Dead Heat (Alpha and Omega) - Patricia Briggs Page 0,51
a witch has power enough to defend herself, she has sacrificed someone for it,” Hosteen said unequivocally.
“Sacrifice, yes,” Anna conceded. “But the witch I knew paid the price for her power herself rather than hurt anyone else. She isn’t evil, and she is very powerful.” It was discouraging how quickly the beginnings of a sweater turned into a loose pile of yarn. She took the ball and began winding, careful not to stretch the yarn out as she put it back on the ball. “Why do you think the Marrok and his sons don’t count?”
“They are werewolves,” he said, taking her bait.
She’d learned to argue from her father, a very good lawyer. “Let them argue themselves into your court if you can manage it,” he’d told her. “They’ll do a better job of convincing themselves than you ever could.”
Anna looked up at the Salt River Alpha blandly. Then she looked at Chelsea, who was beginning to look younger. The crow’s-feet were fading from around her eyes, and her skin, formerly Arizona tan, was paler. She couldn’t see any of the cuts Chelsea had made; most of those had been on her body and were covered with a quilt. But if the lycanthropy was healing the marks of aging, Anna assumed it would have already healed the other marks, too.
Anna didn’t state the obvious.
“Old werewolves,” he snarled. “Not new made.”
“Who were once young werewolves—witchborn,” she told him. “And not evil.”
“Evil is going against the nature of things, the way things should be,” he told her with painful exactness. “Evil twists and turns and smells of blood and disease and death. I am evil, too. I fight it every day, the evil inside me. But I fear that it has a hold on my heart, tempts me to force my son so that I won’t be alone. I fight it. But I don’t know if she will. How can anyone fight two monsters in their heart and win?”
He looked faintly surprised at his own words, but more dismayed that he’d told her so much. Anna had, well, not grown used to the peculiarity of having normally taciturn or repressed wolves suddenly spill their inner thoughts to her, exactly, but she was no longer surprised. They talked to her of their pain or sorrow because their wolves knew that she was no threat.
Looking at Hosteen’s dismay, she decided that in addition to quilting and knitting, she needed to learn something about counseling, too. If people were going to air their darkest sorrows to her, she ought to know how to help them. All she could do now was run with her instincts and gather the wisdom her twenty-odd years on the planet had given her to counsel a man five times her age.
“We all carry within us the seeds of the child we were,” she said slowly. “The ideas of right and wrong and proper behavior. Charles will not speak the name of the dead if he can help it.” For Charles, she fervently believed, that taboo was a good one. His ghosts were dangerous. “The ways of the culture we were born into stay with us, even if we live as long as Bran or the Moor have. Some of those ideas are right and good, but others are modes of survival outdated by the passing of time. Like the idea that men shouldn’t weave or knit, or … wear pink and flowers unless it’s on a Hawaiian shirt. The trouble seems to be sorting one from the other.”
“You think the monster I see in Chelsea is a remnant of some outmoded cultural leftover,” he said neutrally.
“Oh, no,” Anna said, her voice so definite she almost winced. She continued more carefully. “Most people carry a monster within. Not just werewolves or fae, most people. That monster has nothing to do with our wolf except that the wolf makes it more dangerous. It’s a monster born of our own selfish desires and the wounds that life leaves on all of us. Whether those lives are a couple of decades or a couple of centuries long, living means that we get hurt, and some of those wounds don’t heal or they don’t heal completely.”
She had her own monster, didn’t she? Her own darkness that she tried to keep out of sight. A monster that would surprise her mate with its ferocity. Born of helplessness that was made worse by the understanding that there had been help just waiting for her if she’d known how