Archive of Our Own

Long attuned to the movements of her mate, Leah knew he was packing before she was even properly awake. She leaned over the side of the bed to where all the pillows and linen had been shoved and grabbed the nearest t-shirt and made her way over to the walk-in closet that they shared. 

“Where are you going?” she asked as she pulled the shirt on.

Bran tossed, seemingly at random, items of clothes towards the duffel bag that he usually used for short trips.

“Atlanta,” he said, holding up one pair of pants against another, then threw the darker pair towards his bag. “For a week.”

She nodded and took a seat on the padded stool. That explained it, she thought. They didn’t regularly spend the afternoon in bed together. Bran liked their marital activities to be respectably nocturnal or ‘emergency only’. This clearly fell into the latter bracket. “What’s happening in Atlanta?” she asked, covering a yawn with her hand.

He sighed. “I’m mediating a disagreement.”

His least favorite role. “I’m sorry.”

Bran grunted and held up a shirt. “Is this the shirt you hate?”

She eyed it. “No, it’s the other blue one. It’s a weird length on you.”

Her husband tossed the not-weird-length shirt towards his bag. She knew he would hand the whole bag over at the reception of whichever of their hotels he was staying at and ask them to press everything. Her mate liked to pretend he was a man of the people but he was, in reality, a billionaire who had come to expect a certain level of service.  

“I’m going to go back to bed," she announced. She was tired. Bran had been very thorough in his attentions several times and she felt like she had hunted down a buffalo. Sometimes he could be very athletic, even for a werewolf. Which wasn’t to say she hadn’t enjoyed herself. They were good in bed together – very good. One of the few things she couldn’t complain about in their marriage. "Have a good trip."

Without waiting for a response, she went back to her room. Vaguely, she heard the front door close, then his truck start. Then she heard no more until the morning.

*

Leah had set herself a potentially ugly chore the next day. The loft.

They had built this house in 1930 – or, rather, the first part of the house. They had added and extended through the years but the bare bones were ultimately the same. Before that there had been a series of cabins, each bigger than their predecessor to include the additions to modern living. Things had accumulated as they tended to do over long lives. When they had moved into the big house – and it had really felt big, then – Leah had stored most of the ‘old’ things in the loft, in trunks, temporarily.

'Temporarily' had been a long time ago. She couldn’t really remember what was up there now.

It had long been on her list to go through what there was, throw some of it out, donate what she could. It was the type of chore that she hated as it would inevitably be full of memories – the good and the bad. Apart from books and music, Bran didn’t really keep things; he was an old one and he preferred to live in the present. It was Leah who still had the habit of keepsakes and nostalgia.

The contents of the loft were stored in concentric circles. Everything close to the trap-door that was the entrance was new-ish and still in use. Christmas decorations, all the heavy winter clothes that she swapped out when the seasons changed. Then it became truly junk-y - curtains that she no longer wanted, rugs, and furniture that was no longer appropriate for the house. Not so long ago, she’d had built-in-closets put in most of the bedrooms and she and Bran shared a walk-in dressing room between their connected rooms. She liked the clutter-free effect of this but hadn’t wanted to throw out all of their old furniture. She wasn’t sure why – perhaps she thought they’d move again, perhaps it was a long-held habit from when people didn’t throw things away so casually. She wanted to get rid of it now.

It was only as she made her way through the loft, half crouched as the ceiling was slanted, that she found the ‘old’ things.

Sighing, she wiped the dust from a top of a pair of cedar trunks, engraved with her initials, and pulled them open.

The first one was filled with linen that had managed to escape the moths. Most of it would be too small for the beds they had now and was yellowed with age. There was a quilt she didn’t remember and some blankets. She pulled a piece of chalk from her pocket and put a big ‘X’ on the top. All the contents could go.

The second trunk made her laugh as it was filled with an almost random selection of clothes. Vintage” clothes. Again, nothing appeared moth-eaten and she pulled out a few items that held fond memories. She would need to go through this one properly – split out what she wanted to keep and what she could perhaps sell. There were pieces from European fashion houses of the early 1900s that she suspected might be worth something to collectors. She also had a horrible feeling her wedding dress was somewhere in there - a hastily borrowed item that she had kept for no real good reason.

Further along the wall, she found three more trunks, each filled with clothes. Each like a time capsule of history. She found a couple of dresses from the 1950s that she imagined she could easily wear now. If she wore dresses. There was something tight and short from the 60s she couldn’t actually picture herself wearing and decided it must have been a whim.  

One of the trunks was filled with baby clothes - she had no idea why - and she slammed the lid shut fast, drew a big ‘X’ on the top of it and moved on.

She found several stacks of paintings – all Bran’s - that would need to be valued. Maybe Wellesley could take a look at them, she thought. She didn’t have an eye for art. She liked things to look like the thing they were supposed to be. She was pretty sure one was a Picasso, though, which was very Bran. He’ll have bought it because he liked it and then just put it away, never to think of it again. They didn’t put expensive art on the walls of their home because werewolves, even careful ones, could sometimes be clumsy. Just last week, Tag had ‘gently’ pushed aside the couch to get at something that had rolled underneath it and it had shot halfway across the room, the corner embedding itself into the wall. He’d apologetically plastered over it the next day.

“Leah?” a voice called.

“I’m in the loft!”

She heard the slow, considered tread of Tag, then his face peered up through the trapdoor, looking for her. Today, his red hair was haphazardly arranged in a knot on top of his head. She waved from behind an old wardrobe. “Ah,” he said. “I think I know why I’m here.”

“Yes. I need a hand with some of this furniture. A truck is coming this afternoon to take it to Goodwill, unless anyone wants anything.”

He nodded. “I saw the email.”

It wasn’t that she couldn’t handle the furniture herself; it was just that it was unwieldy. Particularly getting it down from the loft. Between the two of them, they could manage, however it was slow and difficult going and she snapped at him quite a bit. He bore it with the expression of a man who had known her a long time and she apologized without apologizing by feeding him a big lunch.

“Where’s Bran?” he asked, putting his feet up on the wall that surrounded their decking and sipping his beer. She didn’t know what it was about werewolf men and beer. The alcohol had no effect on them but - to a man - after a hard day's work it was all they wanted. She sipped her iced tea instead.

“Atlanta. Mediation.” There were four packs in that area and they were forever having territory disputes. Bran had more patience with them than she would have done. She would have just let them kill each other until there was one victor.

“Should just let them kill each other,” Tag grunted.

Leah toasted him in agreement and they shared a rare conspiratorial smile.

“Why the big tidy?”

“It’s spring, I guess.” She looked around her back yard, at the beginnings of the new growth that harked the start of a new season.

After lunch and after a quick assessment of the furniture to see if there was anything he would like, Tag mooched off into the trees and Leah went back up into the loft.

Mid-afternoon, she found a very old trunk. It looked to her mind like a treasure chest, with a curved lid and brass fixtures and fittings. She had a hell of a time getting it open, in fact. Hinges were rusted shut. In the end, she was forced to break it open, at the last minute hoping it wasn’t something to do with Bran. That he hadn’t inexplicably stored something up there with sentimental value and she’d just broken into it with alacrity.

She stared at the contents for a moment. Not Bran, she thought. Her father's. Or, more likely, her mother’s.

When she had left to be with Bran, her father had sent half the contents of his house to her in lieu of any kind of dowry. He had been a traditional, proud man – a werewolf who had been raised an impoverished British aristocrat before being expelled to America – and the fact that his daughter left him with nothing to her name had been a shameful thing to him. This box, for instance, was filled with solid silverware - not just cutlery but several ornate platters and some candlesticks. She could feel the pulse of silver poison as she looked down at them. No wonder they had been sealed so successfully. Neither she or her father could have touched them.

She realized, though, that the silverware was only on the top layer. Very carefully, she lifted the deep tray out and found there were two pearl inlayed boxes underneath. With a very faint memory – definitely the misty kind that accompanied childhood – she opened one. The box was filled with jewelry. Haphazard, cluttered pieces of gold, mostly. Things her father had given her mother.

Leah sat back on the floor properly and pulled the box into her lap. As her fingers brushed the contents, she felt that childhood memory return – of going through her mother’s box, playing with the jewelry under her eagle eye.  

She opened the other box, eagerly, and was surprised to find it only contained one necklace, this time perfectly laid out, anchored by several hooks. Like the others, it was gold, but blackened with age. Unlike the others, she suspected it was much older, a much more simple piece. The chain itself was thicker, more obviously hand crafted with less precise tools. The pendant was a half-dollar-sized coin, that had been curved inwards like a dried leaf. With a strange sense of familiarity, Leah ran her thumb through the groove of the curl. “Ouch,” she said, as her finger caught on something sharp. A bead of blood welled on her thumb-pad and she stuck it into her mouth, inspecting the necklace more closely. Yes, there was a little, sharp rise in the centre of the necklace. A tiny chip of a gemstone, she thought. Maybe a diamond?

In any case, she liked it. It was simple. Exactly the sort of thing she might wear herself. She’d clean it – along with the other jewelry – and keep them. She didn’t remember her mother particularly; she’d died when Leah had been a child. Her father had never married or mated again, mourning her for the rest of his life. He had been the reason Leah had thought she would never want to mate with love. More fool her.

She put aside the silverware and the jewelry boxes to go with the portraits and, hearing the van from Goodwill arrive, decided to finish for the day.

*

Bran called on the landline that night. After the discovery that Sage had betrayed them, they had belatedly agreed – with only slightly raised voices – that all subsequent trips either of them made would be punctuated by a polite phone call to explain any delays or changes to previously discussed plans. 

The landline was a relatively new feature of their household, Bran being particularly resistant to what he considered to be interference. Consequently the ‘rules’ of this device had not been established. Or at least the rules as pertaining to herself. She suspected this was more because of her own inactivity than anything. Bran seemed to have no problem communicating with Charles, for instance.

“This is going to take longer than I thought,” he told her.

She had paused the TV show she was watching – a crime documentary that was as fascinating as it was horrifying – and at his words she dropped her head back on the couch cushions. “Why?”

She heard him move, slightly. She thought perhaps going indoors. She picture the hotels they owned in Atlanta, narrowed it down to the only one she knew of that had balconies. “Marcel has married Forman’s daughter.”

“Goodness,” Leah said, raising her eyebrows. “Isn’t she… wait, isn’t she still a child?”

“Just turned eighteen.” She could hear him smiling. “I also thought she was barely walking. Imagine my surprise.”

Time moved so quickly, she thought. She had held Forman’s daughter as a baby. It felt like yesterday. “So legally an adult.”

“Yes. Nora is pushing Forman to, I swear, call Marcel out.”

She chuckled. “Pistols at dawn?”

Bran blew out an amused breath. “Close. Claws at dawn. There’s some kind of family tradition. First to change, first to draw blood. I really didn’t ask for details.”

It sounded vaguely familiar to Leah. There were a lot of werewolves who considered changing quickly to be a sign of strength – which for an Alpha just meant how quickly and how much power you could draw from the pack bonds. Bran could change quickly without them. So too could Leah, actually. Charles, of course, was in a class of his very own.

Bran’s mood switched suddenly, as it always did. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. I’ll call when I know more.” Then he hung up without saying goodbye.

She was used to – but equally not used to – Bran’s ways by now. The strange disquiet he always left her with interrupted her viewing pleasure and eventually she gave up on the television show. After fetching the gold jewelry she’d brought down from the loft, she set about giving it a clean with a bowl of warm water, dish soap and baking soda, scrubbing with a toothbrush she’d found under her bathroom sink.

It was pleasant work and Leah liked her own company. Introverted, they called it now. She found people difficult. The first thirty years of her werewolf life she had been alone – or as good as, given her father had been tantamount to a recluse. She had joined a pack at his behest, when he became concerned that Leah’s behaviors were becoming more ‘wolf’ than human and soon she wouldn’t be fit for anything but skulking through the forests where she grew up.

Even then, she never quite ‘fit’. There had been two other werewolf females in the pack – the Alpha’s mate and the wife of his second. Both had loathed her which she had later observed wasn’t uncommon between mated and unmated women. She found herself exhibiting the same behaviors herself after she had married Bran.

The men she had found equally challenging. Without question, a reflection of both the era and their species, they considered her their property – on a sliding scale of ‘daughter’ to ‘sister’ to ‘potential mate’. Leah had simply never got to grips with the way to navigate her interactions with them. She was frequently more dominant than most, which left her unwilling to subjugate herself but equally unable to fight them for her own position, and eventually just did what came more naturally – used her looks and her body to manipulate the situation. This didn’t improve her relationships with the women but it did put her on a more understandable footing with the men.

Marrying Bran had been a relief – not just because by becoming his wife, she could escape from the tedium of managing other werewolf males. She now had someone to do that for her. But also, with him, she still felt alone but not alone. For all his power, he was unobtrusive and liked his own solitude and he did understand her, knew her better than anyone, even if that was discomforting for her. But her difficulties with people, her own people, never went away. Consequently, she always loved when their house was quiet.

She put on some music, quietly, and hummed to herself as she cleaned the jewelry. Most of it was not to her taste but she had no intention of selling it. She would ask Charles to lock it up for her somewhere. She supposed she could leave it to someone – though she drew a blank at who. Kara, perhaps. She was fond of Kara. Like Leah, her early years had been isolated and hard.

Finally, Leah held up the piece of jewelry that had been kept by itself. She assumed it had been much treasured by her mother to be kept so separate. She liked it. She slipped it over her head and went to admire it in the mirror. She like the reassuring weight of it around her neck. She touched her thumb lightly to the inner curve, felt the little prick of the stone. She wondered whether her father had it made for his wife, her mother, or if he’d brought it with him from Britain. The gem was a mere speck, likely not even good quality. But the gold would have been prohibitively expensive for the time and a real display of her father’s love. She shook her head at her unusual sentimentality. She didn’t often dwell on the past; her life was very different now.

She packed away the rest of the jewelry and went to bed in Bran’s room.

*

Leah continued to work on the loft. By the time Bran been gone for four days, she had reduced the quantity of the contents by half and was in the process of taking photographs of all of the clothes to send to a couple of interested parties she had found online. Kara had gone through some of the more recent pieces with increasingly high pitched squeaking noises, clutching them to herself as if Leah might possibly be considering selling them rather than donating them to a very grateful teenager.

“That’s pretty, too,” Kara said, indicating the necklace Leah was wearing. “Did Bran give it to you?”

Leah laughed, which surprised Kara, who hadn’t meant to be funny. Bran did not give Leah jewelry. She had long suspected it was because he saw it as stamping the territory of something he had already acquired. Or perhaps he just thought she would lose things in the Change. They didn't even have wedding rings. “No, he didn’t. I think it was my mother’s.”

Kara was intrigued. “You think?”

“I found it in the loft with some things my father sent me when I got married.”

The young woman nervously toyed with the dresses on the rail that Leah had laid out in the hopes that most of the creases would drop out. “You don’t really mention your parents.”

“They both died a long time ago.” It was on the tip of her tongue to say that if Kara lived a long life, she too would consider the people that raised her only very occasionally, if at all, but it felt like one of those comments that was wrong and would hurt her.

“What were they like? If you don’t mind me asking?”

Leah found she didn’t. It was so long ago now it was practically irrelevant. “My father was a werewolf. A lone wolf. He was originally from Britain, though I don't know where. Or even when. Or," she laughed, "his surname. My mother died when I was very young – I don’t remember her much, either. I looked like her,” she added, recalling her father’s morose commentary on the fact when she grew into the young woman she would eventually spend the rest of her life as.

“Was your dad a werewolf when he came here?”

“That’s… a very good question,” Leah said thoughtfully. “I don’t know.”

Kara fell silent. Her fingers toyed with the lace sleeve of a dress. “Is it hard – adjusting to things? Things changing?”

“It really depends if they’re convenient changes or not,” she responded. It was something she had thought on a great deal, as she and Bran both embraced change in different ways. “Pants were more convenient. Cars are more convenient. Cell phones are convenient. The internet.” She sighed. “Just… try not to get too stubborn about it, that’s all. Embrace each change as it comes and you’ll be fine.”

“I’m not sure Asil feels the same way.”

Leah did not like Asil but had to acknowledge that he had been good for Kara and vice versa. She often repeated this to herself. She gritted her teeth. “He’s an old, stubborn bastard. He thinks he knows best.”

“Could be said for a lot of them.”

Leah was beginning to sense there was more to this than she thought. “What’s going on? Is Asil being difficult about something?”

Kara shook her head in a way that suggested Leah was right. “No, it’s just. Things are changing.”

In a few months, Kara would be going to college. Not far – but she would be living on campus, away from the pack for the first time. Her going to college had been important to her parents. They had wanted Kara to have as normal a life as she could. Leah had always felt Kara was less interested in that. She had stopped fighting for ‘normal’.

“You’ll be fine,” Leah said confidently. She was confident. She’d had a hand in raising Kara into the werewolf she was. Kara was strong but also considered and nearly – but not quite – as dominant as Leah. One day she would make another pack very proud to have her.

But Leah didn’t have to think about that yet. “Do you want lunch?” she asked, knowing the answer was always going to be ‘yes’.

*

A week after he had left, Bran called her again. In the meantime, she had felt him draw on the pack bonds twice. She had been intrigued enough to send him a text message to his current cell phone. Bran went through cell phones like she did running sneakers. He didn’t respond; but then she hadn’t really expected him to. He knew she could tell he was alive - the bond between them told her that.

“I should be back by the full moon.”

“That’s another week,” she said petulantly. She missed him.

“Charles says that you’ve been busy relocating Alfred.”

