. I think Kara, for one, would beg to differ.”
“Please. You should have seen me yesterday. She had to ask for a hug.”
“But she only wanted you.” At her surprised eyebrows, Bran smiled and gave her his source, “Andy told me. She wanted you and no one else, he said.”
That was true. Leah was tempted, out of honesty, to point out that Kara was an exception. A loophole of her youth and the extraordinary circumstances of her Change. She had hardly taken anyone else under her wing in quite the same way. Equally – Kara had lived with them and Leah was well aware that she occupied the role of missing maternal figure to her.
“And you have always cared for me,” Bran said quietly, following that thought. He touched his knuckle to her thigh. “Despite everything.”
She had. He was her mate. And she loved him. Her cold, flawed, selfish bastard of a husband. She loved him and she wanted him. She was attracted to him like no other. Even the most handsome of their werewolves could not compare to how she felt about Bran. If she hadn’t trained herself out of it, she, too, would stop and stare when he walked into the room. For a man who was accomplished at disappearing, he held her attention like no one else.
“When we were first together,” Leah began, awkwardly, “you told me that sexual attraction was part and parcel of the mating bond.”
“I did say that, didn’t I.” Bran lifted his head, rolling it towards her, a sorrowful apology on his face. “I made that up.”
She rolled her eyes. “Wonderful. So it’s not?”
“No, it has to exist before. The mating bond, and being a werewolf, amplifies it of course. It’s equally possible you can stop being attracted to a person, which is why the bond can be dissolved. A magical divorce,” he added with a whimsical flourish.
She made a leap. “Is that why you asked if I was attracted to you?”
Bran was grimly blunt, “Yes.”
“Well, I am,” she told him, firmly. “Are you attracted to me?”
He nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes.”
Reassuring. “And the other day—” Yesterday? “—you thought I was, what, forcing myself?”
“Because you were.”
She tried to keep her tone gentle, but firm. She touched his thigh. “I wasn’t, Bran, I was just— exploring. Trying to get it back.”
“You don’t need to make yourself, Leah. I’m not a chore.” Bran pushed himself off the couch, restlessly, and picked up the poker to take a couple of aggressive stabs at a charred log.
“Of course you’re not a chore. It really didn’t feel like that to me.” She frowned at his profile, burnished by the fire. “You know… I always knew. What had happened. I might not have remembered the details, but I knew that something was wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you.” Bran stabbed again at the fire and at this angle, she could see the jut of his chin. “Everything that happened was—that monster’s fault. You bear no responsibility for any of it.”
Leah smiled helplessly at this demonstration of fierceness on her behalf. “I know. I misspoke. I’m just trying to say, we’ve never done anything together that I’ve been uncomfortable with. You’ve always been very considerate.”
He gave up on abusing the log, head drooping a little. “I am very glad to hear you think that. I really am. I’ll admit I’ve had some… unsettled thoughts about it.”
Bran returned to the couch, dropping down beside her. He took her hand, thumb smoothing across it, back and forth. “You didn’t ask. Why I made up the story about the mating bond.”
She was momentarily at a loss. “The story? Oh, about attraction?” She took a deep breath, bracing herself. “Knowing you as I do now, I assume it was guilt or shame or something.” This seemed to be his standard answer.
Bran pulled a face in unhappy agreement. “It was barely a week after your Change that I took you to bed. I hated myself. We didn’t know each other. Your hands still shook when you weren’t concentrating.” He tapped his chest. “But he— needed placating and it had been not so long since he had been in complete control. I was afraid he would return.”
She winced. Though it had happened to her, she felt sorrier for him. “I don’t really remember, Bran.”
“I know. I’m glad, in a way. I sincerely doubt it was very good either,” he admitted, sheepishly. “Brief, probably. Hopefully.”
This made her laugh. “Surely not, Bran.”
“I am sorry.” He lifted her hand to his lips again. “If I could go back, I would do things better.”
She leaned against him, dropping her head onto his shoulder. “Me too.”
*
In lieu of her usual run, Leah took Kara for a hike the next day. She explained what Bran had done to Robbie and that she would need to avoid him, going forward. Brains were tricky things, with a tendency to revert in surprising ways. Kara seemed less bothered by the latter and more interested in the former.
“He can just do that? Change someone’s mind like that?”
“Yes.”
“Could he… do that to me?”
There was no point beating about the bush. “Yes.”
