“When you are ready to go,” agreed Charles. “But not when you have three young children who need you. Do you think she would have chosen death over being a werewolf?”
Joseph didn’t answer. It was a big question, and he liked to take his time with those.
“He’s softer than I remember him,” Kage said as he drove Anna back to the house. “Your husband, Charles. Dad would be so happy when he’d come visit, but he scared the pants off me. Mom would get this funny look and do her best to find some reason to go visit relatives. Sometimes she’d take me with her. He always looked at me like he was deciding how best to kill me.”
Anna couldn’t help but laugh. “I’ve seen that look,” she said. “If it helps, I think it’s his default when he’s worried about something. Not usually murder.” Usually when he kills, his face is very quiet. It doesn’t look like he’s thinking at all.
“But he wasn’t like that today,” Kage said.
She made a neutral noise and then caught herself. She didn’t talk about her husband to people, but he was right, Charles had been softer with him. “You know what his job is, right?”
Kage nodded. “Bran’s troubleshooter and assassin.”
“That’s right,” she said. “It means that he can’t care about anyone, you know? Because that might be the guy who goes nuts and starts a bloodbath Charles has to finish. It was worse after the werewolves came out because it meant that little bit of gray area that allowed him not to kill every-freaking-body who didn’t toe the line disappeared.”
Kage stiffened.
“Chelsea’s not home free,” she told him. “But she’s tough and she controls herself, right? I’ve seen her kids; they’ve grown up with rules tempered with love. That’s a good place to start if you become a werewolf.”
“But he could be the one called to take care of her if something goes wrong,” he said.
“Probably not,” she disagreed. “That would be your grandfather.”
“Hosteen?” Kage swallowed. “He’d kill her just because.”
She started to protest, then swallowed it. She didn’t know Hosteen; she couldn’t offer reassurances about what Hosteen might or might not do.
They bumped along quietly for a little and then, when the lights of the house were visible, Anna said, “Anyway. Charles is hard. He has to be. Justice and law, right? Because without those he cannot function. He doesn’t get close to people—just his father, his brother, his foster sister, and me. And Joseph. That makes you important to him.”
He looked at her like he couldn’t figure out why she’d told him that.
“You can go to him for help,” she said. “That’s why he made you get mad at him—so you’d know he was safe. Hosteen has issues with Chelsea. If you think things are getting out of hand, you call us, okay? Charles isn’t soft. He can’t afford to be soft. But he is always just.” She smiled. “And he’s not afraid of Hosteen.”
Kage nodded. “Okay. I’ll keep it in mind.”
They pulled into the parking area next to the house. Kage walked back to the bedroom where his wife was, and Anna walked with him.
Chelsea slept, curled up in the corner of the bed. They’d left the lights on because nothing short of a nuclear explosion was going to wake her up.
Maggie was seated in a rocking chair, reading a book that she’d set down as soon as Kage appeared. Hosteen had a book, too, but his brooding unhappiness was strong enough that Anna’s wolf took a decided interest.
Maggie watched her son and then stood up. “Anna?” she said. “Could I have a word with you?”
“Do you think I did the wrong thing? Changing Chelsea instead of letting her die?” Charles asked, again. They were coming up to the house, but Charles drove past the turnoff for the driveway.
“Do I? Yes.” That was his friend. Blunt to the point of rudeness, but only with Charles. “Does she?” Joseph made an ambiguous sound that might have been a sigh if he’d had more air. “I think that in the heat of the moment, she would have fought for her life. Any kind of life. I think if you asked her right now, she’d say she was grateful. What she will say in five years or ten?” He shrugged.
“Did you know she was a witch?” Charles asked.
Joseph nodded. “She told me before she married my son. She wanted Maggie and me to understand what we were getting ourselves into. Black witches hunt down people like Chelsea; untrained witches apparently can feed them a lot of power. She’s pretty sure that her first husband was killed by a witch hunting her. She changed her name, bundled Max up, and moved from Michigan to Arizona. I told her that we already had werewolves; a witch would be a welcome change.”
“And Maggie?”
Joseph said, “It was the worst argument we ever had—and I don’t think either of us said a word about it.” He shrugged. “My father likes to argue, to use words. I think his way is better—but it is not Maggie’s way. So we were silent for a while and things went back to normal. Maggie likes her now.”
“But not Hosteen.”
Joseph frowned fiercely. “He keeps the old ways so alive he forgets what is true and what is false. He believes witches are evil because the Navajo stories of witches are all about evil witches. He still believes in the monsters in the stories his mother told him and her mother told her.”
“Navajo witchcraft is such that Navajo witches are evil. If they are not evil, then they are not witches,” Charles said. “And your father is right about the monsters. I’ve met a few of them. The worst monsters hide in plain sight.”
Joseph frowned at him. “Monsters here?”
“I’ve seen skinwalkers who wear the skins of dead men so they look like the person they have killed. I have seen the Cold Woman,” Charles said. He’d forgotten how easy it was to talk to Joseph. “So have you. Do you remember that woman in that old bar in Willcox? The persistent one who tried to get us both to come home with her?”
“Yes,” Joseph admitted. “You were pretty adamant that we had to wait for a friend we didn’t have.”
“Two men went missing that night and were found dead in their car a few weeks later a couple hundred miles away,” Charles said.
“She was the Cold Woman,” he said. “How did you know?”