She was momentarily speechlessly angry that he had spoken to Charles before he had spoken to her. Technically, she was supposed to be second in the pack whilst Bran was away – but he had never allowed her to truly take on that role, always ceding it to his more dominant son. When he had called her the last time he had probably also rung Charles first.

An old, seething resentment reformed in her chest. Her instincts had always told her that it was wrong that Bran allowed his son to have this hierarchical superiority but Bran wasn’t much for instincts. Charles was more dominant – and cleverer than Leah. He was better for their pack and, worst of all, sometimes she agreed with him. She pushed her palm against her chest, where it hurt. She, Leah knew, was just a courtesy call.

“Leah?” he prompted, when she hadn't spoken.

“Yes,” she managed.

“And it went well?”

He wasn’t asking; he already knew. “Yes,” she said. She knew she was too angry – too upset – to speak to him. She couldn’t even tell him any of the things she had wanted to. About the treehouse they had built for Alfred, one of their safer wildlings, and how it had been fun. About the flowers that had grown over Hester’s and Jonesy’s home. About the bear cubs she had seen on one of her runs. The words were stuck in her throat. “I have to go,” she whispered, then she hung up the phone.  

He didn’t ring back.

*

The day of the full moon, Leah felt funny. She went for a run in the morning, like she always did, and took a shower and had a big bowl of fruit and yoghurt out on the decking, listening to the birds. Bran would be coming home at some point before nightfall. The pack already knew in the way that packs did and they would likely all appear at some point mid-afternoon, excited to go for a run with their Alpha. They didn’t always run together. The only real mandatory was the October full moon ceremony.

Knowing she was going to have a full house, Leah took out some dishes she had frozen for such eventualities – a couple of big lasagnes – and boiled some pasta for some pasta salad. It was her wolf that felt funny, she decided. Leah and her wolf were, she had learnt, more integrated than most. She wasn’t a completely separate spirit like many. Perhaps because for all those years it had just felt like it was Leah and her wolf, together and alone. Leah didn’t talk to her – she just had feelings and instincts.

Today, Leah’s wolf felt off. Not restless or excited, like she normally would do on a full moon.

Perhaps she missed Bran, Leah thought, draining the penne into a big colander. Their wolf spirits had an affinity for each other, naturally, or they wouldn’t have been mated. Then it occurred to her that it had actually been weeks since she had Changed herself. She knew older wolves felt the pull of the moon more strongly but had always personally found balance – she normally changed once a week or at least a couple of times a month, just to enjoy going for a run on four legs instead of two. Sometimes she and Bran would go together – he could get very restless if he stayed in human form. They hadn’t done that for a while, though. He was too busy.

She had no doubt her wolf would feel better after she had Changed.

As Bran was coming home, Leah allowed herself the old-fashioned desire to make sure everything was as neat and tidy as it could be. She dusted and cleaned, vacuumed and washed the floors, polished the mirrors and cleaned the windows. In his office, she swept the hearth and relaid the fire, dusted carefully around his bookshelves, over his picture frames.

She’d put the Picasso on his desk for him to look at and decide if he wanted to keep it. Otherwise she would ask Charles to put it away to wherever he put their challengingly expensive things. A bank, she imagined. She had the rest of her mother’s jewelry packed and ready to go. Most of the clothes had been shipped off to their new homes. She had driven the other paintings to an art appraiser earlier in the week after Wellesley had assessed them. The appraiser had sent her a list of their values which she had emailed to Charles to see what he wanted to do with them.

Juste arrived mid-afternoon carrying a big bunch of flowers. She smiled at him as he handed them to her with one of his more restrained courtly bows. “Oh, they’re beautiful. Thank you,” she added. Peonies, she thought. Her favorite.

Juste was used to a very different way of pack life. At full moon, he rarely arrived at their house without some kind of offering to the hostess. Sometimes he cooked something, sometimes it was a cordial he had made. Flowers were always going to be her favorite – flowers she didn’t have to share.

She arranged them in a vase whilst he prowled the shelves in the living area where Bran laid out the books he was happy for the pack to borrow. He curled up in one of the armchairs with an air of satisfaction, the quiet anticipation of a full moon ahead of him.

Leah found Juste similar to Bran – in that he could just be.

Charles and Anna arrived next, clearly in the middle of a flirtatious lover’s tiff. Leah did her best to ignore them. She didn’t think they did it on purpose but it often felt as if they enjoyed rubbing her nose in their happy marriage. Now Leah knew her better, it didn’t feel like something Anna would do and Charles wasn't particularly manipulative in that way. This was just one of those things she was over sensitive to, she told herself, firmly. When she had been younger, matings between werewolves had been more like hers and Bran’s – for power, for security. Things had changed and this one was very definitely not convenient for her.

Still, despite her best intentions, she was snappy with both of them, which made Charles’s eyes kindle. He couldn’t do anything to her, his father would never let him. She was annoyed at herself for letting them annoy her. It just made the whole thing worse. She went up to her room, determined to hide away until Bran came home so she didn’t exacerbate the situation.

The house was nearly full by the time Bran’s car drew up outside. She felt the wave of relief run through the pack. No one felt right when he was away.

Leah listened to his voice, heard him laugh, make everyone laugh. Then his feet on the stairs. He dropped his bag off in his room and came to find her. “Welcome home,” she said.

Bran climbed onto the bed to kiss her, a smile on his face. Rationally, she knew he only looked affectionate because he wanted to have sex but she kissed him back anyway, tugging up his T-shirt so she could touch his warm skin, reassured that he was home now. “You weren’t downstairs,” he said against her mouth.

“No, I annoyed Charles,” she admitted, not going into details. He knew how it was between them. She lifted her hips so Bran could take her jeans off and in return pulled his T-shirt over his head. She ran her hands down his chest, over his scars and he unclipped her bra. “You’ve left the door open.”

“Mmm,” he said, otherwise occupied.

Afterwards, she lay on her front, one arm dangling off the bed, feeling lethargic. Bran on the other hand was restless. “Go,” she told him. “I’ll join you later.”

“Are you sure?”

She managed a grunt. “I’d rather I not face our pack knowing they heard every moment of that,” she said, acerbically, which made him laugh.  

“It’s good to be home,” he told her, bounding from the bed and going to join the pack.

Leah closed her eyes. Ten minutes, she thought. Then she’d go down, put the lasagnes in the oven, Change and join everyone.

*

She woke before dawn and found her husband asleep next to her. She sat up abruptly, knowing that something was very wrong.

“What is it?” Bran said, waking instantly, pulling his arm from around her waist. Bran slept like a cat.

“I didn’t Change.”

He rose onto his elbows. His hair was wild; he smelled of the forest, of the wolves in their pack. “You didn’t?”

“You didn’t notice I was missing?” she said, her voice sharp.

“I— didn’t, no,” he said, sounding appropriately ashamed of himself.

Leah climbed out of bed. That was hurtful and annoying but she couldn’t care about it then. She stood by the bed and willed herself to Change. Her body resisted. Her wolf resisted. It was as if the very natural channeling of her Change was bouncing back off an immovable wall that had never existed before.

Bran's scrutiny was intense. “What’s happening?”

“She doesn’t want to Change.”

He clambered to the edge of the bed and studied her. “Describe it.” It was an order.

“It’s — not like when you’re hurt and don’t have the energy. Or if you’ve changed several times. It’s different. She doesn’t want to.”

Her husband stood and cupped her head, looking into her eyes. She felt him call her wolf, which was always a strange sensation because, for Leah, it was like he was untangling what was her and what was not-her and neither of the two wanted to part. She tried not to resist it but obviously didn’t manage because he growled at her. “You know I find this difficult,” she complained, tempted to wrestle away from his disapproval.

“I know, you are very difficult,” Bran said, in a way that suggested it wasn’t just this she was difficult about. “Stop thinking.”

She couldn’t. Bran leaned forward and kissed her with enough intensity that when he drew back, she felt stupefied, which was his intention. He called her wolf again. This time, it worked – she felt her wolf disentangle herself and take over. Bran said something and the wolf replied, then Leah was in charge again. Her husband looked concerned. “That was strange,” he said.

“What did she say?”

“She said no.”

Astonishing. She didn’t think her wolf could say no to him. He was her Alpha and her mate. “That’s all?”

“Pretty much. Did you get hurt? Whilst I was away?”

She shook her head. Bran still started to touch her, hands drifting over her body that he had only recently reacquainted himself with, a frown line on his brow. “You feel fine,” he said and she knew he wasn’t talking about touch. He leaned forward, pressed his face to the crook of her neck and breathed her in. “I can’t detect anything.”

“Have you heard of this before?”

“Yes, but usually for the reasons you said. Tiredness. Pain. And a full moon usually drives all that away.” He cupped her head again. “How do you feel?”

“Not hurt. Just… worried. A little scared.” She hesitated to admit it but if she couldn’t tell him then who could she tell? “I love being my wolf,” she said. She felt free as a wolf, in a way that being human could never compete.  

His thumbs smoothed across her temples. “I know you do,” Bran murmured. “Well. There’s nothing I can see that’s wrong with you. Let’s try to get some sleep, hmm? And try again in the daylight.”

Leah nodded and, though there was absolutely no chance that she could be seduced again, Bran climbed into bed with her, tucking her close. He was worried and his worry meant she could take what comfort she needed from him. She wrapped her arms around him in a way he wouldn’t normally tolerate. His hand rested on her head, soothing her. “It will be fine,” he told her.

And, because he was who he was, she believed him.

*

It was mid-morning by the time she awoke and Bran was dressed and next to her, quite literally twiddling his thumbs and staring at the ceiling. “Try again,” he said, after she had watched him for a moment, tracing his profile with her eyes.

Leah tried. And shook her head. “It’s the same.”

“I’ll call your wolf,” he said, leaning over to kiss her. This time, she knew what he was about and, on reflection, Leah decided she wasn’t particularly pleased to have her desires used as a tactic to manipulate her. She had her own tactics too and she gasped a little, arching herself up against him and the kiss became more involved than he had expected. He pulled back from her, realizing what she had done and shook his head wryly, detaching his hands from where they had instinctively gone to caress. She snapped her teeth at him and he leaned forward to nip her bottom lip.

“Come here,” Bran said sternly to her wolf, resting his forehead against hers.

Leah felt her wolf obediently come to him and this time they had a few more words. Or something that was close to words as her wolf could get. She was not particularly verbose and it was hard, mentally, like she was doing a very complex math problem. When he released her, she panted with exertion. “Hmm,” he said, sitting on the bed and staring off into the distance. 

It was frustrating, this ability he had to talk to a part of her that she could not. “Does she know?”

“No, she doesn’t. She isn’t worried though. Does she feel worried?”

Leah shook her head. “No. She just doesn’t want to Change. That’s all she’s telling me.”

Bran considered. “It’s… peculiar but I think for the time being we may have to rely on your wolf’s instincts. It may well be one of those things that reveals itself in time.”

“In time?” Leah demanded, feeling her eyebrows shoot upwards. “What does ‘in time’ mean?”

“It means we – you – will have to be patient.” His tone said this was unlikely.

“Patient with my inability to Change?” Leah flung the covers off herself, crossly, and climbed out of bed. “That’s all you have for me? You and your omnipotence?”

“Yes, that’s all I and my omnipotence have for you,” Bran said drily, his eyes drifting down her body as they tended to when she was nude. She went to pull her robe on, tying the ribbon tightly. “I’m sorry I have disappointed you.”

She scowled at him, pacing and poking at her recalcitrant wolf. “Yes, let’s make this about you, shall we.”

Bran raised his eyebrows, imperious. “I don’t think I have. You’re the one expecting me to magic a solution to this problem.”

“But that’s what you do!” Leah exclaimed, waving her arms around. “You go around the world solving problems. Now you have one in your wife and it’s ‘let’s wait and see’!”

She had annoyed him but sometimes he was a bigger person than she and could see it was not him – particularly – that she was really angry about. He stood and put his hands on her shoulders. “Leah, you will be fine. I am sure this is temporary. Please take comfort from my so-called omnipotence – you wolf is not afraid. You do not need to be.”

Leah pressed her lips together. She was afraid. “I love being a wolf,” she said, repeating her sentiment from the previous night.

In a rare show of kindness, Bran lent forward and kissed her forehead. “I know. And you will be again. Trust me.”

*

So it went for the next few weeks. Each morning – afternoon, evening – she tried to bring forth her wolf, to no avail. Bran’s mildness on the matter infuriated her and relieved her in turn. She suggested to him, late one night, that perhaps they should try frightening her.

Bran snorted. “What frightens you,” he joked, when they both knew many things frightened her. Bran could frighten her. Charles. Asil.

She shivered, a little, and he held her closer. Post-coital Bran was her preferred conversational partner. Here, in bed, she could show that she craved his physical affection and he felt he could give it to her. No one was here to see it, after all.

In the morning, she went for her usual run, though she felt a little sluggish. She had a wrist strap that recorded her sprints and her heart-rate and after the first ten miles she stopped at a viewpoint and checked to see that she was still roughly on target. Once she was assured that she was, she set off again, following her usual route.

It was early in the morning and the mists were still settled. She knew the forest like the back of her hand. Knew the sounds and the smells and the ground she ran on with such confidence she could close her eyes and still find her way home. She loved to run.  

When the first prickle of unease tickled the back of her neck, she dismissed it. It had been a challenging few weeks. It was nothing. There were lesser predators in this forest. Bears and wolves and foxes. All these animals tickled her senses and could be dismissed easily.

The prickle became a push, a dark force against her back. Something was following her.

Leah picked up speed. She wasn’t running away, per se, she was just moving more efficiently. She was strong, very strong, and could be stronger if she drew on the pack bonds. Bran himself wasn’t far away. Though he maintained a strict control on their bond, if she was distressed he would come to her aid. It was in his best interest. He might not love her but he didn’t want her to die.

Not that she was going to die, she thought dismissively.

She leaped over a fallen tree-branch and took a fork to the right, sooner than she would normally have done. She felt the device on her wrist buzz – acknowledging that she was going faster than she would usually. There was another five miles to her home.

Normally, Leah would have engaged with her wolf at this point, assessed her readiness to Change. If she got to the house, she could lock herself in a room, start her Change by pulling on the pack bonds. In her wolf form she as more powerful, had claws and teeth and the ability to run faster. But the barest brush against her wolf told her otherwise. She still would not Change.

Leah was trapped in her weaker human form. She had no weapon. And what was behind her felt bigger, more powerful, than she could take, even with the bolster to her muscles that the pack bonds could give her.  

The darkness approached her, swooped fast, bringing with it the icy fingers of death and despair. Her breath was coming out in pants. She had started to run for her life, the miles between her and the house reducing. She would make it. She would get there, she would Change, she would —

Leah skidded to a halt. The darkness hit her back, rolled with her. She shoved her husband to the side. Asshole, she thought at him, when she knew he couldn't hear her. 

“That was fun,” Bran said, pulling the darkness within him, just a normal-looking man once more.

Leah lay, panting, on the ground. “You would think so.”

Her mate crawled towards her, climbed over her. His hazel eyes were excited. He liked to chase her. “You knew it was me.”

“Eventually,” she admitted. She had been witness to Bran’s nightmares enough times to recognize the dark power that he feared above all – himself. It had just taken her a while to recognize it out of the bedroom.

“You worked it out much sooner than I thought,” he said, in a way that she imagined was supposed to be complimentary.

Leah opened her mouth to rail at him and then realized she had brought this on herself. She had suggested it. That Bran had acted on it couldn’t be something she could complain about. If he had he planned it, if he had spoken to her of it, it wouldn’t have worked. She wouldn’t have been afraid.

And she had been. Bran had frightened her, as she knew he could. She closed her eyes again. It had always been an anathema to her that the man she loved had this capability to scare her so. She knew it was part and parcel with him being her Alpha but Bran was also a greater power in himself.

“It didn’t work,” her husband said.

She didn’t reply. She just focused on her breathing. In and out. Calming her heart rate.

“Maybe it would have been better when you weren’t running,” he said thoughtfully. “So you’d have a chance to Change.”

“No, no, let’s not — I don’t want you to frighten me again. Or anyone else,” Leah added, in case he got some idea to involve others.

She opened her eyes again. Bran was still above her, still vibrating with energy and excitement. There was a kind of… sparkle about him. Normally, Bran made every effort to make himself invisible, to sink this enormous power into himself. The opposite was clearly freeing.

Leah slowly raised her hands above herself and stretched, arching her back. Bran’s eyes drifted to the sports top she wore. It was – by necessity – tight and – by design – revealing, with a front zip that Bran’s curious fingers reached for. He tugged and the material parted with relief, releasing her breasts. The cool air on her heated skin pebbled her nipples. His head bent as he licked one languorously, then the other, and then slowly dragged the point of his tongue up her collarbone and up the side of her throat. The small, hitching noise that she made was not intentional.  

Bran glanced up, gave her a knowing look. “You don’t smell frightened any more,” he said, smiling, as his fingers caught in the elastic of her pants and started tugging them down.

*

Nearly every month, when the weather was clement, they hosted a movie night. They drew a white sheet over the side of the pole barn and projected the ‘most voted for’ movie from Bran’s ever-growing collection of what he considered to be ‘classics’. Leah had watched The Princess Bride more times than she could count.

Tonight, it was a new nature documentary which she generally tended to enjoy. She spent the afternoon setting up the screen, the projector, putting out the bean bags that they stored in the garage. With so many of them, they had invested in a catering-sized popcorn maker that she filled up, ready to turn on a few minutes before the pack arrived.

As Bran was home, she left the meeting and greeting to him and went out to make sure each seat had a bowl of popcorn, a couple of bottles of water and some candy. The pack started to drift from the house, laughing and talking. She was – appropriately – thanked for organizing and Leah settled herself into her preferred beanbag.