Kara was suitably awed. Stunned into temporary silence. She trudged behind Leah with significantly less delicacy, her hiking boots crunching loudly in the snow. “I thought it was all made up. The stuff people said about Bran.”
This was not the first time Leah had heard this about her mate. “When you’re as old as Bran is, you don’t often have to exert yourself any more. The rumors do it for you.” She paused so Kara could catch up. “That’s an important lesson, Kara. The same can be said for Asil. Sam. Any of the old wolves in this pack and any you might meet in the future. Don’t let them surprise you. Better to believe the rumors than to be fooled. Always assume the worst.”
Kara nodded seriously. “I see what you mean.”
They talked a little about Kara’s options for school. Homeschooling hadn’t appealed to her the last time they’d talked about it, when she left the Aspen Creek school and decided on Columbia Falls. “What about another school?” Leah suggested.
Kara grunted. “I think I’d rather have the friends I have than no friends at all. It’s not very long until I graduate. I’ll just avoid everyone else until then.”
This was an unhappy answer, for both of them.
Kara took Leah’s arm between hers, squeezing, absolutely comfortable with expressing affection physically in a way Leah never was. “It’s fine. Not everyone enjoys school. In fact, most people hate it. In a way, I’m having a very typical experience.”
She was such a nice child, Leah thought with a pang of helplessness. “I wish it was otherwise.”
“Thanks.” Kara smiled. It was a little forced. She changed the subject. “Did you go to school?”
“Barely. I left when I was eleven.”
“Wow. Eleven?”
“It was a different time. It was quite common for children to leave school early.” She felt obliged to explain with something Kara might be more able to understand than a lengthy tale about rural communities and the sense that girls didn’t have to be educated to fulfill society’s expectations of them, “I had to help my mother at home.”
Kara absorbed this. “I guess I really meant, like, recently. I know sometimes people go back to school. You could pass for a high schooler, if you wanted to.”
“I’m not sure what to say to that.”
She giggled. “Most women your age would be flattered.” Still giggling, Kara released her hold on Leah and bounded forwards, as if she might possibly be swiped at for this comment.
“Oh for goodness sake.” But Leah smiled. She knew what she looked like. She dressed, and made herself up, to age herself. Easier for Bran to look like a college kid and be respected than for her to do the same.
“I did take the HISETs a few years ago,” she confided, well aware she hadn’t even told Bran that. At the time, he’d been away a great deal and studying for them had whiled away some lonely hours. Given their conversation the night before, she made a mental note to tell him. “I’d thought I might look at colleges. I never really followed through with it. Not sure where I’d find the time.”
“You should.” Kara jumped up onto a fallen tree trunk, holding her hands up at her side like she was tight-rope walker. “Maybe we could go together!”
Another pang. “Maybe,” she said, hoping Kara would let the topic go. She really was far too busy.
*
That evening, Leah came out of the kitchen when she heard Charles’s truck pull up in the drive. Charles himself was in the office with Bran because Something Was Happening. As of yet she didn’t know what that was because they’d both been in there since before she’d returned from her hike with Kara.
“Here,” Anna said, handing Leah the baby before even offering a word of greeting.
“Hello to you both.” Leah swiveled Ava around so she could prop her on her hip, which she was just about big enough to do now. She adjusted the little striped cardigan she was wearing. “What’s going on?”
“No idea. Charles just messaged me to say he wouldn’t be back for dinner so I figured I’d come here.”
Faintly reassured that at least Anna was also out of the loop, she watched as her daughter-in-law stripped down the layers she’d apparently put on to get into the truck and drive here. She said nothing, of course. Kara also wore too many layers still. It was probably some kind of retained human habit.
Ava gave Leah’s boob a fairly solid smack to get her attention. “Goodness, you’ve built up your strength haven’t you?” She took the baby’s little hand and kissed it. As soon as she let go, Ava went for her hair, yanking Leah’s head to the side. “Ah. I see. This phase.”
“Yes. You should probably put your hair up.” Anna fluffed her shorter hair. “I do all right but she really punishes Charles.”
Untangling the delicate little fingers from her hair took some work and then a grumbling Ava was placated with a colorful set of fake keys which she shoved into her mouth.
“Asil mentioned Kara’s been having a hard time at school.” Anna looked up the stairs expectantly. “Is she here?”
