Archive of Our Own

Bran was tired and it truly took a great deal of physical and emotional labor to make him tired which was why, barely a mile from home – and his bed – the sight of something blue darting across the road before his rental didn’t cause him any real moments of alarm. He braked to a halt, a shade too slow, and his scratchy eyes followed the creature without really seeing it.

Some kind of swift fox, he eventually decided as he pressed on the accelerator. It couldn’t have been blue, that was exhaustion speaking. Something to do with the combination of LED headlights, the time of night, the glare of his dashboard. Oh, he truly didn’t care.

The driveway to his home was empty, as well it would be. It was 3 a.m. and their cars were tucked up in the garage and all good werewolves were in bed or were chasing down blue foxes in the night. He snickered uncontrollably as he climbed out of the car and then nearly tripped over his heavy feet, numb from being in the same position for hours.

“Woo, boy,” he muttered, shaking his head, glad he had been alone for that moment of un-werewolf-like grace.

He dragged his duffel from the trunk. It stank. Three pairs of jeans that had really been through it and his favorite T-shirt that he was hoping the contents of Leah’s stain-remover cupboard might recover. And a vat of vinegar. Another one.

Inside, his house was quiet and clean. In contrast to himself, it smelled pleasantly of the fragrant roses that adorned the hall tables and of the almond floor polish that the housekeeper used. It was a balm to the soul. He breathed in deeply and exhaled. It was good to be home.

With some alacrity, he tossed his duffel into the laundry room to be dealt with later and closed the door behind it and the last few days.

Legs heavy, he made his way upstairs without incident. What he really needed to do was eat maybe three pounds of steak and take a long shower. What he actually did was undress at the end of his wife’s bed and climb on top of her.

“You’re back,” she said, muffled under the comforter she was rolled up in like a burrito. Mostly. She had one leg that was flung outside, in deference to her werewolf body temperature.

“Umph,” he said, when he meant ‘you smell fantastic’ and ‘I’m so glad to be home’ and ‘I have missed you like a vampire misses the sun’.

Leah’s head moved slightly. She sniffed suspiciously. “Do I detect a hint of skunk?”

“Umph.” She really did smell amazing. He rubbed his nose against her hair, just to bring out the notes of shampoo and her natural scent. There was something about her. There always had been.

To his surprise, his cock gave a little leap of interest. He wouldn’t have thought it had the energy.

Strumming up the vitality to follow-through on this idea – sex and then sleep, he decided, the best of all combinations – Bran tried to unwrap his wife. It proved immediately too much for him in terms of the dexterity required. He couldn’t find the corners. Was she hiding?

Bran must have made some noise that suggested he was in dire need of assistance because Leah began to help. Huffing, she shoved him to the side and pushed the comforter down with her feet. She was gloriously naked. This was convenient. He rolled back on top of her and, yes, in their life together they had shared many delightful explorations of each other’s bodies where pleasure was prolonged, delivered expertly and savored.

Tonight was not like that.

They kissed, sloppily, mouths barely moving, tongues lapping at each other. He made her ready with his thumb on the bead of her clitoris, tight, firm little circles that he knew would please, so that when he slid inside of her tightness, she gasped responsively and pulsed around him. He did not count how many thrusts it was before he was brought to orgasm because no sooner than he did, then he fell asleep on top of her.

All in all, a wonderful homecoming.

*

In the morning, Leah booted him out with an irate shriek of ‘skunk!’ and he showered with their most abrasive body wash. She had a very sensitive nose. He’d already doused himself in vinegar – as had Elmer and Louis, who’d also received the same treatment – and he truly couldn’t smell it on his person anymore. That much.

The bed was already stripped when he came out of her shower. The windows were open. He winced.

Downstairs, she was frying steak, eggs and cubed potatoes with the kind of mutinous expression that told him clearly she was doing this because it was the right thing to do, not because she wanted to.

He made sure his expression was suitably contrite. “Thank you. And I’m sorry.”

Leah grumbled. She pushed the plate towards him and Bran gobbled down one steak quickly, then another. He began to feel more like himself. He started to lay the table for breakfast. “What news?”

“Nothing really. Your delivery of musty maybe-magical trinkets were dealt with reasonably easily – they await your delectation in the secure room.”

Bran had forgotten about Idra’s latest parcel of her father’s apparently misbegotten hoard so he grunted in acknowledgement. And that was all he did. He had learnt that mentioning the other werewolf woman did not make for easy conversation with his wife. She did not need to know.

Leah continued, “Most of your emails have been easy. Though I’m not sure about Dieter’s transfer request, so I’ve left you to answer that. Peggy and Carrie want to do a marriage renewal thing – they’ve sent a save the date.” She gestured to the fridge with the spatula, so Bran dutifully went to look. It was for next June. He had successfully Changed Carrie last Autumn, much to everyone’s relief. “And Emma doesn’t want a dog anymore.”

“Oh?” This was curious. Emma had been asking for a dog for a solid two years. The most unbelievable request given her parents, and her grandparents, and all her ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ all regularly changed into wolves.

“Yes. I took her swimming yesterday and she said she now wants a hamster.”

He cringed. “Ye Gods.”

“Precisely.”

The mysteries of childhood were put on pause whilst they ate breakfast and by the end of the meal, his ankles entwined with hers, Bran was reasonably certain he was forgiven for bringing skunk into the marital bed.

The hamster was unfortunate. He had agreed with Charles that Emma’s Christmas present this year was going to be a puppy, which seemed the sort of grandparently thing to purchase for a child in this day and age.

But a hamster was out of the question. He wasn’t bringing vermin into anyone’s house. And he certainly wouldn’t offer to look after it, when the family were away.

*

Leah had been right to leave Dieter’s transfer request to him. It was the third one in ten years which suggested a problem. He spent the morning closing the net around Dieter, speaking to his previous Alpha, then to his current Second, before broaching Dieter’s current Alpha. All told a very similar story.

“He’s lazy,” Corbon intoned bluntly. “I have never met such a lazy wolf. Just wants to sit around, play computer games. What good is that to me? I can’t be ordering him to work every day. That’s not the kind of Alpha I am.”

Bran smiled, all teeth. “Thank you.” He knew precisely where to send Dieter next.

He had lunch with Tag, then went for an afternoon run. He returned to a fashion show or, rather, Leah’s end-of-summer clear-out. About fifteen women were enthusiastically milling about his living room, going through the racks of designer clothing that his mate no longer cared for. From experience Bran knew a good half of these clothes were things Leah had worn once and never again.

He ducked back into his office, only to find the woman in question curled up on his couch reading. He smiled. “Bit much for you?” Large groups of people seemed to unsettle her. Even humans. For a pack animal, she could be remarkably solitary.

She gave him a haughty look but didn’t deny it. He leaned down to give her a kiss and then hovered over her, hands propped on the back of the couch. Her lipgloss tasted of cherries. Up close, the deep blue of her eyes were flecked with silver.

Sometimes, he simply just liked to look at her, to make up for all the years when he refused to. He kissed her again. “Who have you left in charge?”

“Kara.”

He approved of this. Kara would accept no haggling as all proceeds would go to the church roof fund. In his years as a landowner, Bran had found a community got along far better if they felt they were financially responsible for said community. He could have ‘fixed’ the church roof five times over in the time it took for their people to gather the funds to do so themselves but that was not the point. Obviously his ‘donation’ would be the largest portion.

“I didn’t see Anna.”

“She got a preview yesterday. Family privilege.” Leah grabbed hold of his sweater when he made to move back and she sniffed him again, thoroughly. “What happened?”

He was not a proud man – at least, not comparatively – but he found himself focusing away from her face so he didn’t have to meet her eyes. “We, ah, chased the lone wolf into a cave system that was otherwise occupied. It had been a rather invigorating chase so we didn’t… notice.”

Leah laughed brightly. “Oh, I would have liked to have seen that. Did you catch him?”

“Yes.” Bran scoffed. “Of course.”

She let go and he returned to his desk, where a piece of lemon tart was waiting for him, with a perfect quenelle of crème fraiche. Decorating this there was a dusting of powdered sugar, a sprig of mint and thin curlicues of lemon rind. “You spoil me,” he announced with a delighted sigh, the tart flavor of lemon landing on his tongue as he breathed in.

Pleased, she returned to her book with a smile. “I do.”

*

For a few weeks, life continued the way it tended to, with moments of stress punctuated by the soft contentment that Bran experienced when he was at home. And he did try to be at home. He had expanded his core team of operatives to include Asil and Juste, and beneath them a pair of newer wolves – at least, new to the United States – so when work was required out of state, he delegated accordingly.

Sometimes it was inevitable that it was he who would venture out in the world and increasingly further south as he had expanded his remit into Southern America. There were a few packs there who still resisted his authority and it was helpful to remind them of his presence every now and again.

It was on one such trip that he received a late call in the night. He fumbled for the phone, still half asleep, and put it to his ear. “Hello?”

“It’s me.”

He winced at the quality and rolled onto his side. “This line is terrible. Where are you?”

“On my way into the mountains with Charles. There’s been— a sighting.”

“A sighting?”

She sighed, a sound that crackled with the poor connection. “Oferti swears he saw Devon.”

“Ah,” he said, sighing himself. It had been more than ten years and he still sometimes expected to see his old friend over his shoulder. Such had been Devon’s personality that lingered on when many would have passed into tender memory.

“He has been insistent enough that we have agreed to investigate. I’ll lose signal soon so if you need something, call the main house and Anna will be there. I’ve put your out-of-office on your email.”

“Very well.”

He stayed on the line with her until they lost signal and then, missing her fiercely, he tucked his cell phone under his pillow until he fell back asleep.

*

Bran’s homecoming was much delayed and it was dawn by the time he cruised into his driveway. He’d stopped multiple times to eat so he cleared the car of the empty cartons, paper bags, and the enormous iced coffee that had fueled him through the night. It was a rather unbalanced pile and it nearly went flying as a voice broke the quiet of the downstairs.

“Where have you been, Grandda?”

He maneuvered the pile so he could see to the side of it. His granddaughter peered balefully at him over the back of the couch from her nest of blankets. “What are you doing down here?”

“Nana Leah said I could.”

Bran’s mouth twitched. ‘Nana Leah said’ or sometimes just ‘Leah said’ was an oft used phrase that Emma used as a fait accompli. If Leah said, no one could gainsay her. They had not yet reached the stage where Emma tried to use it in deception – perhaps they never would. She was the child of two werewolves, after all, who had trained their daughter to understand lies would be caught.

Bran unloaded the fast food containers into the recycling in the kitchen, his small companion at his side dragging her blanket. “You should go back to bed. It’s very early, fy mach'i.”

“I know what that means,” Emma muttered, almost to herself. She sounded irritated. “It means small.”

“It does. It’s a term of endearment. And you are small.” He reached down to stroke her hair, sticking up in the fair tufts and whirls of a good sleep. She was – and this often gave him a real leap of near-painful nostalgia – the spitting image of one of her long-lost aunts. Most of his children had been born very fair, growing less so as they grew up. But Aeronwen had been white-blonde, with dark brown eyes, and had remained so as an adult. It had been a striking combination.

If Bran was recalling correctly, she had died in her twenties. Childbirth, of course. It was often very difficult to remember his children as he should – alive and well, rather than their last moments on earth. Her child had perished with her. He remembered not if it had been a boy or a girl.

“Leah said you’d make me breakfast when you got home.” Emma began to climb awkwardly onto one of the bar stools, with her blanket, so missed Bran’s eyeroll. She grinned, cheeks puffing out with sheer mischief. “She said you’d make me pancakes.”

Leah, Bran could see, had been having fun in his absence. “Did she now.”

As if on cue, through the mating bond, Bran felt Leah stirring. In close proximity to each other as they were now, they tended to be more alert to the other’s presence. Like a string pulling taught between them. It had its plusses and minuses. One of the negatives was that they could rarely sleep well without the other also being asleep. Leah said his brain was too ‘fussy’ to sleep through. “Tell you what, why don’t you go wake your Nana Leah up and we’ll all have breakfast together.”

Emma cast him a knowing look. “You’re mean, Grandda,” she said, with a toothy smile. Nevertheless, she slid off the stool and padded out of the kitchen.

*

Leah yawned repeatedly as she unfolded the story of hers and Charles’s foray into the mountains. There had been no sign of Devon’s ghost but they had stumbled across an old hiker, well off his path who had been very grateful to be escorted back to a more recognizable point.

“Human?” Bran confirmed, as he tossed things into the dirty laundry hamper.

“Yes. But—” She yawned again and lounged on the bed. “—long-winded. Charles kept haring off to chase rabbits.”

From this Bran surmised that Charles had been in his wolf form, playing over-large dog. “Was he at least wearing a collar?”

“No, but he did offer his paw on cue.” Leah was smiling.

Bran grumbled about this – his people knew how he felt about them wandering around during the day in their wolf’s fur – but he did acknowledge that Charles could play dog better than most. “I suppose I shall have to see to Oferti.”

“He really didn’t seem any more unstable than the last time I saw him. It was why Charles and I thought it necessary to follow-up on his vision.”

“As a precaution.”

“Very well.” She pouted. “You won’t be gone all night will you? You’ve only just returned.”

The pout was irresistible. He paused his unpacking to come and kiss her. “I’ll head off after lunch and make sure I’m back to tuck you in.”

She snickered and nibbled his bottom lip. The scrape of her teeth had him pushing closer. “Oh, is that what we’re calling it.”

Emma made her entrance then, interrupting any interesting developments in that direction. Indeed, Emma often made an entrance into any room, a combination of the ability to bang all doors against any wall or piece of nearby furniture and a sort of running-stomp effect. This time she arrived with a stuffed toy and a straw hat. “I’m bored,” she announced dramatically. She took a run and leaped onto the bed, bouncing Leah up and down. The hat went flying.

“Are you indeed.” Leah did not sound convinced but her eyes were soft, loving. She replaced the hat on Emma’s head. “Do you want to bake with me?”

“Brownies?” Emma’s face lit up. “With icing and sprinkles?”

“The icing may perhaps be overkill.” Leah’s voice was dry.

Emma pouted. “Please?”

Predictably, Leah caved almost immediately and yet tried not to show it. She had a very particular look for when she let Emma get her way – and it was only a look she had for their granddaughter. A kind of soft hauteur, as if she recognized the feelings she had for Emma were very rare and precious. “Very well. But you can only have a small piece before your parents come and collect you. I will not be accused of spoiling you.”

Bran rather thought the cat was out of the bag on that front.

“Yeah!” Emma cheered, leaping back off the bed and running from whence she came. “I’ll get the ingredients from the pantry.”

The stuffed toy – a much beloved, tattered character that had once belonged to her mother and then become Emma’s in turn – was left behind. Leah scooped it up gingerly. Its arm – or possibly, its leg, as it was one of those unidentifiable Disney characters – was hanging on by a thread. They had hoped she would grow out of her attachment but it didn’t seem to be the case.

“You might need to look at this again,” she suggested, proffering the toy to the only member of the family who still voluntarily retained any darning skills.

Wincing, Bran agreed, and went to fetch his sewing kit.

*

He did keep his word to Leah that he would be back at a reasonable-ish hour, not that she would know it. Despite his earlier considerations regarding their mating bond, his mate was out like a light when he crept into their bedroom and she didn’t stir for a moment even when he demonstrated some deliberately very un-stealthy behaviors.

Disappointing.  

Not surprisingly, Leah was awake before him and, as was typical for her, she took herself off on a run – two legs, if he wasn’t very much mistaken – and Bran resolved to visit his son’s building site for breakfast.

Only – remarkably – the building site was far more progressed than he had expected.

“You have a roof,” he said in surprise, as he crossed the front yard. Good news.

Anna was standing on their driveway, a coffee mug in hand. “Yes,” she said, somewhat disbelievingly. She was clearly still in her waking stages, with her hair quite wild and wearing an oversized shirt over pajama pants.

“Did Rick bring in more support?”

Rick was their main contractor for the town. He was the grandson of a werewolf, and had been raised here, though he lived out in Billings now.

“Um.” A frown line bisected Anna’s forehead. “I guess?”

“Well, he must have done.” It had been a week since he’d last been by and there hadn’t even been walls. Now there were walls, a roof. There was a skylight. And one of those balconies with the glass called something romantic— Juliet, that was it. A Juliet balcony.

“Yes.” Anna took a sip of her coffee. She licked her lips and took another. Her eyes were fixed on the extension with confused fervor. “It’s just. There weren’t walls yesterday. Or a roof.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if Rick brought in some more guys – he had to have done it overnight. It wasn’t like this when I brought Emma back. And I’m pretty sure Charles would have said something when he left this morning.”

Bran believed in many weird and wonderful things. But mysteriously progressed buildings were not one of them. There had to be a rational explanation and that rational explanation had to be that neither Anna nor Charles had noticed that the work had moved on.

He patted his daughter-in-law on her back. “It’s good news, though.”

“Yes,” Anna said, still doubtfully. She dragged her eyes away from the two-story build to him. The early morning light did nothing to hide the suspicion in her eyes. “I suppose you came for breakfast.”

He smiled. “I am but a poor starving man.”

“Sure you are. Well we’re having yoghurt and fruit and home-made maple granola for breakfast today. You are not to break and make Emma pancakes. Even if she turns The Eyes on you. I’ve had to hide those brownies from her in the hopes she forgets they exist.”

“I am capable of withstanding her.”

“Mmm-hmm,” said Anna.

*

He put the mysteriously-appearing-extension to the back of his mind and spent the day playing Alpha, checking in on various members of the pack. Several asked if they would be hosting the next full moon, just under two weeks away. In the long ago past he might have readily agreed – it was the Alpha’s prerogative to provide the collective with a safe and enjoyable night’s hunt – but if he agreed to plans without Leah’s input he would be in Big Trouble.

