girl's voice was wrong, flat and confident-and she was lying.
Sarai frowned at her and put her hands on her hips. "You know better than to try lying to me. Has someone hurt you?"
"No," Mariposa replied in a low voice. Asil could feel her power amass around her, different now than it had been when they'd first sent her to her own kind for training. Her magic had been wild and hot, but this power was as dark and cold as her voice had been.
She smiled, and for a minute he could see the child she'd once been instead of the witch she had become. "I've learned a lot from Linnea. She taught me how to make sure no one can ever hurt me again. But I need your help."
The doorbell woke Asil up before he had to watch Sarai die again. He lay in his empty bed and smelled the sweat of terror and despair. His own.
* * * *
Charles made himself at home on the old wolf's porch swing and tried to lose himself in Indian time. It was a trick he'd never quite mastered-his grandfather had always grumbled that his father's spirit was too strong within him.
He knew Asil had heard the doorbell, he could hear the spit of the shower-and he'd never expect Asil to do him the courtesy of a quick appearance, especially when his visit had come at such an ungodly early hour in the morning. He and Anna would be getting a late start, but their prey wasn't a fish who was best caught in the dawn's light anyway. And this was more important to him than catching a rogue, even if that rogue was killing people.
He'd almost gone to his father instead of Asil after he'd talked to Heather at Bran's house. It was only the scent of his stepmother that kept him from knocking on Bran's bedroom door. This morning, Charles hadn't been up to the dance Leah would insist he perform. When she had driven him to being rude (and she would), his father would intervene; no one, not even one of his sons, was allowed to be disrespectful of the Marrok's mate. And then there would be no discussion anyway.
So he went to the only other person who might understand what had happened, why the bond between him and Anna wasn't complete: Asil, whose mate had been an Omega. Asil, who disliked him almost as much as Leah did, though for different reasons.
Brother Wolf thought that there might be a lot of amusement to be found in this morning's talk. Amusement or fighting-and the wolf relished them both.
Charles sighed and watched the fog of his breath disappear into the cold air. It might be that this was a wasted effort. Part of him wanted to give it more time. Just because the slow part of the mating process, when wolf accepted wolf, had been finished almost as soon as he first saw her, didn't mean that the other half would work so fast.
But something told him that there was more wrong than time alone could solve. And a man who had a werewolf for a father and a wisewoman for a mother knew when he ought to listen to his intuition.
Behind him, the door opened abruptly.
Charles continued to rock the porch swing gently back and forth. Encounters with Asil usually started with a power play of some sort.
After a few minutes, Asil walked past the porch swing to the railing that enclosed the porch. He hopped on it, one bare foot flat on the rail, leg bent. The other fell carelessly off to the side. He wore jeans and nothing else, and his wet hair, where it wasn't touching his skin, began to frost in the cold, matching the silver marks that decorated his back; Asil was one of the few werewolves Charles had seen who bore scars. The marks sliced into the back of his ribs where some other werewolf had damaged him-almost exactly, Charles realized, where his own wounds were. But Asil's scars had been inflicted by claws, not bullet holes.
He posed a lot, did Asil. Charles was never sure if it was deliberate or only an old habit.
Asil stared out at the woods beyond his house, still encased in the shadows of early morning before dawn, rather than looking at Charles. Despite the recent shower, Charles could smell fear and anguish. And he remembered what Asil had said at the funeral: that he'd been dreaming again.