Blood Challenge

TWENTY-FIVE

THE cane stayed behind.

Benedict worked this out logically. If he brought it along after that firm refusal, she’d be annoyed and more determined than ever not to use the thing, even if she needed it. More important, though, it was the wrong thing to do. Children needed to have limits set for them. Arjenie wasn’t a child. She was his to protect, but not from herself. Not from the consequences of her own decisions.

That was the problem.

He’d dreamed of Claire last night. Once that had been common, but not these days. Still, he supposed it would have been more surprising if she hadn’t shown up. In the dream, he’d been at his cabin, which had mysteriously sprouted a new room. A bedroom. Arjenie had been asleep in the new bedroom when Claire walked in.

Sometimes his subconscious was damned unsubtle. “I thought we’d look in at the center first,” he said as he and his new Chosen left his father’s house.

“What’s that?”

“Our child care and community center. We don’t get cable out here, so there’s a satellite dish and a big-screen TV at the center for those who want to watch HBO or Showtime.” He glanced at her. “But maybe you knew about that.”

Arjenie looked apologetic. “The satellite dish does show up on aerial photos. So does the playground equipment. But, um, I haven’t seen inside your center.”

“Nice to know a few things aren’t in the government’s files. We’ll go to baby room first,” he said, opening the front door and stepping out ahead of her. The human courtesy of waiting for the woman to go through a door was all flourish, no sense. If any danger waited on the other side of a door, he’d rather meet it himself, not send her into it.

“Baby room?”

She was moving easily, he noted. Just as she’d said, her ankle wasn’t bothering her. He kept his pace slow. “Where the tenders mind the clan’s babies. Any who are here, that is. Obviously a lot of them won’t be. Even when the father has or shares custody, he may not live close enough to use the center regularly.”

She nodded seriously. “The courts haven’t been exactly friendly to lupus dads. I know Mr. Turner—Isen’s son, I mean, Rule Turner—wasn’t able to have custody of his son until recently.”

Rule’s custody hearing had made headlines—especially since it coincided with a string of supernatural murders. “Some mothers won’t share custody with a lupus father, and until recently there was no chance of pursuing legal remedies. Still not much point in it, in most places. And many of the mothers who do share custody live too far away for their babies to be tended here when they’re at work.” Of course, some women—like Rule’s mother—handed their babies over to their lupus fathers as fast as they could. They didn’t want a child who was going to turn furry one day.

The gravel path didn’t seem to be giving her any trouble. “If I understand correctly,” she said, “that would be girl babies and boy babies both, right? You consider your female children part of the clan even though they can’t Change.”

They also couldn’t be included in the mantle, but he wasn’t going to explain mantles yet. “Is that in the FBI’s files?”

“Well, yes.”

“Your file’s right. Our daughters are clan. Their children aren’t, but are considered ospi, or friends of the clan. Several of the babies and younger children at the center are ospi.”

“You provide child care for them, too? Even though they aren’t clan?”

“Babies are babies.” It was beyond Benedict’s understanding that, in the human world, there were children who went unclaimed, unwanted. Logically he could see that a race as astonishingly fecund as humanity could afford to be careless with its young, but everything in him revolted at the idea.

To be fair, many humans were revolted by it, too.

She fell silent as they reached the road that circled the meeting field, a grassy swathe that anchored the little village at Clanhome’s heart. The center was about two miles away, on the southeast corner of the meeting field; Isen’s house was at the northern end, banked up against the mountains.

It was a typical fall day for their corner of the county—sunny and warm, the sky blue enough to raise an ache in the heart, spotted here and there with puffs of white. A breeze tugged at Benedict’s shirt sleeves and tangled itself up in the riot of Arjenie’s hair. She’d left it down today, and it shone in the sun like molten copper.

The wind smelled of cholla and pine, rabbit and dirt … of home.