The documentary started and she curled up, as was her wont, and the next thing she knew, Bran was calling her name.

“I fell asleep,” she said, stating the obvious as she gazed up at him.

“You did.”

There were a few of the pack still left, though the projector had been turned off. The sky was festooned with stars above Bran’s head. “I don’t normally do that,” she told him, as if he didn’t know already.

Bran frowned but couldn’t say anything, not with other ears still listening. “You must have been tired.”

Leah held her hand out to him so he could pull her from the beanbag. “I guess I must have been.”

He helped her tidy, as did Tag, and she dispensed the last of the popcorn to Kara, who was a bottomless pit.

Leah was faintly annoyed she had fallen asleep; she looked forward to movie night as it was one of the few occasions outside of a hunt where she wasn’t expected to really engage with anyone. She could sit and enjoy the experience, knowing that she had made the pack happy. She felt a little grumpy. Perhaps knowing this, Bran made himself scarce for the rest of the night.

When she got into bed only a couple of hours later, she expected to chase sleep. Instead, she turned off her light, curled up on her side of the bed and fell asleep instantly.

She woke once, hours later, and stumbled into Bran’s room, where she could feel her mate was having a nightmare. It was colder in his room, though the air was set to the same temperature as hers, but she pulled off her T-shirt and climbed into her side of his bed. She had learnt through years of trial and error that the best thing to do wasn’t to wake him but to slowly inch closer to him, to let his subconscious know that she was there.

When she was close enough that he could feel her warmth, Bran curled towards her and she felt the relentless, painful edge of his torment recede.

Again, normally she would lie awake, wondering what he dreamed of – he never told her, said it was 'best left unspoken' – and yet once more her eyes drifted shut and she knew no more until the morning, when Bran slipped from the bed to shower. She rolled into the warm spot he had left and went back to sleep.

Bran posited that her sudden desire to sleep all the time was part of the ‘problem’ she was experiencing with her wolf. “It could be mental,” he said, tapping his finger on his desk. “Something is worrying you.”

Leah did not feel particularly worried. In fact, quite the opposite. Her world was quite small and her worries usually focussed on them. Their marriage, their mating, had not always been on such good terms. And here she used the word ‘terms’ deliberately – theirs was a bargain, an exchange. That she loved him, now, and perhaps forever, was irrelevant. But since Sage, he had been more demonstrative towards her than he had ever been before, more considerate. Consequently, she felt they were communicating better. She was less worried than she had been for a long time.

“Should I… stop sleeping?” she asked.

Bran shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Provided you’re awake for most of the day, it might just be part of the healing process.”

So Leah napped. Most often in the afternoon – she’d pull the blanket over her on the couch and sleep for an hour or if the weather was nice, lie on one of the sun loungers on the decking. Sometimes she’d sleep in the morning after her run. She needed to replace her sports bras, though. Both weren’t fitting her well, which sometimes happened after repeated washings, though she could have sworn one of them was reasonably new. She wouldn’t be buying that brand name again.

So thinking, she offered to take Kara shopping one weekend, giving her the chance to practice her driving and be rewarded with the use of Bran’s credit card. They’d survived the journey to the shopping mall without incident and Leah pressed her lips together tightly whilst Kara reverse parked.

“Well done,” she said, sighing with relief once the car was stationary.

“You too,” Kara said pertly. “I particularly enjoyed the way you pumped your own invisible brake.”

“Werewolves don’t like to cede control,” Leah grunted.

Kara, less used than Leah to not shopping on a budget, restricted her purchases to bed linen and a few accessories for her dorm room. She had a Pinterest board for the ‘style’ she was going for. Over coffees, Leah familiarized herself with this form of Social Media and decided she quite liked it. She redecorated the main house every ten to fifteen years and usually did so through extensive research with interior design magazines. This was a whole other approach.

Kara helped her set up her own account and then they agreed to separate for a while whilst Kara went to look at clothes and Leah to update her running wardrobe. 

The rise of athleisure fashion had made Leah’s life significantly easier and she now had several shops to chose from when she was buying sports wear. Some even had an entire sections dedicated to sports bras with various technical details going beyond just making sure breasts stayed put.

A sales assistant approached her whilst she was flicking through her options. Being what Leah considered to be a ‘professional’ runner, she initially dismissed the sales assistant’s help but her ears pricked at one comment she made.

“Say that again?” she asked.

“A woman’s size can change really frequently – it’s best to get measured every six months.”

“No, the other thing.”

The sales assistant, who had probably been trained to repeat these statements by rote, blinked at Leah. She had disconcertingly bleached hair, and recently too, Leah could smell it. “Oh, just that you can even change size even during the month, depending on where you are during your cycle. You might find a sports bra that fits really well gets tight and uncomfortable later in your cycle.”

Leah stood, holding a lurid pink sports bra she had no intention of buying. One of the additional ‘curses’ of being a female werewolf was that despite having zero chance of a successful pregnancy, they still continued to menstruate. Leah had always been reasonably regular, getting her period just after the full moon.

That she hadn’t had hers spoke to Bran’s belief that she had some kind of emotional or mental stress on her body. It was perhaps another ‘symptom’, she thought.

“Can I assist you with anything?” the sales girl said.

Leah shook her head. “No, I’ll take… this one,” she said, grabbing a sports bra in a cup size bigger than her usual.

The sales assistant, perhaps encouraged by Leah’s interest, chatted at her whilst she rung up her purchase. “We go on a course, as part of our training. The number of women who go for years without being measured and discover they have been wearing the wrong band size or cup size – it’s life changing when they get the right fit.”

Leah managed a small, hopefully discouraging smile. “Mmm,” she said.

“And that’s true even for women who are pregnant, or who have had kids. Your body goes through so much.” She shook her head and handed Leah the little bag. “Thank you for shopping with us!” she said brightly.

*

The next full moon Bran encouraged Leah to spend the day meditating, which was not something she had ever been particularly fond of or successful at. His expression brokered no argument and she set up a yoga mat on the decking, assumed an appropriately meditative position which started out upright, then morphed into a more horizontal one. Then she was asleep.

Bran poked her awake with his toe. “This was not what I meant,” he said.

She knuckled one eye and sat up. “It was very relaxing,” she said. “Isn’t that the point?”

“And can you Change?”

Leah thought about it. “No,” she sighed. The wolf was very calm, though. No sense of the agitation that usually came with full moon. Just looking at Bran, she could see he was longing for his wolf, there was a definitive frisson to him that wasn't there the rest of the month.

Bran sat down in front of her and held his hands up. “Let’s try your wolf again.”

They had done this so frequently now that the separation came more easily, like water pouring into two separate channels.

Bran let go of her. “Same,” he said. “Though she is becoming clearer. It’s not that she doesn’t want to. It’s that she shouldn’t.”

Leah was perplexed. “Why? Why would a werewolf feel she ‘shouldn’t’ change? It’s the complete opposite of normal behavior.” And certainly the opposite of her own.

Going without Changing for weeks felt supremely unnatural now that she had realized it - and felt guilty for not realizing sooner. She missed her wolf form with a physical longing. She felt uncomfortable, as if her skin didn’t quite fit right.

She knew, too, that she’d had none of the signs that she was about to get her period. Missing it for two months running was unheard of. “Perhaps there’s something really wrong with me. Inside,” she whispered, voicing a concern she’d been thinking about for some time.

“I believe I would know,” Bran said, resting his hand on her knee. His eyes were soft. “But if it would make you feel better, we could have a healer look at you.”

She chewed her bottom lip. “Could Samuel do it?”

If Bran was surprised, he didn’t show it. Historically, she got on even less well with Sam than she did Charles. Unlike their other healers, though, Sam was a werewolf and nearly as old as Bran. He knew more about werewolf physiology than anyone else. She may not like him – he was too emotional, too dominant and sometimes looked eerily like Bran – but she could respect him.

“I will give him a call. See where he is.”

Bran left her then, presumably to speak to his son. Feeling like her mandated meditation was no longer required, Leah went inside to make the usual preparations for full moon.

*

This time she was awake when they all left. No one but Bran noticed that she didn’t Change with the rest. If they thought on her absence at all, it would be assuming she would follow later. Or perhaps spend her time as a wolf alone, which sometimes she liked to do. She and Sage had often struck out together. They had made a good hunting pair.

Bran returned after midnight, earlier than his usual. He kissed her with open-mouthed passion, blood still high from the moon and the Change. She responded in kind; she didn’t need the full moon to feel that way about him. Afterwards, he made to go shower and she pulled him back. “No, I want to smell the wolf on you,” she said.

He humored her, coming back to bed, letting her drape herself all over him. She rested her head over his heart, listened to the soothing beat of it. After a while, he said, “I’ve had a thought.”

She knew, purely from his tone, that it was not going to be something she would like. “Have you.”

“What about letting Anna—“ Leah cringed and he pinched her backside. “Let me finish. How about letting Anna try to calm you? See if that helps.”

Leah did not like Anna. Or, more specifically, did not like Anna’s power. “It doesn’t work on me the same.”

“I have noticed,” her mate said drily. “You try to stubborn it out.”

She opened her mouth to protest; it wasn’t intentional. There was just something about Anna that rubbed Leah the wrong way. And it wasn’t just jealousy, though there was a healthy dash of that there as well. Bran had grown fond of Anna, quickly. Just the same as with Mercedes, the last stray he had collected. Leah was certain he wasn’t even ‘fond’ of her and she had slept beside him for two centuries. Was she really so unlikeable?

“Stop whatever you’re thinking,” Bran said sternly, his voice rumbling beneath her ear.

Sometimes, she knew, their mating bond resisted his efforts to control it. It was why she knew when he had nightmares and why sometimes he knew when her thoughts were bad.

“Fine,” she said, as she knew she was going to be given no choice. “But I don’t want her to know why.”

“That will make this trickier,” Bran advised.

“I don’t want her to look at me that way.” She ran her nails over his chest lightly, drew them down his side. Felt him twitch. He mirrored her, the pads of his fingers dragging up her back. Goosebumps rippled across her skin. She took this for the invitation it was and straddled him. Her husband looked up at her with his fathomless eyes and she lowered herself to kiss her way down his chest.

*

Anna, mystified but obedient, did her Omega trick on Leah, who attempted to keep her expression as sweet as Charles’s wife. It was not an expression that sat well on her and Bran nudged her, rolling his eyes in disapproval.

She felt Bran’s very being soften as Anna trickled – there was no better word for it – her magic towards Leah. She found herself looking at the floor. Since Leah was only mildly irritated with the situation, and neither mad or depressed, she found Anna’s effects to be rather similar to that of having a stiff drink. Or lots of stiff drinks – as that was what it would take to get a werewolf even slightly tipsy.

She leaned back on the couch, comfortably. She’d seen werewolves grow hysterical in front of Anna, some collapse. For all her jealousy, it was a useful skill, one Anna had used in service for the pack many times, including on Leah’s own mate. Would that she had it, to be cherished so. She would be forgiven her temperament, then.

“That’s enough, Anna, thank you,” Bran said, eventually. He looked at Leah.

Leah tested her wolf, found her calm but still resistant, and shook her head. She ignored Anna’s querulous look.

“Is something wrong?” Anna asked, imbuing the words with something that sounded like genuine concern.

“Apparently not,” Bran replied, body language conveying only slight disappointment. He smiled warmly at his daughter-in-law. “Would you like to stay for lunch?”

Well used to Bran’s mysterious ways, Anna’s lips quirked. “No, thank you. Charles is cooking for me at home.”

“How novel,” Leah said mildly, to some approbation from her mate. She stood up herself. “I guess I should start preparing our lunch.”

Over said lunch – marinaded chicken and salad sandwiches – they had a fight, about Sam, of course.

Bran's hazel eyes sparked across the table at her. “Since you forbade me from telling him why, I can’t force him to prioritize you over whatever it is he is doing.”

“Yes, you can,” she insisted. She knew how it was. Bran would capitulate to his sons sooner than he would her.

“Leah, it’s only two more weeks.”

She pushed her plate away and stood up. She was so angry she could spit and yet she didn’t have the words to argue against him, not when he was so cool-headed, so assured that he was right, that she was somehow making a fuss over nothing.

Bran looked up at her, waiting. “Well?” he asked, coldly.

Once, Leah would have thrown a plate at him. Screamed. He had trained her out of those behaviors, like a dog he had rescued from the street. He had always made her feel inferior. Now, she just walked away. “If it had been Charles, even Anna, he would have come, or you would have made him,” she said as she went up the stairs to her room.

This, Bran knew was true.

*

They slept apart for several nights and ignored each other during the day. Leah felt herself grow more uncomfortable as each day passed, the feeling of wrongness, of her body not fitting right continuing. The weather grew warmer and one day she pulled a pair of shorts from her drawers only to find they didn’t fit.

At first, she was confused. She thought, perhaps, she had somehow picked out someone else’s shorts. Someone slimmer than her. Anna who was petite, or Kara who had a narrower hips. She took them off, inspected them, but admitted they were definitely hers.

She tried again, this time holding her breath as she did up the fly and managed to get the button closed. But they were uncomfortably tight.

Leah took them off again, exchanged them for her usual leggings and T-shirt. She touched her stomach, lightly. A strange, unlikely thought struck her. She dismissed it immediately, then found herself running down the stairs and grabbing her keys, toeing on a pair of sandals.

She drove to the first, most anonymous chain store pharmacy she could which was – paranoid as she was – nearly an hour's drive. Assured she would not be observed doing something so patently ridiculous, she bought four different pregnancy tests and then sat in the car and read all the instructions.

Snorting – because it was so ludicrous – she drove back home, berating herself all the while and relieved to see Bran’s car was still absent. She didn’t know where he had gone to, only that he had left before she had woken up that morning; apparently being in an argument meant ‘communication’ went out of the window.

No matter, it was better this way. She had to very carefully pee on some sticks, apparently, and neither of them had any compunction about walking in on each other in the bathroom.

Humming to herself cheerfully, Leah waited the few minutes required for each of the different tests to reveal their inevitable, negative answer. She would have to take them somewhere else to dispose of them. It would be just her luck that one of their trash bags ripped and they fell out in front of someone from the pack. She would never hear the end of it. She could only imagine the look on Bran’s face. He really would think she had gone mad, she thought.

She looked down at the first test. Confused, because she felt for sure negative was one blue line, when instead this said two, she looked at the next. And the next. And the next.

All positive. One even estimated she was three weeks or more pregnant.

Leah went to re-read the instructions, looking for where she had gone wrong. It admittedly wasn’t rocket science but each test did say there was a small margin for error. It was also possible to have a false positive. The latter made more sense.  

Deciding this ridiculousness had gone on for too long, Leah packed up the tests into the bag from the pharmacy and took another drive to a trash can far enough away that the contents couldn’t possibly be traced back to her.

She spent the rest of the day in a daze.

*

Bran came home that evening. “Good show?” he asked.

Lost in her own world, Leah responded vaguely in the affirmative until Bran mutely drew her attention to the fact that the television wasn’t on and she was just staring at a blank screen.

Annoyed – where had he been? – Leah got up and left the room. She’d go for a run, another one, she decided. Maybe she'd just put on weight for the first time in two hundred years. She pulled on her summer-weight running leggings, her new sports bra and a baggy T-shirt to disguise the fact that all of these things felt too tight on her, and left the house.

That afternoon, Leah had done a great deal of Googling – mostly terrifyingly looking at ‘symptoms for illnesses that looked like pregnancy’. She had a whole host of answers about various cancers. A werewolf getting cancer was about as likely as a werewolf getting pregnant, to her mind.

Unless it was magical cancer. In which case, magical pregnancy was also surely possible?

She needed was a professional diagnosis. What she didn’t know was, if Sam was going to take his sweet time coming home, whether an unknowing human doctor would work just as well?

Leah ended up three miles from home having not run a step. She sighed and turned around. She knew what she needed to do.

“I want to speak to Sam,” she told Bran, walking straight into his office with determination.

Bran’s hazel eyes narrowed. “I told you—“

“I’m not going to ask him to come home any faster,” she said, avoiding eye contact. “I just want to ask him some questions.”

He studied her, glanced at her folded arms, the tension in her shoulders. He sat forward in his chair. “Speed dial two,” he said, handing her the phone.

She blinked at him. “Who’s speed dial one?” she asked, already knowing it was Charles.

“You live with me,” Bran pointed out, rolling his eyes.

She grumbled. “I’d like to do this alone, please,” and knew her tone was petulant.

“I’ll just leave my office, then.” But he got up from his chair and even closed the door as he left.

“Thank you,” she said quietly to his receding steps.

She pressed speed dial number two, waited. The dial tone changed; Sam was clearly not in the US. After a few moments, when she was becoming nervous enough to want to hang up, Sam answered. “Da? What’s happening?”

It was strange to hear the worry in Sam’s voice directed towards her. It made her lose her balance for a moment. “It’s me, Sam. Leah,” she said.

“Leah? Is something wrong with Da? Where's Charles?”

She had woken him; he sounded fuzzy and tired. She wondered where he was. “I’m sorry to wake you. Your father didn’t mention you were abroad.”

“Is everything okay with Da, Leah? My brother?” Sam snapped, impatiently.

That was more like the Cornicks that she knew. “He’s fine. They're both fine. It’s me. I— I am not fine.”

She heard him sit up, the sound of bedclothes rustling. She thought she heard a fan, the big ceiling kind that went whomp whomp whomp.

“Tell me.”

Leah took a deep breath and described her symptoms, everything from the wolf refusing the change, down to her shorts not fitting properly, her missed periods. It was not comfortable talking to a man about menstruation – a 19th Century hang-up she had failed to grow out of - and it was all the more uncomfortable knowing that man was her husband’s son. “So – and I know this is ridiculous, I know it – I took four pregnancy tests today," she whispered. "They all came back positive. There must be another reason for that so I was wondering, if I went to a human doctor, and they did the test…?”