Not that Leah would say ‘no’, of course. She took her duties as seriously as he did. He would be very much surprised if she hadn’t already taken it into consideration. But if he took it upon himself to arrange a pack event without her nod, she would view it as a serious overstep on his part, particularly as the bulk of ‘organizing’ would usually fall to her.

With this in mind, Bran returned mid-afternoon and as he took off his boots, announced to the house that he was thinking of hosting a pack run on Full Moon and what did she think of it.

“I’ll do the big grocery shop a couple of days before and put out the buffet table,” he said, approaching the couch. The TV was on, though muted, and he could see the pot of tea on the coffee table. She usually took a break around 4pm.

Leah was silent. He leaned over the couch to speak to her and got the shock of his life. She was asleep. And she was wearing a dress.

He didn’t know what was more surprising – the nap in the middle of the afternoon or the dress itself. It was blue, with little flowers. He had no notion she even owned such an article. It certainly wasn’t her typical daytime uniform of jeans and shirt. Even when dressed up for a more formal occasion, Leah still wore pants. Out here, she claimed it was more practical.

Bran did the only logical thing at this point and took his cell phone out of his pocket and snapped a few pictures. She looked so sweet, with her cheek smushed on her palm and the cushion clutched against her stomach. The little white flowers were killing him.

He fizzed with the desire to wake her, to tease her, to – actually – do some more investigating of this dress, but he withheld the urge to any of those things. Presumably she had done something exhausting this morning and needed the sleep.

With a strong and enjoyable sense of protectiveness, Bran put out ‘do not disturb’ vibes through the pack bonds to ensure that they wouldn’t be bothered and quietly pottered about between kitchen and office. He put the pack gathering in the calendar with a big question mark. He checked his messages, his emails but declined to make any calls, wary of interrupting Leah’s peace.

It was encroaching on dinner-time when she finally woke. She dragged herself, and a blanket, to the doorway of his office and blinked at him. “I was asleep,” she announced, her voice still thick with slumber.

The same fizzing desire to tease returned but this time was coupled with that wave of love that still sometimes poleaxed him. It was a wave of love that threatened various things – to pick her up, wrap her in that blanket, cuddle her on his lap and growl at anyone who approached her. It was not particularly rational as Leah would probably tolerate none of those things.

And it was, as ever, a feeling that struck Bran with a significant sense of doom, a reminder that Leah would forever be the most powerful weapon against him.  

Instead of voicing any of this, he smiled. “You were. Very deeply. Hard morning?”

Leah frowned heavily at him as if the question was a perplexing one and then didn’t respond, instead wandering off, the blanket susurrating over the floorboards behind her.

The wave of love transformed into humor at her antics. He knew laughing would be fatal, however. “I love the dress!” he called, as his cell phone lit up on his desk with Asil’s name for the fifth time. This time he answered it.

*

They had a TV dinner, as the expression went. Bowls of rice and meat and a dense documentary on the civil war they had both lived through. There wasn’t much conversation beyond the occasional grunt of recollection.

On their way up to bed, Leah shocked him for the second time that day. “I don’t want to have sex tonight,” she said breezily, as if this was a thing she sometimes said.

Bran almost missed a step. Like many dominant werewolves, sex – the when, where and how of it – was something that was vaguely on his mind at all times, even if he wasn’t consciously aware of it.  “Ah. Okay,” he replied because when one’s wife declined one’s attentions one didn’t force them on her. “Any… particular reason?”

“I just don’t feel like it.” She bit her lip and gave him an apologetic look. Or something close to it; her eyes were on the floor. “I’m sorry.”

“No need to be sorry,” he said quickly. He watched her retreat into her walk-in closet, where she changed out of sight. The blue dress was thrown into the hamper. A little part of Bran was very sincerely sad he hadn’t had a chance to take it off.

When Leah re-emerged, she was in her pajamas and he was still standing exactly where she’d left him.

Hesitant for the first time in many years, he checked, “Do you want me to sleep in my room?” He rarely used it, these days, except to store his clothes.

Leah’s surprise was palpable. And reassuring. “No, of course not.”

Okay, then.

Their normal routine was excruciatingly not normal. Leah’s announcement had put him on edge and he tiptoed around her as they brushed their teeth and did all the usual ablutions. Normally, this was a time for conversation. Sometimes a little flirting. Routine was important to old werewolves and, prosaic it was, sex was part of their nighttime routine.

And, actually, they hadn’t made love for several days now that he thought about it. He’d been away. And she’d been asleep when he returned last night.

He got into bed beside her, thoughts roiling away. Worrying, ultimately, that he had done something wrong and not knowing what that was. Worse – there was a definite sting of rejection, a very human emotion that he did not savor. Leah had never rejected him. Not for good reason anyway. Which led him back to worrying what he had done wrong. He did so try not to wrong her.

Her hand reached across his vision. She touched his cheek. “I’ve hurt you. I’m sorry.” She leaned over him, the comforter bunching between them, and kissed him. Her thumb rubbed backwards and forwards on his face, her eyes rounded and gaze soft. “I feel a little off, that’s all.”

Concern for her washed over him. She had slept for a long time this afternoon. He touched her face, that age-old gesture of checking a temperature that told him nothing. She was as warm as he was. “Shall I call Sam?” Werewolves could get sick. Not often – but they could.

“If you want to make me feel worse,” she said drily. She laid her head down on his chest and squeezed him. “I’m sure I’ll be better in the morning. Don’t worry.”

*

She woke him with her mouth pressing open-kisses down his belly and if there was a single way to shut down his brain, it was the sight of her fair head between his legs. He was rock hard in an instant. Focused on one thing and one thing only. Wet, tight heat surrounded him as she massaged the base of his cock with her tongue and applied precise pressure to the head.

He groaned out her name. Surprised. Delighted. Reverent. This was not a frequent occurrence. 

As he had realized the night before, it had been several days since they had last been together so after a few minutes of savoring this delightful activity, when she slithered up his body, the smell of her own arousal perfuming the air, there was no thought remaining than the desire to be inside her. He reached for her T-shirt, intending to bare her to him, but she batted his hands away with a coquettish look. “No touching,” she growled.

He half-laughed, half-groaned again and instead reached above to take hold of the bars of their headboard, freeing her to have her way with him.

And have her way she did. She took him by the head and sank down, all the way down. His eyes rolled back in pleasure but not for long, it was too magnificent a sight to miss as she rose and fell upon him in a mesmerizing rhythm, the sheath of her cunt holding him tight. The T-shirt did add a certain mystery to the act – the sight of her breasts bouncing tantalizingly behind the material, nipples peaked. His mouth watered with the desire to touch. To take a nipple and roll it between tongue and teeth. To suck hard.

Suddenly realizing how close he was, he cursed. “Are you close?” He clenched his eyes closed and thought of unappetizing matters.

“Mmm,” Leah said. She changed her pace, resting her palms on his abdomen and leaning a little forward. Their skin slapped together faster as her hips snapped.

“Fuck,” Bran said, a curse word he seemed to only use in the bedroom, as his climax rushed up fast at the change in pace and sensation. He reached between her legs to find her clit and perhaps he need not have for he barely brushed her before she was gasping, her mouth opening and her eyes blowing wide. He felt the flutter of her internal walls ripple around him. He let go with a shout, hips snapping up and up as he came, the boiling rush of pleasure leaving him, driving home. White-hot-nothingness filled his mind.

When he had nothing more to give, Bran slumped back onto the bed, suffused with that particularly soothing post-orgasmic lassitude, his wolf lulled into peace.

Leah flopped to his side, rolling onto her back. She wore a big, pleased smile. “I love it when I make you curse.”

He huffed out a laugh. This was a loss of control he could give her. He turned his side to the side to kiss her. “You are magnificent.”

*

In a very good mood, he volunteered to take Emma to her swimming lessons, even though the strong smell of chlorine gave him a headache. They got pizza on the way home – which had been part of the deal he had agreed with Charles to prolong this outing – and Emma entertained him with stories of her classmates, who were all sons and daughters of the pack or the extended pack.

“What’s this I hear about you no longer wanting a dog?” he asked, as he offered her a paper towel to dab tomato sauce from her nose. And cheek. And left earlobe.

She shrugged. “I just don’t want one anymore.” The napkin was enthusiastically rubbed all over her face, getting most of the sauce. “But Amity has a gerbil. I like gerbils.” She accompanied this statement with a coquettish batting of her eyes – an expression she could only have picked up from Leah. It was slightly disconcerting.

Bran pretended ignorance. “I don’t think I know what a gerbil is. Is it also some kind of rodent?”

“Rodents are rats, Grandda!” she exclaimed, delighted to be correcting him on his error. She crumpled up the napkin and climbed up on her chair so she was kneeling, leaning forward on the table which was the kind of poor manners Bran might have chastised his own children for once but on his grandchild he let slide.

She tried to grab hold of his glass of coke, which he moved. She pulled a face at him.

Bran smirked. One of the many delights of children was their utter fearlessness. Emma, in particular, was completely unphased by him. “They’re a classification of many mammals. Rodents can be rats, gerbils, hamsters—”

“I don’t think so,” she said, sitting back. From the frown line on her forehead, she seemed less sure.

“Shall we look it up on the Google?”

She giggled. “It’s not The Google, Grandda. It’s just Google.”

He knew that, of course. But there would come a day when she no longer giggled when he made silly mistakes, when her eyes didn’t shine across the table at him like he could do no wrong, and today was not that day and so he would carry on.

They Googled rodents until Emma had another preferred pet to pester her parents with. Which she did, immediately upon exiting the car and jumping into her father’s arms. “Can I have a capybara?”

“A capybara.” Charles’s eyes swiveled accusingly to Bran, who held up his hands innocently. Nothing to do with me, son, I’m just a casual bystander. “I’m not sure capybara would find Montana very hospitable, sweetheart.”

“He could borrow one of my sweaters.” Emma played with the shirt points of her father’s collar. Bran was almost certain she was joking. She had a very dry sense of humor. “Nana Leah could knit him little booties.”

“I’m not sure—” Charles was trying not to laugh. “I’m not sure Nana Leah knits.” He checked this statement with Bran who swiftly nodded as he climbed back into the car. Leah had refused such pursuits back when shoulder-pads became fashionable. The first time.

“But Amity says all nanas knit.”

“And you should definitely tell Nana that when she’s back.” He hoisted Emma up in his arms. “I’m sure she would knit you anything you asked.”

Bran was also certain any negative feelings Leah had about domestic arts would be put to the one side by Emma’s demands for mittens. But Charles had said something curious. “When she’s back?”

Charles bent his head so he could look through the window at him. “She said she’d mention it. When we were looking for, ah, the ghost, we passed the winter cabin. Looked as if it had some storm damage. Nothing too major but when I saw her at the store this morning after her run she said she was heading up there to fix it. Said she might stay the night.”

This was the first Bran was hearing of it. And whilst Leah was a dab hand at general repairs, that was normally something she delegated. Particularly if it might involve an overnight stay in an uncomfortable location. His mate was a woman who enjoyed her high thread count sheets.

He tried calling her on his way back to the house but her cell phone just kept on ringing, as well it might – he found it was on the hall table, along with a note conveying her whereabouts. As Leah would be heading out to the border of wildling country, she would have followed his edict and not taken her cell with her. Tech and wildlings did not mix.

He pondered the note for some minutes, his brain ticking over his discomfort with the situation as he studied the neat loops of her careful handwriting. He couldn’t quite pinpoint why he felt off about the situation. It was a perfectly reasonable chore for Leah to carry out. And she had left him a note, after all, as well as mentioning it to Charles. She wasn’t being subversive about it; for all he knew, she recalled it on her run and wanted it done before it got colder.   

It was just… off the back of her behavior last night, he had the strangest of feelings that Leah’s trip was an excuse of some kind.

An excuse for what, though?

*

Twice Bran set off, intending to track her down, and twice he set his ass back in his chair and gave himself a stern talking to. They worked hard on their marriage – as all long-lived couples did – but in the peaks and troughs of their time together, they had worked hardest for the betterment of their happiness in the last decade. He had been a fool over Leah for a very long time and that kind of foolishness had left wounds that had taken time to heal.

It had been a slog on both their parts to reach the comfortable equilibrium they had now, with many difficult conversations. Nowadays, things weren’t quite as hard as they had been. Neither of them second guessed each other. They were kind. Loving. They had reached the kind of balance that should have been theirs with only a little effort on his part from the beginning.

Stomping off into the mountains to check on Leah was the sort of thing that would put her teeth on edge. Even if he had a feeling.

The built-up concern had to go somewhere so Bran carried out the short phone tree of checking in on his other loved ones. First there was a call to Sam which – not unusually – started well and then descended into bickering. Ariana took control after that and they had a reasonably pleasant discussion about their plans for the holiday season.

He then put in a call to Mercy and Adam. The cell phone was answered by Warren, who, hearing Bran’s name, then quickly passed the phone to Jesse – who was something like his foster-granddaughter, Bran had decided – and they discussed a book she was reading. She was in an off-and-on-again relationship with the Dark Smith of Drontheim’s son, which he tried not to think nor ask about.

Finally, he spoke to Mercy, who began with, “If you’re asking about Thanksgiving, we haven’t talked about it yet.”

Bran pressed his lips together. It was annoying when people presumed. “I am not asking.”

“I’m just saying we haven’t talked about it.” 

“Very well. I am just seeing how you all are.”

“Oh, fine, fine. The latest— Evie, no, put that down,” she said sternly. “The latest monster of the week has been defeated.”

“I haven’t seen anything on the news.” The phone pressed between head and shoulder, he typed his usual search terms into YouTube. He scanned the series of videos that came up – none of them recent. He let out a quiet breath of relief.   

“Thankfully, Adam’s PR machine worked very hard to suppress it— I said down, Evie,” Mercy said, still stern but calmly. “Thank you. Good girl. All good at home?”

This last part was aimed at him. “All fine here,” he said. “Emma wants a hamster.”

“What happened to the dog?”

“Not sure. Change of heart I think.”

“That puts paid to your extravagant Christmas present, I suppose. Perhaps a pony?”

After delivering this jibe, she swiftly changed the subject, as well she might. Mercy thought Emma was being spoiled and had Opinions about it. Bran’s Opinion was that Mercy had a difficult childhood, which he had a part in, and when she had grandchildren she would see it otherwise. They had argued on this topic. He was well aware that Mercy had conveyed her feelings on this matter to Anna – which had gone down about as well as could be expected and led to some weeks of frostiness. “Adam said you are thinking of holding an assembly in January.”

“Thinking about it. Just the Alphas who are public.”

“This is a boys’ only meeting then?”

“As the boys are the Alphas, yes, because no woman would be foolish enough to take on the task. Though of course family would be welcome.”

“You know they all think Adam gets preferential treatment because he’s married to me.”

“They think correctly,” he said, to be amusing. It had nothing to do with Mercedes and everything to do with Adam himself, of course.

Bran couldn’t say his phone calls to check in with the family left him feeling any better. Indeed, he was now left with the same low-grade irritation he was always left with – that his children didn’t mind him as they should and that he didn’t see enough of them. He was now thinking of Thanksgiving and Christmas and he started to draft an email to that effect.

Which of course he would have to discuss with Leah, should she ever deign to return to him.

Kara interrupted this circular thinking. She was dressed for work in her uniform, gun on her hip, and she at least tapped on his door politely before walking in. “So, weird thing,” she announced with a smile that did not fool him in the slightest.

“Oh no.”

She held up a hand, patient as ever. “How weird – I don’t know. You know how Carrie has wanted a new truck for years?”

“Very vaguely.”

“Well she has,” Kara said, taking on the tones that women always took with him when they expected him to Do Better, “and now she has one and neither she or Peggy know how it got there.”

Bran’s fingers froze on his keyboard. “What?”

“It’s a Range Rover. Which you probably know better than I, costs more than $300,000 so is way out of their price range. But it’s sitting in their driveway right now.”

*

A small crowd had formed around Carrie’s Range Rover. It was unmistakable, as the brand had reverted back to the boxy look of the 90s, but being European still a smaller model than the SUVs commonly found in these parts.

“It’s this year’s model, all right,” George said, crouching down to inspect the impeccable tires. He leaned forward to sniff. “0-62mph in 3 seconds. It looks, and smells, brand new. There isn’t even any dirt on the tires.”

With a face more appropriate for venturing into a cave in enemy territory, Tag opened the car door, bringing with it that waft of fresh leather. Various things started beeping the way modern cars did telling you obvious things like the door was open but nothing exploded or seemed otherwise threatening.

The mystified couple were standing to one side. Peggy had a hand over her mouth. Carrie was bug-eyed with something akin to terror and barely repressed excitement. “It was always my dream SUV,” she whispered.

Peggy’s hand drifted around her wife’s waist.

“What about the CCTV, Kara?” Tag asked, leaning inside to open the glove compartment. He withdrew, holding a key fob, and slammed the door shut, silencing the beeping. “Found the keys.”

Kara’s visit to the main house had not been for the express purpose of sharing this bizarre news. She had wanted to check the footage on the security camera, which they had done together. Most of the roads in Aspen Creek had some form of coverage and the single-track up to this property was fully visible. No metallic-blue SUV had made its way up the winding, bumpy track.  

George, clearly thinking along the same lines, lay down so he could get a look at the undercarriage of the car. “It’s spotless,” he announced. His voice held awe.

Carrie whimpered. With unspoken communication, Peggy pinched her wife’s arm. “Ow,” Carrie said faintly.

It wasn’t that Bran hadn’t believed Kara when she’d claimed a magical car had appeared on the doorstep of the couple but he’d truly assumed there would be some more logical explanation for it. What that logical explanation might be, he imagined that it would manifest upon seeing it.

However, staring at the shiny, pristine vehicle, the logical explanation did not manifest. Was quite simply refusing to manifest.

“I don’t suppose there was maybe a delivery truck on the footage?” Peggy asked, clearing her throat and looking at Kara hopefully.

Kara shook her head. “No. Nothing except your car, last night. Oh, was the movie any good?”