It was good to be walking here on this hard-packed dirt road, smelling home and feeling the sun’s warmth. Good to be alive to feel these things. Even after the overmastering pain had subsided, it had taken him years to be able to feel that simple joy, untainted by guilt. How, he had wondered, could he exult in life, when Claire would never feel these things again?

He’d finally understood that his grief and guilt added nothing to the short span of Claire’s life. He’d had the question backward. The real question was: How could he not?

He was glad now that he’d lived. Life wasn’t a burden taken up because his Rho insisted he was needed, and it hadn’t been for a long time. Life was what it was. Short or long, bitter or sweet, life simply was.

As Claire had reminded him tartly last night. Quit feeling sorry for yourself, she’d said. Good God. What’s so special about pain? About fear? You know fear. Even back when we were together—and you know, you really weren’t that bright about some things back then—you understood fear better than me. I went crashing around, smashing into everything so I wouldn’t have to face my fear. You told me then I had to face it, accept it.

She’d snorted. It had sounded just like her, too. Some reason you want to make my mistakes instead of finding one of your own?

Smart Claire.

Maybe it really had been her he spoke with in the dream, not just the promptings of some buried, wiser self. Maybe not. Benedict knew there was something beyond death. He didn’t know if that something allowed a woman who’d been dead for forty-two years to drop in on him in his sleep. It seemed possible. And impossible to know for sure.

And it didn’t matter. Benedict drew a deep breath, looking around at so much that he loved … none of which was guaranteed to last until tomorrow. He’d lay down his life to make it last, if necessary, but even then he didn’t get any guarantees.

Fear could be helpful, if you learned the right things from it. Or it could make you helpless. He was tired of being helpless. “You’re quiet,” he said to the woman walking beside him. Walking, not limping.

“Every now and then,” she agreed. “It doesn’t happen often, but now and then I stop talking. I was wondering … you said you were a father.”

“Yes.” He might as well tell her. She would be learning a great many of their secrets. “What did you wonder?”

“Pretty much everything. Do you have a son or a daughter? Will we see him or her at the center, or is your child older, or not living nearby? What about the mother? Do you have custody, or … you’re laughing at me.”

Yes. Yes, he was. That felt good, too. “You’ve kept a lot of questions pent up.”

“I was waiting for you to finish that thinking you were doing. It seemed to be making you feel better. Lighter.”

He cocked his head, curious. Most people couldn’t read him at all. Especially humans, who couldn’t use scent as a guide. “It did. I have one child, a daughter. Nettie Two Horses.”

For some reason, that delighted her. “The doctor who treated me is your daughter?”

He nodded. “You may be surprised by her appearance when you meet her.”

“She doesn’t look like you?”

“Around the eyes she does. She’s got her mother’s chin and jaw, and her mouth is a feminine version of Isen’s. But that wasn’t what I meant.” He paused. “She’s fifty-two.”

She blinked. “Oh. Oh! I was right! You don’t age the way humans do.”

He stopped, staring. “You know?”

“I didn’t know until you said that, but I guessed. I mean, it’s logical, isn’t it? If you heal damage almost perfectly, you’d heal free radical damage, too, so you’d age more slowly. Oh! Is that why you don’t use your original surname? Because it might give away your real age?”

Urgently he said, “Does the government—”

“No, no.” She patted his arm reassuringly. “That isn’t in any of the files I have access to. And I access Restricted and Confidential information routinely, and am cleared for Secret if I jump through the right hoops, and even Top Secret with specific authorization. Generally, if I run across a pertinent reference that involves Top Secret material—some of the Secret files are heavily redacted Top Secret material—I simply annotate it to that effect, and the agent making the inquiry can either request the complete file or not. But I’ve read pretty much everything the Bureau knows about your people. That information isn’t in the files.”

He wasn’t reassured. “Who have you told?”

“No one. Like I said, I was just guessing, and I understand the need to keep some things secret. Even basically nice people might start envying lupi your longevity, and envy can be extremely toxic. Though I don’t think you’ll be able to keep it secret forever.”