Sam was silent. “A doctor would do a urine test and a blood test,” he said, finally, sounding strange. “Do you normally miss your periods?”

Leah firmed her lips. “No. I always have them – a day or two after the full moon.”

“Da said you were stressed. That’s what he told me on the phone before. That it was having some strange effects on you that he hadn't seen before. He didn’t make it sound serious but this... this sounds serious to me.”

“I asked him not to say anything. I don’t feel stressed. Or I didn’t.” Leah managed a laugh. “I feel pretty stressed now.”

“I can imagine.”

“So you think seeing a human doctor isn’t a good idea?”

“No. I… don’t want someone taking your blood or having a record of your visit." She heard him rub a hand over his face, the rasp of beard growth. "Have you experienced any pain? Abdominal cramps? Any bleeding outside of when you might normally have your period? Even if it's just a little?"

"No, nothing like that."

"Okay. Well. I’m going to reschedule some things so I can come back sooner. It’ll take me a couple of days – there aren’t any direct flights from here.”

Leah sank back in Bran’s office chair with relief. “That’s… that’s good.”

“Is Da there? Can I speak to him?”

“He doesn’t know about my periods or the pregnancy tests,” she said, hurriedly. “It’s insane. Obviously. So could you not tell him?” She winced; the likelihood of one of his sons obeying such a request was minimal. She prepared herself to be mortified.

But Sam surprised her. “As your doctor, Leah, I can keep this confidential. But the female body is pretty simple about these things. If the hormone is present, it’s very unlikely it’s a false positive. You could well be pregnant. As implausible as that seems.”

“Please don’t tell him,” she reiterated, his words bouncing around in her head but not settling.

“Well, then, tell him I said I’ll see him in a couple of days and I’ll let him know my travel plans as soon as I have them.”

“That’s wonderful,” Leah said brightly, feeling as if she had escaped an uncomfortable situation. “I know he loves to see you.” He did. Bran adored his sons. She had often thought that if one of them died, the Berserker wouldn’t give a damn about the mate that was tied to Bran and all of this would have been for nothing.

“Leah… try to rest, okay? Take it easy. Sleep when you feel like, eat what you want. Don’t do anything strenuous and stop trying to Change,” Sam said, this last instruction sounding perilously close to an order his father might have made.

“I understand,” she said. “Goodbye, Sam.”

*

Bran said nothing when she told him Sam would be coming back earlier than anticipated. Just raised his eyebrows and waited expectantly for her to tell him more. For once in her life, Leah was not compelled by her honesty and instead told him she was tired and going to go to bed early.

Since, she supposed, they were still in an argument about a thing that had now resolved itself, and that she now felt stupid about, Bran did not come to her that night. He left a note for her on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, where she would be sure to not miss it, telling her Sam’s flight details. And that he would be gone for the day and not to expect her until the next.

A wave of misery overcame her then – her mate’s familiar spiked handwriting, more than anything, causing her heartbreak. She missed him. She picked up the phone and dialed his cell phone.

He answered. “What is it?”

“I—“ She didn’t really know. Normally, this kind of argument – the small, petty kind – would rumble along until one of them forgot. She swallowed down past the lump in her throat. “I’m sorry. For Sam.”

“It’s fine,” he said and his tone was softer.

“I’m just frightened.”

“I know. I understand. Leah, I’m not alone.” She felt the prickle of shame, embarrassment about being overheard being so pitiful and not knowing by whom. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

She nodded. “Yes, thank you.” She hung up, hurriedly, before he could.

Remembering Sam’s edict about resting, she went into Bran’s office and took one of the few books she liked to read. She had learnt to read, and write, quite late in her life – it hadn’t been something her father had prioritized, spending more time on teaching her survival skills. When she had joined her first pack, it had quickly been made apparent that revealing any kind of weakness wasn’t permitted. She had got by until she he had met Bran and even then she affected disinterest in reading generally and this failure passed him by. There were some patterns she learnt – how to write and sign her married name, how to recognize his, place names – and generally there wasn’t much call for it. When Bran had found out, as he inevitably had done, he had been quite angry with her.

She’d had to learn, then – but not from him. It had seemed he had been able and willing to teach anyone about anything, except he did not have the temperament to teach her, nor her the ability to receive instruction from him.

Perhaps consequently, Leah preferred magazines – small chunks of information, lots of pictures – but there were a handful of books she had read, all of which she liked to re-read when she needed comforting.

At lunchtime, she was hungry and didn’t know what for. Nothing in the hugely overstocked refrigerator appealed to her. She was just convincing herself into a quiche when the phone rang.

“Oh, good, it’s you,” Sam said briskly when she answered. “I’m about to board the first of two connecting flights. In the next hour, can you send me a rough calendar by text. Your last three periods, just so I can get a sense of your cycle, the dates of the full moons since then, the last few times you Changed and,” he sighed, “I guess when you and my father have had sex.”

Leah closed the refrigerator door. “You don’t know the dates of the full moon?”

“Not really. It just happens. I don’t really make note of it. It’s not such a big deal when you’re the only one of us for miles.”

It was extraordinary. “And do you want all the individual times we’ve had sex or just the days?”

“Oh, good Lord, Leah, just ballpark dates, please.”

Leah could practically see him grimacing with distaste. It was so strange how much younger Sam behaved than Bran. As if it were centuries that separated their ages, not decades. “It might be easier if I just say what dates we didn’t have sex, then,” she said, feeling smug.

“Boarding now!”

Leah laughed, for the first time in ages, and decided she would really like garlic bread with her quiche. And a big salad. Ooh, and coleslaw.

*

Leah wrote down the dates for Sam whilst she ate her lunch. She texted them to him since her cell phone was basic and had no photography functionality. Charles preferred, for security reasons, the pack phones to be limited in capability. More than once, Leah had contemplated secretly buying an iPhone.

Once she had sent her message to Sam, she went to get the calendar only she used in the kitchen – albeit rarely. It was actually still turned to February, which just showed how little it was used. She flicked forward and discreetly marked when she had last had her period, then the dates of the full moon. Her Googling had been instructive – she knew what Sam was looking at. Roughly speaking, if she was, in fact, pregnant, then it looked as if she would have ovulated just as Bran went to Atlanta and that was when she 'got pregnant'.

Leah realized she was looking at this as if it was fact. She slammed the calendar closed, alarmed. It was not fact. It was almost certainly fiction.

She went back to reading her book.

*

Bran called, as he said he would. Their argument was obviously over. “What are you doing?”

“Reading.”

“Austen or Tolkien?”

“Emma,” she admitted, closing the book on her finger. “Where are you?”

“Butte. Fae business.”

She was relieved; that wasn’t so far. “I didn’t think there were any fae left in Butte.”

“A small man in a small cave,” Bran sighed. He didn’t like speaking of the fae over the telephone. “We had an agreement that he appears to have broken. We are now negotiating. I hoped to be back before my son returns but that might not be possible.”

Leah wondered if that would be for the best. Then she could have the conversation with Sam, and whatever else he would need to do, and the business would be sorted. “I’m sure he’ll stay for a few days,” she suggested.

Bran said nothing in response and she knew it was up to her to tell him her thoughts. She still found she couldn’t, however. She just didn’t know how he would take it. Would he be angry? Horrified? Embarrassed for her?

“How are you?” he asked, a question he rarely asked. Because, for the most part, Leah usually was fine. Just fine. He did not particularly show care, in that way, even if it was he who had hurt her. If he hurt her – it was for good reason, a sacrifice for the greater good of the moment. The pack, his family, his own sanity. He would apologize and move on, not ask after her feelings afterwards.

“I’m relieved Sam is coming back.”

“I’m glad.” Bran paused, then clarified, “I’m surprised.”

“He’s a good doctor,” Leah said. Everyone had always told her so.

“You think he can tell you more than I.”

Now it was Leah’s turn to be surprised. She hadn’t expected that Bran would feel slighted by her desire to speak to Sam. Bran was not an unnecessarily proud man. He rated his sons’ skills, acknowledged where their strengths were and what his own weaknesses were – for he did have them.

“I guess I do,” she said softly. “I guess—“ She wrestled with herself. Initially, she had just wanted a healer who would take this seriously in a scientific way. Now, of course, Sam was the most informed about werewolf fertility. She couldn't tell Bran that, however. Could she?

“What, Leah?” Bran prompted her.

“Well. You know. He would have a medical view,” she said, eventually.

“Sometimes these things just require a little patience.”

Leah put her book to the side and sat up, making a decision. “I need to tell you—“

She heard the knock at the door, at his end. “Damn. Leah, I need to go.”

“Of course,” she said, wincing. She could already see not telling him was going to be problematic. “If you can, call me?” But the dial tone engaged before she had finished her sentence. He had already gone.

She didn’t know the seriousness of what Bran was dealing with in Butte and she didn’t want to distract him. She went to get her cell, typed out a message to him, trying to word it in a way that didn’t sound ridiculous. But it was ridiculous. She knew it. Tomorrow, Sam would be here and he would tell her she wasn’t you know what, that it was something else.

She deleted the message.

*

Leah met Sam at the clinic, after he had gone back to his house and showered. His hair was still damp, curled at the nape of his neck like Bran’s did. She sighed, inside.

“So, we’re going to do a basic physical. I’m going to weigh you, take your blood pressure, temperature and so on. I’m also going to take some blood – for a variety of things. We’ll do another urine test. Depending on what I see from that, I’ll probably do an ultrasound or examine you,” Sam said with brusque efficiency.

Leah nodded, at once comforted by his proactive tone and the white lab coat he'd put on.

He had taken her blood before. She’d been one of his - unwilling – test subjects back when medical science was evolved enough for Sam to start building his understanding into the differences between werewolves and humans. She was relieved to see the process hadn’t changed much. He admired her veins, just as he had done last time. He filled several vials. “We’re going to test for a few things. Not just the hormone that indicates pregnancy. I’ll have to send your bloods away to a colleague but he owes me a favor so the results should be back quickly. Do you have any questions?”

“Not… right now,” she said, watching him scrawl details on a piece of paper.

The urine test looked different than the pregnancy tests she had used before but it came back positive and Sam’s eyes gleamed. At least she knew she hadn’t done it wrong.

He weighed her. “You’re a few pounds heavier than from what I have on file for you,” he said, making a note of this. “Your weight doesn’t fluctuate?”

She shook her head, stepping down from the scales. “Not really. Most of my clothes I’ve had for a really long time. It was only the last month or so that I’ve noticed things have stopped fitting properly.” So thinking, she reached up to adjust the band of her bra.

Sam's eyes followed this movement. “No significant change to diet or exercise?”

“No.”

“Hop onto the bed, now. We’ll go straight to the ultrasound and see what's going on in there.” He rolled away on his chair to pull a machine forward. It had a screen and chunky keyboard with handles and several hand-held devices slotted into the side. She’d seen something similar on TV.

"You think there's something going on? Inside?"

Sam was vague. "The ultrasound will show us." He started pushing buttons, then instructed her to roll up her top and unbutton her pants. He tore off a sheet of tissue paper and tucked this into her shorts, before squirting some gel onto her flat stomach. Sam pulled one of the hand-held devices from the machine and pressed down firmly onto her belly, watching the screen as he did so. The black and white and grey shapes were meaningless to her but Sam held still for a moment and pointed. “There,” he said, unable to keep the excitement from his voice. “There it is."

Leah's eyes widened, following his finger. "What?"

Sam pointed to a grey peanut within a roughly circular black hole. "Your baby. I'd say about eight weeks. Look, you can see a little leg here. An arm here.”

She stared at it. “If you say so,” she said, doubtfully.

“I do. That's definitely a baby.” There was a smile on his face as Sam moved the device around. “Just checking there isn’t another,” he said, cheerfully.

Leah felt her eyes flare; she had barely considered one, two was more than she could cope with. “Are you sure? It couldn't be something else?"

"Nope," Sam said, as if this was absolutely fine.

"I... Sam, it can't be."

"Even if I hadn't done the ultrasound, you are displaying the classic signs.” Sam drew in a deep breath and she saw he was trying to dampen his excitement. “Most werewolf pregnancies end in a miscarriage at the first full moon because you cannot stop the Change but it really appears as if you have passed two with your wolf's compliance.”

She couldn't believe it. Couldn't put her mind around it. She stared at the peanut some more. "Is it… does it look normal?”

“As much as I can tell at this point.” Sam's smile came back. “Amazing. I can honestly say in my life I have never seen a fetus this developed in a werewolf mother. The question is how. I looked at your calendar.” He rolled his chair over to the desk and pulled a piece of paper. He’d drawn a rough calendar, much as she had done. “Based on this, and a general estimate of your cycle patterns and the size of the fetus, you got pregnant here,” he said, gesturing to when Bran had been in Atlanta. “Now getting pregnant isn’t actually the most interesting thing. It’s what came after. It’s how you convinced your wolf not to Change so that the fetus could implant and develop.”

“I didn’t, Sam,” she said, earnestly. “If anything… I’ve been spending the last two months trying to convince her to Change.”

He turned anxious blue eyes onto her. “You’ve stopped now?”

“Since… since you told me.”

Sam looked down at the piece of paper, seemed to want to say something and then stopped. “Leah, we need to tell Da.”

She nodded. “He’s coming back from Butte. He’d hoped to be here but he was delayed.” She looked at Sam, really met his eyes properly for the first time – and held them. She didn’t like revealing things about her marriage, particularly given that both of his sons were now happily mated and both knew better than most that her relationship with Bran wasn’t like their own. “I don’t know how he’s going to react.”

Sam’s blue eyes seemed to sadden. “This is an unusual circumstance. I’m sure Da will see that.”

She did not think Sam knew his father as well as he ought.

*

Leah was still feeling a little bit like the situation was a dream, one that she would wake up from. Sam wanted to drive her home, though it was a short journey and meant he’d have to get his car later. She made him something to eat whilst he pottered about making a few phone calls. The first to Ariana, whom Leah generally tried to ignore – having a fae in the family was not something she was desperately comfortable with – and then to the colleague receiving her blood test. She heard a number of acronyms being tossed around and understood little.

At the dining table, Sam pulled out his calendar again. “I’d like to talk about what you’ve been doing over the last few weeks. See if there’s any pattern.”

Leah went to get her own calendar from the kitchen and brought it back. Sam asked her to go through everything since her last period which, given it was more than three months, took longer than lunch. When Bran came home, they were still at the table, Sam writing notes in her calendar himself.

She knew, as did Sam, Bran’s mood was not good before he even opened the door. Her mate carried with him a great darkness and if he was unhappy, it spilled over.

She felt, suddenly, very nervous.

When they had mated, she and Bran had made an agreement. The terms of their marriage. She would help him cage his beast and, in recompense, Leah would have all the power and money she would desire. She would be an Alpha’s mate and, then, as Bran’s role grew, the highest ranking werewolf female in America.

They had agreed that from this functional union there would be no children. Bran had two living sons and Leah could discern in herself no maternal instincts. She had even confided to Bran that she found babies and children almost frighteningly fragile. She thought he had been glad of this.

Over the years, whilst her thoughts on children had occasionally wavered, Bran had remained firm. Children had crossed their paths and he had handed them off to other, more suitable parents.

But their own child? That was something different surely?

Bran sighed when he saw them, tossed his duffel onto the couch. “Well?” he asked impatiently.

Sam glanced at Leah, who had stood up at the dining table.

“I’m… not sick,” she managed which, as far as she was concerned, was the best news.

But the look of triumph in Bran’s eyes was irritating. “I’m sure Sam is grateful to have come all this way for you, then.”

“Da,” Sam intervened, before Leah could snap something back. “It was good that I did. Leah, perhaps you’d like to talk to Da privately?”

Leah snorted, hurt by Bran’s first response. “No, I think it would be better if you stay. He won't believe it from me. I’m pregnant,” she told her husband.

Bran’s darkness spilled out more and then he pulled it back in quickly, until he was his usual self. It still managed to leave her breathless, though. “Sam, explain,” he said, eyes piercing his son rather than Leah. Leah lowered her head submissively, acknowledging that she had been right. She was glad she hadn't said anything about the pregnancy tests.

Sam was less affected by his father than her and met his gaze straight on. “She’s telling the truth. She’s probably around eight weeks, we think. I’ve done an ultrasound.”

“How?” Bran demanded, furiously, eye glittering as if he was facing a betrayal. “And what is it?”

The second question was one that Leah hadn’t previously considered. ‘What’ it was. ‘It’ was a baby – a fetus, as Sam put it. Wasn’t it? She sucked in a little breath. “Sam – what if – “

Her step-son put his hands up, a half-smile on his face. “Guys, it’s a human fetus. I promise you. As to the ‘how’, we’re trying to work that out.”

“Sam, whatever it looks like, it’s not possible,” Bran insisted.

“I know, Da. But it’s pretty conclusive. I’ve never seen a fetus so developed in a werewolf female. If she manages not to change for another few months—“

“No,” Bran said, shaking his head. The look on his face could only be described as revolted. “No. Stop it.” He walked off, down the corridor, towards his office.

“I’m sure he didn’t mean—“ Sam began.

Leah held up a hand. “He just needs some time,” she said, not sure of it herself. ‘Stop it’ meaning ‘get rid of it’ or ‘stop it’ meaning ‘please stop talking because my head will explode’? she wondered.

She started clearing the plates from their meal, taking them into the kitchen. Quietly, Sam helped her. “Something bad obviously happened in Butte,” he said.