“In her room. I’m sure she’d like to tell you about it.” She wasn’t about to tell Kara’s tale of woe. And if she cried again, Anna would be best placed to deal with that. A win-win, as they said.
Anna smiled and thumbed in the direction of the staircase. “Do you mind if I leave her with you?”
It had been a long time since anyone had left Leah with a baby. But Ava was clean and currently drooling over the keys and, more importantly, she was Bran’s so she was pack now, regardless of how Leah felt about her biological father. “We’re fine.”
Indeed, she was fine. Ava slobbered over the keys and then they practiced standing, balanced on Leah’s thighs on the couch. She was growing to be a nice-looking child. Big, brown eyes and curling brown hair, pink cheeks, and she was beginning to develop a cheeky personality, diving for Leah’s swiftly plaited hair at every opportunity and gurgling with laughter when she didn’t get her way.
When Ava grew bored with Leah’s hair, they explored a number of interesting features of the living room, including the grand piano which was cause for much excited burbling. No doubt Ava’s parents played her music on their own piano. Passing their house as she did sometimes, Leah would often hear them singing together or some other such wholesome activity.
Leah sat with the baby on her lap and lifted the lid. Acknowledging the lingering sense of fear, ignoring it, she played a chord. The mellow sound filled the instrument, rising to fill the room, up into the high rafters. Leah waited but there was nothing else. No Bad. Absolutely unaware of Leah’s inner disquiet, an impatient Ava joined in, bashing the keys ineffectually, her weight not enough to make a noise. She kept hitting, hoping for something, and yelped when nothing did.
Leah played her Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, noting how the baby stilled with interest. Then she dug up a lullaby from memory – not something she had ever sung to her children, she thought, but someone else might have. She quelled the uncomfortable thought that followed and played on. Ava leaned back against Leah and sighed.
Leah didn’t know much about Ariana, truth be told her eldest step-son’s life was not something she properly engaged in, but Sam was certainly musical. She wondered if Ava would have musical talents like all the Cornicks seemed to. She had an appreciation, at least, though at less than six months that could just be an interest in the noise the big piano made.
Knowing it was ridiculous, she began to tell Ava the names of the keys, playing each one. She showed her a few chords, the difference between the natural notes, the sharps and the flats. Then the door to Bran’s office opened and with it came a murmur of voices. Ava clearly recognized her father’s low tones because she started to bounce excitedly on Leah’s lap, throwing her diapered bottom upwards to get momentum.
Leah stood in anticipation of returning her, holding her facing forwards. “Is that Daddy?” she whispered to her, pressing her nose against her sweet-smelling baby cheek and kissing it. “Can you hear Daddy?”
Charles was beaming when he rounded the corner – an expression so unfamiliar on his face that he was almost unrecognizable. “There’s my girl,” he said, reaching for his daughter.
Ava all-but flung herself at him in joy. Leah laughed as she handed her over. “She’s so strong, now.”
“Isn’t she just. Where’s Anna?” her step-son asked, hoisting Ava into the air and making joyful, wide-eyed faces, the way every parent did when their child was so visibly happy to see them.
“Upstairs with Kara.” Dragging herself from the unlikely tender scene, she left him, taking this opportunity to see her husband.
Bran was pawing through his filing cabinet, frowning. “What’s going on?” she asked, leaning on the open doorway.
“We’re being audited.”
“Is that a problem?”
“It’s rather more attention than I want from the government and suspicious timing, let’s put it that way.” Bran stopped what he was doing suddenly, his hands resting on the hanging folders, and gave her his full attention. He smiled. It was rather strained. “How was your day? Did you and Kara have a nice hike?”
“We did, thank you. I took my HiSETs a few years ago.”
He nodded, surprised at this non sequitur and then understanding. “I didn’t know that. Thank you for telling me.”
That out of the way, Leah continued with her purpose, “She says she will stay at Columbia Falls. Apparently unhappiness is preferable to loneliness.” Even as she said it, Leah found herself applying her own thinking to that statement. She guessed she agreed.
Bran resumed looking through his folders. “It’s not long until she graduates.”
“Her thought as well. Is there anything I can do to help?”
He gave her a grateful look. “I would love something to eat.”
“I can do that.”
*
After an unusually pleasant family dinner, Anna took a sleeping Ava home, leaving Bran and Charles still feverishly working, on the phone to the various accountancy firms they used. Kara and Leah finished off an episode of an incomprehensible Netflix show about teenagers with magic powers that Leah was barely following and then they both decided to turn in.