“Probably not,” he said, his voice very dry. “If you can make that connection, others can, and will.” They’d known the day was coming. From the moment Rule went public, it had been inevitable. Eventually people would notice that “the werewolf prince” looked the same in his recent photos as he had five years ago. Or ten.

“So how old are you?” She flushed. “I guess that’s rude, but I’d really like to know.”

“Seventy.”

“Wow. That’s just … wow. You were really young when Nettie was born.”

“Young and foolish. No more so than most at that age, I suppose. I had a lot of help raising Nettie, both in her mother’s tribe and here. I needed it.”

“Nettie. That’s such a pretty name. Old-fashioned. It comes from the German nette, I think, which means clean or nice.”

His eyebrows climbed. “You know German?”

“I read it. I don’t speak it very well. I can read a lot of languages I can’t speak.”

“How many?”

“Um … twelve?” She wrinkled her nose as if dissatisfied with her own answer. “More or less, and not fluently, except for the Latin languages. Just enough to see if a text has what I’m looking for, mostly. And it has to be a language using the Roman alphabet. Well, except for Greek, which I can wade through slowly, and I’ve got a teensy bit of Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. But I don’t know hanzi or kanji at all.”

His eyebrows climbed. “You’re apologizing for only being able to read in three alphabets?”

She flushed. “I’m a little self-conscious about it. People think, wow, you know all those languages? You must be a brain and a half! But I’m not, as my grades in calculus proved. I just have a really good memory, especially for things I read. Not a photographic memory, which some experts think is strictly a savant ability, though I read this article that said … never mind. That’s not pertinent. My point is, being able to remember things can be handy, but it isn’t the same as being able to synthesize or draw accurate conclusions or come up with new ideas.”

“Is an unusually good memory a sidhe characteristic?”

“Not as far as I know. I think it’s just me.”

He smiled suddenly. “I guess you remember the first words you said to me, then.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, you’re going to tease me.”

“Nice doggie?”

“I was shook up,” she said with dignity.

“You knew I wasn’t a dog.”

“I may not be a genius, but I’m not stupid.”

And yet it was common for a lupus in wolf form to pass for one of their domesticated cousins. People saw what they expected to see. “What are the visible differences between a dog and a wolf?”

She snorted softly. “Aside from sheer size? You’re a very large wolf, Benedict. But okay, I’ll play. On the whole, wolves have longer legs, longer muzzles, and larger feet. The legs are a particular giveaway. Malamutes—who look more like wolves than most dogs—have curly tails, while wolves’ tails are straight. There’s a difference with the teeth, too, but I didn’t see yours, so that doesn’t count.”

He smiled at having his guess confirmed. “You also knew I wasn’t only a wolf.”

“You didn’t act like a wolf. You weren’t upset by my nearness—and wolves aren’t comfortable being around people, you know. Plus I was fairly close to your Clanhome, so that made it more likely you were a lupus. I’m ninety-five percent sure there aren’t any wild wolves in the area.”

“Ninety-five?”

“None have been sighted in recent years. I suspect other wolves avoid your territory. But while a lack of sightings might be highly suggestive, it isn’t proof, so I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure.”

She’d figured out all that while crippled from a fall and scared half out of her mind. With armed militia in the area and an extremely large wolf watching her, she’d sorted through her prodigious memory and come up with logical possibilities. Benedict smiled. “You’re wrong about your intelligence. You don’t simply remember things. You apply what you know to your situation, even under strong stress.”

She turned pink with pleasure or embarrassment. “I think I take more comfort from facts than a lot of people do, so when I’m under stress, my mind naturally zooms in that direction.”

For whatever reason, she didn’t like thinking of herself as unusually bright, though she clearly was. Maybe she already felt a little too different from everyone else, given her heritage. He held out his hand.

She blinked, then smiled shyly and took it.