“Mmm,” she said, well used to people making excuses for her husband. People did not, she knew, make excuses for her. “Tell me, Sam, if your mate was worried she might be dying of some magical condition, would you be more concerned about points-scoring or would your first reaction just be relief?”

Sam closed the dishwasher. For a moment, he looked ashamed. “I’m sure he is relieved. It’s just—”

“Yes, something bad must have happened in Butte.”

They both heard Bran’s office door open. Her husband came into the kitchen. He seemed to have wrangled his emotions until an expression of contrition was on his face. Momentarily ignoring Sam, he came to Leah, put his hands on her shoulders. “I am relieved you are otherwise okay,” he said, having clearly heard them talking.

Mutely, Leah nodded.

“The other thing…" Bran closed his eyes, slowly, and then opened them again. She thought she saw a shimmer of gold. "It is not something I have managed to work my way through yet.”

She nodded again. She’d had longer to, if not get used to the idea, acknowledge that the possibility was there. Bran thought he knew all there was to know about werewolves. There were rules about things, about their physiology, their behaviors, and he didn’t like to see them broken.

She was glad that not a single part of her had ever thought he might be happy at the thought.

Bran looked at Sam, rubbing Leah's arms. “You’re absolutely sure?”

“We can get a second opinion, if you’d like,” his son said drily, leaning against their kitchen island.

Her husband went to lean against a counter, folding his arms across his chest. “Can you stay?” he asked Sam.

“I’ve made some phone calls. I’ll need to go back in a week – after the full moon,” Sam gave Leah a sideways look, “but I can return if. Well.” If she made it through another full moon, she surmised.

Bran nodded. He looked at Leah. “Nothing bad happened in Butte. But on the way home I received a call from Angus. The Hardesty witches have taken Moira. Her mate is seriously wounded. I have sent Charles, and Anna, out directly.”

With a sinking heart, Leah saw where this was going. “You want to go.”

“The timing is poor. That’s why I was angry.”

She turned her back on them both, poured herself a glass of water. With Sam here, she didn’t want to lose her temper, didn’t want to rail at him that he had just been away, that this was difficult for her. It made no difference to Bran who put his people first. “That’s fine,” she said. It wasn’t but it would have to be. “Sam will be here.” She knew now it would annoy Bran that she saw Sam as a consolation but it was true. Someone would know about her little condition. The accidental, magical, mystery thing growing inside of her. “You’ll be away for full moon?”

“I don’t know yet.”

She put the glass down reasonably certain her face would be placid when she looked at them. She was surprised to find Sam looked angry. “Da, I’m not sure you should be leaving Leah,” he said.

She felt the prickle of Bran’s anger return, though Bran’s face was expressionless. Alphas didn’t like to be questioned. “It’s what he has to do, Sam,” she said, for Leah, too, did not like her Alpha’s will to be questioned.

*

They didn’t talk about it. They had dinner, the three of them, and then Bran drove Sam to his house. In the meantime, she prepared for bed, climbed between his sheets and waited for him to come back. Whether they talked, she didn’t know. Bran didn’t seem any different when he returned.

She wasn’t sure what she expected of him. Maybe that he would be more gentle. Maybe he would be more hesitant. Perhaps that his hand would settle on her stomach. But, if anything, their coming together was rougher, more eager – on both sides. She had missed him and he was already leaving her again. She wanted to climb inside him, have his imprint on her for all the days that he was gone. She bit his shoulder, hard enough to draw blood, and he laughed and pulled her on top of him.

“You’ll miss this, at least,” she said, leaning down so the curtain of her hair fell around his face as they kissed.

“I’ll miss this,” he panted. It was as close as she ever got to ‘I miss you’ from him. She was almost satisfied.

He left just after dawn the next morning. She did, she admitted, shed a few tears when she knew he was gone. This, she put down to hormones.

*

Sam insisted on going with her on her run. He wanted to look at anything ‘unusual’ and to do that he needed to be in wolf form. Which meant he had to wear a collar and, no, Leah did not enjoy putting a collar on a werewolf more dominant than she.

During her run, Leah resigned herself to the knowledge that she would be stuck with Sam for a few days. He had a very martial look in his eye when he turned up to her house early that morning. She knew – and it was part of the reason she’d called him – that Sam’s interest in werewolf fertility made her situation all the more intriguing for him. It had less to do with her and more to do with the ‘how’ she had done it.

Not that she had ‘done’ anything.

She paused where she normally did, breathing deeply, and watched the big white wolf that was her step-son sniff around the area. She wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Magic pollen? A particular flower? Maybe a fairy circle?

“I haven’t made any wishes,” she told him, just in case he was imagining some kind of benevolent fae had granted her a longed for scenario. It wasn’t the case. She had – in her long lifetime – toyed with the idea of a child. Perhaps adopting a child. Or convincing Bran that one of the few children abandoned to the Marrok’s care could be one that they keep. She had never been stupid enough to suggest this to him.

Ignoring Sam, she continued her run, the reassuring pounding of her feet on the well-worn path allowing her mind to drift. Sam believed something had happened in the time that Bran was away in Atlanta. Something convinced her wolf not to Change. She had taken him through her schedule and he was particularly interested in the things in the loft.

“There wasn’t anything magical up there. Bran doesn’t store things like that,” she said.

“Can you detect magic?”

She admitted she wasn’t as attuned as others. Not in human form. She showed him her mother’s necklace and he held it, sniffed it, but ultimately shook his head. “Doesn’t smell like magic,” he said.

Leah described the other things in the loft, which had been her main activity during the time Bran was away. They’d also rehoused the wildlings and Leah had gone to Hester's and Jonesy’s old, destroyed house.

“Let’s go look at that, then,” Sam said, interested in the flowers.

By the end of the first day with Sam, Leah was exhausted. He cooked her dinner and she dozed on the couch. When the phone rang, Sam answered it in the kitchen. The TV was on and so she could only catch some of their conversation but she guessed from Sam’s annoyed tone that he was talking to Bran.

She went into the kitchen and wrestled the phone from him. “That’s burning,” she said, nodding to the sauce on the stove, more to distract him than anything else.

Leah took the phone back to the couch and curled up in her warm spot. “Hello,” she said, yawning.

“He’s cooking you dinner?” Bran’s tone was soft.

She nodded. It was a rarity. As was spending so much time with Sam. He had been unusually compliant. “For running me all over the place today. He wants to get my mother’s jewelry back from wherever Charles has put it.”

“I’ll speak to Charles.”

“Also. The flowers around Hester and Jonesy’s place aren’t magical-pregnancy-making-flowers.”

“The flowers?” She explained, remembering that she hadn’t told him. His voice was wistful, when she described the scene. “Sounds beautiful. I'd love to see it.”

She grunted. Sam had spent a lot of time exploring the flowers before admitting they were a type of Asteraceae.

Sam came out of the kitchen with a big bowl of pasta, which he handed to her with a fork. Apparently they were having a TV-dinner. She was suddenly ravenously hungry. “What are you doing?” she asked, forking up a big twirl of linguine.  

He moved and she heard a rustle. He was lying on a bed somewhere. “Waiting until it’s late enough to go on a stakeout.”

“On your own?”

Bran hesitated. “No. There are a few others.”

There were a very small handful of people that Bran avoided talking to her about. No, ‘avoided’ was too strong a term. Neglected to mention. “Mercedes,” she said, resigned. She felt Sam tense on the couch beside her, though his eyes were fixed politely on the TV. Everyone knew how she felt about Mercedes.

“She has an interest, as does Adam.”

Leah ate her pasta, surprised as she always was at the strength of emotion that the mention of Bran’s not-daughter brought out in her. Mercedes had troubled her for many reasons during her short life. All of the Cornicks had been inexplicably – to Leah’s mind - ga-ga over her. Bran loved her - had loved her as a small coyote pup, to the attractive, magically interesting young woman she had grown into. Leah had never been more glad when Mercedes had married. It galled her that she had married Adam Hauptman, however. One of their most eligible werewolf men.

“And what did my son cook you?”

She allowed Bran to change the topic because she wasn't going to win any arguments about Mercedes - she had tried and failed, over and over again. “Mmm, pasta in a mushroom sauce with spinach. It’s very good, actually,” she admitted. “And not just because someone else has cooked me something.” The only foods Bran expressed any proficiency in were breakfast foods. He could, if pressed, make a pancake in the shape of a cartoon mouse.

“And there’s dessert,” Sam added.

Leah looked at him in surprise. She had thought he’d been in there for a long time but only in the context that it was nice to be alone. “Oh, there’s dessert too?” She had a sweet tooth.

“White chocolate mousse.”

“I love white chocolate mousse,” Leah said. If she was going to have a favorite dessert, it would be that one.

Her step-son shrugged. “Lucky guess.”

Leah felt warm. If it was a guess, it was a good one. Otherwise he had remembered. She was touched. “Did you get swapped out with someone else in Africa or wherever you were?” she asked suspiciously. Sam snorted and forked up a massive pile of linguine.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” her husband said on the phone, “but is there any more progress you’d like to discuss before I leave you to your evening?”

Surprised at his unusually acerbic tone – that was normally more her territory – Leah told him no. “Will you call again tomorrow? Let me know how the stakeout went?” She didn’t usually ask for updates but things were different now. If she didn’t ask, he wouldn’t know she wanted him to.

“I’ll try,” he said.

*

The stakeout didn’t go well. Bran pulled enormously on the pack bonds, strong enough that she woke up gasping, strong enough that Sam – sleeping in the guest room – was at her side in moments.

“We don’t know how that will affect the baby,” he told her, his eyes glittering with his wolf. “Damn him.”

Leah panted. “I’d rather he took what he needed,” she said.

Sam took her blood pressure, in any case, then let her go back to sleep once she’d retrieved her cell phone from downstairs. She sent a message to Bran. Are you safe?

An hour or so later, when she was still fitfully tossing and turning, he spoke to her in the way he did rarely – mind to mind. I’m safe, Leah. Go to sleep.

She cuddled his pillow, and her relief, closer and fell deeply asleep.

*

Leah ate fruit and yoghurt for breakfast and Sam listed all the foods she wasn’t going to be able to eat for the foreseeable. “Well, I don’t particularly eat those sorts of things normally,” she said, forking up a segment of apple.

Sam ignored her. “We don’t know how this pregnancy will differ from a human one so I think we should take precautions and follow the same rules. And you should limit your caffeine and alcohol intake.”

“Fine,” she said.

“I’ve also got some pamphlets for you.”

“Oh good. Reading.” She took them from him and stacked them up. She sighed. “I think I’d like to see what happens on the full moon before I… commit to this level of.” She thought for a while. “Hope.”

Sam nodded. “I understand. I guess, having never expected or wanted this, it’s a challenge.”

“You guess correctly,” she said. “Though you’re wrong about the wanting. I don’t think I’ve ever known a werewolf female who didn’t regret the possibility of choosing.” And envying those who could. She thought of Mercedes, whom Sam had theorized would be able to even have a werewolf child. She had hated Mercedes for that as well, hated the thoughtful looks Sam and even Bran had given her.

“No, of course. I apologize.” He hesitated. “You were always so adamant about it, though.”

“Better to deny something you can’t have than want it,” she said, shrugging.

He nodded. “I can understand that.”

That had never been Sam’s way. Sam had loved each child his human women had born him. There had been mention, too, of a girl at medical school who had aborted his baby, mistakenly believing there would be more in their future when they had a more secure financial basis. Her step-son had been broken-hearted.

It had made her look at him differently, when she had heard that. She wasn’t often moved to sympathy, particularly not for her step-sons who had never liked her. But they had never liked her because Bran had encouraged them not to. And because she had – mistakenly – believed they were competition for his affection.

“Have you heard from Da?”

She shook her head. She had tried calling this morning but he hadn’t answered. “Not since last night. He said he was fine.” Leah tilted her head, considered the difficult bond that stretched tight between them, little used as it was. “He’s still alive. Did he draw from you, as well?”

There was a family bond, too, as Sam was technically not part of the Aspen Creek pack.

Sam nodded. “It was big.”

Leah had long learnt patience, when it came to Bran. Patience and trust. She had to trust that he was all right.

Still. Witches.

Sighing, she put her bowl in the dishwasher and walked into Bran’s office. She dialed the first speed dial.

Charles picked up the phone. “Hello, Leah. We’re all safe here,” he said. He sounded strained.

“And what condition is my husband in?” In the background, she heard a ‘chuff’ of humor. A werewolf. Her mate. She raised her eyebrows. “I see. And when do you think he will be able to update me himself?”

“He says another few hours.”

“What was it?”

“Some kind of massive explosion of death energy triggered when we crossed into their territory. It sent Da a little loopy protecting us all. So he Changed and he’s taking some time to cool off.”

‘Loopy’ could mean anything. It didn’t mean the witches had triggered the Berserker. If it did… it meant they could… which was more worrying.

“Ask him to call me, Charles.”

“I will.” Charles made a noise. “He promises, as soon as he’s able.”

She hung up. Sam was still in the kitchen. She wondered if he’d let her go for a run on her own today.

*

Leah tolerated Sam’s intensively courteous company for longer than she ever imagined. She then requested a break. Bluntly.

“Perhaps you have friends you could visit today,” she suggested.

Sam’s lips quirked. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“Yes.”

He left. Not without instructions that she ‘rest’. She closed the door on him and breathed a sigh of relief. Moments later, she returned to answer it.

“Asil,” she said.

Asil tried not to visit the main house when Bran was away. Word would have spread that Bran was traveling; he would have known that. “It’s about Kara,” he said.

Surprised, Leah beckoned him inside. “What about her? Is she all right?”

Asil pursed his lips. “Do you know she has been ‘seeing’ a young man from school?”

“I wasn’t aware, no,” Leah said, feeling hurt that Kara hadn’t shared this with her.

“A human boy.”

She breathed in deeply. Leah had no time for humans. She also believed Kara should have no time for humans.

“And?” she asked, because she knew it would annoy him.

The Moor narrowed his eyes at her. “I believe you have a care for her.”

“I do.”

“Then you know as well as I that this will not end well.”

Leah fought with herself. She knew Asil’s tricks, knew he manipulated her, like he manipulated many wolves. Bran had warned her about this in a way that he didn’t need to warn smarter wolves, like Charles. He will use your temper against you, Leah. You must remember that. She’d found it so hard, though, to separate her instinctive, bad reaction from what was the right thing to do.

She wanted to call Kara, demand to see her, and challenge her with this information, then insist she break it off with the human boy. But, equally, she could appreciate that the pack ‘daughter’ – which she was – did not have age appropriate young werewolf men to have as companions. She remembered that feeling well. Could she really deny Kara this? She was young. Any relationship she formed now wouldn't last.

She put two and two together and thought of the girl asking her about change a few weeks ago and guessed it was this she was talking about. Asil had challenged Kara directly and had obviously been rebuffed.

Leah sighed and carefully said, “And you know as well as I that many teenage relationships do not end well. That is, in fact, the point of them.”

The Moor was silent for a moment. “I see,” he said, his voice all but acid. His hands clenched at his sides. He couldn’t hurt her, Leah told herself as she tensed. Not her, the Marrok’s wife, in the Marrok’s home. “I see that I should have not come to you with this.”

Once upon a time, Leah had thought she had understood the type of man Asil was. A handsome man, flirtatious, she had seen in him the kind of man she had come across all those years ago. When he had flirted with her, complimented her appearance, kissed her hand, she had flirted back. And found herself frozen out, chastised for her unacceptable behavior as the Alpha’s mate.

Leah was not Asil’s kind of woman. Asil liked a particular type of woman. A strong woman, yes, they were all werewolves after all. But women who were gentle and caring, nurturers. Women like Anna, who didn’t let the scars of her past change their good natures. And, above all, virtuous women.

Leah was not that kind of woman. Sage had not been that kind of woman.

“Asil, she will go to college and she will fuck,” she used the rarely-used curse word deliberately, to watch him flinch, “half a dozen human-or-Other boys, if she’s lucky. If she’s very lucky, she will break their hearts, not the other way around. Then maybe she'll meet an appropriate werewolf man or two. Who knows. You will have to get used to this unless it is a very different kind of relationship you want with our Kara. Which, if that is the case, I suggest you speak to Bran now so that he doesn’t bite your head off when the time comes.”

She had stunned Asil into red-cheeked silence, for once. Pleased with herself, she gestured for him to leave and closed the door on his face.

Then, because Sam had told her she must ‘rest’, she went for a mid-morning nap.

*

The night of full moon, she went to bed early. Sam was going to be in charge of the pack that night and she had no compunction to make a pretence of her presence. They had not heard from her mate in several days since the much promised phone call after his forced healing Change. He had not given her much more detail than Charles had. She had the vaguest feeling he hadn’t wanted to worry her – which was ridiculous.

With the howls of her pack mates disappearing off into the distance, Leah found herself drifting off to sleep, her last thought that it was strange how not strange it had become, the call to the moon disappearing from her life. Her wolf was content, still, inside of her. Yes, she missed the feeling of running on four feet, the breeze in her fur, the sense of the pack around her, but it was manageable. Particularly if... well. Best not to think of that, yet.

She woke, just before dawn, and knew Bran was home.

She found him downstairs, sitting fully dressed on the couch. “What are you doing?” she asked, her voice sounding loud in their quiet home.

Bran lifted his head from the cushions. His face was drawn. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I want to be woken by you,” she replied, baldly. “Come to bed.”

Bran followed her upstairs, his tread heavy. Unusually, he pulled her close when they climbed beneath the covers. He was cold, very cold, as if he had drained himself. She would need to make him a big breakfast, she thought.

Her husband’s hand drifted, very carefully, over her abdomen, before it slid itself between her thighs, tucked her more closely against him.