Bran woke her – on purpose, she decided – when he came to bed. “Noisy,” she complained to her pillow. He didn’t need to turn the bathroom light on to brush his teeth.
He spat and rinsed. The bed dipped as he climbed into bed. “You weren’t asleep, really.”
She grumbled. “I was nearly asleep.”
He leaned over her. “I want to try dream-walking.”
She squeezed her eyes closed. “Not tonight. Sleeping.”
Her husband huffed and flopped down next to her, a child whose favorite toy had been taken away. The thought was so apt that she found herself smiling. He must have noticed because he pressed his cold nose into the back of her neck in chastisement. She shivered. “Did you go for a run?”
“Yes. Charles humored me.”
Since Charles had been married, he was less able to be bent to Bran’s whims so he took the opportunity to invite him for a run whenever he could, including – apparently – in the middle of the night after a long day of finance.
There were a limited number of people with whom Bran could run without it turning into a form of submission – Sam, Charles and herself. With Charles, she thought they also disagreed less when they ran together on four feet.
She reached behind haphazardly and attempted to pat his thigh, missed entirely and patted his arm instead. “Nice.” Then she pulled his arm around her waist. “Go to sleep.”
Duly invited to do so, Bran cuddled up behind her, insinuating his long, pleasingly cold body into her warm cocoon. She shivered again, noting that he was especially cold because he was in the nude. He hadn’t come to bed naked for weeks, instead dressing in a series of rarely used pajamas. This thought lingered, curiously turning over in her mind despite her attempts to take back the strings of sleep. She grew increasingly alert, a fact that did not pass Bran by.
It was full moon in a couple of days.
She gave up and squirmed around. Bran was wide awake, as expected. “How bad is it, truly, with your wolf?”
“I am in complete control.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s what you’re going to get.” It was said genially but with a note of, not threat precisely, but certainly a warning. He did not like to have his control questioned.
Once, Leah would have obeyed this warning, for he was her Alpha and he desired her obedience and she desired to please him. She cared astonishingly less about this now and poked his chest. “I do not accept that. If you were in complete control, you wouldn’t need to sleep elsewhere.”
This annoyed him. “It’s fine.”
Once again, she was struck by a desire to punch him in the arm. He was so frustrating. “My goodness, Bran, I’m not about to throw myself on your cock to save you, if that’s what you think I’m getting at.”
Bran was stunned, his ire dissolving in the face of language she never used. His mouth opened and closed before he managed, “I cannot believe you just said that.” He sounded like he was near to laughing.
Leah blushed. She had surprised herself. “Well. I’m not,” she said.
“I… want you to say it again.”
She lifted her chin. “I will do no such thing.”
“Please say it again.” This time Bran did laugh and he cuddled her closer, his body vibrating. “It was magnificent.”
“Stop trying to change the subject.”
He was gleeful. “You have never said the word ‘cock’ out loud in your life. Admit it.”
“And I never will again if you continue like this.” She had to hide her face in his neck, sure she was burning with embarrassment. It was not ladylike language. She had always strove to have ladylike manners, suitable for the wife of a man of his station.
Bran sighed rapturously, the sigh of one who had enjoyed a good, unexpected moment. “Wonderful.” He rubbed his hands over her back, rolling so she was half on top of him. For Leah, there was a flutter of a feeling of what is this before she forced herself to relax. It was the most physical contact they’d had in a long while but he was exuding no pressure, no sense of expectation. She laid her ear down over his heart.
His chest rumbling beneath her, Bran finally gave her a proper answer, “He is not, as you know, truly communicative. But our situation has disrupted the order of things. Physicality is helpful for reinforcing that order.” He shrugged his shoulders, jiggling her head. “This is good, incidentally.” He became quiet. “Any physical touch at all helps.”
Leah hadn’t known that but from the sounds of things, he hadn’t known either. She gave her own wolf some reflection but she was not the same restless creature as Bran’s. Werewolves liked to be touched, that was true, but Leah liked to be touched only by a handful of people. She supposed, given her history, that was only natural.
“Around full moon, the urge to do something about it is stronger. I thought space might be preferable.”
She felt a jolt of not unpleasant sensation. Nervousness. “Oh,” she said, obliged to say something.