That, too, felt good. Incredibly damned good. He wanted to … but he wouldn’t. Not now. For now, it was enough to hold her hand, learn about her, walk with her. His Chosen. “Let’s go look at the babies.”

Arjenie liked the baby room, and she liked the babies. She knew how to hold them, too, how to make funny faces and tickle. One of her cousins, she said, had been a late-life baby, so she’d gotten some practice there, plus she used to babysit in high school. Benedict learned the name of that much-younger cousin, and of several others. He learned the names of her uncles and aunts, too—five uncles named Delacroix, one of them married to her mother’s sister.

None of her uncles were related to her by blood. Most of her cousins weren’t, either.

Arjenie came from a large and loving family, but only her aunt Robin and her aunt’s children were family by blood. It didn’t seem to matter to her. She claimed them and they claimed her. It was like clan, Benedict thought. Blood mattered, but the claiming mattered more.

They visited the toddlers, then headed to the barracks for lunch. Benedict made sure his people ate well; lunch was chili and cornbread today. She ate a big bowl and two pieces of cornbread, and chatted easily with men who’d helped capture her two nights ago. Then they checked out the new nursery, where Samuel was growing native plants to sell to local garden centers. She asked Samuel a lot of questions, no doubt sorting the new information away tidily in the encyclopedia in her head.

As Benedict stored away the sight, sound, and scent of her in his head. Each moment was clear and precious. He’d told her he was taking time off. That was true, as far as his duties were concerned. His second was handling drill and routine security. That wasn’t unusual. Benedict left Pete in charge when he was up at his cabin or taking a new batch of youngsters into the wilderness for combat training.

But this wasn’t a normal time. His Rho believed their ancient enemy was active in their world once more and moving against them.

That was seriously bad news, yet on a personal level, it was a relief. A huge relief. The Lady hadn’t gifted Benedict with a second Chosen because of anything about him. It wasn’t personal at all. She’d done it because, for whatever reasons, the clans needed Arjenie. The Lady needed Arjenie. This meant that by protecting Arjenie, Benedict acted on the Lady’s side and for the good of his people.

He was free to protect her. Whatever it took.

Rule had called Benedict three times today. The first was to let him know that he and Lily would be returning today. They should arrive around supper, and would be staying at Clanhome for a while. The other two involved selecting the specific location for the heirs’ circle. With the venue changed so abruptly, that was a scramble. Rule had to present the other Lu Nuncios with a choice of sites, then all five had to agree on one.

Amazingly, they had. Now it fell to Benedict to assure the security, first, of his own Lu Nuncio—and second, of all the others. He should be at that site now, reacquainting himself with it.

He wasn’t. He was going to have to tell Arjenie about the mate bond, and soon. Everything would change then.

This wasn’t time off. It was time stolen.

“You’re not supposed to just pick people up,” she’d said when he first captured her. She’d offered several variations on that theme. He wasn’t to pick her up without her permission.

“I have a strong sense of privacy,” she’d told him when she learned he’d opened the bathroom door a bit . “I don’t like having that intruded upon.”

She hadn’t liked it when he listened to her voice mail, either. And when Seabourne spotted the binding last night and held her still so he could study it, she’d told him, “I don’t like being grabbed.”

Arjenie did not tolerate being physically forced or intruded upon. Just this morning she’d said it again. “Ask. You have to ask.”

Maybe that was a quality innate to the sidhe; he didn’t know enough about them to say. Maybe it had developed because of multiple operations and long hours in the hospital when she’d had so little control over who touched her, what was done to her. Maybe it was just her, like her prodigious memory. Whatever the reason, Arjenie could not stand to be physically constrained.

At first he’d thought her reaction no more than what anyone would feel. She wasn’t fiery, like Claire. She didn’t scream or lose control. But after enough repetition, even he could get the point, however politely it was made. Arjenie did not want to be touched, held, or helped without permission. You had to ask first.