“Go to sleep,” Leah told him, needlessly. The deep breathing on the back of her neck told her he was already there. She stayed awake, listening to him breathe.

It was some hours later that Bran finally woke up and they reunited in the usual way albeit – she thought – a little quickly, as if she was a need he was fulfilling. He kissed her, apologetically, afterwards. “I have to go again,” he told her, running his hands over her back, mouthing her neck, her shoulders.

“What?”

“I only— I had to come back for something.” She wondered what. “But they still have Moira and her mate has started to show some suggestion that they are torturing her and he is being affected through the mate bond.”

Leah curled her arms around Bran, tightly. “That’s horrifying.”

Bran agreed. He rolled her onto her back again, loomed over her. His eyes were dilated and his next kiss took her breath away. “I need you, again,” he told her fervently, lying between her legs, his hands parting her thighs.

“I’m here,” she told him.

*

Leah was beginning to get heartily sick of falling asleep at the most inopportune times. She woke only when Bran’s truck had already left. It was almost 10am.

“I suppose we can still have sex,” she said to Sam, before she was truly properly awake.

Her step-son froze, then relaxed. “Yes. That’s fine.”

“Good.” She slid onto the stool and looked at Sam’s coffee enviously. She had decided rather than limit herself she would just remove it entirely from her life. “Did you speak to him?”

Sam shook his head. “Barely.”

Leah looked around the kitchen. She had been going to make him breakfast. She hoped he had eaten something. She rubbed her hands on her bare thighs. “Have you eaten?”

Sam turned soulful eyes on her. “No,” he said, deliberately pathetically.

Leah laughed. Had he always been funny? “I’m famished. Let’s have something extravagant.”

Acknowledging that she was lavishing the attention she would have given her mate on his son instead, Leah prepared something of a feast. She asked, politely, after his fae wife and Sam, equally politely, replied. He was besotted with her. She had known Sam a very long time. She had thought he had loved Mercedes once, more than just for her breeding potential. It was a pale comparison to the deeper feeling he had for the fae woman. She was glad of it. He and Mercedes would not have worked well together. And, selfishly, it meant Mercedes hadn't returned to being a daily thorn in her side. The years after Bran had finally sent her away had been peaceful ones.

“Damn,” Sam said, a forkful of bacon and pancake paused before his lips. “I was going to show Da your necklace.”

“I thought you said it didn’t feel magic?”

“It doesn’t. But he’s better at that sort of thing. I might be missing a trick.”

Leah took a sip of her milk. He was right. “I think what he’s working on now is more important than my mystical pregnancy.”

For that was what it was. She had passed another full moon. There was still the – no doubt high – possibility that this as still a freak fluke. But something in her bones told her otherwise. Her wolf was calm. Her body didn’t fit right because it was changing to accommodate another life.

She had, she had to admit, hope.

She put down her glass. “I’d like to talk about my pregnancy now,” she told her doctor.

*

Leah’s wardrobe was full of tight clothes. She was proud of her body and her clothing choices reflected that. Her jeans were skin-tight, her shorts were high on her thighs, her T-shirts stretched across her breasts and stomach. None of these things were conducive to her changing shape. Even her limited selection of summer dresses erred on the ‘fitted’ style and were smart enough that members of the pack commented on them. ‘Going somewhere nice?’ often being the slightly disapproving refrain.

She drove to the nearest mall and spent a couple of hours finding looser styles of clothing – or just a size up from what she would normally wear - but nothing that screamed ‘maternity wear’. It was traditional to tell family and friends about a pregnancy once the ‘danger’ of the first twelve weeks had passed but werewolves were supposedly an observant species and she wanted to make sure any changes weren't obvious.

“Not that anyone would think I was pregnant,” Leah commented to Sam. "Because it's preposterous."

The new clothes made a significant difference to how Leah felt. Now she wasn’t constantly adjusting the band of her bra or the waist of her pants, she felt a little more normal. She took the vitamins Sam insisted she took, she drank more milk, she ate nutritious meals.

Strangely, she started to dip her toe into Bran’s nightmares.

The first time it happened, she woke – panting – and assumed it was something her own subconscious had conjured up – something that she immediately forgot, though it left her with a strong sense of doom.

After fitfully trying to go back to sleep, she got up and tidied the bedroom. She had not slept in her own room for several weeks now, not with Bran coming and going as he had been. When he was away, she had a tendency to be untidy. She sorted clothes into the dirty laundry hamper, folded some others. In their walk-in, she moved some of her clothes out of the way to make way for the looser summer items she had purchased.

That done, she went back to bed and slept peacefully until morning.

The next time it happened, she was more attuned to it, recognized it for what it was, even if it was not something that had happened to them before. She forced herself to wake, a skill her husband did not have. She picked up her cell phone and called him.

Bran answered, voice thick with sleep and grumpy. “Thank you.”

The fear and tension bled away. “You’re welcome.” She snuggled back into the pillow that no longer smelt of him. “When can you come home?”

She heard him rub his face. “We’ve stabilized Moira and Tom but neither have woken.”

Leah grunted. They needed Moira awake for her assessment of what the witches had done to her, and to her mating bond. “I wish you were here,” she said, feeling it was almost the same as talking to him together, in bed, and she could say such things.

“I’ll be home soon.” She heard his bones pop as he stretched the last of the nightmare kinks from his body. He sighed and she felt his mood shift. “Where are you?"

"Your room, of course."

"Mmm. And what item of my clothing are you wearing?”

She giggled. “The wrong blue shirt,” she said.

“I thought you hated it.”

“I do. It’s weirdly long on you. It works for me as a night shirt.”

They talked a little more, mostly of nonsense, and when she started to slur, he bid her goodnight and she fell asleep with the phone on the mattress next to her.

Anna came home, before Charles and Bran. She looked tired and unhappy. “It was awful,” she said. “And I was stressing everyone out. I couldn’t control it.”

Leah, truthfully, was always glad to hear that Anna’s amazing power had its limitations and there were some occasions when Anna wasn’t useful. Anna was also forbidden from attending the ceremony where Bran – and others – Changed their loved ones. She took away the need to fight.

Leah remembered her Change. She had been shot and though the wound had not been major the blood poisoning that followed had been. Her father – devastated at the thought of losing her – had Changed her himself. The human needed to fight then. It was no place for an Omega.  

Anna had rarely been without Charles in her mated life and after a day or two, she started haunting the main house, when she wasn’t visiting with Asil, or Tag, or any other of her friends in the pack. Leah felt Anna’s keen eyes on her and tried not to fidget. She had a very, very small bump, hidden now under cotton blouses and linen shirts. Anna couldn’t tell, she reassured herself.

“Perhaps we should do a movie night,” Leah suggested, giving the task of organizing this to Anna as a distraction.

It worked. Anna threw herself into it and, for once, Leah felt no compunction to try to take over, to lead as she would normally have done. She adjusted things when Anna wasn’t looking but it felt more like a habit then a deep desire to interfere and show Anna who was boss.

She curled up in the beanbag that was always hers and watched The Princess Bride for perhaps the hundredth time, miming the words like everyone else and if she dozed off, she woke before the credits rolled, able to see Wesley rescue his love.

Bran had been away a long time. Tag asked if they could have another movie night before the next full moon, his eyes going to Leah for permission.

“Of course. If anyone has any movie suggestions, let us know,” Leah said, yawning as she dragged the beanbags back into the garage.

Sam took over. “Here, let me do that,” he said, waving her off. “Go to bed.”

She was more than willing and took herself off, ignoring Anna’s curious looks.

*

Sam wanted to do another scan at twelve weeks, spend more time over it. “You can send Da a picture,” he said, enthusiastically.

Since Leah and Bran hadn’t exchanged one word about the pregnancy, she thought this was unlikely.

Finding time, however, to slip the suddenly strangely enthusiastic presence of the pack in her home became difficult. Anna was almost always around and so too was Kara, Juste, Tag and, her favorite, Asil. They had set up a badminton net in her back yard, of all things, having discovered that if each of them played against Anna, the urge to dominate was subdued.

Her every movement was noted upon and she was resorting to increasingly acerbic demonstrations of her lack of appreciation for this ‘stalking’. The only respite she got was when she was with Sam, whom she now took on her runs almost by rote, who accompanied her to the grocery store or on her chores around the town.

The morning Sam did the scan, they had run to the clinic together, Sam Changing in the back room whilst she got comfortable on the bed.

“I have to go back this week. Ariana is less than pleased,” he admitted to her. He tucked tissue into the folded top of her shorts and squirted gel on her bump.

“I understand.” She paused. “Thank you.”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Difficult to say was it?”

Leah scowled at him. “As a matter of fact.”

Sam chuckled. They both looked at the screen, and Leah sucked in a breath. It was now definitely a ‘baby’ in black and white. “I wish we had one of those 3D ultrasounds,” Sam mused as Leah marveled at what was growing inside of her. “I guess I could hire one.”

“Is it normal?” she asked. She could see a head, an arm and a leg.

Sam pointed those things out to her. “It’s a good size. Your weight is developing as it should. There's its horns, a tail…”

She kicked him. “Sam.”

He laughed, then reached for a knob on the machine. “Here, you’ll enjoy this.”

As she heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time, a broad smile broke across her face, mirrored on her step-son’s. “That the baby’s heart,” she said. She laughed, then clapped her hands over her mouth, muffling the sound.

“It is indeed.”

They listened for a few more moments, stupid grins on both their faces, then a thought occurred to her. “Can anyone else hear that? Normally? Can you?”

Sam shook his head. “No, not yet.”

“Not yet?” She tried to think – had she come across pregnant women before? Heard the baby’s heart beat?

“It’s pretty well insulated in there. You’d have to be really listening for it.”

Leah supposed that was true. As a werewolf, you learnt to filter out sounds that were irrelevant. She only focussed on someone’s heartbeat if she was looking for something – a lie, perhaps.  

Sam went to get his calendar and flicked through to what he was calling her ‘due’ date. “But, realistically, I suspect we’ll be looking at a Caesarian. I’m not entirely sure what werewolf contractions will do a human baby so better not to risk it.”

This wasn’t something Leah had considered. She was alarmed. “What if I go into labor early?”

“You won’t. Don’t panic,” Sam said, nose flaring. He turned her attention back to the screen. “I can’t quite tell from this if it’s a boy or a girl. I suppose you want to know?”

“Oh. Yes. Or should that be something I discuss with Bran?” She felt that flare of panic, again. Things had been comfortable with Bran, remote as they were, but the gaping void of the lack of discussion about the baby was now staring her in the face.

Sam was watching her. The corner of his mouth was up. “You’re very easy to read,” he said, as if this thought had never occurred to him.

It was something she had been told, many times, before. It always annoyed her. As if it was something she ‘lacked’, this ability to hide her thoughts. Why would she need to hide what she was thinking to werewolves? Why would anyone? If she was faced with fae, or vampires, that was another matter. Then she worked on it. She could be as dead-eyed as the next person. “We haven’t talked about the baby at all. I’m worried about what that means.”

“For Da, it’s probably not as real as it is to you and me.”

She agreed with that, at least.

*

Sam left the following morning and, with a slight hesitation, he kissed her cheek. “I’ll call you.”

Sam was… nice, she thought, watching his car drive off. She heard her cell phone chime and took a moment to track it down, lost in the couch cushions. It was a message from Bran.

Bringing Moira and Tom home with me.

Her mouth dropped open, all softer feelings fading away. Annoyance – no, anger – coursed through her. She pressed dial and listened to the phone ring and ring and ring. He didn’t have voicemail set up so she hung up in disgust and replied with a ‘NO’.

Naturally he didn’t reply to this. She stormed up to the guest room and started stripping the sheets. She did a furious load of laundry and when he still hadn’t replied, she tried ringing him again.

When that didn’t work, she tried Charles who, probably at the behest of Bran, had been told not to speak to her so didn't answer.

“Unbelievable,” she muttered, making the bed in the guest room. Weeks away and then he breaks his own rule, bringing a witch - strangers - home to their house. Whilst they had other things to discuss.

Leah was pissed. He was outrageous. He really was.

Still, because she was expected to be obedient, she prepared the guest room suite. She made sure the bathroom was clean. She put fresh towels out and a selection of travel sized toiletries. She put flowers in a vase and tried to make the room as welcoming as possible.

Once she was done, she felt a little calmer, remembering that Moira and Tom had been through something horrific. And Bran wasn’t bringing them back to Aspen Creek for a vacation. Yes, it would have been nice if Bran had called her and acknowledged that she, Leah, was going through something but that had to be put on hold, again, temporarily, for whatever reason. She was used to being de-prioritized but she was also, she hoped, rational when it came to duty.

It was her duty, now, to accept Moira and Tom.

She touched the curvature of her abdomen. Her time would come. Bran would really have no choice.

She sent Bran another message asking when to expect them and if Moira had any dietary requirements.

Then she went for a run.

*

Any private reunion Leah might have imagined with her mate was delayed as Charles, Anna and Asil turned up at the house – at Bran’s invitation – shortly before Bran did. Apparently there was to be some kind of meeting.

Anna asked about Sam. “He’s gone back to Zimbabwe,” Leah said vaguely, having almost entirely forgotten Sam. “This morning.”

For whatever reason, this made Anna share a look with Charles. Or, really, not a look – just a slight change in her body language that suggested they had just exchanged a word or two through their bond. Leah knew this was one of their many gifts. “Oh. That’s a shame. He couldn’t have delayed until Bran got home?”

“He was here rather longer than planned,” Leah said, wondering what they had said to each other. “I think Ariana was missing him.”

Charles had a particularly pinched expression. “What is it?” she asked him, feeling as if she was missing something important.

Bran’s car drew up out front, stymied any attempts to get the truth from Charles.

Through the door walked her mate and behind him Tom, a wolf she had met only once or twice before, carrying his mate, the white witch Leah had heard so much of.

Room was rapidly made on the couch, Anna floating affectionately around the woman as she was settled. “Can I get you something?”

As Leah was hostess, this was her job. She scowled at Anna for overstepping and stalked into the kitchen to start the tea that was requested. Anna followed, apologizing. “I’m sorry. She just looked so bad,” she said.

Leah decided it would be better to say nothing. She’d felt the prickle of tears, unexpectedly, and being in the kitchen got her out of the way. She boiled water for a pot of tea because that was the way her father had always done it. There was very little caffeine in tea, she had learnt.

Anna filled a tray. Her hand hovered over the jar where Leah kept the cookies. She gave Anna a short nod. “They’re fresh,” she said.

Anna laid them on a plate and went to slice a lemon. As she did so, Leah re-arranged the cookies into a more pleasing display and filled a little jug with milk, put cubed sugar onto the tray as well. Cups with saucers.

“This is pretty. Is it new?” Anna asked, lifting one of the cups.

“It was in the loft. It was my mother’s,” Leah said, though she had no idea if that was true. She smiled without any warmth. “You can take the tray through.”

This proved to be a tactical error. Whilst they had been carrying out the women’s work, the men had moved Moira into Bran’s office. Anna took the tray through and, clearly, was invited to a meeting. The door was closed behind her.

Leah, standing in the hall, alone, felt the sucker-punch of rejection like a physical blow.

She clenched her hands at her side and, for a moment, she imagined herself, head held high, opening the door and joining the conversation as if she was a respected member of the Marrok’s circle. But Bran didn’t do things accidentally. If he closed the door, he meant it. She was not invited.

Because – she reasoned – she had not been part of the attack against the witches. Asil’s mate had been a witch, or at least, witch-born, so he had value to add. Leah… well, what did she know? Her father had been a werewolf. Her mother human. She was irrelevant to the discussion.

Never mind that she was the Marrok’s wife. She had never been involved in his business. Her place was here, with the pack.

She busied herself with laying the dinner table. She put out cold cuts and cheese, some fruit, two loaves of sliced bread, all covered in plastic wrap. She put out a jug of water, another of iced tea. There was a roasted chicken, ready to be sliced. If she did all this with a resentful heart, no one would know.

Afterwards, she went up to her bedroom, showered, vindictively locked the door between her room and the hall and the interconnecting one between their bedrooms, and went to sleep.

*

Leah was not sorry for herself. She had chosen this. Bran had been very clear on what he wanted from her. If her expectations had changed well, then, more fool her. She was the stupid one; Bran was just consistent.  

She left early on her morning run, just as she always did. The house was quiet. To her knowledge, Bran had not tried her door the previous night. That was fine too.

Unaccountably, she wished for Sam. Who had been nice to her. Who had known about the baby, had been excited for her. Well, not for her, she acknowledged. For their people at large. If she could get pregnant, who else could? Ariana perhaps. Anna. The list was endless. Bran would be thrilled; a non-violent replenishment of their species.

She had a small cry halfway through her run. The hormones were most inconvenient, she thought. She wasn’t normally a person who cried. Also, the new running leggings she had bought were feeling a little tight.

Her small cry went on a bit longer than she had anticipated. She had to sit down for a while and stifle the noises she made with her fist. When it was done, she was too tired to keep running and walked back, which took a long time.

Leah could hear them all in the house, when she grew closer. Knives and forks, the smell of coffee. She snuck in through the back, up the back stairs to her room and locked the door behind her. A quick shower and she was back in bed. She slept through lunch and woke famished.

After assessing, she decided there was no one in her house, so she dressed one of the loose summer dresses she had bought to cover her tiny bump and bounced down the stairs.

She froze midway, realizing the witch had been left propped up on her couch.

“Hello? Is that the lady of the house?” Moira asked, head twitching in Leah’s direction.

“It is,” Leah said, coming down the stairs, reluctantly.

“I’m sorry we weren’t introduced properly and didn't have a chance to talk. Leah Cornick, isn’t it?”