Bran tapped her back. “Yes. ‘Oh’.”
That was apparently all from him. His breathing began to grow deeper, drifting into sleep. Leah’s head rose and fell on his chest as she lay, wide awake, for some time afterwards.
*
The brief experimental piano playing with Ava had oddly done more for Leah’s sense of Not Bad than Bran’s invocations had in the music room – a room she had still yet to re-enter, incidentally. As she commenced the usual preparations for the full moon, making vast quantities of chili in this case, she had half a mind to try her hand again, the next time Bran was out.
She paused, tossing another can of kidney beans into the strainer, and re-thought this. Why would she wait for Bran to be out? Why was that her instinctive thought?
Her brain supplied her with the answer. Because music was Bad and it should be hidden. From Bran. From everyone. Furthermore, if she was going to put herself at risk, that was fine. If something went wrong, she wanted time to cover it up. To prepare herself for Bran’s disappointment.
She rolled her eyes at herself and poured the beans into the enormous pan. Unbelievable. It was like she was having to re-code herself. Question every thought, every decision she ever made.
Shaking her head, Leah put the lid on the pan, turned it down low, and made herself, and Bran, a coffee. She took this out to him in the back yard where he had been working since that morning. He was still in the process of chopping down the wood from the trees he and Tag had felled to clear the roads earlier that winter.
It was hot work. He’d taken off his shirt and she had very enjoyable time just watching him toil, toned muscles glistening with the honest sweat of hard labor, before he noticed her and pulled out his headphones. “Ooh, thank you,” he said gratefully, licking his lips at the sight of the coffee.
Leah cleared her throat and handed this to him. She watched his throat move as he gulped, truly distracted. His hair was wet at the nape of his neck, working its way into damp curls.
Bran’s gaze caught hers and he lowered his mug, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “You’re blushing. Why are you blushing?”
She certainly wasn’t about to explain. She took a quick sip of her own coffee. “I’m going to practice the piano this afternoon.”
His face cleared with approval. “Good idea.”
“So if the world ends, you’ll know why.”
Bran grinned and bent down to scoop up his T-shirt. He rubbed this over his hair and then down his chest. She averted her eyes, gave the pile of logs he was building a firm study. “I heard you playing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star for Ava. I’m reasonably certain the world hasn’t ended since.”
Deciding that if she stayed here any longer she was going to spontaneously combust, and that he wasn’t taking this nearly seriously enough, Leah turned on her heel with a small huff.
“Leah!” Bran called, laughter in his voice.
She stopped by the door. “What?”
“I liked the way you were looking at me. Just then.”
Mortified, she hurried off.
*
It was extraordinary how all the music pieces she could remember from her childhood sounded comparatively dreary in the modern context of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century music.
Her fingers moved across the keys, sounding out the peak of the 19th Century’s accolades to the Lord, recalling the fervor for which she had played these pieces as a child. They were meaningless to her now. Her belief in organized religion had taken a nosedive in tandem with her father’s, though for differing reasons.
Bran had some music left on the piano from the last time he’d played, which she looked through, mostly folk pieces which she’d heard him play before that didn’t really appeal to her.
“You remember for a while I taught piano.”
Leah nearly jumped out of her skin. “You did that on purpose.” He, only he, could sneak up on her if he truly wished to.
“You were concentrating very hard.” Bran handed her a spiral-bound book, a compendium of classical pieces ‘from intermediate to advanced’. She flicked through them. Some she recognized, some she didn’t. “May I sit with you?”
Shyness beckoned. Bran was a professional level pianist. He could easily upstage her and she usually did her best to avoid his critique. “Um. I’m quite, ah, rusty.”
He tilted his head to the side. “Please? I can turn pages.”
Leah couldn’t say no to a ‘please’. They moved the piano stool and sat, side by side. He’d showered and changed, but his fresh T-shirt was rolled up his arms and there was something about him in sweat pants that was making her feel funny. She felt very warm.
She focused on sounding out the Bach piece she had selected. It was the Aria from the Goldberg Variations, reasonably simple. It was distracting having him beside her, even though he wasn’t doing anything, just counting time and turning the pages as he had said he would. She stumbled a couple of times and felt an embarrassed flush spread up her neck but he said nothing.
“I could probably find Variation 1, if you’re interested on expanding on the theme,” he said, when she had concluded the piece.
She had vague memories of the Variations so wrinkled her nose. “No, let’s find something else. Is there something more modern?”