The Lady hadn’t asked. Arjenie was bound to Benedict for the rest of her life—physically bound—and she’d been given no choice in the matter.

But “for the rest of her life” wasn’t entirely accurate, was it?

It had always been within Benedict’s power to release Claire from the mate bond. He’d hadn’t once seriously considered it. And in truth, Nettie had been only nine, so he couldn’t have offered that particular solution if he’d wanted to.

He hadn’t wanted to. Back then, he’d never tasted real failure. Oh, he’d worked for success, not waited for it to fall in his lap. He might have been arrogant as hell, but he hadn’t been an idiot. That had only served to convince him he deserved success. By the time he met Clare at the age of twenty-seven, he’d been spoken of by some as the top warrior of his generation—and by a few as the greatest warrior of the century. He had a daughter, his smart and shining Nettie, whom he’d sired when he was only eighteen, and she spent the school year with him, the summers with her mother. That had been a rare arrangement back then.

Not that he’d known how to fully appreciate Nettie. He’d loved her, sure—she’d been the central joy of his life. But he’d also figured it was only a matter of time before he had a son or two as well.

Then the Lady had gifted him with a Chosen.

A man who’d never failed sure as hell wasn’t going to fail with such a precious gift. Sooner or later, he’d been sure, Claire would become reconciled to the bond. It wasn’t as if she didn’t care about him. She cared deeply, passionately. He just had to be patient, find ways to distract her, make the bond rest as lightly on her as possible. When that didn’t work, he’d focused on keeping her from doing anything irrevocable.

Like driving her car off a cliff.

Benedict had never believed Claire did it on purpose. There had been a cop at the hospital who’d said … but Isen had held Benedict down. The officer had probably never guessed how close he’d come to dying that night.

Claire had always loved to take risks, to push herself, but when he first met her, those risks had been leavened by practicality, practice, and planning. She threw knives for a living, but she’d tried other acts, too—high-wire, trapeze. He’d taught her to skydive. She’d loved it.

Claire had always been restless, too. She’d grown up in the circus and was used to constant travel, but the mate bond wouldn’t allow that. Not unless Benedict went with her. He’d gone with her as much as he could, but she’d hated knowing her freedom was forever limited by what he agreed to do.

The bond also meant that she couldn’t marry. Ever. Wildly unconventional in so many ways, his Claire had wanted marriage, wanted it badly.

The coastal road had been slick with rain that night. Claire had been furious, frantic. And pregnant.

They’d fought when she told him. At least, she had. He’d tried to calm her down, but as usual, that only infuriated her. There was no guarantee he’d be able to give her a baby himself, so in spite of his sorrow that this baby wasn’t his, he could rejoice that she would have a child of her own. He would gladly raise it with her.

That wasn’t what she wanted. He wasn’t sure she’d known herself what she wanted from him by then. Jealousy, maybe. She would have understood that. Or maybe she’d wanted exactly what she said she did. The demand she’d hurled at him had been simple enough: Marry me or get out of my life.

He couldn’t do either one. And she couldn’t understand why. Why couldn’t he thumb his nose at the “lupi don’t marry” dictum? Hadn’t she thumbed her nose at everyone by taking up with him in the first place?

By then he’d been tired of explaining. Tired of her irrationality, her refusal to believe him or accept the reality of the bond. When she’d flung herself out the door and into the jazzy little convertible he’d bought her for her birthday, he hadn’t called her back.

She’d died on the operating table.

As they left the nursery, a big yellow Lab came romping up, trying to coax them to play. Arjenie laughed and rumpled his ears, which reduced him to bliss. Benedict introduced them.

“Mondo?” Upon hearing his name, the dog immediately plopped down and offered his belly for a rub. She grinned, bent down, and complied. “What a perfect name for this big guy. He’s huge, all right. Though I don’t think he fits the Spanish meaning of ‘clean.’ ”

“You know a lot about the meanings of names.”

