Could he have made me submit to him on purpose? Was it physiological or parapsychological, science or magic? If I knew it was going to happen, could I resist it?
Who could I ask?
I looked at the car parked in the driveway. Samuel was home from his shift at the ER.
Samuel would know, if anyone did. I'd just have to figure out how to ask him. It was a testimony to how shaken up I was that I got to my feet and headed home with the intention of asking one werewolf, who had made it plain that he was only waiting to make his move on me, about the way another werewolf had made me desire him. I'm not usually that dumb.
I was already beginning to have doubts about the wisdom of my plans by the time I reached the front porch. I opened the door and was met by a frigid blast of air.
My old wall unit had been able to keep my bedroom about ten degrees cooler than the outside, which was all right with me. I like hot weather, but most of the wolves had trouble with it, which is why Samuel had installed the new heat pump and paid for it. A considerate roommate, he usually left the temperature where I set it.
I took a look at the thermostat and saw that Samuel had punched it down as far as it would go. It wasn't forty-two degrees inside, but it was trying. Pretty decent effort considering it was over a hundred degrees outside and my trailer had been built in 1978 before the days of manufactured homes with good insulation. I turned it to a more reasonable temperature.
"Samuel? Why'd you turn the temperature down so low?" I called, dropping my gi top on the couch.
There was no reply, though he had to have heard me. I walked through the kitchen area and into the hallway. Samuel's door was mostly shut, but he hadn't closed it all the way.
"Samuel?" I touched the door and it opened a foot or so, just enough that I could see Samuel stretched out on his bed, still in his hospital scrubs and smelling of cleanser and blood.
He had his arm over his eyes.
"Samuel?" I paused in the doorway to give my nose a chance to tell me what he was feeling. But I couldn't smell the usual suspects. He wasn't angry, or frightened. There was something... he smelled of pain.
"Samuel, are you all right?"
"You smell like Adam." He took his arm down and looked at me with wolf eyes, pale as snow and ringed in ebony.
Samuel isn't here today, I thought, trying not to panic or do any other stupid thing. I had played with Samuel's wolf as a child, along with all the other children in Aspen Springs. I hadn't realized how dangerous that would have been with any other wolf until I was much older. I would have felt better now, if those wolf eyes had been in the wolf body. Wolf eyes on a human face meant the wolf was in charge.
I'd seen new wolves lose control. If they did it very often, they were eliminated for the sake of the pack and everyone who came in contact with them. I'd only seen Samuel lose control once before-and that was after a vampire attack.
I sank down on the floor, making certain my head was lower than his. It was always an interesting feeling, making myself helpless in front of someone who might tear my throat out. Come to think of it, the last time I'd done this it had been with Samuel, too. At least I was acting out of self-preservation, not some buried compulsion to submit to a dominant wolf-I was faking it, not submitting because of some damn buried instinct.
After I told myself that, I realized it was true. I had no desire to cower before Samuel. Under other, less worrisome circumstances, I'd have been cheered up.
"Sorry," Samuel whispered, putting his arm back over his eyes. "Bad day. There was an accident on 240 near where the old Y interchange was. Couple of kids in one car, eighteen and nineteen years old. Mother with an infant in the other. All of them still in critical condition. Maybe they'll make it."
He'd been a doctor for a very long time. I didn't know what had set him off with this accident in particular. I made an encouraging sound.
"There was a lot of blood," he said at last. "The baby got pretty cut up from the glass, took thirty stitches to plug the leaks. One of the ER nurses is new, just graduated from the community college. She had to leave in the middle-afterward she asked me how I learned to manage so well when the victims were babies." His voice darkened with bitterness that I'd seldom heard from him before as he continued, "I almost told her that I'd seen worse-and eaten them, too. The baby would have only been a snack."
I could have left, then. Samuel had enough control left not to come after me-probably. But I couldn't leave him like that.
I crawled cautiously across the floor, watching him for a twitch of muscle that would tell me he was ready to pounce. Slowly I raised my hand up until it touched his. He didn't react at all.
If he'd been a new wolf, I'd have known what to say. But helping new wolves through this kind of situation had been one of Samuel's jobs in the pack I'd grown up in. There was nothing I could say that he didn't already know.
"The wolf is a practical beast," I told him, finally, thinking it might have been the thought of eating the baby that bothered him so much. "You're more careful what you eat. You aren't likely to pounce on the operating table and eat someone if you aren't hungry." It was almost word for word the speech I'd heard him use with the new wolves.
"I'm so tired," he said, raising the hair on the back of my neck. "Too tired. I think it is time to rest." He wasn't talking about physically.
Werewolves aren't immortal, just immune to age. But time is their enemy anyway. After just so long, one wolf told me, nothing matters anymore and death looks better than living another day. Samuel was very old.
The Marrok, Samuel's father, had taken to calling me once a month to "check on things," he said. For the first time it occurred to me that he hadn't been checking on me, but on his son.
"How long have you felt this way?" I asked, inching my way up onto his bed, slowly so I didn't startle him. "Did you leave Montana because you couldn't hide this from Bran?"
"No. I want you," he said starkly moving his arm so I could see that his eyes had changed back to human grey-blue.
"Do you?" I asked, knowing that it wasn't completely true. "Your wolf might still want me, but I don't think you do. Why did you leave the Marrok to come here?"
He rolled away, giving his back to me. I didn't move, careful not to crowd him. I didn't back away either, just waited for his answer.
Eventually it came. "It was bad. After Texas. But when you came back to us, it went away. I was fine. Until the baby."
"Did you talk to Bran about it?" Whatever it was. I put my face against the small of his back, warming him with my breath. Samuel would see suicide as cowardice, I tried to reassure myself, and Samuel hated cowards. I might not want to love Samuel-not after the way we'd once hurt each other-but I didn't want to lose him either.