Bran brought the book down and flicked through. “Gershwin?”
“Oh, definitely not. What about someone who is still alive? But simple,” she added.
He smiled and from the back of the book pulled a sheaf of loose sheet music. “All right, all right, someone fresher. Here.” He arranged the sheets on the music desk before her so she could see.
Leah absorbed the title. “At the Ivy Gate?” It was absolutely unfamiliar to her, as was the composer. She read through the arrangement, her fingers moving soundlessly over the keys at first, itching to begin. It was reasonably simple and she knew as soon as she started to play that she loved it. It was a peaceful melody. A little romantic, in a reflective way, and like the best kind of music when it was over she sat, her hands resting on the keys, her mind cleared of everything else but what she had made.
Bran, his mouth close to her ear, whispered, “I probably have more of his work. He’s good for—”
Leah turned and kissed him, silencing him. Unlike the other day, this was a wholly impromptu kiss, spurred on by a simple desire to kiss him. She had to.
Bran was clearly surprised. He inhaled in shock, his mouth parting against hers, his lips a little rough from working outdoors in the cold today but still soft. He tilted his head to meet hers, their tongues brushed, and he responded to her gentle kisses with more of his own, each individual kiss an eager caress.
Soft. Gentle. Caressing. Words that she would never have prescribed to any part of their relationship. But she didn’t think of that now, didn’t want to. She threaded her arms about his neck, pulling herself tight against the warmth of him, so delighted with her mate, with the music, with the sensation of being close to him again. Everything. Anything.
The discordant sound of multiple keys being leaned upon at the same time jerked her out of this lustful haze.
“Sorry that was—” Bran was holding his arm in the air like he’d had no idea how he’d lost control of it. He looked utterly stunned, mouth wet and swollen.
She imagined she was the same. Her heart was racing. She found herself rubbing a hand over a diamond-hard nipple, seeking the sensation, like that was remotely acceptable public behavior. Bran’s eyes zeroed in on this and a hand lifted towards her before he pulled himself back.
Blood roared in her ears. She yanked her hand away from herself like she was burned. This was not what— in the living room, for goodness sakes.
“Yes, quite,” Bran said, taking her hand and pulling her away, towards the door.
It was almost funny, the speed to which they raced to the nearest bedroom. Hers. He pulled his T-shirt off with one hand as he closed the door behind him and she shoved him against it, leaned down and bit his pectoral muscle because the thought had brushed through her mind before, when he’d been chopping wood, and she had wanted so badly. “Sorry,” she said, immediately afterwards, the bite mark already fading.
Air whooshed from Bran’s lungs as he stared at her, eyes blown wide. “No, please feel free to do the other side.” He was still holding the t-shirt. It dropped to the floor with a whumph.
She did. With alacrity, scaping her teeth against him as he purposefully tensed. He laughed, cupping the back of her head, but it was shaky. He released her so he could fumble with her pants, let out a growl of frustration. “A belt, Leah? Was this some kind of torture plan?”
“They’re still a little loose,” she protested, helping him with the belt, the top button and leaving him to deal with the fly so she could pull off her sweater.
“Bed, bed, bed,” Bran chanted, backing her towards it, shoving her pants down her hips.
She kicked these off and reached behind for her bra, only for him to push her fingers out of the way. “I like doing this.”
Leah didn’t know that. “Anything else you like that you’ve been keeping to yourself?” She reached down between them, grazed her fingers over his erection, trapped within the soft material of his pants. She would put money on it that he wasn’t wearing underwear. He rarely did when he wore sweats. Maybe that was why she liked them so much.
He slid her bra straps down her shoulders, kissed the marks left behind, kissed her neck. “I like it when you’re on top.”
“Well, I did know that,” she laughed. She could hardly have missed it.
On this note, it was no surprise that when they reached the bed, Bran spun them so that she fell on top of him. Together, they wrestled with his pants, Leah peeling them down his legs. She was right; no underwear.
“How fond of these are you?” Bran asked, fingers going to the elastic waist of her panties once his pants were no more.
“Fond! Fond!” she squawked, rolling off him to remove them herself as quickly as she could. “They’re a matching set.” She flung them safely away and he pulled her back. He was shockingly hot against her bare skin. She rubbed against him, sliding around so she could feel as much of him over her body as she could. The patches of crisp hair on his chest scraping at her nipples, the softer hair of his thighs against her legs. She straddled him and reached for his erection again as he slid a knuckle between her thighs, bumping her slippery clit. She moaned, clenching her fingers around him, hard and silky soft at the same time.