“Yes!” She and Carrie exchanged enthusiastic looks. “You and Alec should definitely go. But later – there were quite a few kids on our showing.”

Kara winced, something toothily. “Oh. Ah. We broke up.”

Peggy winced as well. “Again? Oh, hon, I’m sorry…”

Bran cleared his throat, interrupting what he knew would be an unnecessary deviation from the proceedings – one which he would have to memorize and then repeat verbatim later to Leah, who liked to be kept abreast of Kara’s relationships. “The car wasn’t here when you got home last night?”

Both women shook their heads.

“But it was here this morning.”

They nodded.

He thought some more. “Who knows this is your dream car? Precisely this model and make?” he asked.

Peggy, of course, put her hand up, and George as well, as it was a love they both shared, but whilst everyone else knew that Carrie had a particular fondness for European cars, they had never got this specific. Everyone else shook their heads.

Carrie chewed her lip and continued, “My dad, I suppose. I got my interest from him. He prefers muscle cars, though.”

Peggy nodded in support of this statement.

“No one else.”

“I don’t think so. Oh— no, actually, weirdly there was this one guy, the other day.” Carrie’s face cleared with the excitement of a potential clue. “At the gas station…”

*

Charles was in his cave, which wasn’t really a cave. It was his office and it only resembled a cave because it was wall to wall screens and the blinds were drawn. The room was small and smelled like electricity. Bran’s wolf, who was ancient, did not like it.

His son pulled off his noise-cancelling headphones when Bran opened the door, appearing – briefly – irritated, then that irritation cleared. Slightly. “Oh, it’s you.”

Ah, the enthusiasm.

“I called. I knocked. I shouted your name.” Then Bran had given up on politeness and let himself in.

Charles glanced at the headphones admiringly. “These are so good,” he muttered.

Bran rolled his eyes. “The other day, when you were looking for Devon’s ghost—”

Charles grimaced. He never had liked naming the dead.

“—Leah said you met a strange hiker.”

“Yes, an old man who was lost.”

“He was human?”

“As far as I could tell.”

“Is there a possibility you might have been mistaken and he could have been some form of Other?”

Charles was not an arrogant man, just a man who was extremely aware of his capabilities. His eyebrows rose as if he couldn’t believe Bran was asking this question of him – neither could Bran, really – but then he gave this some polite consideration. “He smelled extremely strongly of cinnamon candy. He had a tin of them.”

Despite what Bran felt was the seriousness of the conversation, he grinned. “Are you suggesting the smell of Red Hots might throw you off your game?”

“They weren’t Red Hots.” Charles frowned but his eyes sparkled with humor. “They were much stronger than that. He offered Leah one and her eyes watered. But he moved like an old human. His heart beat like a human. He certainly wasn’t fae – I would have known that. So would Leah.”

Bran agreed. Of course, he would have had this conversation with his wife but she was currently hiding from him.

He glanced at the moving numbers on the screens for a moment – not taking anything in. Charles treated the stock market like a game. It was a game Bran was not personally very interested in and was grateful his son was.

“What did Rick say about your extension?”

“He said a couple of his guys stayed late.”

“You doubt this.”

“I could tell he doubted it,” said Charles slowly. He looked away from Bran briefly and Bran who, truly, did not dwell on his late wife very often experienced a brief flutter of recognition. There was something about Charles’s profile that was very like his mother’s. “But then I heard him ask his crew and two of them did say they’d put in some extra time and they weren’t lying. Perhaps— perhaps I just didn’t notice.”

Bran decided that was about as likely as a Range Rover manifesting in the front drive of two werewolves.

He leaned more heavily against the door jamb and folded his arms. “Did you hear much of Leah’s conversation with this man?”

“Not a lot. Why?”

“Wondering if she mentioned your extension.”

“If she did, I didn’t hear of it.” Charles swiveled his chair around. “Why are you so interested, Da?”

“Something odd happened today.” He explained and as he did so, Charles’s dark eyebrows climbed up his face. A faint smile twisted his mouth and now he looked just like Sam.

“You think we have some kind of Other magic at work here? Handing out gifts of cars and building work?”

“How else would that kind of car get up there?”

Charles snorted. “There must be a more logical explanation.”

“I don’t have one. You’re welcome to try and find one yourself.”

“I shall do so.” His son stood up – and up – and towered over him. Bran tried not to sigh.

“Very well.”

*

When Charles returned to the main house, he was in his wolf form and he changed on the decking to the absolute disinterest of his wife and daughter. No comment was made whatsoever on Charles’s choice of T-shirt – which was neon pink and had a Metallica logo on it – so Bran didn’t comment either.

Once upon a time, Charles’s clothing choices post-change had been quite uniform. It was only recently that he’d begun to experiment and Bran half wondered if it was an attempt to get attention.

“And what did your majestic nose detect, my son?” Bran asked, putting the old animated movie on pause. Emma had lost interest half an hour ago and it had plainly only been he who was involved in the story of the lost fish.

“Cinnamon.”

“Interesting.”

“Would that really mask an Other’s scent from a werewolf?” Anna put down the pair of knitting needles she had apparently dug out from Leah’s mostly defunct hobby cupboard. Emma had expressed an interest in learning and Anna, delighted at the prospect of a game that did not involve a screen, had been all too happy to teach her.

So far, all Emma had mastered was the ability to choose from the various skeins of wool on offer. She had gone for a very pale blue and was currently building a pyramid with the rejects, her own needles set to one side.

Charles sighed and dropped down onto the other couch. “Not your typical Others. It might work on something more subtle.”

“Or something with only a touch of Other,” Bran suggested. Not everything was smell. Some things were a feeling. He knew quite a few Others who had managed to keep themselves hidden from him for a long time before showing their true colors.

“And what we’re saying is that this guy is handing out miracles.” Anna was cheery. “I must say, our monsters-of-the-week are really improving if that’s the case.”

Leaning over, Bran picked up Emma’s knitting needles. He cast on, slowly. It had been a while for him too. “Not sure a new car and an extension might be considered a ‘miracle’.”

“No. And you didn’t, you know,” Anna’s eyes slid slyly to him, “spur of the moment buy Carrie a new truck.”

“I did not.” The needles clicked satisfyingly as he began a simple garter stitch. “Is that the prevailing theory?”

“Yeah.”

Bran grunted. “A generous Alpha.” He did consider himself to be reasonably generous – or tried to be. There was no tithe. Their people and their extensive families paid a peppercorn rent for their homes, which were well maintained. There was a good school, the general store was subsidized. They’d even organized a great deal on the town’s energy supply. Or Leah had.

But, no, he wasn’t buying members of his pack $300,000 cars. He would have to make that clear to everyone or there would some jealous expectations set.

Emma, bored of her balls of wool, climbed off the couch to go sit with her father, which involved a lot of sharp elbows and knees digging into parts of his body. She was a rangy child, with many pointy ends. Charles tolerated this well, barely batting an eye and only murmuring ‘careful’ twice.

His daughter pressed at the frown line between his brows. “Daddy has his thinking face on.”

“Not miracles,” Charles said thoughtfully, confirming her statement, and kissing the end of that finger, “but wishes.”

“Wishes.” Bran paused and then with a sense of tremendous resentment, and incredulity, said, “We cannot have a jinn.”

“Oh, we do not!” Anna sat bolt upright, excitement lighting her up like a beacon. Wool scattered.

Across from her, Charles did not reflect his wife’s jubilation. Quite the opposite; he shared Bran’s feelings on the matter. He sank back into the couch. “Oh no,” he said quietly.

“What’s wrong with a jinn?” Anna demanded, some of her jubilation fading.

“They are impossible to get rid of. A plague that hops from person to person, causing untold damage.” Forgetting his occupation, Bran rubbed at his face vigorously and nearly stabbed himself in the eye. “We have never had one on this continent, not that I know of. But we are jumping ahead. No one has wished for anything.”

“I wished for a dog,” Emma said helpfully. “A blue one.”

Everyone looked at the stuffed animal. The toy, much darned, was sitting on its throne of cushions at the end of the couch, listing drunkenly to the left. It was vaguely dog shaped – with the exception of the large, bat-like ears – and very definitely blue.

Emma rolled her eyes at the tedium of communicating with adults. “That’s not my dog. My dog ran away.”

“You wished for a blue dog,” Bran repeated, patiently.

“And the man asked me for my wishes.”

All three adults sat forward. “What man, sweetheart?” Anna asked, managing to keep her voice low and calm, even as she eased her way towards the edge of the couch. Genie or not, Emma talking to any stranger was not good news.

Nevertheless, Emma sensed trouble. The rules of her upbringing had been by necessity very strict. Her dark eyes roved between the three of them, looking for a friendly face and finding only masks of anxiety. “The man at the store.”

“Our store?”

Emma nodded. Charles gave Bran an appalled look. One that spoke to a major lapse in security that he personally felt responsible for – even if he had not been present.

Anna continued calmly, “What did you wish for, darling?”

“I wished for a dog.” This was said with a great deal of impatience, as she had repeated herself numerous times. “But then he ran away,” Emma pouted, “so the man said I could have more wishes. I wished the house was finished. Because Daddy would like that.”

Charles nodded minutely.

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Emma.” Anna unfolded herself from the couch and came to sit on the other side of her daughter. She was now pumping out – perhaps unconsciously – a great deal of Omega magic. This eased the permanently crisp edges of Bran’s wolf but it did nothing for the ball of anxiety in his chest.

Jinn – whilst ostensibly neither good nor bad themselves – preyed upon human vices. Selfish wishes that had a propensity to do exponential damage at the hands of the jinn’s interpretation. “What else did you wish?” He worked hard so that there was no hint of a demand in his voice.

“Ummm. I wished that Aunt Carrie had a big car.”

“Yes.” Anna stroked her daughter’s curling hair. “What a lovely thought, Emma.”

The ball of anxiety in Bran’s chest twisted in an easing direction. A blue dog – they could find that and deal with it. The extension – it sounded as if some of Rick’s men wanted to take credit for that. Let them. And they’d bring in a third party to check the building was sound. Or knock the whole thing down again and start afresh, erase it from existence.

The car, he already had George checking the serial number, finding out where it had come from. They could return it if necessary. Carrie certainly wouldn’t be driving it. No one would.

Buoyed by the praise, Emma clambered up so she was kneeling. “And,” she said, not without some triumph, “I wished that Nana Leah had a baby that I could play with. She’d like a baby, I think.”

All three adults winced.

*

With Emma’s revelations, various actions were set into motion. Charles headed straight for their security system, starting with a review of the footage of the general store where Emma had met this stranger. To everyone’s frustration, the normally impeccable shot of the general store was grainy for the full thirty minutes after Anna and Emma entered the store, where the alleged conversation had taken place. There was a vague picture of a third figure, standing by a smaller figure at the magazine rack whilst Anna was talking to Corey at the check-out, but nothing distinct.

Horrified, Anna – damningly – did not recall there being another person though and she was typically extremely alert to strangers near Emma. Rather than assume that Anna had simply not been paying attention, there had to be magic at work.

A call to Corey’s mom for his account revealed he was playing soccer that morning and she assured them that he would get in touch with the Marrok as soon as he returned.

Bran had Emma describe her blue dog to him and then he briefed Juste and Asil to search for it. Capture, not kill, was the rule of the game and if either men had any questions on why there was a blue animal running around, they didn’t verbalize it. They had, in their long lives, seen stranger.

George reported that the brand-new Land Rover was indeed brand new. Disappeared-off-a-transport-ship new. Which now made this an interesting problem because there was a record of an expensive vehicle being loaded onto a ship on the other side of the Atlantic and a record of an expensive vehicle not being loaded off the other side. International paperwork was always a problem. Returning it was going to be a problem.

Anna’s face fell when Charles put forward the notion of razing the extension. “But why?”

“Jinns are creatures of imbalance.”

“How is our extension going to imbalance anything?”

“It already has. Two of Rick’s men have claimed credit for working late – when they didn’t. They’ve been feted for something they haven’t done, which may impact their performance in the future and is just fundamentally dishonest. And Rick’s now going to be done in time to start his next job on schedule—”

Anna gurgled with laughter. “Oh, no, how dreadful.”

Her husband frowned. “We don’t know what chain of events we are disrupting.”

His daughter-in-law tried to appeal to Bran, who shook his head. He agreed with Charles. Rectifying the imbalance was generally the way he had always treated the actions of a jinn in the past. Admittedly, those ‘wishes’ tended to be on a far larger scale than the issues they were dealing with now – but the principle remained the same.  

She blew out a breath, exasperated. “If they’re liars, they’re liars. And I can only see good coming out of our contractor starting his next job on time. Maybe somewhere down the line there’s a family who desperately needs the work done before… before… grandma moves in or they have a baby— speaking of which!”

Wide golden-brown eyes turned back to Bran. Anna was thrilled to move the conversation on to a topic Bran was not thrilled to talk about. “What are we doing about that?”

“I think that’s a wait-and-see issue,” Bran replied, attempting to sound blithe about it.

Fostering, or adoption, seemed the most viable answer to Emma’s wish which Bran supposed meant he ought to be alert to the sounds of a baby’s cry or tires crunching over their driveway. He’d already checked the front door several times, looking for a infant abandoned on their doorstep, which had sometimes been the way children had appeared in Aspen Creek.

He was not looking forward to explaining this situation to Leah, whenever she deigned to return home. Of the many, many conversations they’d had in the last few years, children had been one they had both shied away from. For obvious reasons.

“Do not mention it to her,” he said, meeting both their eyes in turn. “Not a word.”

*

“It’s entirely possible he’s moved on,” Bran said to no one later that night. A glass of wine at his side, he was reviewing the security footage himself, first staring at the grainy footage of the general store and then the main roads before just giving in and slowly fast-forwarding through the rest of the footage.

Not that a jinn ‘moving on’ was a better scenario. They would still need to track them down and outside of Aspen Creek this would only become harder. At least until someone wished for something that would hit the news.

That afternoon, he’d spent his time vacillating between dealing with the Range Rover issue – arranging for the SUV to be mysterious ‘returned’ – and reading up on the role of jinn in early Arabian religion and in later Islamic culture. He did not have vast resources on the subject and had to resort to buying academic texts online in the hopes that his memories would be triggered. That was the problem with being so very old. Sometimes recollections did vary.

The more traditional tale of jinn popularized by various forms of media over the years had them granting three wishes to the ‘owner’ of the lamp and then returning from whence they came to serve someone else. In Bran’s experience things were a little less cut-and-dried than that. There was rarely a limit to the wishes – just a limit to the jinn’s patience and personality. What was more – often much was played up about specificity being the way to deal with a jinn, similar as it was with the fae. But again that was not always the case. He could not imagine Emma’s wishes had been supplied with much specificity, for instance. He doubted she knew the exact make and model of car Carrie had been craving.   

One finger tapping on the fast-forward button, Bran took another sip of his wine – a very nice, easy drinking Malbec – and watched Tag’s truck turn off into his road, just as a familiar car drove in the opposite direction: Leah’s battered Ford.

To amuse himself, he switched views and followed her. This was when he had last been away and Leah had been going about her day-to-day chores. He watched her turn off and then switched cameras again, picking her up as she made her way up the narrower track. He could just about make out her face from some angles, the slight frown of concentration, her fingers tapping on the wheel to the beat of a song. He smiled, automatically. He enjoyed seeing her this way, unobserved. He wondered where she was going. That track led up to the old mill, which had been rather left to ruin. They’d talked occasionally about rebuilding – turning it into a family home – but it had become one of those deprioritized issues. They did occasionally have problems with teenagers setting up camp there.

But Leah’s car came to a halt long before the winding track reached the derelict property. Instead, he watched her open the door, lean out and vomit.

Her expression afterwards was as surprised as his was now. She wiped a hand over the back of her mouth and climbed out of the truck. She paced to one side, clearly breathing deeply through her mouth, then bent over abruptly and threw up once again.

She stood, the same look of surprise on her face. She stared at the trees, hands on her hips. After a minute or so, she climbed back into the truck and drove on.

Frowning now, the wine glass pushed to one side, Bran leaned forward and began the process of stalking his wife through footage. Up to the ruins – yes, she was checking it – and then back down to the main road. She stopped to get gas. She stopped at the general store to pick up something – milk, he guessed. When Emma stayed, they went through pints of it. She returned to their house with no more incidents.

They did not have cameras inside the house so what Leah did indoors wasn’t visible, despite his tapping around to see the whole property from three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees, but several hours later, Anna drove up with Emma and Leah met her granddaughter at the door. Or, rather, caught her – as Emma leaped up in the air for a hug as if they had been parted for some months.

There was some conversation whilst Emma did cartwheels on the grass. Leah said something that made Anna laugh. Then Anna left.

Glancing at the date, Bran confirmed that this had been the day before he had returned home. Leah would have mentioned if she had been seriously ill.

“Probably,” he said out loud, not actually certain. Even if she had been very ill but then recovered, she might have thought it not worth mentioning. That was very much the scenario he suspected he was seeing here. She’d eaten something that disagreed with her and up it had come. He could see Leah thinking that was nothing to bother him with.

In any case, she had called him. That night, she and Charles had headed off to look for Devon’s ghost. That had been the priority. Besides, he hadn’t been away long enough this time for the kinds of catch-up calls they sometimes had. The previous occasion, when he had been searching for the rogue wolf, they had spoken each night, entertaining each other with the details of their days. He’d warned her that he’d been expecting a delivery from—

His trail of thought ended when through the mating bond came a sensation not unlike the ringing of a church bell. Where he was the bell and pulling on the rope at the other end was his mate. It was an alert. It was a cry for help. A cry for his specific help.

“God-fucking-dammit,” he cursed, running from the room.

His suspicions about the origin of their monster of the week would have to wait. Instead, he hurried upstairs, shoved his feet into a pair of shoes and found his car keys.

