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.
"The Marrok knows," he whispered. "He always does. Everyone else believed I was the same, just like always. My father knew something was wrong, that I wasn't right. I was going to leave-but then you came."
If Bran couldn't fix him, what was I supposed to do?
"You left the pack for a long time," I said, feeling my way. He'd left the pack shortly after I had, over fifteen years ago. He'd stayed away for most of those fifteen years. "Bran told me you went lone-wolf in Texas." Wolves need their pack, or else they start to get a little strange. Lone wolves were, in general, an odd bunch, dangerous to themselves and others.
"Yes." Every muscle in his body tensed, waiting for the blow to fall. I decided that meant I was on the right track.
"It's not easy being alone, not for years." I scooted up a little until I could wrap myself around him, tucking my legs behind his. I slipped the arm I wasn't lying on around his side and pressed my hand over his stomach, showing him that he wasn't alone, not while he lived at my house.
He started to shake, vibrating the whole bed. I tightened my arm, but I didn't say anything! I'd gone as far as I was willing to go. Some wounds need to be pricked so they can drain, others just need to be left alone-I wasn't qualified to know the difference.
He wrapped both of his arms over the top of mine. "I hid myself from the wolves. I hid among the humans." He paused. "Hid from myself. What I did to you was wrong, Mercedes. I told myself I couldn't wait, I couldn't take the chance that another would take you from me. I had to make you mine so my children would live, but I knew I was taking advantage of you. You weren't old enough to defend yourself from me."
I rubbed my nose against his back in reassurance, but I didn't speak. He was right, and I respected him too much to lie.
"I violated your trust, and my father's, too. I couldn't live with it: I had to leave. I traveled to the far corner of the country and became someone else: Samuel Cornick, college freshman, fresh off the farm with a newly minted high school diploma. Only on the night of the full moon did I allow myself to remember what I was."