“I want to make you come,” Bran announced, as if this was a perfectly ordinary thing for him to say, as if he had said it ever before, ever, when their previous intimacies had been punctuated only by moans and the slapping rhythm of their skin coming together.
Her brain stuttered to a halt and Bran rose up to sitting, replacing his knuckle with his thumb, circling her ever so lightly. He kissed her. “What do you want, Leah?”
Her hips began to move against his thumb, seeking that friction. “Ummm,” she said, no notion of what she wanted.
“Like this?” he whispered, pressing with his thumb. He kissed the corner of her mouth, her chin, the top of her neck. “Or with my mouth?”
She clenched in response and flushed hot all over. A visceral, deep reaction to the thought of his head between her legs… yes. His head. His mouth. His tongue working her. She clenched again. Bran nibbled her neck, dragging his lips over the tendons, up to her ear. His thumb continued circling her clit, slipping down and back up.
“Want that? Want my mouth?”
So apparently Bran talked dirty. And Leah wasn’t sure she was going to survive this experience. She felt him smile against her neck, like he knew how helpless he was making her, and he rolled them over, barely resting on her before he shuffled down, his hands parting her thighs. Leah tried to brace herself as he lowered his head. This, they’d done. He was a generous lover. She hoped he felt she was equally so.
He traced her with the tip of his tongue, teasing her by never going deeper than that. Her clit, which had a taste of pleasure earlier, throbbed in anticipation and her hips started to lift in eagerness with each swipe of his tongue but then the bastard moved upwards, tracing her abdomen, her belly button, alternating kisses with little licks. She rubbed her wet mound against his chest, attempting to get a little friction but he raised himself from her, denied her even that. He met her eyes, predatory but somehow cautious. “Okay?”
Her reply was not deeply verbal but encouraging. If not impatient.
Smiling, Bran slid up her, raising himself on his hands so he was poised over her breasts. His hot tongue traced her nipple, again with the same frustrating gentleness, lapping at her areola, before moving to the next.
Leah closed her eyes, firmly telling herself to just take the moment to enjoy being pleasured, to ignore that instinctual need to draw him inside her. As if hearing this, Bran made a happy little noise and nosed his way back down to where she was most needful. He kissed the top of her slit and then spread her with his thumbs, cool air hitting her hot flesh.
Leah held her breath.
Bran knew better than to go in with the sharp point of his tongue. That would be too much. Instead, he lapped at her softly, tongue round and soft. It still sent a sharp zing of sensation straight up her belly but she didn’t want to curl away from him. He did it again, keeping his tongue flat. He licked down her and back up two, three, four times. She began to feel the first flutter of building pressure. Perfect. Oh, God, she had missed him.
With another noise of enjoyment, Bran returned to her clit and this time he pressed a little, open-mouthed suck to it. She jolted, her hands clenching her thighs tightly. He did it again, then laved it with his tongue, soothed her, blew lightly against her.
“Is this good? Do you like this?” he asked politely, breathing warm little puffs on her swollen skin.
She nodded. It was nearly frantic. “Oh yes. Thank you,” Leah added, ridiculously.
He nodded. A man who was serious about his job. Diligent. His eyes met hers and he smiled as he slid two fingers inside of her, easily. Her mouth parted. She suspected she made a noise, a whimper, because his eyes darkened with satisfaction. He moved his fingers, gliding in and out, his thumb resting just below the bundle of nerves he had so successfully stimulated and, yes, that was definitely a whimper.
Leaving her full, but not full enough, Bran bent his head once more and – she should have seen this coming after all the teasing he had done, lulling her into a false sense of security – this time began to flick his tongue over her clit, tiny, pointed, rapid flicks, his fingers plunging in and out of her. Her eyes widened and she sucked in a breath as her orgasm went from a gentle, trickling build to a shrieking inferno. He added a third finger and the stretch, the assault on her clit, was too much. He curled them upwards and she came with a punch. With a yell. Her whole body splitting into rippling halves.
Her first orgasm in months and it was an absolute spine-tingler.