Leah nodded then recalled Moira couldn’t see. Her experience with those who had lost one of their senses, however, reminded her that it only honed the others. “Yes. And you’re Moira. My husband has told me much about you. May I get you anything?” The tea at her elbow was cold, Leah surmised.

“No, I’m fine. Our husbands have gone for a run. There wasn’t much opportunity whilst we were in Seattle and, I don’t know about your husband, but mine gets twitchy.”

Leah agreed that ‘twitchy’ was the right word for it. “How are you?” she asked because she couldn’t help but note the air of weakness about her and it was the sort of thing that ought to be asked.

“Getting stronger each day, I assure you, though it may not look it.”

Leah had no particular plans for her day once she had eaten. With the men – Bran and Tom – out of the house, she had vague thoughts of watching some TV. She said as much to Moira. “I don’t know if there are other draws on your time.”

“By all accounts, I’m to sit here and get better.”

This was more information than Leah had been given. She recognized that she would only embarrass Moira by saying that. She put on her favorite detective show; she’d pre-recorded several episodes. Sam had not been interested in the kind of television Leah watched so she had built up quite a backlog.

To her surprise, Moira enjoyed the show. She said the dialogue and the intonation of the actors was good enough to enjoy it without much visual description. It was light-hearted. Leah found herself chuckling at the same time as Moira did.

When their mates returned, Tom greeted Leah formally and leaned over Moira to kiss her hello. Bran didn’t – this wasn’t unusual – and Leah attempted to smile in a direction that some might mistake for being in his. Her husband, of course, did not.  

“Moira, do you feel up to trying again this afternoon?” Bran asked her.

“I’m more than ready,” the woman said, stoutly.

The phone rang and Bran picked it up. After a moment’s conversation, during which Leah recognized Sam’s voice and instinctively held out her hand, Bran passed the phone to her.

“Hold on,” she said, clambering up from the couch and walking out of the living area onto the terrace. She closed the doors behind her and walked across the back yard to where she knew the signal would still work but the occupants of the household who didn’t need to know her business wouldn’t be able to hear.

“Not alone?” Sam asked. He sounded far away.

“No. Bran has brought Moira and Tom back for further interrogation,” she guessed.

“Oh?” Sam said.

“It seems important. I,” Leah swallowed. “I don’t know what it is they’re doing. But I’m sure it’s important.”

“Yes, of course. How are you?”

“Fine.” She snorted. “It’s not been that long since you left. Nothing has gone wrong. Yet,” she added. She sat on a bench which allowed her to touch the tips of her fingers to her abdomen without being obvious.

“I didn’t think anything would,” Sam said, for all the world as if this was a normal pregnancy. “Have you spoken to Da yet?”

“It’s been a little busy. But I will,” Leah said confidently. “I think, realistically, only once Moira and Tom have gone.”

There was a staticky pause from Sam’s end. Then he said something she couldn’t make out. “Sam?” she said. “I didn’t hear that.”

“I said,” and Sam’s voice was suddenly loud and clear. “I said I was surprised at Da.”

Leah could see Bran now, in his office. Just the back of his head. “He has his priorities,” she said, softly.

“I remember what he was like, when Blue-Jay woman was pregnant,” came Sam’s tinny voice.

Leah experience a small stabbing sensation in the vicinity of her heart. She tried not to think of the woman to whom she would always be compared. “Well, that was different,” Leah said softly. “It was always going to be different.”

As everyone under the sun knew, Bran had loved Blue-Jay Woman and presumably he had wanted their child, Charles, if not for his own sake, then for her great sacrifice.   

It was entirely possible that Bran didn’t want this one, she realised, tied as it was to Leah herself. She served him a purpose, a functional one. That wasn’t to say he didn’t enjoy aspects of her company but he was a man and a werewolf and was more than capable of separating sex from emotion. Unlike her.  

Still. This avenue of thinking was not one that she had really allowed to fester before. Of course - Bran would love this child, she reassured herself. He loved his children. It was only natural.

Unless, he felt he couldn’t? In much the same way he couldn’t love her?

But, a small, weak voice said, how would she cope if he loved their child but didn’t love the child’s mother? She was a jealous person. Would she turn that jealousy on her child instead?

A wave of horror sunk her spirits low. She found herself shaking her head. No. No, she would not allow that.

“Leah?” Sam’s voice came, from far away. He said something and again the line cut out.

“I can’t hear you,” she sighed, frustrated. “But I’ll manage.”

“…. I know you will,” he said. “Ariana and I will be back. Two weeks.”

She sat on the bench for a long time after Sam had said his goodbyes, twisting thoughts occupying her mind. She had never considered herself a maternal person. Quite the opposite. The nugget of possibility that she might grow this baby, bring it into the world and resent it had never occurred to her. What if she couldn’t love it? She thought of her delight at hearing its heartbeat. Maybe she - ridiculous as this sounded - already did love it? Which was a risk in itself because she had months to go. How did other women do this? she wondered.

The phone in her hand rung and she answered mechanically.

“I need to speak to Bran,” came the obstreperous tones of Mercedes Thompson Hauptman.

“Of course,” Leah said, finding for once jealousy didn’t even stir. She really didn’t have the energy for it. She walked into the house and handed the phone to Bran, who had come out of his office expectantly. “Mercedes.”

*

She prepared dinner in a state of detachment. A bigger dinner than she was expecting, as once again Anna, Charles and Asil joined them. She set the table outside and by nature of the fact that she and Bran each sat at opposite ends was able to eat quietly, listening to the discussion around the table. All eyes looked towards Bran, rather than her. Mercedes’s name was mentioned more than once – apparently she had been heroic in saving Moira.

Of course.

Leah paused over grabbing a piece of soft cheese from the platter nearest. She couldn’t remember if it was unpasteurized. Until Sam’s edicts, she hadn’t really paid much attention to the origins – or processing - of their cheese. She then hovered over a slice of salami and quickly drew her fork back. This wasn’t allowed either, she thought. Toxoplasmosis.

She ate some more bread and salad and planned tomorrow’s menu. Sandwiches for lunch – stuffed with fillings with fries on the side. For dinner, there was beef. She would have to add more sides if the others were going to join again. Another potato dish, a salad, some more green beans.

Someone – Asil – asked a question about Sam. Leah’s ears pricked as this was, so far, the only part of the conversation she could demonstrably participate in. Bran said he had been sorry to have just missed him.

“Oh, he’s coming back. He and Ariana,” Leah amended.

“Really? Is their business in Africa wrapped up?” Asil asked, smearing cheese on a piece of bread.

“Zimbabwe,” she corrected. Sam continued to be vague. She took this to mean it was fae business of Ariana’s and therefore not their own. She wondered if Sam’s relationship with the fae woman would serve them an advantage with the wider fae community. A thought Bran had no doubt already had. “And I don’t know if it’s wrapped up. Presumably.”

“It’s been nice having him around,” Anna said, looking at Bran and then Charles. “I haven’t really spent much time with him before.”

Asil grunted. “When the lady of the house allows.”

Leah frowned at Asil. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.

“Just that you rather monopolized Bran’s son. Always scurrying off somewhere.”

Leah began to get an inkling of the exchanges she had occasionally seen pass between the pack when she had left somewhere with Sam. She supposed to an outsiders point of view, her sudden desire to spend time with a son she had always demonstratively disliked would have looked very peculiar.

“He’s surprisingly good company,” was all she managed, taking a sip of the wine that had been poured for her. At the taste of it on her tongue, she remembered no alcohol and found it suddenly quite hard to swallow. One sip probably wouldn’t hurt, she thought. Surely?

The men cleared the table and Anna helped Leah with dessert. “Sam reminds me a lot of Bran,” she said, spooning freshly whipped cream over the strawberries.

Such was Anna’s power over Leah that Leah found herself wanting to disagree with something she had always thought herself. She held it back - just. “Mmm.”

“I think Charles looks a lot like Bran too. Sometimes.”

Obviously, genetically, Blue-Jay Woman’s genes had a stronger role to play in Charles’s appearance but Leah had seen Bran in him, too. “It’s the mouth,” Leah sighed.

“Exactly. And sometimes the expression.” Anna smiled.

Leah garnished the little dishes with a snippet of mint and a crumble of meringue and Anna piled them on to a tray to take out. Leah heard the chorus of gratitude, heaped upon Anna instead of Leah herself who had planned, prepared and executed the meal.  

Annoyed at being thwarted again, she pulled a bottle of dessert wine from the refrigerator crossly and returned to the table. Bran caught her wrist as she passed him. “Thank you, Leah,” he said, gesturing at everything.

Leah smiled at her husband, genuinely, for the first time since he had come home. “You’re welcome.”  

“Yes, it’s been delicious, thank you,” Moira added, saluting Leah with her glass. Her cheeks were a little pink; she certainly looked better than when she had arrived.

Moira then regaled the group with the plot of the television show she had watched with Leah that day, weaving Leah into the conversation with witty questions about the characters. It made everyone laugh, as she had intended it to, and Leah reflected that Moira wasn’t so bad. For a witch.

That night, since there was apparently another ‘meeting’ after dinner, Leah went to bed but left her door unlocked in case her mate chose to join her. Instead, she woke just before three to the knowledge that he was having a nightmare. A bad one.

She padded over to their connecting door but found it was locked from her side. She had forgotten to unlock it. Wincing, Leah did so and crept into Bran’s cold, dark bedroom. Both colder and darker than it should have been.

“You shouldn’t be here,” said a voice from his bed.

This was not Bran’s voice. Nor was it the Berserker, not truly. This was something in between, in the dark landscape of Bran’s subconscious. Her feet stumbled but she persevered. “A very bad dream,” she said lightly, ignoring the tremble in her own voice.

“Not a good idea, little girl,” the voice said silkily as Leah climbed into her side of his bed. The sheets felt cold, almost damp. She shivered.

She wondered if there was a part of Bran who truly thought she was a little girl. By comparison, perhaps everyone was – except Sam and a few others. The Moor maybe, though, in Leah’s personal opinion, he behaved more like a child than anyone else. She thought uncomfortably of his reaction to Kara growing beyond his purview. And of him all but accusing her of having an affair with her husband’s son at the dinner table. Really.

She inched closer to her husband, who was frozen in his nightmare, laid still, as if dead. She slid her fingers over his stomach and felt him twitch. His skin was icy. She kept going until she was draped over him and then, after a few minutes, she felt him wake up.

Bran’s arms came around her. “Hello,” he said, roughly.

“Bad one,” she said.

He turned his face into her hair and breathed in. He curled into her. “Very.”

After a minute or two of silence, where she waited – as ever – for him to say something, Leah forged ahead. “I forgot to unlock the connecting door,” she clarified.

“Ah.”

That one sound told her he had tried it. She was tempted to make a move, then, but his breathing was growing deep and even and even her brief glances at him during the day had shown he was tired. She cuddled close and went to sleep with her husband instead.

*

In the morning, she slept late again and Bran was gone. Faintly annoyed that he hadn’t woken her, she dressed in her running gear, complete with baggy T-shirt, and found that everyone had breakfasted already and were cocooned in his office once more. The door was closed.

She went for a run – she was definitely slower now, which was annoying – and when she came back to shower and change into one of the new summer dresses, there was no one in the house. Not even Moira. There were signs that they had left in a hurry, however. She looked in the usual places for a note from Bran but found none. Definitely left in a hurry.

Leah ate breakfast and called Bran’s cell. It rung in his office. It was at this point that she gave up. She needed to get more groceries, anyway, if she was going to be feeding so many people two or three meals a day. She laid out three loaves of bread, plates, cutlery, as well as all the usual sandwich condiments in case everyone returned before she did, and took herself off to the grocery store.

Leah loved the grocery store. The variety and ability to choose could not but please her. To her mind, it hadn’t been so long ago that replenishing food was constant work. Now all she had to do is roll her cart along the aisles and pick what she wanted, like a game.

She hovered for a long time in front of the ice-cream. She planned to make apple pie for dessert that evening and wanted a very good vanilla ice-cream to go with it. A young woman drew up next to her, a tiny baby in the baby-seat attached to the front of her cart. Leah froze.

She hadn’t really imagined the actual baby part yet. The outcome of her apparently viable pregnancy. Plenty could still go wrong, after all. She was a physical impossibility.

But if everything worked out, at the end of this would be a baby. This would be her, she thought, staring at the mother who was deciding between some low-fat frozen yoghurt. She would be the one pushing a baby around a grocery store. A baby with hazel or blue eyes. Blonde or sandy brown hair.

Leah drifted around, now observing it for more than just the usual delights of the bounty of modern America. It was midday on a workday – there were plenty of housewives with young pre-school age children. She followed two who had clearly arranged to shop together and found herself in the baby aisle. Or, rather, aisles. Food and milk and diapers and tiny clothes.

Wistfully, Leah touched the synthetic trim of a tiny dress and then snatched her hand back.

She was getting ahead of herself. She had months to go. Months before she could really think of things like baby socks and bottles and a crib. A crib, for goodness sakes.

Forcefully, Leah returned to her usual shop and paid briskly, her mind returning to her chores, not the baby-addled thoughts from before.

Normally, if a female was staying in the guest room, Leah would spare no thought to going in and cleaning the bathroom, maybe tidying a little. It was a territorial game to her. She had even done it with Kara, when she had stayed with them as a young teenager, but Kara had mistaken it for maternal fussing. A female werewolf would recognize it for what it was – it was Leah’s house and her territory that was being encroached upon. It said mind how you go.

Moira, a witch, would consider it strange behavior, an intrusion on her privacy, unless she had much experience with dominant females. Leah knew Angus wasn’t mated, though. Perhaps she wouldn’t know it.

Tom would know what she meant by it – he wouldn’t like it but he wouldn’t say anything. Leah was dominant to him.

It was the sort of behavior that Bran disapproved of. He liked to appear as human as possible. In a way, that almost encouraged Leah. There was nothing wrong with being a werewolf. This was her natural state.

Except, obviously, not right now. A werewolf who couldn’t Change.

She sighed. Fine. She wouldn’t bother Moira with her game. She could be human this time.

Leah drove home, listening to the radio and singing along, as if the sound could drown out her thoughts. Another benefit to being alone. No one could hear how terribly she sung; she was almost totally tone deaf. It made Bran wince so she never sung in front of him but that just meant when she was by herself it was all the sweeter. She could pretend.

There were no cars in their drive when she arrived home which meant Bran was still out doing who knew what with who knew who.

She opened the garage using the remote, reversed in. There was another entrance into the kitchen through the garage - it would be more efficient than carrying the groceries through the house.

Still humming, she unpacked everything, made herself a sandwich and put away the rest of the food she had left out for everyone. She pulled some pastry from the freezer to thaw for that night’s apple pie and took her sandwich outside to eat on the decking.

Two mouthfuls in and there was a knock on the front door and then, as pack tended to do, the door was pushed open before she could get to it. “Hello?”

Sighing, her peaceful afternoon interrupted, Leah went to see Peggy, hovering in the entranceway. Behind her were two children – her mate’s from a previous relationship.

Peggy eyed Leah nervously. “Hi, Leah. Is Bran home?”

“No,” Leah said. “Is something wrong?”

The other female looked disappointed. She lowered her eyes. “Oh, it’s nothing. Just. Liam and Petra are with us this week and, well. I’ve got to drive to Helena this afternoon to drop off some of the pieces to the gallery. They’ve already been cooped up in the car for the last couple of days. It’s really no way to spend their summer vacation.”

“You were wondering if they could stay here.” Peggy must have been really desperate. She understood now the temerity in Peggy’s eyes when she realized Bran wasn’t home. The children were human; Leah was not.

“I— if it’s not convenient —“ Peggy didn’t seem to know what to do.

“It’s fine,” Leah said. Peggy was pack. The children didn’t look the small, vulnerable type. The girl was holding a book and the boy some kind of plastic toy weapon. “They can watch movies. Play outside. I’ll keep an eye on them.”

“Are you sure?”

“I said it was fine.”

Leah listened with a great deal of amusement to Peggy’s nervous entreaties that the children be very, very, very good for Mrs. Cornick and they were not to bother her. She wondered if they knew Peggy was a werewolf. She had never thought to ask.  

The children were reasonably self-sufficient. After showing them where the bathroom and kitchen was, the little girl – Petra – settled herself onto the couch with her book. The boy asked where the outdoor faucet was and if he could use his Super Soaker.

“What’s a Super Soaker?” Leah asked.

The boy held up his gun. “It’s this. You fill it with water and fire it.”

Leah could see that water pistols had clearly moved on in the world. “Fine. Don’t shoot the flowers.”

She sat on the decking and finished her sandwich. Then went to make herself a second one. Liam went around the yard firing plumes of water in the air in an increasingly desultory manner. She suspected it would be more fun if he had a companion who also had a ‘Super Soaker’.

After a while, Leah sighed and went into the garage. She fished out several empty bottles from the recycling and returned to the back yard. “How about we do some target practice?” she suggested.

*

By the time Bran, Moira and Tom returned, Leah and the children were wrapped in towels and drinking hot chocolate on the decking. She had put the children’s clothes in the dryer, leaving them both in their underwear. Their hair – and hers -  was damp.

Leah had not gone easy on them but Liam’s superior expertise in the vagaries of the Super Soaker's ability to fire accurately meant that he had come first in target practice, followed by Leah and Petra third. Liam had agreed that as Petra had been quite late to joining in, she didn’t have the same amount of practice, which seemed to stymie any hurt feelings. Leah had been surprised at this level of sophisticated pacification from such a small human – surprised even further when Liam had given her a conspiratorial wink.

Bran came out just as Liam was giving Leah a run-down on the more superior models of Super Soakers. She supposed she’d had worse conversations.  