*

It had started to rain because of course it had. This time of year, it was to be expected, however as he wove his way up to the winter cabin, he couldn’t help but feel a light drizzle would have been a kinder way for the universe to treat him. Milky white sheets of water not only disrupted his vision but turned the increasingly smaller tracks he was traversing into rushing streams.

It was entirely possible that his mate was summoning for a reason other than the jinn. In the past she had used that technique for wildling sightings. To get him to call her. Once she’d used it to remind him to pick up her dry-cleaning.

If it was unrelated, whatever it was, he would have to be up front about Emma’s fourth, more outrageous wish and deal with that. How he would do so, he had not yet solved. It would be crucial to get her to understand that the outcome of Emma’s wish would need to be reversed. If a child landed on their doorstep tomorrow, their care would need to be handed to someone else. Preferably an authority.

They would not be raising a jinn-bequeathed child in Aspen Creek.

And if that conversation led to other, more tender matters, then so be it. He was prepared to open the discussion on children, if that was what she wanted. It would be a difficult one. With their mating bond open as it was, now, she would be able to tell that he instinctively did not want more children. For some very selfish reasons.

He finally found her truck in the rather overgrown clearing they usually used and he followed the scent of her up, through the now sodden, squelchy undergrowth. It was no more than a couple of miles and he walked at pace, not bothering to be subtle about it. She had probably heard his car anyway.

The rain gave him a break when he caught the glimmer of cabin lights and as he passed into the small clearing where raised vegetable beds had once been, it eased off until there was nothing but the droplets falling loudly from trees. The cabin itself looked… well. Uncared for. But there was a sheet of blue tarp nailed over one window of the cabin and a pile of sweepings at the base of the wooden steps that suggested Leah had been clearing the small decking.

The door opened to reveal his wife. She was wearing a large, plaid shirt that hit her just mid-thigh but no pants. Her pale skin was stark. “Been for a run?” he called out, smiling in a friendly fashion, not in a ‘I’m a paranoid bastard’ fashion.

Instead of replying, Leah grunted a noise of pain and bent forward, one hand reaching out to the railing as if she needed to hold herself up.  

“Leah?” He hurried towards the cabin. “What’s wrong?”

“Stay there!” she snapped. “I need to—”

He froze at the base of the steps as Leah backed up two paces with a twisted look on her face, her wolf flaring in her eyes. The plaid shirt clung to her body oddly, giving her lower half a strange, misshapen quality. Swollen. Her thighs were streaked with wetness.

He considered himself to be an intelligent man but though the pieces of this puzzle were staring him in the face, he could not make them connect.

“What’s happening?” he asked her.

“What does it look like, Bran?” she groaned, her long ponytail slithering over her shoulder and dangling in the air, swinging back and forth.

He did not typically appreciate being spoken to in that manner, but he was too blindsided to pick up on it. He answered factually, though outrageously, “It looks like… it looks like you’re in labor.”

“Ten points to—” She paused to grunt again – an earthly, deeply internal sound – and then continued, “—the Welshman in the corner.”

He made another move forward, resting his foot on the bottom step. Leah whined, not a human noise. “All right.” Bran held his hands out, palms facing forwards. “I just—”

He ‘just’ what? Wanted to get close to her? Help her? Put a hand on the rounded mound of her belly and feel for himself? He knew what the liquid running down her bare thighs was now. He could smell blood, the mild, sweet scent of amniotic fluid.

But she could not be in labor. It wasn’t possible.

I wished that Nana Leah had a baby.

In his wildest dreams he wouldn’t have imagined this. A baby brought by the stork would be more plausible.

“Can we go inside,” Bran managed, because the winter cabin, basic as it was, was significantly more appealing right now that the outdoors. A wind had got up, which suggested more rain was the on the way, and she smelled scared and wounded. That scent would bring predators.

She staggered backwards. “Stay there,” she said, making her slow and careful way back into the cabin, leaning against the wall, then the door. “Where I can see you.”

Though it tore at him to do so, he waited until she was safely inside. He approached cautiously and stood in the open doorway, so she had a clear view of him.

The cabin was much as he remembered. It was stocked up for emergencies – refreshed every spring once the excess of snow had disappeared. There was a good stockpile of dry wood by the wood-burner. A camping bed set up, with pillows and blankets zipped up in a waterproof case. A stack of towels treated similarly. A teakettle. A basin. Several water coolers. Canned food. Bars of soap.

Leah’s toolbox and portable speaker were an incongruous addition to this. There were some planks of wood and she’d put up the saw bench.

He wiped a hand over his mouth and chin. Some things were beginning to make sense. “You knew.”

“Knew what? That I was to experience the fastest pregnancy known to womankind?” Wincing, Leah started to pace. Her head kept turning, checking on him. Her eyes flashed between a shadowed, human blue and the icy blue of her wolf. “Don’t be ridiculous, Bran. I just thought I was exceptionally bloated.”

“Then why are you here?” Hiding from me, his brain supplied.

“Because—" Before she could reply with something like a hotly spat denial – and a lie – he saw the next contraction hit her, forestalling her capability of speech. Her body seemed to ripple and she leaned on the wall for support, her mouth open briefly before she clenched down, breathing through her teeth.

The wind blew in a crispy, water splotched leaf and Bran decided she would have to get used to his presence because he wasn’t going to leave any time soon. He stepped inside and closed the door. “How frequent are your contractions?”

“I don’t know.” She laughed – hysterically. “And before you ask, I don’t know how frequent they’re supposed to be, either.”

For various reasons – long buried memories, a better understanding of human physiology instilled in him from attending more recent childbirths – Bran did. He thought Leah’s were close enough together to mean that moving her to, say, a nice sterile environment would be impossible.

“Lie on the bed.”

“No,” she panted, electric-blue eyes bulging. “I can’t. She’s—” Leah tapped her chest, quick stabs. “She’s trying to get control. It’s… driving her wild that you’re here. I can’t… I can’t lie down before you.”

Bran understood – and relief warred with the strong sense that he should have recognized this. This was not a Leah problem. This was a problem with her wolf. Her instincts. And it was no wonder. At her most vulnerable as she was, about to – however unlikely – bring new life into the world, her wolf would be absolutely on edge. Any dominant would be an issue, even her mate.

“I should call Anna.”

“No!” Leah exclaimed, impassioned. And that was Leah speaking. “I want you. Just… move slowly.”

He nodded. “Understood.”   

Doing just that, he slowly took off his wet jacket, tossed it over the spindly chair currently housing her jeans. He began to roll up his sleeves, the motion of tucking and turning muscle memory. “Do you think you can sit on the end of the bed so I can take a look at you?”

Leah growled. “I don’t know. Give me a moment.”

He turned to lay the fire. Fire. Hot water. Sterilization. He quickly stacked wood and lit the fire.

“I’ve done this before,” she muttered, almost to herself. Then to him, “But you don’t know— we don’t know what’s in there. It might not be human.”

“It’s human,” he said calmly, filling the teakettle.

“No. I mean— I mean it could be some kind of parasite. It could be—” Leah’s wild eyes roved the room, seeking more horrifying possibilities and found none. Even in the state she was, her practical brain failed to provide.

“It’s human, Leah. I can hear its heartbeat,” he said gently, setting the filled teakettle on the top of the woodburning stove. “And so can you.”

She whimpered. “Please don’t kill her.”

Though, again, this was her wolf speaking, this was so close to his earlier thinking on the repercussions of the jinn’s actions that for a moment Bran wondered if she had read his mind. But his brain had not got that far, not yet. It could not. He shook his whirling head. “I’m not going to do that.”

Leah said nothing. Just buried her next groan of pain into her elbow and refused to look his way.

He made his way over to her. She was too caught up in a prolonged contraction, leaning against the wall, to run from him. When it eased and she did get the look of a bolter, he took hold of her hand and pulled it, resisting, to his mouth to kiss.

“Leah Fenwood Cornick, I’ll not harm your baby – parasite or otherwise,” he couldn’t help but add. “Now will you sit on this bed so I can take a look between your legs please.”

*

It was not a quick process. Though Leah’s contractions were close together, from what Bran could see and what Google told him, she was not dilated enough to begin pushing. She didn’t want to sit, or lie down, so they paced the cabin arm in arm, in silence.

Mostly.

“Why on earth would she wish that,” Leah muttered through gritted teeth. A bead of sweat was balanced on her cupid’s bow and it dropped as if in punctuation.

Bran did not have a response to that. Emma was around adults far more than she was children her own age. She was exposed to more adult conversations. It did not strike Bran as implausible that she had heard Leah say something, some expression of regret or longing that she had never shared with him and interpreted it correctly.

Or perhaps she just wanted a friend to play with and thought that Leah was the answer.

They paced some more. Leah was getting used to the pain, her werewolf body adapting to physical discomfort, and she only stilled, a rictus grimace on her face when she was hit by a contraction. Then they resumed walking.

“A Jinn? How did a Jinn get here?”

“The package that was delivered whilst I was away. The time before last.”

“There wasn’t a gods-damned lamp in it.”

“It, ah, doesn’t have to be a lamp.” Now was not the time for a magical lesson. Leah rarely tolerated them from him anyway. “And everything in that package was sent from Idra.”

Leah paused because, even in extremis, her ability to launch herself into unfounded jealousy was unparalleled. The wolf’s light that had dimmed returned in full force. “You did not tell me that.”

He cleared his throat. “I have not seen her in more than three hundred years.”

Her eyes narrowed to glinting, suspicious slivers. “You write, though.”

“Email. Very occasionally.” He didn’t know why this detail was important. Email, however, seemed far less personal to him than letters. There was no scent to email. No trace of perfume or body odor. There was nothing romantic about email.

Leah, naturally, did not see it that way. “I see,” she said through her teeth. She began walking again and this time her arm pulled against his, as if she wanted to get away. He held on tighter. “How convenient.”

“If we could focus on the matter at hand, please.”  

“Well, I followed all the usual precautions,” she said snippily. “So if your Arabian princess sent you a genie, I didn’t let it free.”

“My—” He bit it back, bit it all back. Truly, she could rile him like no other and now was not the time.

The more Bran thought about it, the more a possible scenario formed. “Anna is still taking Emma into the secure room, isn’t she.” It was not a question.

Leah wrestled with a reply for two more turns of the cabin, one hand on her back. “I think so.”

The fact that Emma’s ‘Maker’ qualities had not manifested yet had become something of a concern for Anna, who was young and had not lived long enough to view the passing of time with the patience of the rest of her werewolf family.

Most witch powers manifested when the child was young, that was true, but the fae were more of a mystery. Anecdotally, Bran knew the Dark Smith’s half-blood offspring hadn’t demonstrated anything until he was a teenager.

But Emma didn’t even smell like fae. Emma smelled human.

Sam and Ariana had never spoken of Emma as their daughter. There was no reference, by word or even a flickering expression, to her heritage. At Anna’s urging Charles had tried, once, to ask Sam more questions about Maker capabilities but Sam had simply walked away, his face a blank slate.

Bran felt they simply needed to wait. And enjoy the years when Emma was expectation-free. But Anna, ever-curious Anna, she had to know. She wanted Emma to learn about her capabilities whilst she was still learning about the world. She wanted her to grow into them as a child, not be shocked by them as an adult when she thought she knew her place in the world. 

It wasn’t utterly unreasonable, Bran supposed. Anna read a great deal of parenting books and as much as Leah might sniff at that, he had a suspicion that if there had been books to read on raising children, he would have done the same when he had been raising his own. God only knew he needed the help.

To encourage her gifts, Anna had signed Emma up for various classes – arts, predominantly, and the kind of woodworking appropriate for a ten-year-old. She hoped that the ‘making’ capabilities Emma had might translate more literally. When Emma returned home with nothing more than misshaped objet de art, Anna had upped the ante. She had taken to regularly escorting Emma through the secure room of their house to see if any of the fae objects spoke to her.

Initially, this had been something of a secret – not Anna’s access to the secure room, which was a pin-code entry and every time she opened the door Bran and Charles would get an email – but Emma accompanying her. She had always made sure Bran was out of the house.

When Bran had found out, there had been a scene. ‘Unwise’ was one of the politer words he had used in the following argument. He had forbidden anyone under the age of sixteen to access the secure room and he had believed Anna had stopped doing it.

“Don’t growl like that,” Leah complained on a groan, “you’re as curious as the rest of us.”

“Did she go in after the delivery?” He hadn’t been there. He’d had only the briefest look at what had been delivered, too. It had mostly looked like junk.

“Oh, I don’t know, Bran. But it seems deeply unlikely that Anna would have let her touch anything.”

“It is not beyond the realm of possibility,” he said through his teeth, because all elbows and knees as she was, his granddaughter was a sneaky slip of a thing, “that she did, however.”

“No. It is not— ah, fffffffffuuuuuck.” With this unlikely curse, Leah stopped. Her hand clenched so hard on his arm he heard his bones squeak, her other hand shoved hard against the wall. The cabin seemed to shake.

This contraction went on longer and was clearly more excruciating. When it was done, white faced, Leah looked at him with alarmed eyes. “She’s coming now.”

*

She came fast, after that.

Leah refused to lie down, instead half leaned, half squatted against the wall. Bran formed a mass of blankets and towels underneath her and knelt between her legs. The scent of Purell hurriedly grabbed from her car almost overwhelmed that of various bodily fluids.

The baby slithered out as Leah made a succession of unholy noises, her hands grabbing his head. After the fact, Bran would remember it as one of the easiest births he had ever attended. At the time, each second seemed to last an hour and when the baby was there, right there, panic had him flailing for a towel, almost dropping her, slippery as she was. And she was a she. Ten fingers. Ten toes.

Leah slid down the wall, hands reaching out, fingers flexing in demand. Her face was wet – with tears or sweat, he couldn’t tell.

“I have to cut the cord,” Bran said faintly. The baby was crying. Distantly, he knew that was good. Otherwise, it felt like there was blood everywhere. On his hands, the towel, the blanket. The wriggling line of tubular flesh that connected the baby to his mate.

He was vaguely aware his heart was pounding too fast, too hard. It was pushing up his throat.

“My pocket-knife is on the table and there’s a clip, on the bag of chips,” Leah said, easing the bundle of mewling life from him. She had undone her shirt. She held the baby against her heaving chest.

Bran stood and stumbled over to the table. More Purell. His hands were shaking. He couldn’t get the penknife to open. His vision greyed for a moment and he leaned against the table. “She’s fine,” he said to himself.

Leah misinterpreted him. “She is fine.” Her voice was rough with emotion. “Everything is fine.”

He brought the cloth and the penknife over, the little clip that he removed from giant bag of Doritos and then squirted with more Purell. Carefully, he wiped her hands with the towel. Her legs. Blood smeared over her beautiful skin. He had been here before, he thought, then he tried not to because it was a thought that made him want to sink to the ground.

“You have to put the clip close to her navel,” Leah reminded him, voice gentle and quiet, “before you cut the cord.” She parted the blanket and showed him.

Bran stared at the curved belly of the baby, inflating and deflating with air. The arms and legs, so strangely attached to the little torso. Unreal. He managed the clip. The baby’s cries didn’t seem to grow exponentially in volume when he passed the blade through the cord. There was more blood, though. The wash-cloth wasn’t doing much. He fetched another.

“I need to push out the afterbirth,” Leah announced practically.

Oh God, it wasn’t over.

“Can you hold her?”

“Not concerned I’m going to kill her now?” His voice sounded very far away – but acidic. He winced, as his mate could not be held to blame for the instinctive reaction of her wolf. She had wanted him present, after all. Leah had called him.

His mate decided to take the higher road or perhaps she simply had other things on her mind. “Come, Bran. Hold the baby.”

He did as she asked but couldn’t bring himself to look down. He could feel her. Hear her. She weighed nothing. She cried. But nothing about this moment was real. There could not be a baby in his arms.

Leah was very real, however. Alive. Leah braced on the floor, concentration etched in her features. Her face reddened as she pushed and a clotted mass slithered between her legs. She grunted when it was done and her head hit the wall. Dust drifted down from the rafters, disappearing into her stained clothes, the unsalvageable towels, the blankets.

That triggered something in him. He looked around, seeing the cabin with fresh eyes. His wife had just given birth in a cabin that had probably last been cleaned in the 90s. It was a cabin for emergencies. A hole to shelter in. It was barely sealed against the elements. The window she had ostensibly come out to fix was taped over, the tarp pulsing in the breeze.

He looked down fleetingly at the defenseless baby in his arms, her scrunched, furious little ham-face. He looked away just as quickly. Later. “We’re leaving.”

*

Bran would say the journey home added perhaps a thousand years to how old he already felt. Though Leah didn’t comment at the speed he drove – glacial, slower than walking – he could feel her thinking it. But his foot would not press any harder on the accelerator and his eyes scanned the road and the roadsides as if they were under attack.

When he finally stopped outside their house, his adrenaline had spiked so high he felt almost poisoned.

In direct opposition to this was Leah, who had been placidly breastfeeding for most of the journey. The baby was making tiny suctioning noises. Leah was looking out of the window, her profile smooth, devoid of any concerns. Almost… glowing.

He gazed at her, stupefied by the enormity of what had just happened. He had been utterly unprepared and he was a man who prepared for everything. “I had forgotten how terrifying it was.”

Leah’s head turned. “Childbirth?”

“Yes.” He swallowed, his throat dry, and then looked around the car interior. Somewhere, there was a water bottle. He found it, tucked in the door. He uncapped it and passed it to her. When she didn’t finish it and offered him the remainder, he shook his head. “You have it.”

She drank the last of the water, clearly needing it. “Were you at all your children’s births?”

It was such an unexpected question that Bran answered without thinking. “Yes. Efa insisted upon it.” And obviously he had been there at Blue Jay Woman’s death. His mind shied away from this again, quickly, automatically, not even scraping across the memory.

There was a small pause. “You’ve never told me her name before. Your… Sam’s mother.”