“It’s sort of a hobby of mine. My name doesn’t have a meaning.”

Startled, he said, “None?”

“Not in our realm, anyway. It comes close to a lot of words or names in various languages, but I’ve never found an exact match.” She straightened, much to Mondo’s disappointment. “Just before he left, Eledan told my mother that if she did bear his child she was to name it Arjenie if it was a girl, Arjana if it was a boy. She always said it was a good thing I turned out to be female. Can you imagine naming some poor boy Arjana?”

“She named you to please your father?”

Arjenie looked wistful. “I don’t know. Eledan told her that names affect the sidhe in ways they don’t affect humans, and that seems to be true. Mom said she didn’t know enough to name me properly herself, while Eledan had had a great deal of practice naming his babies.”

He’d touched her cheek before he had time to remember that touching her was a bad idea. Her skin was so soft. He stroked his thumb across that warm, smooth skin. “That makes you sad.”

“It made her sad. Not all the time, but sometimes. Sometimes I’d see her sitting quietly, looking out the window, and I knew she was thinking of him. Remembering. Wanting him to come back, even though she knew he wouldn’t stay. But he—he’d told her he’d come back one day. Not right away, because he was a foolish and distractible fellow. Those were his words, and when he said it he laughed in this way that always made her smile when she told the story. She wasn’t to expect him on any particular day, for he was blasted if he could see how anyone knew what they’d do tomorrow, much less a year or ten from now. But one day he’d come back to check on her.” She swallowed. “He did, too. He came to check on her … two years after she died.”

He kissed her.

There was no thought to it, no plan, no reason. And every reason. She jolted when his lips touched hers, then went still. He kissed her softly, learning the taste and feel of her mouth, and then he made another mistake. With his lips touching hers, he breathed deeply of her scent.

Fire leaped in him, and need—need so strong it made his breath jerk in his throat and almost, almost, made him reach for her with his hands as well. But some dim remnant of reason told him that if he did that, he wouldn’t stop.

And he had to stop. His head was light and empty, dizzy with hunger, when he lifted it, breaking the kiss. Her hands clutched his arms. She looked as undone as he felt.

“What …” She stopped. Swallowed. “What was that? I mean, I know it was a kiss, but it was—I never—”

“A summary,” he told her, his voice hoarse. “You’ll get the full report soon, but right now we both have to settle for a summary.”

She shook her head. “You’re not making sense. You aren’t … you can’t do a glamour, can you? Like the sidhe?”

Like her father had done to her mother, she meant. He looked at her wide, wary eyes, and sorrow took him by the throat and shook him like a terrier shakes a rat. “No.” He forced that word out, then found a few more. “We’d better get back. Sun’s on its way down. Rule and Lily will be here soon.”

“Okay.” But her brows remained pleated in a small, worried frown. “Are they going to answer some of my questions?”

He managed a wry smile. “I don’t know. Can you wait until tomorrow to have them answered?”

Her chin tilted up. “I can. I don’t want to.”

When he held out his hand she looked more worried than shy. She hesitated for several long heartbeats. But she did take it.

His stolen time was ending. He’d known that it would. The sweetness of their afternoon together was marred now by all he wasn’t telling her. And she sensed that.

Tonight, then. He would tell her tonight. But he would make it clear that if she couldn’t tolerate the bond, there was an alternative. Not a good one, but sometimes all the choices were ill.

If everything went to hell, Benedict would release Arjenie in the only way he could. It was not a solution he liked, nor was it without risk for her. But if she grew frantic and miserable and dangerous to herself … well, Nettie was an adult now. He didn’t fool himself that she’d understand. She wouldn’t. She’d hurt, and so would his father and brother. But it was his decision to make, not theirs.

There was only one way to dissolve the mate bond, but it was one that lay within Benedict’s power to grant. Death did the trick neatly. Only this time, he wouldn’t be the one death left behind.