But he was not done. Keeping his fingers inside of her, he continued to lick her, the rough flat of his tongue setting a steady, firm pace. She twitched into his face with each lick, pings of sensation sparking in her body. She could hear herself making weak little noises, almost-embarrassing murmurs. It was too much – then it became not enough. The sharp burn of oversensitivity began to warm as he coaxed her to her next orgasm. She clenched her fingers into the sheets, trying to contain herself. He began to move his fingers, in and out, slipping and slurping within her, curled up to rub against the inside, faster, faster, faster— “Bran!” she yelled, helplessly, as her whole body bowed with her climax. Agony and ecstasy. No wonder they called it the little death. Her whole being centered around the clench around his fingers, pleasure coursing through her, ebbing and tightening over and over until she had nothing left to give.
She collapsed back on the bed, overwhelmed, twitching with little electric shocks.
After a moment of contemplation, Bran jiggled her knee with his hand. “How about that? Was that nice?”
*
When her wherewithal returned, she rode him, sliding down on him and having the pleasure of watching Bran fall to pieces instead.
“Nice?” she asked. Because apparently they talked during now.
“Nice,” her mate managed gruffly as his eyes shifted from hazel to gold and back again.
She built her tempo, that swooping, sweeping angle that gave him the most sensation, the muscles of her core working overtime. She couldn’t come again, not after the overload he had given her but it felt good. Full. She leaned forwards a little more, her hands pressed to his tensed stomach and he reached up to cup her breasts, thumbs tracing her nipples.
He gazed down at their joining, then lingered on her breasts, her face. He was openly admiring. “You look amazing like this. Like some kind of goddess.”
Her rhythm stuttered with this unlikely comparison, as he switched from the dirty talk of earlier to—she didn’t know what this was. Compliments? Possibly a brain hemorrhage? “A goddess?” she repeated.
Bran reached behind her to grab her butt, to bring her tight to him as she recaptured her motion. He began to lift his hips, meeting her. “Like a goddess. A Valkyrie. I’m going to come soon,” he added as a polite addendum.
“Want to roll over?” It was usually at this point that he would have her on her back, her legs over his shoulders so he could finish as he liked.
“No, no, like this,” he insisted and she could hear he was close. “With you like that.” His eyes turned to solid gold once more and this time she heard the rise of his wolf, that rumbling warning in his chest. She gasped and he shook his head. “It’s okay. It’s me. It’s okay.” He tensed, fingers pressing deeply into her flesh as he thrust up into her one final time, and then he shuddered violently with his climax. His eyes closed, his mouth parted, then he issued a strangled sound, close to her name, and collapsed back on the bed, trembling.
She waited a moment or two for his trembling to subside and then leaned down to kiss him. “Nice.”
He huffed and the wolf was gone from his eyes when he opened them once more. “Nice,” Bran agreed with a sweet smile.
Leah patted his stomach, then stroked it – it was very nice stomach, it really was – and carefully parted them. Gravity did its thing and she stumbled to the bathroom, only to realize he was right behind her. She stopped, clenching her thighs together and pressing a hand to his chest. “What— are you doing?”
Bran blinked. “I have no idea. I just automatically followed you.” Baffled, he about-turned. “How strange. Excuse me.”
Alone, she giggled at this oddness, did her business and washed her hands. A glance in the mirror revealed some impressive bed head, which she patted down halfheartedly before giving up. She didn’t think he cared. She certainly didn’t.
She felt amazing. Honestly, amazing. As her reflection looked back, her wolf rose to the surface just briefly, as if to agree that she, too, felt amazing.
In the bedroom, Bran was now spread out on the bed, legs and arms akimbo. He had an equally pleased, if slightly dazed, looking expression on his face.
“You can talk dirty,” she said, almost accusingly, crawling next to him and resting her head on his shoulder.
“I don’t know where that came from, either. Did you mind?” He stroked the back of her head.
“It was very effective.” She suspected she might be thinking about it for days to come. Just randomly thinking - Want my mouth - and clenching reflexively.
He touched his lips to her forehead. “And you’re… everything is okay?”
“Everything is okay,” she agreed.
At this, Bran cuddled her close, effusively affectionate, kissing her head, her face, everywhere he could get. It tickled and felt – despite what they had just done – like the ultimate expression of love and affection. She kissed him back, just as effusive, just as joyful. Better than normal.
Then, Bran pulled back, a new light in his eyes. "Now can we try the dream-walking?"
-end-