“I don’t think I’ve said it out loud for— for a very long time. I’d…” Loathe was he was to say it, to admit it, he did, “I’d forgotten. In a way.” This was not what he had wanted to say. He had to parcel that up, his long-lost, beloved wife, and put her aside because his living beloved wife was the subject of his thoughts now. “Leah, that was—” He faltered and said the honest truth, “I am at a loss.”

“I’m not sure I could have done it if I didn’t remember. It’s funny. You forget, almost immediately, the cost of labor.” She looked down at the sliver of face visible. “Until you do it again. But it hurt just as badly as I remembered. Worse than having my leg torn off.” She grinned and turned back to him, as if he might possibly find this as entertaining as she apparently did.

He could only stare at her. Her blood was under his fingernails. He would probably smell it for days.

“Too soon,” Leah agreed, nodding, so caught up in her happiness. “My apologies.”

*

Obviously ‘rebalancing’ the equation of the baby was out of the question. A human life wasn’t returnable. Even if it was – Bran, after all, regularly killed humans when he needed to – it would be the end of them and Bran had done many things in his life for the rightness of it, regardless of how they affected others, but—

It would be the end of them.

He could not accept that. He could not lose her.

He would have to accept Leah’s baby, however she had come into the world. He would have to turn off that part of his brain that considered consequences. He had done that before, for her, in fact. Leah was a consequence in her own right. It was almost fitting that her child would be the same.

In his office, the door open to the sound of the baby’s mewling cries upstairs, Bran closed his eyes. His wolf was tearing at him and he was struggling more than usual to control him. The scene in the cabin had been too familiar. The wolf was not rational about Leah, about the past that they both tried to never think about.

Bran tried instead to focus on the other, more challenging issue he was now facing.

There had been a time in his life where children had been expected. You married, you had children. Efa had born many babes, not all had survived their first, second or third years, though that changed by the time Sam had grown to seven or eight.

There had been other children, after Efa. After he was Changed. There was no such thing as a chaste werewolf. He had been careful, with the women he had been with – both in choosing the kind of woman and in his relations with them – but there was little in the way of birth control. Accidents happened.  

He was not proud of that.

With Charles’s mother, he had thought he’d need not worry about the consequences of their union. He had been wrong there, underestimating Blue Jay Woman’s desire to bear a child. His growing anger at Leah for hiding her situation from him – given she had no doubt had her suspicions, however unlikely they were – had a similar flavor but paled in comparison to how angry he had been with Blue Jay Woman, who had given him no choice in the matter of whether he was to be a father again.

With Charles grown into the man he was, it was hard to remember just how much Bran had not wanted a child. Before and after Blue Jay Woman’s death.

He was not proud of that, either. He often wondered if he had spent Blue Jay Woman’s pregnancy filled with hope and the joy of the life they had made together, if the wolf might not have responded the way he had done after.

But this situation was different. He had to remember that. It would do him no good to dwell.

Leah’s tread as she approached him was heavier than it usually was. She stood in his doorway, the baby now strapped in some form of wrap that secured her to Leah’s front. She closed the door to his office and cautiously took a seat.  

“Perhaps,” she said blandly, one hand curved around the baby, “you could email Idra.”

Bran turned his screen around to show Leah he had done just that. His wife’s avaricious gaze drifted down the email thread. It was innocuous – and functional. He gave her a small smile. “I repeat my previous invitations for you to review my correspondence any time you please.”

“I trust you,” said his wife even as her eyes moved quickly across the page. She frowned. “I itemized everything. Is there anything missing?”

“I’ve just checked again. I cannot see the tin both of you name,” he admitted, turning the screen back around.

Idra’s list was written in the body of an email with her notes next to each item. Someone had scratched the Hamsa on the top of the tin which Idra had said was not original and was also quite ambiguous. She had gone on to write that the tin had belonged to her father – which if Bran had his ages right, would put its origins in the late 1600s. It had gone missing shortly after his death but made its way back to me in the 1970s.

Bran recalled reading this list when she had originally sent it, proposing that he might ‘enjoy’ some of these items that had not sold at auction. At the time, nothing about this sounded sinister. He himself had items he had once owned ‘make their way back’ to him – through family or friends, occasionally through auctions he followed. He’d bought and sold the same painting four times, in fact. On two different continents.

Idra’s father had been a wealthy man, known for his good fortune. He had been a collector of magical artefacts, though in the time Bran had known the man ‘collector’ was a polite word for ‘hoarder’. Tamas claimed nothing more than a smidgeon of fae blood that made him long-lived and gave him no other magical talent – unlike his wife and daughter, who had both been witches. Like many humans with such gifts, Idra had lost what magic she had when she became a werewolf. And Bran had tasted her so he knew it was true.

Bran’s email pinged. At the top of his inbox was Idra’s response to his enquiry about the possibility that she had sent a jinn across the world to him.

Not on purpose, she had written, followed by a frowning face.

*

It was reasonably easy to keep the children away. All Bran had to say to Charles – who wanted the whole pack to join in the search for Emma’s lost blue dog before it bred with the native wildlife – was the truth. That he and Leah wanted to have an early night alone. Together. He might have been a little too heavy-handed because Charles made a revolted noised and hung up.

Since Bran didn’t anticipate that kind of an early night with his wife, he considered this to be an unnecessarily exaggerated reaction.

Charles’s house not having the storage space necessary, all of Emma’s baby things had been kept in their loft. Bran had brought most of it down in a strange, automated fugue whilst Leah scavenged from their own storerooms. She was always prepared for a town-wide siege, so there were diapers, bottles, formula – all the detritus of baby needs.

The co-sleeping cot had been pushed to Leah’s side of the bed, along with a trolley from the medical room which Leah had stocked up with diapers and rash cream and wipes.

They had on occasion had Emma to stay when she had been very young but this had a decidedly different feel to it.  

In fact, having the baby in the room with them felt a little as if he had invited something deadly into their private space. He watched her, out of the corner of his eye, whilst Leah abluted. Then he took his turn. When he returned, Leah was in bed on her phone. The baby, nursed earlier, was asleep.

Not for long, he imagined.

He got into bed. Lay down. Stared at the ceiling.

Leah tapped something on her phone and then put it aside. “I can feel your brain racing.”

Sometime between her shower and his, Leah had re-opened the mating bond. She could feel a whole lot more than his mind racing.

“We can talk about it later,” he said, to stymie any difficult conversations.

“Yes, later,” she said, softly.

*

Leah’s baby woke three times in the night and was changed and nursed in succession. He woke when Leah did and lay wakeful, getting up to take the dirty diapers outside the bedroom and refill Leah’s water bottle.

“Thank you,” she whispered, when he brought this article to her. Her wide eyes met his. “You could sleep in your room if you wanted.”

“I do not want,” he replied, watching the alien scene of a tiny mouth pressed to his wife’s breast with a sense of unease. He jolted himself out of it and returned to his side of the bed. He checked his cell phone. “They found the dog.”

“I suppose that’s something. Will you… put it down?”

Bran didn’t know and said so. He did not say that this was a change from his earlier thinking. He did not think it needed saying.

He watched her burp the baby and he had certainly see her do this with Emma, back when she was small, but he could not recall the pang of knowing Leah had done this before, with her own children.

And now there was this child. Regardless of whether Leah wanted more children or not, it was another choice that had been taken from her by a situation he had, however accidentally, created.

He rubbed the palms of his hands over his eyes.

Leah laid the baby down carefully and shuffled down herself, one hand in the crib, her head turned away from him. Fairly soon, her breathing turned deep and even as she slipped easily back into sleep.

Bran did not.

Earlier that day, Bran had been sure of many things. That they would return the car. Knock down the extension. That the blue dog would be put down.

That a child would not be part of their immediate future. 

He was not certain of many of those things now and that did not sit well with him.

In her sleep, Leah rolled towards him. They were not cuddlers, naturally. Werewolves ran too hot for that but very occasionally they would wake pressed against each other. More often than not, he’d find her ankle wrapped around his or vice versa, seeking out the physical comfort of each other in sleep. And he did find Leah comforting. Always had.

She snuffled against his bicep now, her breath hot. She no longer smelled solidly and reassuringly of herself, and him, but of alien scents. Of breastmilk. Of the medicinal rash cream. The sticky tape on the diapers and the bodily fluids of another human being.

He was not sure he liked it.

*

After watching Leah consume her body weight in breakfast and an entire pot of tea, Bran voiced the decision he had made at 4am after he’d got up to scrub under his fingernails some more. “We will tell everyone that we have adopted.”

She nodded and used the last square of waffle to scrape up the blob of maple syrup and butter. “As opposed to miraculous werewolf pregnancy.”

That was the easy part out of the way. He pushed his plate to one side. “I think it would be best if you, and the baby, went away for a couple of weeks. It would be an easier narrative if you returned when she is slightly more substantial.”  

She stopped chewing momentarily, then picked up her napkin to dab at her glossy lips. “You can adopt newborns.”

“Yes, but whilst we are searching for a jinn and dealing with the potential repercussions of said jinn, I do not want anyone to make the connection between it and your child.”

“My child,” Leah repeated, faintly.

It was an unfortunate slip of the tongue but Bran pushed through, ignoring the way his wife’s head had tilted slightly downwards, just as her wolf would when she spotted prey in the distance. “You understand I cannot have a mad rush of werewolves seeking out jinns as a fertility solution, not if we actually have one roaming around the country. Nor do I want you to be the object of more curiosity than you already are.”

“I suppose not.”

She was clearly reluctant so he forced the issue. “You agree?”

Leah’s wolf rose into her narrowed eyes briefly, then she snuffed her out. Coolly, she asked, “Do I have a choice?”

“Of course you do, Leah,” he snapped, because underneath it all he was angry with the situation and would likely remain angry until he had come to terms with breaking a magical code of his own construction. Because his autonomy had been taken from him, once again. It would be better for their marriage, he had decided, if Leah was not in the vicinity whilst he forced himself to overcome this. “If you have an alternative, I am all ears.”

Leah did not shy away from him. Not physically, at least. But he felt her do so mentally and he immediately regretted losing his temper. “I’m sorry,” he said, lowering his voice to a more courteous tone.

Leah barely nodded. She did not meet his eyes. “Very well. I suppose— a hotel? In Helena or something? Close enough so that you can visit?”

“Yes. I was also thinking, and this is not a reflection of your capabilities, that perhaps my brother could be prevailed upon to be your escort.”

When he’d considered this as an option he’d thought there was a possibility she would reject the idea. She was a woman who took great pride in her ability to deal with anything that came her way and only yesterday she had rejected him, at her wolf’s behest, admittedly, but it still stung.  

But Leah’s shoulders seemed to relax infinitesimally. “Yes. That’s— that sounds like a good thought.”

*

Reaching his brother was not difficult. Communicating with him over the phone without revealing anything was more of a challenge.

“Trust me,” Bran said after some tedious round-a-bout circling where Sherwood tried to trick him into giving him more details, “when I tell you that you will more than agree as soon as you see Leah.”

Sherwood had a soft spot for Bran’s wife. He knew it. He had never plumbed the depths of that soft spot because he was not a masochist. Their shared past was left to the past, now, where it would remain.

Leah left not long after, packing the car in the garage out of the sight of prying eyes. She took his truck, which had tinted windows and a higher safety rating and as he watched her tail-lights disappear, the mantra of for the best repeating in his mind, he could not help but notice that the sense of unease had not disappeared.

And she had not kissed him goodbye.

Rubbing his chest, he returned to the house.

Part of the narrative he was now building involved convincing Anna and Charles – everyone, but specifically them – that the baby was a planned fixture that he and Leah had yet to share with them. He did not think this would be too difficult to do. If there was enough time between the jinn’s arrival and the ‘adoption’, Charles and Anna might not question it. And if they did, Bran would convince them that the adoption process had been underway beforehand. Secretly.

But first he needed to clear the house of any evidence of their surprise guest. He removed the trash, aired the rooms. He polished the floors and cleaned the kitchen. Leah had taken most of the baby things with her already. The rest he migrated to the room that was officially Emma’s which… was something he would have to think about later. This was Emma’s second home; he didn’t want to expel her from it.

Then he put a call into their preferred supplier of documentation, the same one who had provided Emma’s papers. They were expensive but excellent and asked no questions.

Given current legislation in the US forbid werewolves adopting, the baby would have to be foreign-born which was helpful in terms of creating a more complicated paper trail.

“Name?” the highly distorted voice asked.

“Name?” Bran repeated blankly.

“For the adoption certificate.”

“Ah. Oh. She doesn’t have one. Yet.”

“I’ll need a name.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

Bran’s hand rested on the handle of the phone for a moment longer. Of course she would have a name. Couldn’t go around calling her the baby for the whole of her life.

However long that was.

He swallowed down a suddenly very dry throat and reached for the last of his quite cold cup of tea, drinking the dregs regardless. Then he put a call into Leah, well aware that demanding she come up with a name now was probably going to cause some strife, but she didn’t pick up. He could feel her, through the bond, so he wasn’t unduly concerned. He left her a message.

No sooner had he hung up than the phone rang. He picked it up immediately, hoping it was her.

“I don’t suppose you can finally spare a few moments to come and look at this dog?” came the testy voice of Asil.

*

It was not, thankfully, a very lurid blue. In some lights it might even be considered grey. He recalled he had mistaken it – for it was surely the same creature – for a fox. It was not too far off.

The ears were… rather too large, though.

Asil had tied it up in the small shed in his back yard and apparently provided it with a dog bed, a bowl of water and, from the smells of things, the remains of his dinner. The smell was the real reason the dog was in the shed, however. He stank. Someone else had a run-in with a skunk, apparently.

“I can wring its neck,” Asil said cheerily. He had a handkerchief in his hand, dabbed with menthol oil, which he wafted delicately before his nose.

The dog whined as if it understood.

“It’s a ‘he’, by the way,” Asil added.

Trying not to wrinkle his nose, Charles crouched down to meet the creature’s eyes and, just as any other of their domesticated brethren, he soon got Charles’s measure and lowered himself to the ground subserviently. His rather scrawny tail wagged tentatively, though. “I sense nothing Other about it. It’s just a dog.”

The three men continued to look at the creature. The dog seemed to have a marked affection for Asil for, though he spared all of them glances through thick eyelashes, his amber-brown eyes lingered longest on the Moor. He shuffled forward as far as the chain would allow and sniffed Asil’s boots. His tail thumped harder against the concrete.

“What if we had him neutered,” Charles suggested. He allowed the dog to sniff his fingers. “It seems, I don’t know, rather cruel to kill him for something that was not his fault.

Bran rolled his eyes. “You are turning into a soft touch, my boy.”

“If you meant that for an insult, Da, you fall far of the mark,” was Charles’s terse response. Despite his tone, his long fingers tickled under the dog’s chin gently.

Sighing inside, Bran rested his own fingers on his son’s shoulder by way of silent apology. If he could escape this day without emotionally wounding more of his family, he would be grateful.

Asil, who allowed this bi-play to pass without comment, said consideringly, “You know, the griffin was by all accounts a creature created by a jinn.”

“They are extinct.”

“And also remain harmlessly in myth.”

“They were creatures of aggression,” Bran corrected. ‘Harmless’ they were not.

“Not according to Christian symbolism. Or if you’re referring to Herodotus’s account, wouldn’t you be angry if someone stole from you?”

Bran sensed this was a topic that, should it continue, would have them both reaching for mythological texts. Neither of them was alive when the last griffin roamed the earth.

“In any case, he’s been out in the wild for several days,” Charles said, rising to his feet. “We might be lucky – it’s not mating season. Perhaps we might escape any unexpected blue pups.”

Bran sighed. “Get him spayed, then.”

Charles appeared surprised. “Really?”

“Really. But he can’t be let loose. So you’ll need to make sure this yard is fenced in.”

Asil’s eyebrows rose. “I?”

“Yes. Congratulations.” Bran slapped Asil on the back. He was done with this and, actually, this was a nice solution for when Ruby was on the road, as she often was. Sometimes Asil had a tendency to pine and inflict that mood on himself. “You have a pet.”

*

Bran called Leah again and she did not answer, which meant she was probably ignoring him. He did not like to be ignored – and he needed to know she had reached the hotel safely, regardless of how irritated she was with him – so he called the hotel reception and asked for her.

“I’m sorry, sir, we have no guest by that name registered.”

With a growing sense of frustration, he tried a couple of other likely aliases before hanging up on the harassed employee and resorting to the ignoble option of calling his brother to ask where his wife was.

The phone rang and rang. And rang. And Bran listened, tugging on his hair. Nothing was wrong with Leah. He knew that.

But still.

He gave up on Sherwood and called her cell phone again. It went through to voicemail. “It’s me, again. I tried the Marriot’s reception and you don’t appear to be there. Where are you? Please call me.” He hesitated before he hung up. He was not one for lingering over a voice message. “I love you,” he said in the end, and quickly pressed the end button.

He tapped his fingers on the desk and assessed their mating bond once more. Open, its limit was a considerable distance of several hundred miles, so he could still feel her clearly. From the shape of it, he knew she was on two legs. Which was to be expected, of course, because she could hardly take care of a newborn as a wolf.

His eye twitched and he pressed two fingers against it.

His cell phone rang. It was a number he didn’t recognize. “Cornick,” he barked.

A battery of noise assaulted him. Voices. Cutlery clinking. A television showing a sports game. And then Sherwood’s quiet voice, “Her cell phone was ringing but she has gone to the restroom to nurse. But be reassured they are with me, and they are safe.”

In the space of a nanosecond, Sherwood’s choice of words triggered in Bran the kind of visceral terror that had been pleasantly absent from his life for just shy of a decade. It rose as if from nowhere, his wolf rising high with it, and then sank back down to manageable levels. “Thank you, brother,” he said, slightly breathless. Acid burned the back of his throat. “Ah. Is this your new number?”

“It is one of many. The hotel was unsuitable. We are researching alternatives,” Sherwood continued.

“How so unsuitable?”

