Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

white-blue, colder than the snow I ran through, all the more startling for the black ring that edged his iris. There was plenty of room for me to dive under his belly and out the other side, leaving him between me and my pursuer.
    Before he had a chance to do more than give me that first startled look, Leah appeared, a gold-and-silver huntress, as beautiful as Samuel in her own way: light and fire where he was ice. She saw Samuel and skidded ungracefully to a halt. I suppose she’d been so hot on the chase she hadn’t been paying attention to Samuel’s call.
    I could see the instant he realized who I was. He cocked his head, and his body grew still. He recognized me all right, but I couldn’t tell how he felt about it. After the space of a deep breath, he turned back to look at Leah.
    Leah cringed and rolled onto her back—though as Bran’s wife she should have outranked Samuel.Unimpressed by the show, he curled his lips away from his fangs and growled, a deep rumbling sound that echoed in my chest. It felt just like old times: Samuel protecting me from the rest of the pack.
    A wolf howled, nearer than before, and Samuel stopped growling long enough to answer. He looked expectantly toward the north, and in a few minutes two wolves came into sight. The first one was the color of cinnamon with four black feet. He was a shade bigger even than Samuel.
    The second werewolf was considerably smaller. From a distance he could have passed as one of the wolves that had only this decade begun to return to Montana. His coat was all the shades between white and black, combining to make him appear medium gray. His eyes were pale gold, and the end of his tail was white.
    Charles, the cinnamon wolf, stopped at the edge of the trees and began to change. He was an oddity among werewolves: a natural-born werewolf rather than made. The only one of his kind that I have ever heard of.
    Charles’s mother had been a Salish woman, the daughter of a medicine man. She had been dying when Bran came across her, shortly after he arrived in Montana. According to my foster mother, who told me the story, Bran had been so struck with her beauty that he couldn’t just let her die, so he Changed her and made her his mate. I never could wrap my imagination around the thought of Bran being overcome by love at first sight, but maybe he had been different two hundred years ago.
    At any rate, when she became pregnant, she used the knowledge of magic her father had given her to keep from changing at the full moon. Female werewolves cannot have children: the change is too violent to allow the fetus to survive. But Charles’s mother, as her father’s daughter, had some magic of her own. She managed to carry Charles to term, but was so weakened by her efforts that she died soon after his birth. She left her son with two gifts. The first was that he changed easier and faster. The second was a gift for magic that was unusual in werewolves. Bran’s pack did nothave to hire a witch to clean up after them; they had Charles.
    Bran, the smaller of the two wolves, continued on to where I stood awaiting him. Samuel stepped aside reluctantly, though he was still careful to keep between Leah and me.
    There was no sense of power about Bran, not like the one his sons and Adam carried—I’m not certain how he contained it. I’ve been told that sometimes even other werewolves, whose senses are sharper than mine, mistake him for a real wolf or some wolf-dog hybrid to account for his size.
    I don’t know how old he is. All I know is that he was old when he came to this continent to work as a fur trapper in the late eighteenth century. He’d traveled to this area of Montana with the Welsh cartographer David Thompson and settled to live with his Salish mate.
    He padded up to me and touched his muzzle behind my ear. I didn’t have to sink submissively to be lower than he, but I hunched down anyway. He took my nose between his fangs and released it, a welcome and a gentle chiding all in one—though I wasn’t certain what he was chiding me for.
    Once he released me, he stalked past Samuel and stared down at his wife, still lying in the snow. She whined anxiously and he bared his teeth, unappeased. It seemed that even though he’d once asked me to leave, I wasn’t to be viewed as fair game.
    Bran turned his back on her to look at Charles, who had completed his transformation and stood tall and human.