“What you tried could have killed my mate,” said Charles softly, and everyone in the room who was not Anna stiffened. Funny how the man, even kneeling beside the couch, could cause so much fear. To her knowledge, he’d never killed anyone without just cause or the Marrok’s orders.
She leaned forward and caught a glimpse of his face.
“I think,” Anna said, touching Charles’s skin, just below his ear, so that he’d pay attention to her, “I think it was what I tried, actually. No one forced me to do anything.”
“Not true,” growled Asil sourly, “whatever you believe, chiquita. I was here, I saw him, felt him pull you into his nightmare. But, I, who was supposed to keep you safe, could do nothing because I was occupied holding him so he didn’t kill you physically instead of magically.”
Under her fingertips, Charles’s muscles tightened.
Anna glared at Asil. “So not helping,” she told him. “Okay, so I got yanked into Wellesley’s nightmare—”
“Soul,” said Wellesley.
“That isn’t quite right either,” Anna said. “Charles?”
There was a little silence, then Charles deliberately relaxed against her, wrapping one of his hands around her knee, which he squeezed. I’m onto you, that squeeze said.
“Vision,” said Charles, “or the Dreamtime, maybe.”
“It was a nightmarish vision, at any rate,” said Anna. “But once I was there, I could have left at any time. As long as I was willing to leave Wellesley’s wolf spirit bound in that witchcraft construct.” She couldn’t imagine doing that—not if she had a chance of freeing him. “But it was Wellesley’s own magic that turned the key, I think. You called it a spirit—was it a living thing that imprisoned your wolf?”
Wellesley nodded. “Magic is a living thing.”
Charles agreed with that assessment because he said, “You saw it as a plant, and that was fairly accurate, I think. Living, but not reasoning except in the most basic of drives.”
Wellesley took a sip of his wine, then tipped his cup to Asil. “I think it lasted so long because my own magic fed the spell. It was growing stronger, and I was growing weaker. I thought it was my wolf I was fighting, too, until Anna saw it with me. For me.”
“Cursed,” said Sage thoughtfully. “You were cursed, and Anna and Charles broke it? With a little help from the Marrok, our leader, who is absent?”
“In a nutshell,” said Anna.
Sage hummed, rubbed the rim of her glass with one of her well-tended nails. “There were rumors of a witch at Rhea Springs.”
“Yes,” Wellesley said heavily. “There was a witch. Or two.” He set his cup on the table and pushed it a little distance from him. “I don’t remember a lot more than before.” He glanced at Charles. “Do you still want this story?” When Charles nodded, Wellesley said, “I suppose it began with Chloe … with my wife’s death.”
Charles, who had settled down enough to take a seat on the floor beside the love seat, resting against Anna’s legs, raised a hand to stop Wellesley. He pursed his lips, and said, “You should begin this story where your wolf tells you to begin it.”
Wellesley reached out, took a gulp of his wine, and set the cup rather firmly on the table. “Where my wolf tells me …” He blew air out like a startled horse. “He tells me to begin with my Change. That has nothing to do with Rhea Springs.”
Charles grunted. Then he made an amused sound. “Maybe, maybe not. That first story is why, when given the choice, I brought you to my da instead of killing you for the murders of those young women.”
Wellesley blinked at Charles in evident dismay. “Hmm. I thought … Hmm. I guess I wasn’t thinking all too clearly then, anyway. I don’t tell that story. Only to your father—who told it to you, I suppose.”
“Before he sent me to Rhea Springs,” said Charles. “Because he knew what I would do with it. If your wolf tells you to start there, please, begin at the beginning.”
Wellesley looked at his cup, at his hands, around the room as if looking for something else to talk about. At last, his gaze settled on Anna. He sighed.
“All right. I was born somewhere in Africa. Probably near the western coast because that’s where most of the slaves came from. I suppose if I traveled back there, I might find it again, given a year or two to wander. But my village was destroyed, my parents killed by slavers, so there has never been any reason for me to return. I was around eleven or twelve at that time, preparing for my manhood ceremony, but still a boy.”
He closed his mouth, shook his head, then said, “I was taken, and none of the next five or six years are relevant to anyone except for me. I choose not to talk about them.”
He let that statement stand, glancing at Charles as if expecting an objection.
When no one said—or did—anything in response, he nodded. “So. In Barbados, I was bought by a man looking for, how did he put it? A strong subject. He bought six or seven of us, about the same age, and took us to an island in the Caribbean. It was not a large island, and he owned it all.”
He looked at Anna. “I never learned the name his own people would have called him, and I will not call him Master.”
“You could call him Moreau,” suggested Charles.
Wellesley gave him a quick, tight smile. “No. In the book, Moreau was a scientist, a doctor. The man who owned me was no mad scientist. He was simply evil, his soul destroyed by his own actions.
“But in the end, he is not important to the tale, this man who was not my master,” he said. “What is important is that man was raised, as many people in his class and station were, by servants and slaves. His nurse was an evil woman, a woman of power. She escaped hanging by fleeing aboard a ship headed to Barbados as a bondswoman.” Wellesley closed his mouth and shook his head slightly, as if the mere words had conjured up too much emotion to allow him to continue.
“Witch,” said Asil darkly into the pause, as if he could not help himself. “She was an Irish witch. It is true that she escaped hanging for the death of a child in her care, but I suspect that she was more frightened of the witches who were pursuing her for what she stole from them.”
“Who told you my story?” said Wellesley suspiciously.
“You did,” Asil told him. “This part at least. One night after a full moon, shortly after I arrived here.”
Wellesley stared at him, then looked down, frowning. At last he nodded. “Yes. Yes. I am sorry. My memory is tangled. I think I remember. You told me of your mate’s death. I told you … parts of this story.”
“You were talking of the nursemaid,” Sage said, her body leaning forward on the kitchen chair where she sat. She had a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the table.
Anna wondered what elements of Wellesley’s story had tangled with Sage’s own to make her engage so strongly with it. Sage wasn’t old, old. Older than she looked, maybe, but not old enough to have experienced institutionalized slavery. Maybe it was the witches. Witches tended to send the hairs on the back of Anna’s neck up, too.
“Yes,” agreed Wellesley. “The nursemaid was a witch. No one paid attention to such women. They were to keep quiet and do the work of raising the children. The children who were the future of the family. Someone, you would think, should have understood just how much power that gave them.” He shook his head with sorrowful incredulity. “This man’s nursemaid was a witch, Irish, yes, because her accent was still strong. But how she came to the Caribbean and why—this was all based on rumors in the slave pens. Who knows how much of it was true?” He sent a frowning look toward Asil.
“The Irish witch part was,” said Asil, when it seemed that Wellesley had quit speaking. “Sometime since I first heard your story, I realized that I knew another part of it. I knew the witches who were hunting that one. She stole a small book of family spells from one of the nastier witch clans in Northern Europe, the kind of spellbook witches kill for. As I know what that witch did—and I know the rumors of that family’s powers—it was not difficult to connect the two stories.”