“The vampire living there, for one. That is no place for my niece.” Sherwood placed great emphasis on the word.  

Bran pressed his lips together. “There’s a vampire living in the Marriott in Helena.”

“Apparently a recent arrangement. I did not feel this was the right moment to discuss the situation with him.”

Bran re-found his twitching eye with his fingers. A vampire. In his territory. Just what was needed. “I shall look into that.” Or, rather, Asil would.

“And I will find somewhere appropriate for us to stay and send on the details when I do.” Sherwood sipped something – probably an oversweet cup of coffee. “However, she came into the world, Bran, she is miraculous. You are blessed.”

“Yes,” was really all Bran could say to that. “Please ask my wife to call me when she can.”

“I will.”

They hung up. Bran very carefully placed his cell phone on his desk. Then he stood, picked up one of the wooden chairs that were placed against the wall for when he had more than two guests in his office, and destroyed it, piece by piece.

*

An exquisitely shamefaced Anna and a mulish Emma arrived the following morning. Bran, who had not slept a single iota for various reasons, was in no frame of mind to be anything but blunt. “Well?” he demanded sharply.

From her pocket, Emma pulled out the lid of a rusty tin. She slid it onto the hall table and then took a large step back to huddle by her mother’s side. “Sorry, Grandda.”

He looked at the innocuous piece of junk. The etched hand on the lid could barely be distinguished. “Where’s the rest of it?”

Emma shrugged. “Lost it.”

He was very, very close to losing his temper so he took a deep breath in through his nose and out through his mouth. “We will need to try very hard to find it, Emma.” He glanced at Anna. “Very hard.”

Anna nodded, once.

“Did your mother take you into the secure room, Emma?” He had gone through the log so this was more of a question of honesty than it was need-to-know. Anna’s code had been used once in the last few weeks and it was after Leah had put the delivery in the secure room and before he had checked it.

Emma’s brown eyes dropped to the floor sorrowfully. “No, Grandda. I snuck in by myself.”

“She memorized my code,” Anna explained frostily – though the frosty look might have been because Bran had just accused her of taking Emma into the secure room despite his instructions not to.

“That’s— quite a lot of numbers to remember.” He was reluctantly impressed.

“Oh, it was easy,” Emma said, eagerly – if accidentally – dispelling any thoughts Bran had about her potential numeric genius. “It was my birthday, Daddy’s birthday and Mommy’s birthday all together!”

Bran gave Anna a look that could have melted ice.

“I reversed the order,” Anna muttered, clearing her throat. She touched Emma’s shoulder. “What do you say, Emma?”

“I’m sorry. I won’t do it again, Grandda.”

“No, you certainly will not. It is extremely dangerous in there.” He almost shuddered to think of the harm she could have come to, alone. To her mother, he said, “And I will be assigning the codes from now onwards.”

Anna rolled her eyes in such a way that halfway through she decided now was not the time and adjusted this to a stern look, which she gave to Emma. “Emma will be going without screen time this week as a consequence of her actions.” Emma’s shoulders hunched unhappily. “Can you let Leah know? That includes car rides – so she can’t stream whilst she’s on her way to swimming.”

“I’ll tell her. But she’s unlikely to be back this week, so I’ll take Emma to swimming.”  

“Oh? Where is she?”

“She is with Sherwood. Some business in Missoula.”

Anna was well used to some elements of Bran’s work not being shareable, so she knew when he wasn’t going to elaborate. She nodded instead. “All right. I’ll see you later.” She hustled a significantly less contrite-looking Emma towards the door. “By the way, Charles and I have agreed to put a pause on the building works for two weeks. We figure that way we might adjust any ‘balance’.” Anna used her fingers to make the necessary emphasis. “Good enough?”

Bran smiled grimly and his mental seesaw of magical balance tipped still further into debt. “Very good.”

*

Leah finally called him an hour later. “We have found somewhere more suitable, though I imagine Sherwood has already informed you,” she began without preamble.

“Yes.” He was lying on the floor of his office. The ceiling offered little in the way of inspiration so he said dully, “Looks nice.”

“Mmm,” said Leah tightly. “You said you needed a name for her paperwork.”

He cleared his throat. “Yes. What— did you have anything in mind?”

“I suppose I have a few thoughts. What about you?”

He sighed heavily. “I don’t have any thoughts, no.”

Silence was the only response he had to this statement. Then a crisp, “Perhaps we should name her after Idra.”

“Leah.”

“No, you’re right. Naming her after one of your ex-lovers is crass.”

Bran’s teeth itched. Though he had naturally never explicitly said it had been the case, he and Idra had been lovers. In the very basic sense. A very, very long time ago.

With difficulty, he managed a coherent response that was on topic: “Appreciating, of course, that this is something people normally have some months to decide upon, we will need a name fairly quickly for the certificate.”

“We will, will we? There is a ‘we’ now?”

The phone in his palm creaked as he clenched his hand. “I am aware we need to discuss this properly, Leah, but picking a fight over the phone whilst my brother is listening is not that time.”

There was a very strange noise at the other end of the line. A sort of high-pitched, scraping noise. Then there was the sound of the cell phone hurriedly exchanging hands and his brother’s voice. Then the slam of a door.

Bran sat up, heart racing. “What happened?”

“Leah experienced an uncontrolled partial change and has gone to lie down.”

“She what?”

“She’s of an age to be developing a new skill, so it is to be expected,” Sherwood said briskly, as if Bran was not the font of all werewolf knowledge and knew his mate the best. “It is clear to me that you should be here and not I, brother, for you have much to discuss with your mate.”

This did not need saying. The phone beeped and Bran glanced at the screen. “Charles has a lead. I have to go.”

*

Gratifyingly for the future of their relationship, Charles was silent as they drove west. His son could be very restful which was a feature he had inherited from neither of his parents and was uniquely his own.

Bran let his mind drift, looking out of the window at the landscape of his home for more than two centuries. Charles overtook a furniture removals van. Then another. Idly, Bran wondered whether they were moving to or from the area. Good place to raise children, he thought, as he had never thought before.

They drove through Eureka and Charles glanced down at his dash. “Might stop for gas,” he said.

Bran nodded. “Good idea.”

He watched his son fill up in the rear-view mirror. Like many werewolves, Charles was ostensibly quite young looking but because of his physique could pass for late twenties, unlike Bran, who would forever remain boy-ish in comparison.

He barely remembered Charles as a boy. He didn’t remember him at all as a baby – he had stayed well clear, in those precious early years. In truth – outside of Charles’s maternal family – Sam had been more of a father to Charles than Bran had, teaching him English and Welsh, being there for his first steps, singing him the songs that Bran had once sung to him. Sam had been there the first time Charles had changed. The second, third. He had been at Charles’s side on his first run. His first hunt on four paws.

Bran had not.

Very slowly, Bran leaned forward until his head was resting against the faux-wood of the glove compartment. He closed his gritty eyes, failure of the past and present eating at him acutely.

Charles returned and slid into the car. “Do you want to talk about it,” he said, an unwilling statement that had been dragged forth by his conscience, a statement he had not been able to even turn into a question so much did he not wish to speak it.

“No,” Bran told him, his voice bouncing off the dash in front of him.

“Oh good,” Charles murmured.

Bran rallied, a little, when they finally turned off Highway 37 onto the gravel-lined track that would take them parallel to Sutton Creek. The car slowed, stones spitting beneath them. There was a very basic campground, a little further up. It was a popular route for hikers, though they were off-season now so only the hardy would be in situ.

Indeed, the small clearing was empty but for one rather lackluster looking rusty-green tent.

“That it?” Bran checked.

“Apparently it’s larger on the inside.”

Bran sighed. “Of course it is.”

They ran regular patrols along the borders of Bran’s immediate domestic territory. Right now, it was being run daily by the new changes, under a rotating guard of some of the more reliable members of Bran’s long-term pack. It had been a new change – Gideon, whom Leah had described recently as a ‘baby tank’ – who had followed the whisper of cinnamon to the furthest west border and beyond. He and George had tracked the old hiker to this camp-site.

George had called from the payphone and then Charles had ordered them home.

The scent of cinnamon was really quite overpowering as they approached the tent. Bran’s eyes watered. “That can only be purposeful,” he murmured to his son, who nodded.

The tent flaps opened and a head stuck out. Amber-brown eyes widened but not in particular surprise. “You.”

“You,” said Bran, stunned.

*

Tamas made them mint tea and they sat on the heavily cushioned floor. Overlapping rugs in various patterns crisscrossed each other. There were ornate lanterns hanging from the ceiling, swaying even though there was no breeze. Through the billowing cloth tent, there was a sense of great heat – even though Bran knew it was drizzling slightly outside.

“Why,” Bran asked, looking around, “does the inside of your construct look like a Bedouin tent? Your people were from Damascus.” Outside a horse neighed. “You hated horses.”

In answer to this, Tamas looked at Charles, his plump mouth twisting into a rueful smile. “Apparently its appearance strongly reflects what my guests expect.”

Charles sipped his tea. His cheekbones were tinged with pink. “It’s how I always imagined the inside of a jinn’s lamp to be.”

But this was not the inside of a jinn’s lamp. It was certainly similar in some ways – a magical prison to contain a magical being – but Tamas was no jinn.

Idra’s father, dead more than four centuries, had not changed. He had a thick mane of silvered dark hair that ran into a trim beard. His warm brown eyes were thickly lashed. He had the jawline deserving of a marble Roman bust. His nose still had that slight kink from being broken at the bridge by his wife’s brother-in-law.

Bran sipped his tea. “When did she trap you?”

Leaning to his left, Tamas’s be-ringed fingers investigated the top of a stack of current newspapers. “Give or take four-and-a-half centuries, from the looks of things.”

“Your death was much misrepresented, then. Dare I ask why Idra imprisoned you?”

The man waved a hand, top lip curling. “I don’t recall. Some ridiculous female nonsense.”

“Tamas.”

“It was a very long time ago. You know how we were.” Clearly wanting to change the conversation, Tamas’s eyes roved back to Charles. “So this is your boy.”

He narrowed his eyes to scrutinize Charles further and sipped his tea as he did so, bushy eyebrows lowering until they almost met his eyelashes. It was such a shockingly familiar expression that Bran felt himself slip back in time, to when he had last seen the man – hundreds of years ago. He’d been arguing with Idra in Arabic. Female nonsense had been the exact words he had used then, too.

Charles allowed himself to be studied. He was polite like that.

Looking away, Bran continued to study the environment, though he did so using senses more witch than wolf. It would take great magic to create a prison such as this. A prison, in itself, was do-able. A pocket reality. He could, perhaps – even now. Sherwood could certainly do it, but this was a very complex piece of working. Certainly, Idra and her mother would have needed help. What flavor of ‘Other’ would give that help, that was the question. A Black witch?

Delicately, Bran sniffed the air, considering.

The other question was why. Idra and her father had clashed on quite a few subjects that he had personally witnessed. Her father’s gluttony had been the topic of many arguments. He had been unfaithful to Idra’s mother. Idra herself had been widowed young, and had been grieving her husband still when they had first met. Even then Tamas had been pushing her to remarry and produce a litter of offspring for no better reason then he wanted grandchildren. Female nonsense, indeed.

So he could imagine well why she had entrapped him. But why, then, would she send her father’s prison across the ocean to Bran several hundred years later?

An act of war?

No. For all Bran’s paranoia, he knew Idra had never been power hungry. She was an academic, at heart.

Perhaps the answer was simpler. She had not anticipated her father’s prison could be opened. And she wanted the memory of this act far, far away from her.

Having finished his study of Charles, Tamas changed the subject to Bran’s other son. “What happened to the other boy? Samuel, was it?”

“He is well but lives elsewhere.”

“Ah.” Tamas leaned forward to open the wooden box on the table between them. He chuckled. “Apparently your boy’s imagination includes Turkish delight. Cinnamon, if I’m not mistaken. Might I tempt anyone?”

Charles blushed some more and declined politely.

“Why the wishes?” Bran asked, when what he really he wanted to ask was how the wishes. Tamas, to his knowledge, had not the power to create on such scale. He thought Sherwood might struggle with the magical logistics of transporting a Range Rover from a transport ship.

“Gratitude for my freedom, of course. A gift like that should be rewarded.” Tamas smirked.

Bran was not about to believe what was surely nonsense. Tamas had been a collector of wealth. He did not give.

He smiled instead. He could be polite too. “Your generosity has ruffled the waters of my quiet little home, Tamas.”

“It has?” The man preened. “But I didn’t know it was your little home, sir. That is quite the coincidence. Quite, quite the coincidence.”

This was a lie. Bran played along. “You were a gift from your daughter.”

“My little Idra?” The change was abrupt, not in Tamas, no he remained as affable as ever, a quirky smile tugging at his mouth. But a shadow seemed to fall above the tent, casting the room into shade. The warmth of earlier seeped away.

It passed, as if it were merely a cloud. Tamas poured them more tea. “Tell me about my Idra. She lives. How?”

Again, Bran got the strong feeling Tamas knew all this. “She’s a werewolf.”

“Indeed?” He sipped. “Her mother would have hated that.”

“She came to terms with it, I believe. She lived with her daughter until she passed.”

“The witch is dead then.” Tamas grunted. “I cannot mourn her. She made my life a misery.”

And Tamas certainly returned the favor.

“Where will you go from here?” Charles asked and Bran could tell he was done with being polite. He wanted Tamas far, far away.

“I’m not certain. I’ve nothing but my wits to live on.” Tamas sighed. “I don’t suppose there are warmer climates on this continent?” He shivered dramatically. “I find this weather most inhospitable.”

*

Bran made two calls from the car. The first was to Leah, who did not pick up. The second was to Sherwood. He did not beat about the bush. “You remember Tamas.”

“Unfortunately.”

“If my memory served, he had nothing more than a touch of fae blood.”

“Fae? Not that I am aware of. In his cups, he once claimed he was a descendant of Bhaga.”

It took Bran a moment. “Of Vedic mythology?”

“I assumed so. I think you are confusing him with Siddhartha,” Sherwood said, ponderous and kind.

Because there was nothing so irritating as having one’s brother correct you, Bran huffed automatically. “I am not confusing Tamas with Siddhartha.”

The kernel of this thought grew, however, and goddamn, he was right. Siddhartha had been the great-great-great-grandson of a Grey Lord. The two had nothing in common except—

Sherwood rumbled in wry amusement. “They both tried to kill you because you slept with their daughters.”

Bran closed his eyes in response to this unfortunate, if quite correct statement, and Sherwood’s elephantine ability to never forget. Now.

Beside him, Charles made an intrigued-sounding noise, which turned into a brisk clearing of his throat. “My Vedic mythology is patchy but I feel Bhaga was a god of some kind.”

Sherwood replied, as if surprised to hear Charles’s voice, “Hello, nephew. You are correct. Of wealth, amongst other things. I do suspect it is spurious, however it might account for his lengthy lifespan.”

“Is my wife there?” Bran asked, for once hoping that was not the case.

“I would not be so indelicate to speak of your affairs before Leah,” was Sherwood’s even-toned response.

“Thank you for that.” Bran hung up the phone.

Blessed silence fell in the car but it was a silence that spoke volumes.

Charles indicated to join the highway and they pulled out behind a Ford F-Series that seen better days. A piece of hay flew at the windscreen and skittered away.

“It’s not that I thought you were a monk,” Charles muttered. “That would be ridiculous.”

Bran decided this statement wasn’t aimed at him and said nothing. He tapped his fingers against his jeans.

“Though it was one of the reasons Sam said you had to marry Leah. For propriety.”

Around the 1500s, Bran had left Sam in Sherwood’s care – or perhaps the other way around. He’d always regretted it for it appeared that his son and brother often found Bran’s ways a topic of conversation. Like Sam, Sherwood had never laid a hand on a woman he did not intend to wed. “Did he now.”

“Obviously, not true.”

“No.”

“Did Tamas expect you to marry Idra? More to the point, did she expect you to marry her? Perhaps that is why she sent you this gift.”

Bran’s mouth opened to deny both these things but he hesitated. As with all his memories, raking out the truth from what he wanted the truth to be was a challenge of some delicacy. Idra had been a widow, which had once been his preferred female state for a liaison, and the social mores of Ottoman-ruled Damascus in the 17^th Century had been fairly robust for women, compared to Europe.

He had typically been very straight-forward when it came to managing expectations of sexual partners. It seemed unlikely, too, given that Idra had plainly been a witch of some power that he would have encouraged any view other than their relationship was an affair.

“I don’t remember,” Bran said, having thought on it for at least five miles. It was the truth.

And yet…

*

On four paws, Bran returned to the camp-ground late that night. He’d needed the run and was well aware that having his son in attendance would have hindered any intimacies Tamas might have been inclined to share with an old… whatever they were.

Men like Bran did not have friends, not truly.

He dropped the bag of clothes he had been carrying with him and changed at his leisure before pulling on the sweatpants and T-shirt that was his preferred uniform at home. On bare feet he approached the tent.

This time, no full head of dark hair poked its way through the tent flaps. Instead, Bran ducked through without invitation.

An entirely new world awaited him. Gone were the carpets, the tasseled floor cushions of Charles’s apparently quite vivid imagination. Bran now stood in the cool, ornately tiled courtyard of a Damascene family home that could have been the mirror of ones he had visited when he had toured the Middle East. A water fountain took center stage, bubbling away. Padded wooden furniture was tucked against the walls. Greenery dangled down from a wrap-around balcony.

Except – nothing was green. It was grey. The tiles which should have been hues of natural tones, were shades of slate. Looking up to a square of cloudless sky, it was not that bright, cerulean blue he was expecting but a drab, dark sky. The very air seemed to be grey. It was as if he was still seeing the world through his wolf’s eyes.

Feet padded towards him. A narrow, carved door opened on his left and Tamas peered out.

Bran gestured. “Are my expectations particularly depressing or is this what it actually looks like?”

