Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega 4)

“Charles asked me to stay here,” she said, rather than confronting Hosteen with his lie. “You aren’t my Alpha—and even if you were, he can’t make me do anything, either.” She tapped herself in the chest with one of her needles and half sang, “Omega. Me.” Dropping into her own voice, she said, “As an Omega wolf, I don’t have the urge to obey you. At all. Not even the tiniest bit. Don’t worry, it makes the Marrok crazy, too.” There was another of those funny holes in the row of otherwise neat stitches she’d just finished.

“What do you think I’m going to do to her?” he asked. “She’s the mother of my great-grandchildren.”

Anna met his eyes. “Then why do you want to be alone with her so badly?”

He flinched from her gaze. “Two wolves aren’t necessary,” he said. “I can keep her wolf in line, and you are, forgive me, not family.”

“I can help her keep herself in line,” she told him, “because I am an Omega wolf.” She quit speaking, holding up her knitting again. There was another stupid hole. “But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to protect her from you.”

He turned his back to her altogether, Anna wasn’t sure why. Alphas, she’d noticed, had weird reactions to Omega wolves. He could be ashamed, or he could be fighting off his temper.

“Witches are evil,” he said without turning around. He was telling the truth as he knew it. Mostly as Anna knew it, as well.

“So I’ve noticed,” she agreed.

He turned back to her, his surprise evident. Some idiot had been arguing that point, evidently. Anna hadn’t been in the supernatural world long, but the scariest person she’d encountered (other than the Marrok himself) had been a witch.

“Most of them, anyway,” she continued. “But you can tell when they’ve turned.” She tapped her nose with the end of one of her needles and went back to work.

“All witches are evil,” he told her.

She pursed her lips. “A fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos.”

“By their fruits shall you know them?” He didn’t have any trouble with her Latin—she must be getting better. “She tried to kill her own children. That is her fruit.”

“No,” she said patiently, though she didn’t know exactly why she was arguing with him. Kage had been married to Chelsea long enough to have two children. If his own grandson hadn’t changed Hosteen’s mind, she probably wasn’t going to be able to. Her job was just to keep Chelsea safe. “You know that. She didn’t kill her children, though she was under a strong fae compulsion. Charles thinks that it was her witch blood that let her resist. The fae don’t break their spells with ‘blood and spit,’ that’s a witch thing. She bled herself nearly to death to keep from doing evil. That is, in my book, the very opposite of evil.”

After a moment of silence, Hosteen came over to her and sat on his heels in front of the rocking chair, putting his head level with hers. “You’re doing it wrong.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“The knitting,” he told her, his face still serious. He indicated her beginning-of-a-sweater-for-Charles with a jerk of his chin. “You have holes. You’ve been letting your yarn get in front of your knitting. That’s why you aren’t getting a solid pattern.”

Anna brought her knitting up where she could examine it, as if she hadn’t already noticed the stupid holes—seven of them scattered irregularly.

“You aren’t paying attention to your yarn,” he said. “We all do it once in a while, pay so much attention to making things right that you make mistakes in the simple things. If the yarn is in front, between your needles while you’re knitting, you’re actually purling where you should be knitting. It leaves a hole. It’s a legitimate stitch, actually; it’s called a yarn over.”

“Son of a gun,” she said. “That’s where those little suckers are coming from.”

He laughed, sounding tired.

“You know how to knit?” Anna asked. She was going to have to unravel it down to the first few rows to get rid of them all.

Hosteen nodded. “My mother taught me to weave. I enjoy it; most of the rugs you see in this house are mine. But weaving takes a loom and sometimes it is good to have something to do with your hands. So I learned to knit and crochet and cross-stitch.”

“I thought that traditionally weaving was a woman’s thing among the Navajo?”

He snorted. “Navajo men did what there was to do—just as Navajo women did.”

Anna sighed, looked at the inches of sweater she’d managed, and then pulled on the loose yarn to unravel it.

Hosteen sighed, too, his sigh quieter than Anna’s had been.

“You think,” Anna said gently, “it might just be possible that you may have been paying so much attention to the duty that requires you to keep your pack and your family safe that you might have made a little, very important misjudgment?” she asked.

Hosteen said, “In my experience, either witches are evil, or they are victims waiting until one of their kind notices them and comes hunting. At which time many people who cared about the white witch die as well.”

“Okay,” agreed Anna easily, watching the unraveling piece in her lap instead of looking at Hosteen. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable now that he was actually talking to her, but she wasn’t going to make a big thing about dropping her eyes for him, either. No sense in letting him think that he was her boss.

“I mostly agree,” she continued. “I know exactly four exceptions to that rule: Charles, the Marrok, Samuel, and a witch I know in Seattle.”

“Bran and his sons don’t count. If a witch has power enough to defend herself, she has sacrificed someone for it,” Hosteen said unequivocally.

“Sacrifice, yes,” Anna conceded. “But the witch I knew paid the price for her power herself rather than hurt anyone else. She isn’t evil, and she is very powerful.” It was discouraging how quickly the beginnings of a sweater turned into a loose pile of yarn. She took the ball and began winding, careful not to stretch the yarn out as she put it back on the ball. “Why do you think the Marrok and his sons don’t count?”

“They are werewolves,” he said, taking her bait.

She’d learned to argue from her father, a very good lawyer. “Let them argue themselves into your court if you can manage it,” he’d told her. “They’ll do a better job of convincing themselves than you ever could.”