“If by colorless and joyless, then yes.” Tamas dropped down onto the nearest wooden couch heavily. He, too, appeared grey, all the vividness drained from him. “This is what it actually looks like. Unlike your son, you manage your expectations well. But then you always have.”

Bran did a full turn. The house looked very familiar. “For centuries, you have been trapped in here. You must have gone mad.”

Tamas grunted, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “Perhaps I already was mad.” He rubbed his hands together and seemed to follow Bran’s gaze as if he had not seen the same tiled courtyard every day for longer than Bran had been in the United States. His eyes lifted up, and up again. “Impressive, isn’t it? An entire replica of my home.”

Bran agreed. “It is impressive.” And alarming. It reinforced what he had supposed earlier - a white witch could not create this construct. Not alone.

A vague thought stirred. He knew magic, it’s many flavors. This was not witch. Perhaps he had been wrong about this being the inside of a jinn’s lamp.

“From my reading, I understand it is unlikely that my true home as it was still stands.”

Bran’s attention was brought back to the present. Many wars had been fought in and around Syria in the years that Tamas had been gone, never mind the one that was still lingering now. Idra had left Damascus shortly after her mother had passed. “It was a very long time ago that you left.”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose it was. One still imagines, everything as it was before,” Idra’s father murmured, looking down at his hands.

Bran knew the feeling. When the occasional thought of his native land drifted through his consciousness – untainted by what memories that did cling on of the atrocities he had committed – he imagined it as it was then. Green – mostly untouched by man. He was not so sentimental to hark back to a simpler time because it had not been simpler, even then. No child of the Cornick witch had known simpler times.

“You said it is a replica inside as well?”

“Indeed. Books, my Idra always said, were the only wealth worth hoarding. And I have a chess board. Every other Tuesday, I played chess against myself. It might not have been Tuesday, of course. Sometimes time passed… oddly.” His eyelashes fluttered as his eyes closed. “Sometimes I slept for days on end.”

It was so remarkably close to how Bran remembered periods of his own life that he had to shake off the sudden chokehold from his wolf – a threatening reminder of what was in store for him should he ever let slip his control.

Bran smiled. Smiling helped. “You are remarkably cogent given the circumstances.”

And he wondered why. Even after he had left the Berserker behind, it had taken him years to adapt to the changes of the world. Much of his behavior had been mimicry of ‘normality’, a mimicry he still practiced today – each time the world changed and he found himself a step behind.

What manner of genetics lay within Tamas that meant his sanity was not so broken?

Sometimes I slept for days on end.

Bran’s mind began to weave together the possibilities. Tamas’s tendency to hoard… yes, the spurious claim to a god of wealth was a good story. But there were more likely answers. Creatures known for hoarding gold. For hibernating. Creatures of long-ago myth and legend who had jealously seen the way the world was changing and evolved to take human-like forms to continue to nurture their wealth in mankind’s way.

Human-like forms that met and mated with humans, bore children with traits of immortality, with magic running like fire in their veins.

Idra had always had a particular flair for pyrotechnics. And myth drew to myth, after all.

Having hoarded his own secrets, Bran had no intention of directly accusing Tamas of a more reptilian ancestry. “How is it that you can speak English, my friend?”  

The man stood in the way that older men often did, as if their bones creaked. No such noise accompanied the movement but he could well be tired, Bran supposed, in the way he sometimes felt tired. As if the weight of time and obligation pressed upon him. “Come.”

He followed Tamas up a flight of wooden steps to the mezzanine and then inside, through a paneled wooden door. It was cool and dark in the small room, the ceiling arched and high. Tamas opened the shutters over a tall window.

The view outside was familiar to Bran. A wet field, surrounded by forest, the mountains of his home in the distance. Even in the dark, it was shockingly verdant in comparison to the shades of grey in the house that he found himself blinking furiously. “So you could see something of the world around you,” he surmised.

“Indeed. For a long time, I saw my— study.” Tamas clearly corrected his choice of word. “And my daughter, coming and going with an eclectic parade of lovers. Then I was stolen.” A dark look settled on Tamas’s face. “Egyptians. During the occupation. I was passed around for many decades – sold on a market stall for nothing, won in a game of cards. I sat in the pockets of men who passed me around. I finally ended up in the hands of a lieutenant in the British army. A souvenir from his tour abroad. He brought me back to Britain, where I graced a mantlepiece for nearly sixty years, only to be dusted occasionally. You learn a thing or two. Mostly the plots of some riveting soap operas.”

“How did you end up back in Idra’s hands?”

“The grandson of the lieutenant, who inherited the contents of his mother’s house, sold me to a collector who placed me on some online auction house for people who like that sort of thing.” Tamas waved his hand and long fingers about dismissively, as if he himself had not liked ‘that sort of thing’ when from what Bran knew he had been a collector of just that all his life. “My daughter purchased me. She said she had been looking for me.”

“She spoke to you?”

“Through here.” He nodded to the window. “She did not know if I was alive or dead. But she could not open the tin and set me free. She had used the final wish of a true jinn, you see, swapping our places. One of my own relics, used against me.” His smile was brief but very toothy. Almost proud. “But not being a jinn myself, my entrapment was a one-way thing. She did not know how to reverse it.”

“Ah.” Bran began to see more clearly. “So she sent you to me.”

“After much debate with her current lover, yes. Apparently you remain a power in this world.” Was there a whisper of a sneer there? Perhaps it was just Bran’s imagination.

Bran pursed his lips. “She could have written a note.”

Tamas’s dark eyes slid to Bran with a sparkle of amusement. “I suspect you might have thought twice about allowing me onto your continent if she had.”

A fair evaluation.

“She was right, however,” Tamas said begrudgingly. “You freed me.”

Bran, who was beginning to suspect who had really set Tamas free, said nothing to deny his role in this. “And in return you… granted some wishes.”

“I gave a select few what they desired above all.” He shrugged, as if this was nothing. “A question of a little manipulation of time and space.”

Bran considered this. The manipulation of space perhaps answered the question of the Range Rover. The manipulation of time explained Leah’s full-term pregnancy in the space of a few days. It perhaps even explained the work on the extension.

He had to ask, however, “How did you create a blue dog?”

Overtly startled, Tamas replied, “What blue dog?”

*

It had been a long day, and night, by the time Bran rested his forehead on the door of his wife’s temporary bedroom. He knew she was awake because he’d heard her get up to feed the baby when he’d been skulking outside the property in his wolf’s fur. He’d intended to wait until dawn, to nap outside in the bushy undergrowth, but his wolf had insisted.

They missed their mate.

Sherwood had let him in and then returned to the pull-out sofa without a word, no facial expression hinting at his thoughts. He was snoring now; he’d always had that ability to fall fast asleep, whereas Bran would lie wakeful, tugging at the threads of his world.

The door wasn’t locked and the hinge well oiled; it opened with ease and he entered the dark cocoon of Leah’s refuge. She had known he was there. She had probably felt him running to her.

To give the barest sense of privacy from his brother, Bran closed the door behind him and crept first to the cot where the baby was asleep once more, a tiny, repressed ball of energy. He paused for a moment. The temptation to open his ill-used third eye was a strong one but he refrained. He just wanted to look at her.

She did not look like an overcooked ham anymore. She was small and not particularly florid. She had a light cap of fair hair and a little pursed mouth.

An innocent. A miracle.

He leaned down and sniffed her, an act that caused his watchful mate to sit more stiffly in bed. Bran held the scent of his daughter in his nostrils and was given the answer to a question that had tickled him for the days since she was born.

Wolf-born. Like her half-brother.

“So. Tell me,” came a distinctly unimpressed voice from the bed.

Rising, Bran looked towards his mate. His heart flipped. She was so beautiful to him. “It was Idra’s father.”

“Who is not a jinn, I suppose. Nor dead.”

“No. He was imprisoned in a jinn lamp, though.” One Tamas was reluctant to leave, as it happened. Frightened to leave the only home he had, one that hadn’t changed like the world outside of it had. Bran could understand that. “But the magic is… of his own.”

“What is he?”

“Dragonkin, I think.”

Leah’s eyebrows rose. She forgot to be angry for a moment. “A… child of a dragon?”

“In effect. It’s very rare, these days. I have only met one before.” For Bran, the lure of his mate tugged at him and he drifted away from the baby towards the bed. He studied his wife instead, just as she was studying him. The mating bond throbbed between them with untold hurt.

“I am sorry,” he said, resting one knee on the corner of the mattress and holding the position. He had thought about this apology a great deal, trying to find the words. “I have not been here for you. For you both.”

Leah acknowledged this with a small inclination of her head. “That is correct.”

“I…” He paused. He had once been considered a bard, a weaver of words and tales. He had written poems and ballads – speaking of battles and love, which were sometimes one and the same. There was a novel or two out there that he had penned, under an assumed name. They had been received very well.

Strangely, it had always been the case that with the women he loved those words failed him. They failed him now, despite his efforts to the contrary.

Demonstrating that she knew him better than he knew himself, Leah spoke for him, “If she was the product of the jinn, that caused you a problem. There is a balance to magic, a give and take. Her existing tipped the scales in one direction that unsettled you on a soul-deep level.” She looked towards the crib. “If she had not been my child, you would have killed her. But she is my child and you know full well what would have happened had you done so.”

There was a flicker of a threat in Leah’s eyes. Not the wolf’s, as it happened. Purely her.

Bran, still speechless, nodded.

“And you fear being a father. That is a new thought for me,” Leah said, tilting her head to the side in consideration. Now her eyes pierced him. “I did not realize. I believed you, always, when you said it was a matter of safety. When you placed children elsewhere than at the Marrok’s house. But you are afraid you are not good enough. That you failed Samuel and that you failed Charles. That this is history repeating itself and you do not know how to stop it.”

A spool of stress unwound within Bran’s chest. A spinning top, it rattled around his ribs, shaking him. “Yes,” he said, a mite too loud, too impassioned for the low tones of the bedroom. They both looked towards the crib to see if it would wake the baby.

She slept on.  

Leah returned to her subject matter, her salting of his wounds. “Regardless. You should still have been here for me. You should not have sent me away,” she said softly. Wounded.

“To create a narrative that would protect you both,” he insisted, though it was weak. Though there was a grain of truth in his words, she was right. He had sent her away. Like a coward, needing to lick his wounds.

“I have been part of your narratives before, Bran,” said his mate, and there was a darkness in her voice, a magic of her very own. A threat. “I do not want the same for her.”

His wince was full body. Christ, she knew how to cut him deep. Bran pulled back from the bed but only so he could walk around to her side and drop down to his knees. She did not know it, but he could sink to his knees to no other.

Oh, he could pretend, he could fake subservience, but he could not fake this. The wolf had no problem bowing before his mate. Particularly not now, not now she had given him a child – and lived. An innate, pre-historic sense of worship tweaked his wolf now, Leah elevated to goddess-like status.

“I am sorry,” he said again, his words ringing with formality. “You are right.”

“I am,” Leah agreed. She was tired. He could see it in her eyes. It was not just because of the baby. She exhaled, as if she had been expecting a battle with him, when instead he had rolled over and taken her words as truth. “Surely the magical balance is the same even though Tamas is not a jinn?”

He shook his head and eyed her hands. He wanted to touch her and did not think he had permission to do so. “No bargain was struck. Emma… did not make wishes. Not truly. She— he was walking around, consumed with the glut of real freedom, and feeling benevolent for once in his life. His magic to do with what he will, stored up over centuries.”

Bran’s mouth quirked. If Idra’s intention had been to change her father’s ways, perhaps she had achieved it. Momentarily.  

“He met Emma and was charmed by the whimsy of the moment. Fixing her family’s home was nothing to him. He found Carrie because the idea of giving her such a gift struck him as amusing. He met you, and Charles, and you— he said— you spoke of—” Bran could not repeat what Tamas had told him, not yet. He tried for a lighter topic. “He’s apparently made Gideon four inches taller, you know. Which he has kept to himself. We shall have words. It was arbitrary and his will. If you wanted a baby so much, why did you not tell me?” he demanded, because apparently he could speak of it.

Leah looked sharply away from him. Her long fingers gripped the sheet under her hands. “I did not tell him that.”

“He said you said something to the effect.”

Tamas had said he had met a werewolf woman called ‘Leah’ who seemed to fit Emma’s description. He had thought she, and Charles, were together and he had asked all the questions an old man asked of a young married woman. He said he had heard the agony in Leah’s voice. I cannot have children, she had told him, thinking him a stranger and safe.

With no notion that he was speaking to Bran of his own wife, Tamas had said he had pitied her – it was God’s will that a woman should bring forth children, even if that woman was a werewolf – and he had been moved to give her what he perceived she wished. The timing of such things was precipitous, as it happened, Tamas had explained, waving a hand. The spark of life was already there but it would have been lost at Full Moon. I just hastened it along.  

Bran could not repeat any of this and Leah’s mouth was pressed together, a white line of denial. “I had hoped we were better able to communicate with each other.”

“You mean me.”

“I mean both of us.” God knew he was not good at it. “But I would do anything for you, Leah. If this was what you wanted…”

She made a dismissive noise. Her eyes were sparkling now. “No, you wouldn’t. Particularly not if it upset the balance.”

He laughed. It wasn’t a particularly nice laugh. She had no idea. Maybe because even he hadn’t known it. “Leah. Leah,” he said, again, speechless at his own lack of self-awareness.

Had she told him she wanted a child, he would have made it happen. He knew this now. He would have made it happen, regardless of how he felt. He would have come to terms with it and in most normal circumstances he would have had the time to come to terms with it.

Bran laid his head down so that his forehead pressed against her hip. “Ask me. Ask me for anything. I will prove it to you. I love you. I want you to be happy.”

Even with just a sliver of the mating bond, Bran could feel he had made her uncomfortable. His verbal expressions of devotion did tend to. He had trained her to feel that way. Two centuries of lack and she did not know what to do with his love so he had shied away from saying the words to save her the discomfort. To save them both.

This, he realized, was a mistake.

There was a small touch to his head. A finger, brushing his hair. “I just… feel I shouldn’t have to ask. Not anymore.”

*

Bran had placed the lid of the tin in the safe room, in a lead-lined box. Emma peered at it curiously. He had decided to have this conversation without her parents present. Man to girl. Wolf to fae.

“I think you chose this tin because you had a feeling about it,” he began.

Emma bounced on her heels. Her eyes darted about the room. It was one of her tells. “A funny feeling.”

“Where was this funny feeling?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Kind of everywhere?” She touched her stomach, though, absently. “I knew it was broken.”

“And that you could fix it.”

“Yes.”

“What kind of fixing did you do?”

Again, the screwed-up face. It was adorable. Bran ignored it. “Dunno.”

“You don’t know,” he enunciated correctly, in the hope that she would lose this lax language habit she had no doubt picked up from watching unfettered YouTube. “Why don’t you describe what you did? You are not in trouble.”

Emma – who was wise – looked doubtful.

“You are not in trouble,” Bran repeated. He was repeating things a great deal at the moment. I love you and I am sorry.

His granddaughter made to reach inside the box but he touched his fingers to her wrist in warning. “No touching?” She blew out a frustrated breath, as if touch was important to her ability to explain properly. Her face screwed up as she thought hard. “I took the lid off, Grandda, and then I took the other lid off.”

The tobacco tin was a fairly standard structure. There was only one lid, with the scratched Hamas on the top. “The other lid.”

“Yes, there was another lid. It was—” Her hand flexed. Her eyes darted away. She knew what she was saying was strange. “Different.”

Magical, Bran assumed. The jinn’s magic. The magic of the lamp.

Bran had wondered if the lid were to be reunited with the other half of the tin – which Tamas had – the prison would reform. But the tin had been in use many times over the centuries of Tamas’s imprisonment. At a guess, he had thought everyone who had handled it had been mundane – except Idra had also handled it. Many of Idra’s pack had. A wolf would not be able to break the magic of the tin, nor a witch.

A fae Maker, however, that was another story.

Bran put the lid back on the box. “Emma, you know what you did was wrong. My secure room is secure for a reason. There are some extremely dangerous magical artefacts in there. Things that would hurt you and others.”

A mutinous flicker flashed over Emma’s face. She didn’t know how to hide it. “Yes, Grandda.”

His mouth twitched. “When your punishment is over, you and I will take a tour through my secure room. I will show you the contents and you will tell me if anything needs fixing.”

Again, because Emma was no fool, she gave Bran a deeply suspicious look. “Won’t I get in trouble?”

“Not if I accompany you. And I will always accompany you.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Mommy will be annoyed with you.”

“Very likely.” Bran smiled. “But not after I explain why.”

Emma considered him seriously, no doubt weighing up the pros and cons. Ultimately Anna being annoyed with Grandda proved too much of an incentive and she nodded regally. “Very well,” she said, in an echo of her grandmother’s tone.

Bran had to swallow down a laugh.

*

Coming off the conversation they’d only just had on Emma’s newly discovered magic trick, Anna made the leap, “Emma made the blue dog?”

They had all returned to Asil’s house. Well, not all, because Leah would rather stick pins in her eyes than step foot on Asil’s property. So instead Bran, Charles and Anna stood in Asil’s living room and studied the puppy, currently deeply involved in a chew toy.

“No. She says,” Bran repeated, not often in the position of taking a ten-year-old verbatim but Emma had been adamant, “that she only found him which she thought was the result of her wish. But he ran away.” He had to admit, Emma had not been particularly clear on the timeline of this.  

Anna crouched down to give the dog head scratches. He paused in chewing to tilt his head up in ecstasy.

“Is he less blue than before?” Charles asked curiously.

“Hmm, yes, about that,” Asil said. “I gave him a wash.”

“A wash.”

“Yes. A very thorough one, to get rid of the skunk.” Asil’s sculped mouth moved into a moue of distaste. “The water was a strange color afterwards.”

Anna gasped. “Are you saying he was dyed blue? That is so cruel.” She moved the scratches down the dogs back which led to his tail loudly thumping against the floor. The tip of his tail brushed the base of a standard lamp and Asil, sighing, moved it. Looking around, Bran could see evidence of decluttering, some chewed furniture legs. Clearly the dog did not have the best of manners yet.

“Oh no,” Anna said suddenly to the dog. “There was that trend, earlier in the year wasn’t there? On social media. Teenagers were dying their pets’ fur. It made the news. Oh, darling, did someone dye your fur blue? Did they?”

Anna devolved into cooing that was not actually too dissimilar to how she had greeted her new sister-in-law that morning.

“So he’s just a dog,” Charles confirmed, pleased. “Not a magical dog. Not a dog willed into existence by my daughter. Just a dog.”

“What have you called him, Asil?” Anna asked, bright eyed. She was halfway into rolling on the floor with the dog now, scratching all his hard-to-reach places.

“The dog.”

“You can’t call him the dog.” She burbled out a delighted laugh as if Asil’s stubbornness was a treat she continued to enjoy. “What about… Indigo?”

“Bluebell,” was Charles’s suggestion. He was enjoying Anna’s enjoyment.

“How about Woad,” Bran suggested drily.

The dog’s head swiveled in Bran’s direction, his tongue rolling from his mouth. Coincidence, surely. Or the sound of authority in Bran’s mouth.

“Woad it is,” Asil sighed, moving his standard lamp still further away.

*

When Bran returned, he found Leah in the kitchen fiddling with the new bottle sterilizer. She had put off changing for as long as she could, suspecting that if she did so her ability to breastfeed would disappear, and she had been right. It was causing her some heartbreak.

He paused to kiss the back of her neck, lingered there for a moment when she willingly leaned back into him. “I signed her up for those classes.”

Hoping there was a small window of opportunity for the baby to be socialized before she started to change spontaneously, Leah wanted her to experience all the same things Emma had, at her age so Bran made a list of classes for her perusal. Water Babies. Music lessons. Baby yoga. Anything Leah wanted, he signed them up for.

“Thank you.”  

Since Leah hadn’t moved, and there was a sense that his affection was accepted, if not desired, Bran tentatively slid his arms about her. They needed to spend time together – that was what had worked before, when they had been muddling through the last mess Bran had made. If they spent time together, it became more likely that they would talk of other things than the practical realities of marriage.

Bran had, at some point in the last ten years, forgotten this. He had allowed their marriage to fall back into the easy rhythm where time was not carved out for them specifically, where the only time they spent together alone was at night, when he was not so focused on talking. And Leah took his lead or perhaps she was equally lulled into a false sense of contentment, too. He had taught her to hide her woes from him, after all.

This was his fault.

Finding the time now was proving difficult as it needed to incorporate the baby, at least for the next few weeks until Leah felt more comfortable leaving her in the care of his son and daughter-in-law. Bran, meanwhile, had been delegating left, right and center in an effort to free up time himself.

He needed to be present in every way that mattered.

“Shall we take the baby on a walk today?” he suggested. Leah had been steadily building up a wardrobe that would keep the baby toasty warm.

She ‘hmmmed’ thoughtfully. “We could try.”

‘Try’ was right. The first attempt took place after the morning nap and was thwarted by an unexpectedly explosive diaper change when they were halfway out the door. This required an extensive clean-up. The second attempt was thwarted by it starting to snow which made Leah nervous but thankfully only lasted twenty minutes. Resolutely they set off.

It was cold but it was crisp. Their boots crunched and squeaked through the fresh snow, where human and animals had woven clear paths. All around was still and quiet.

Bran knew where every single one of his wolves were at this very moment – and they were not in the vicinity.

Leah walked ahead of him, because that was what Bran preferred. In theory, it was so he could watch her back. In reality, it was a little of that but it was also an unashamed study of her lower half in her tight hiking pants. It had always been the case; he loved the way she moved.

“Is she all right?” he asked when they had been walking in silence for forty minutes.

Leah paused so he could look for himself. She unzipped her jacket, snugly wrapped around the baby, and eased up the little knitted hat. Curious hazel eyes regarded her parents from her restful cocoon. “She likes it, I think.”

“She likes being close to you.” Bran could understand that. He stroked his daughter’s cheek and she looked him curiously the way she always did, a little questioning, as if she was not as sure of him as she was her mother. Far from hurt by this, he considered her to be an excellent judge of character.

“What’s todays word?” Leah asked.

“Enfys. It means rainbow,” he explained. He adjusted his daughter’s little hat carefully. She didn’t like her ears to be covered. She liked to hear everything.

Or possibly just she ran warm.

Leah duly repeated the word downwards. “We should have picture cards,” she decided, zipping up her jacket and resuming walking once more, “the same way we do for the English alphabet.”

Bran watched her ponytail swinging from side to side. “I could do that. You’re a better drawer, though.” Better than he at most of the creative arts, as it happened. She could draw and paint. She’d tried her hand at calligraphy once. Before she had given up on sewing, she had been a dab hand with quilting. They still had one of hers, folded up at the end of the bed in the guest bedroom – pale greens and muted blues, scraps of old clothes repurposed. He had a horrible feeling he’d only just been polite about it. Looks warm.

“If you write all the words down, I’ll have a go.”

Midway, they paused to take in the view – ate some crackers and cheese and drank bittersweet hot chocolate. Leah kept giving him side-eye and eventually crumbled, much as the crackers. “We’re fine, Bran.”

It did not feel that way. No, what it felt like was more specific than that. It felt like they shouldn’t be fine. It felt like Leah had, once again, forgiven him for something that should be unforgiveable. He could not forgive himself so, mere weeks after the fact, Leah behaving as if all was well was an anathema to him.

She’d done this before. He’d done this before, and he’d let it lie, because it was easier that way.

Apparently she read him through the mating bond because she scoffed. Frustrated. “You apologized. I have forgiven you. I find you easy to forgive. Perhaps that in itself is a problem,” she reflected drily, “but it is how I feel and I cannot change it. It is… a reasonable thing. To be alarmed at the prospect of an unexpected child. Particularly if you had reservations about your capabilities as a father. I have reservations about myself. I do not expect you to behave perfectly, Bran. We both make mistakes.”

“You are being very reasonable.”

Leah delicately removed a crumb of cheese from their daughter’s hat. “Would you prefer otherwise? That I punish you?”

He had thought about it. “Yes, actually.”

“Is that what she did?”

“She who?” Bran asked. Then he wished he could take back the question, closing his eyes. “Oh my god.”

“I meant your mother,” Leah said and he could tell she felt bold doing so, bringing up a topic he had never broached with her. “Anna believes everything you do is because of your relationship with your parents.”

“I can assure you my father had little to do with anything.”

“I suspect that’s rather her point.”

“Oh god,” he said again, scowling into the distance.

He disliked this modern tendency to therapize every situation. To understand. Once upon a time Leah agreed with him but after her memories returned she had a change of heart. Psychology books appeared around the house with subdued, lengthy titles and she read them a pencil in hand, little colored sticky notes pressed between pages.

Suddenly, his mate listened to Anna’s modern ways. She reflected on her behavior far more. She made changes.

Within reason, of course. There was a layer of werewolf instinct that differentiated human from dominant wolf – something Anna, an Omega, would never quite grasp in the same way.

They lapsed into silence, which he tried to convince himself was better. He did not remember his mother. Not in the way that Anna no doubt thought. Anna no doubt believed Bran recalled in crystal clear detail the years of torment that had been his childhood. He didn’t. It was more than two millennia ago. He remembered, vaguely, their home. A simple farm. He remembered one or two of his siblings – in their human form. He was better with their wolves. He could not recall his father’s face and would not recall hers. There had been food on the table, which was more than many could say.

She had punished him. Of course, she had.

He finished off his chocolate and screwed the cap back on the thermos. “May I take her?” he asked, clearing his expression.

Leah nodded. The exchange was the work of some careful minutes of unzipping and unsnapping buckles. Bran held his daughter close to him as Leah tightened straps and belts and thought he might swallow his heart. He could feel her breathing. Hear her heartbeat.

There was a moment where the unsettling ball of emotion that Bran seemed to now carry with him at all times lodged threateningly in his throat. Leah’s cautious eyes on him helped that, however, and he swallowed it down.

It had simply been a very, very long time since he’d had a daughter. He was not used to it, yet. She still resembled a ball of energy. On many levels, as it happened, given who and what she was.

“Okay?” Leah checked. She sounded doubtful.

She had zipped up the jacket around them both and he was a little warm but he nodded. “She’s perfect.”

Neither of them were certain about their daughter’s core temperature. Leah had been understandably frustrated when Bran had been unable to answer any questions about Charles, the pattern-card for genetic uniqueness. And Sam was currently non-contactable, as he sometimes was.

The shame that Bran was not able to talk about Charles’s youth was something he carried with him at all times but not something he had been forced to dwell too much on. Until now.

“We need to give her a name,” Bran murmured, curving his hand around her tiny back.

“Nothing suits her yet.”

Now that they were not ‘adopting’, the paperwork could wait a little while and there was some noodling to do about that – in terms of declaring her relationship to Bran and Leah, now that they were both under the watchful eye of the FBI. He had a couple of other identities, as did Leah, but nothing that would put them at childbearing age. Or married. Indeed the point of those identities had been to ensure that they could live separate lives, if they needed to, should one or other of them be detained by the authorities.

He walked at a considerably slower pace than before, now that he had cargo. Periodically, that ball of emotion tried to wedge itself in his throat and he kept swallowing, kept looking around, trying to distract himself.

Behind him, Leah stopped so he stopped. She leaned down to fiddle with her boot and he pointed out a nuthatch to the baby who could not see the bird from her position, nor did she know what a bird was. Nevertheless, he described it to her, in English and in Welsh. His voice wavered. He cleared it, resolutely.

Leah spoke up behind him, “I hear you. At night.”

For a moment he didn’t understand. Then a prickling sweat broke out around Bran’s hairline. “I… beg your pardon?”

“I hear you. When you get up to feed her at night.”

His mouth opened and closed. There was a whisper of desire – from his wolf, from him – to run.

But Bran Cornick did not run.

Leah was still fiddling with her boot. She was trying to give him privacy. But when he failed to respond in a timely fashion – indeed, he breathlessly gawped at her – she stood straight and fixed him with her no-bullshit gaze.

Her voice came out so small, but she said the words he had been dreading, “I hear you weeping. Seems to me that of the two of us, the only one who is not fine is you.”

*

It had started the very first night after Leah had changed and she was no longer the main source of nourishment for the baby. It had made sense that they alternated feeding her so that they could each snatch a few more hours of sleep. Though for certain werewolves could last far longer than humans on a handful of hours of sleep, a tired old werewolf was a grumpy old werewolf.

Bran had crept into the baby’s darkened room as she fussed and changed her. Then, bottle in hand, he settled with her in the nursing chair. He had fed babies before. He had looked after Emma. He knew what to do.

But there was something about the darkness. The sudden quiet relief as the baby took the bottle. The feel of that sweet, strong pull of her mouth. Looking down at her, Bran experienced an uncontrollable surge of emotion.

He did not have uncontrollable surges of emotion.

But it had surged indeed, up from the depths of his belly. An acidic-tanged darkness. It had forced his heart into his throat. He had choked on it.

*

It had started before then.

It had started from the bushes. Wrapped in his wolf’s boiling fur, swallowing his growls, he had watched as Sam bounced around with Charles in his arms, trying to placate him. He had been singing something that had Charles’s sobs waning, turning into childish giggles.

Frog went walking on a summer's day ahum…

Frog went walking on a summer's day ahum…

Saliva pooled in his mouth, even as Bran mourned.

*

It had started when his eldest son, blooded from hip to chin, had held out a squalling, unwanted babe to him. “Hold him, Da,” he’d croaked, and there had been tear tracks down his suddenly ancient face. “I’m sorry.”

*

It had started when the woman he loved had taken his hand and laid it across her belly, and her smile had stretched for miles.

*

It had started, oh so long ago, as he watched his children die one after the other.

Samuel’s beloved brothers and sisters.

And, much later, the handful of children born to women of whom he had been fond but had been temporary comfort in his life, children whose care he’d paid for but from whom he’d kept his distance.

Grandchildren. Great-great-children. Those pieces of his damned magical bloodline, snuffed out before their time.

It had always been better to forget.

But he never could.

*

On the skirt of the mountainside, very much in the present, Leah crept closer to him. Her arms reached around his neck, wrapping him close, the baby between them. Hiding him. Cocooning them in the darkness together.

Her cheek brushed his, wet. “It’s okay,” she whispered to him. She kissed his jaw. Her thumb wiped under his eye. “It’s okay.”

*

This time Bran did not knock. He crept through his son’s home and took a moment to take it in. The instruments on the walls, the art, the framed family photographs. He was in one or two, as was Leah. There were things everywhere. Toys, books, devices, used glasses and an empty chip packet squished down the back of the couch. The couch cushions had dents in where the family had curled up together in the corner, a blanket crumpled to one side, a pair of child’s slippers tumbled on the floor.

Once upon a time, Charles’s home had been near-sterile in its neatness. Now it was lived in. Untidy.

He passed down the hallway to Charles’s office and there he hesitated before the closed door.

Charles was alert to him.

“Da?” asked his youngest son but no longer his youngest child.

Bran pushed open the door, just as he had done not so long ago. Charles faced him, headphones in his hands and a look of expectation. “What is it? Something wrong?”

“I have to tell you something.”

“Sounds serious.”

Bran nodded. It was. It was serious and it was necessary – he just hadn’t known it. The words that had been bubbling up came forth. And they were easy. “Your mother wanted you, deeply. She dreamed of you, when she was a child. I never told you that. She— communicated it to me, when she told me she was pregnant. She was overjoyed.”

His son’s mouth was agape. Bran wasn’t certain how he could have shocked Charles more. He would think on that, another time.

“I was not,” he said, slowly. “Firstly, because I didn’t believe she could overcome the pull of the moon. And I did not want her to be hurt when she could not. Then because— because I have always believed in balance. That our species’ fertility is, however much it pains me to say, so intermittent is for a reason. I thought a child borne in such a way would be unnatural. We argued. She was so happy and I…”

Words failed him. Not because he didn’t have them but because the overwhelming memory of their arguments, the expression of deep hurt on her face, flashed before him like a vision. It took his breath away.

“Was not,” Charles finished for him. The shock had ebbed into deep discomfort. A soul-deep sadness. Charles was looking down hard at his headphones. “I know, Da.”

Bran took a step further into the room, pushing the past aside, even as he used it to explain the present. “When she died, the wolf painted you as the reason for that death. There is no rationality with the monster. He did not understand that it was her will. In a way, I didn’t understand either – not for a long time afterwards. I still had hope, until the very end, and it was easier to place blame elsewhere. But you hold no responsibility for her choices. Nor mine.”

He took a deep breath – the oxygen much needed suddenly in this airless room, on this airless matter – and Charles seemed to mirror him, his chest filling, his spine straightening. His son’s eyes were rounded with emotion.

Bran continued, “The day Sherwood summoned me, I had decided to end it all. I was so tired of fighting him, tired of keeping his rage from you. So very tired. I was running until I couldn’t run any more.” And suddenly he could feel it. He could feel his paws hitting the ground, the weight of his wolf body, laid low after a decade of an internal battle. He had felt grey inside and out. Sucked dry. “Another few days and I would not have been able to save them.”

Charles’s lips parted in the pause, whether to say another ‘I know’, they would never find out for Bran took another step into the room and that stopped him. He stood before his son now. “I have regrets. All men as old as I do. I regret not seeing the joy of your birth, the way she did. Even in death, she celebrated you – her last smile was for you. I regret not being there for your childhood. I regret it wasn’t I who told you stories of your mother, who she was to me, instead of who she was to everyone else. I regret we do not speak of her. I regret that when I returned with Leah I did not… work to make us a family, instead I deliberately kept you apart. I regret that I… used you, as a weapon, and not as a son. I regret—”

“Da,” Charles said, interrupting. He was flushed. Overwhelmed. Almost vibrating. “You can stop. It’s fine.”

But Bran wasn’t finished. It was not ‘fine’. It had not ever been ‘fine’. “I am grateful, for Leah, for many things. In some senses, she gave me you. And I love you, my son. The world, my world, is a better place with you in it. Your mother was right. I am truly sorry I have never said this to you before.”

He exhaled in triumph, the need that had gathered in his chest easing for the first time in— well, forever. “There. That is what I came to say. There will no doubt be more to come but that is the heart of the matter.”

His son was frequently a man of thoughtful silence. And Bran had embarrassed him – of course he had. Their family had never been communicative in this way. Bran had never been communicative. He had assumed his children knew he loved them but his relationship with Charles had always been different.

Charles ceased fiddling with his headphones. He put them down, blinking rapidly. “Thank you, Da. That is— I appreciate you saying this. It’s good to hear it said.” His mouth quirked into a boyishly shy smile. “Very good.”

Bran smiled back. “I’m glad. I am sorry it is rather late in coming.”

His son’s mouth wavered a little. “I know, well, Bother Wolf knew, some of it, as you know. I have always understood.” Not allowing Bran to comment on that – Charles’s ready acceptance of Bran’s flaws as a father – he asked curiously, “What brought this on?”

“Becoming a father again at my geriatric age has apparently brought up some deep-seated emotional distress.”

Bran flung a hand in the air, as if he could care less when – obviously – the opposite was true. Spending the last few weeks uncontrollably weeping over a child in the dark was not the sign of a man who had a strong grip on his mental health. “I’m sure Anna will have a name for it.” Leah certainly did. Post-traumatic stress, was one such name. She had several others. The self-help books had made a disappointing return.

Charles’s smile became broad. Big and beautiful and somehow happy. “I’m sure she does.”

Snorting, Bran rested his hand on Charles’s shoulder and squeezed. Then he leaned forward to kiss Charles on the forehead.

Before, finally, he returned to a love language they both knew. “Do you want to go for a run?”

-end