Her husband surveyed their lawn, littered as it was with bottles, cans and the bricks they had used to create some more challenging ‘targets’. Bran was amused. “This looked like fun,” he said, casting an eye over the children and Leah. “Hello, Liam, Petra. Had a nice afternoon?”

Both children agreed. They made loud slurping noises as they drank their hot chocolate, which she’d already told them was disgusting but both seemed to take this as encouragement so she decided to ignore it.

Bran raised a questioning eyebrow to Leah, awaiting an explanation.

Leah sipped her own hot chocolate. “Peggy had to take something to Helena and didn’t want the children to be stuck in a car all day. I don’t think anyone else was available.”

“I see.”  

“And how was your day?”

“Good.” Bran smiled – properly – and then to her disappointment his smile faltered, disappeared completely. “I will show you what we’ve been doing, later.”

“Intriguing.” Leah heard the ping of the drier and stood, the towel falling off one shoulder. Her wet hair hit the back of her neck and she hurried to sweep it over the towel again. “I’ll go get the clothes.”

Bran followed her to the laundry. “I think you should go change,” he said quietly as she pulled clothes from the drier.

“It’s just a little wet.”

“No.” Bran plucked at her dress. It was a loose shape, tied only at her shoulders so it draped down in an A-line. She saw what he meant when he pulled at the fabric. Damp, it clung to the new curve of her stomach.

“Oh for— yes, fine.” She handed the clothes to him. “Distribute these appropriately.”

In her room, she could hear Moira and Tom down the hallway, their voices sounding lighter. She changed quickly into a similar dress, this time white with small embroidered blue flowers. She wasn’t sure what it said that the clothing she had bought was so significantly more feminine than before. It hadn’t been a conscious decision on her part. Perhaps it was simply the style of clothing themselves?

She went back downstairs to find Bran had just put the children in front of a movie, with sandwiches and glasses of milk. They were staring, glassy-eyed, at the enormous TV system, enraptured.

Since Bran himself had vanished, presumably to his office, Leah began preparations for dinner. Tom stuck his head into the kitchen and asked if he could help. She set him to lay the table and then found herself with Moira’s company in the kitchen.

“Bran said he was going to show me the fruits of your labors this evening,” she said, in a blatant attempt to find out what was going on.

“Yes,” Moira sighed, sipping the glass of wine Leah had poured her. “After it worked on Charles and Anna, we tried it with Donovan and his mate.”

Donovan and his mate were a lone wolf pair that Bran deigned to live just outside of their territory. Presumably, ‘it’ was something to do with mating bonds, then. Something Bran was going to try on theirs.

“That’s good,” Leah sighed. Her and Bran’s bond was… tricky. Bran controlled it, controlled it so completely that she had only the vaguest idea of its potential. Of course, when she had been newly mated, she’d had no idea what to expect. It had been decades before she had heard from other couples the ‘gifts’ their bonds gave them. The ability to talk, to share emotions, to heal, even. All that Bran allowed her was the ability to pull on the pack like he did. Anything else, she knew, was an accident.

As she chopped up the vegetables for the salad, she found her mating bond in her mind’s eye, a shining spool of copper and gold that unwound in the direction of her husband. She touched it – in so much as ‘touch’ existed – and felt Bran clamp down on it, resisting. No, was what she heard/felt.

See. Tricky.

*

To her relief, only Anna and Charles appeared for dinner, though Bran nearly upended that by inviting Peggy and the children to stay when she returned to pick them up. Peggy declined, thankfully, and Leah was left with a slightly easier job. Easier, too, because she felt more comfortable without Asil present.

“Bran took Asil aside today, told him that Sam was here at his behest,” Anna explained when she helped clear the first course. “He wasn’t best pleased with Asil’s insinuations.”

Leah was glad to hear something had been said. She would have enjoyed it more if she had been present which, knowing Bran, was precisely why she hadn’t been.

Dinner was more enjoyable that evening. There was less tension amongst all the guests. And, now that Leah had the bare bones of what had been happening, now that she knew it would be ending, she was feeling more at ease. Her guests were effusive in their praise, which pleased her and in turn meant she wanted to be more pleasing. At heart, Leah was not a complicated woman.  

Anna gestured to Leah's dress. “This is pretty,” she said, when the men were discussing cuts of meat in a competitive way.

Leah looked down at herself. “Thank you. It’s not my normal style. But I liked it.”

“Petra called you a fairy princess,” Moira commented, “so that gives me an idea of what it looks like.”

“She did? How charming,” Leah said. Until today she had never bothered to learn the names of Peggy’s step-children.

Anna described the dress to Moira, who asked to feel the material. Leah complied and caught Bran’s eye at the end of the table as she did so. She smiled, hesitantly, and he returned it, before lifting his glass of wine to his lips and turning to Charles again.

They discussed clothes a little more – a passion of Moira’s, it appeared – and Leah reflected how expensive things were. “It would have cost me perhaps a third as much to make this,” she said, looking at the hem.

“You can make your own clothes?” Anna asked, brown eyes curious.

“Of course, most women could, once. Clothes now are, if anything, significantly simpler. I shouldn’t think something like this would take me more than a couple of hours with a sewing machine.” Leah spread the cloth over her thigh, making sure to keep her back straight so that the dress fell from her breasts and skimmed her stomach.

This appealed to Anna, a modern woman used to buying off the shelf.

“I made the drapes,” Leah said, pointing to the heavy cream drapes that framed the sliding doors of their living area.

“What? Really? But they’re gorgeous.” Anna, in fact, got up to demonstrate this by investigating the drapes herself. It crossed Leah’s mind that this might be another one of Anna’s ‘tricks’. Bran’s daughter-in-law was quicker than she. She often replayed their conversations in her head and saw that Anna had twisted things to confuse her to get her own way.

Leah felt herself recede slightly and let Moira pick up the conversation.

“Were you born here, Leah?” Moira asked.

“In America? Yes.” Leah scooped up the last of the melted ice-cream.

“And your parents?”

She shook her head then remembered to speak, “No, I don’t believe so.”

Anna, who must have spoken to Kara, asked, “Did your Dad have a British accent?”

Leah hesitated, for once not annoyed that her personal business had been passed around the pack. She looked down into her empty bowl, trying to remember. She thought she could picture his face, still, but his voice? “I… think so.”

Down the table, Bran chipped in, “He must have done because you did.”

“Did I?”

Bran nodded. He had his elbows on the table now, hands clasped together. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and looked relaxed. “Perfect elocution. Completely wild, but perfect elocution.”

Charles laughed. “Wild? Leah?”

“Utterly wild. Took years before she become the lady of the manor you see before you.”

Leah pulled a face at Bran. Wild. Honestly. “He’s exaggerating,” she muttered. “He didn’t see me when I first joined the pack. Then I was wild.”

This caused their guests to whoop with laughter. She grinned into her wine glass, then remembered she wasn’t supposed to drink anything and swapped it for her water.

“That whole pack was wild,” Bran said, with fondness. “Roamed the Great Plains, almost entirely nomadic.”

“Truthfully?” Tom said, awed. She couldn’t quite remember but she thought he wasn’t that old. A few decades as a wolf. Very much of the 20^th Century. Or 21^st, even.

“Yes, it was very dog eat dog. If you weren’t dominant, you didn’t eat. You had to be entirely selfish.” Bran reached across the table for the wine. “It was a different time.”

“Not so different,” Anna mused, quietly.

Charles moved slightly, putting his hand on his mate’s leg under the table.

Sympathetic looks were directed towards the Omega at the table. Leah herself lowered her eyes in respect. There was no question that Anna’s experience had been horrific, that it shouldn’t have happened. But the life of a female werewolf was hard and always had been. There were things in Leah’s past she would rather not remember, too. 

“I’d like to hear more about Wild Leah,” Charles said, changing the subject.

Leah stood up. “He can’t tell you. He’s forbidden,” she said, sweetly, reaching for the empty bowls.

Charles looked to his father. Bran gave him a commiserating look. “Afraid she’s correct.” He mimed zipping his lips. “The result of a lost wager, oh, a century ago, I think? My lips are sealed.”

Moira and Tom chuckled, as if Bran was being funny.

“You’re serious!” Anna laughed. “Do you often make wagers?”

“Not since that one,” Leah said pertly, carrying the debris of the dinner into the kitchen, leaving the others pestering her mate for more information.

He wouldn’t give it. The terms of their wager had been very explicit.

*

That night, she left both doors unlocked and the connecting door open. Bran came in, drying his hair. She was propped up in bed, yawning. “Are we doing the thing with the bond now?”

“No, better wait until you’re not limp with exhaustion.”

“Might have to wait a few months, then.”

Bran blinked at her, as if he hadn’t put the two things together, then tossed his damp towel towards her chair. It slumped onto the ground. “In the morning, then.”

She stared at the towel, annoyed. “What is it? And put that back in to the bathroom, please.”

“I need to build a wall.” Bran went to pick the towel up, returned it to the bathroom.

Leah didn’t think she liked the sound of that. He climbed into bed. “A wall? Don’t we have enough of those?”

“Different kind. And we don’t have a wall.”

To demonstrate what she considered to be a ‘wall’, Leah plucked at the bond between them. Without a flicker, Bran clamped down hard on whatever it was that he felt when she did that. “Stop it,” he said.

Leah held her hands out. “I don’t even know what ‘it’ is.”

Her husband looked – there was no other word for it – shifty. “It’s… unsettling.”

“Why? How?” She paused. “Why don’t you do it back to me?”

Bran shook his head and turned off the light. “Let’s go to sleep.”

Leah parked the mating bond conversation immediately. “Oh, is that what we’re doing?”

“I thought you were tired.”

She huffed and turned on her side, her back to him. Almost immediately, he was up against her back, pushing her hair to one side so he could kiss her neck. Leah felt an unexpectedly potent surge of lust.

She rolled onto her back and kissed him, grasping handfuls of his hair and pulling. Their tongues tangled eagerly. To her delight, she heard him moan but then he yanked himself back momentarily, breathing hard. “Do I need to be careful?” he asked.

For a split-second she didn’t know what he meant. Then she shook her head. “It’s fine,” she replied.

But he was careful, she noticed. And his questing hands, his lips, never once touched her stomach.

*

Bran arranged two chairs opposite each other in his office and they sat so their knees touched.

“I wanted to wait to do this with you because our bond is a little –“

At his hesitation, she supplied him with her word, “Tricky?”

“Tricky. Yes. And it’s not just me,” he said, lifting his eyebrows. “If I let you, you would pour everything you think and feel at me.”

“I would?”

“Yes.”

Leah felt embarrassed and she squirmed on her chair. She didn’t like the sound of that. He had never mentioned it before, either.

Bran was watching her, humor in his hazel eyes. “It’s very reflective of your best quality, Leah. Don’t take it so hard.”

She shrugged, tried to appear unbothered. “So what do you need to do?”

“I need to open the bond to build a ‘wall’, just a small one, where we have learnt we are weakest. Where a witch, if she has the skill, can make an attack on not just the werewolf she has in her possession but their mate as well.”

Leah grimaced. “Dangerous.”

“Just so. It was unnerving to see Tom debilitated and had I not been there, they would have been able to kill him. The witches mustn’t have this as a weapon in their arsenal. Charles, Tom, Angus and I will now spend the next few weeks teaching our Alpha pairs the techniques so that they can apply it to their mated couples.”

With a sinking feeling, Leah realized this meant he would be going away again. Bran’s hand came to rest on her bare knee.   

“In order to put this wall in place, I will have to open up the bond between us. I need you to do two things for me – one, try not be afraid and two, try to think good thoughts.”

“Good thoughts?”

“Happy thoughts?” he countered, as if this needed explaining.

Leah snorted. “Really, Bran?” She rubbed her hands on her thighs, nervous. Possibly more nervous because of the ‘happy thoughts’ than the warning that she might be afraid. She supposed that made her odd. “Give me a moment, then.”

She did have happy thoughts. She loved her home. She loved Aspen Creek. She, of course, loved him – but he wouldn’t want to see that. She had been happy at dinner the previous night. Spending time with Kara made her happy. Successful activities with the pack. When the wildlings were content. When Bran was home.

Leah found she had closed her eyes and when she opened them she caught a moment of raw openness on Bran’s face. He covered it quickly. “Ready?” he asked.

She nodded, trying to keep hold of the gentle contentment of her thoughts. Her lips parted, about to ask him what he was going to do, when he took hold of the sides of her face and suddenly she was freezing. And no longer in Bran’s office. Nowhere she—

“This is a cave,” she said, always one to state the obvious.

It was a cave and it was winter and Bran was… not her Bran. “Oh,” she said, somehow not surprised. “It’s you.”

“Hello, little girl.”

*

Not-Bran had golden eyes and a crooked smile. He was wearing pants that ballooned out around his knees and tied at the ankles. She wanted to giggle, because they were ridiculous but a slight nod from him had her looking down. She was wearing something similar, in a shimmering green fabric, with a wrapped piece around her breasts. The bare swell of her stomach was clearly visible and she covered it with her arms, suddenly shy. Standing naked in front of her own mirror was different than standing in front of him. Or not him.

“Where are we?”

“One of the places in his subconscious. Or maybe yours? Either way, someone probably died here.” Not-Bran shrugged and walked off, out of the cave. She could see it was snowing. “Come on!” he called.

“I’m not really dressed for the weather,” she said. “Why don’t you come back here?”

He didn’t because whilst he wasn’t her Bran he certainly shared similarities. She shivered and rubbed her upper arms.

Behind her, where it was dark, and cold, something stirred. Something that felt familiar. The cold rush against her spine when Bran had chased her through the forest.

Someone died here, she thought.

Happy, she remembered. She had to remember her happy thoughts. She pictured taking Kara shopping, the first time. The little girl, as she had been then, pressed close to her side, Leah’s arm going around her shoulders, feeling protective of someone smaller and more vulnerable than her. The expression of innocent gratitude on Kara’s face as she had looked up at Leah. Yes, that was a good one. It had been a long, long time since Leah had felt that way about anyone, about a child.

The cold press at her back eased and with it she felt a little warmer. She went towards the mouth of the cave and looked out. “My goodness,” she breathed. In front of her was a landscape she hadn’t seen before. Snow-covered rolling hills and mountain, forest – not pine and firs like their own but oaks and ash. The snow was falling, the sky leaden, coming on to dark.

She could see the trail Not-Bran had left, shimmering strangely in the snow. It was ankle-deep.

Leah cast a look over her shoulder. Should she leave? It seemed that if she had ‘woken’ in the cave, maybe it was the place she should wait…for whatever it was that Bran was doing.

When she turned back, Not-Bran was suddenly there again. Now his eyes shimmered silver. “Do you want to go in there? You won’t like it.”

“Who are you?” she wanted to know.

“You know.” He shrugged again and walked back into the cave.

Her Bran tried not to be cryptic with her. He knew it drove her mad. This character had no such compunction. She stomped after him. “I don’t know,” she told him. “Just tell me.”

“That’s not how this works.”

“How what works? This holding room of my mate’s subconscious?” She stared at his bare back and realized he didn’t have the scars that Bran did.

Her voice echoed back through the cave, into the dark, cold space. Mate, mate, mate, it said. No, not her voice. Another.

Happy thoughts, Leah thought urgently as all the hairs on her arms stood to attention. She pictured the target practice with the children. Petra’s laughter as she hit down her first bottle. Liam losing control of the hose and it flinging water, snake-like, at them all. She had laughed a lot that day.

Not-Bran pressed forward, into the dark and Leah, hackles rising, followed.

They walked through the dark and the cold until Leah was no longer certain they were in a cave, just surrounded by an impenetrable, silent darkness. It was disorientating – like the stories of fighter pilots who emerged from clouds upside down.

She kept her eyes on the back of Not-Bran, watching the play of his muscles under his skin as he walked forward soundlessly. It was so cold. Her breath was coming out in puffs of white. It took a lot for a werewolf to really feel the cold; it was well below freezing.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something move and she glanced over. Nothing. But also, she thought, the darkness was not as solid as she had thought. It was writhing, like a boiling sea.

Quickly, she looked away. And stopped dead in her tracks. There was no sign of Not-Bran. Had he gone further? She picked up her pace, uselessly, feeling the panic from earlier pluck at her. He didn’t come back into focus, as she knew, somehow, he wouldn’t. Instead it was just her and the boiling cold darkness.

She stopped again. “Bran?” she called.

There was no echo this time, for which she was glad. She waited and it seemed as if the boiling mass was closing in on her. It was a trick, she thought. Closed her eyes. She opened them again and jolted. No. Much closer. Coming for her.

Happy thoughts. She covered her face with her hands and tried to summon some. Movie nights. Hunting with Sage – no, not that one. The view from her bedroom. Bran. Bran. Bran.

She couldn’t help it. Her happiest thoughts, her best thoughts. They were all him. All Bran. And the moment she thought that, she couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t but think of all the little things that she loved about her difficult mate. The crinkled corners of his eyes when he was trying not to laugh. The way he railed about the failing education system of America to anyone who would listen. How he turned down the corners of newspapers and magazines for articles he thought she might like to read. The way he slept on his back with utter abandon, his arms flung above his head. Their first time together, the first man to touch her with gentleness, to seek her pleasure as well as his own. The look in his eyes when she was on top of him. I need you.

The swirling darkness coalesced into a body, then a man, then the figure of her husband, scars and all. He was panting, as if he had been chasing something down.

Not-Bran nudged her with his shoulder, appearing out of nowhere. “Oh, well done, little girl.”

“Don’t call me little girl,” she said, snippily.

Bran gave himself a shake. “Leah, who are you talking to?”

Leah pointed. “Him.”

Though Not-Bran waved, his crooked smile in place, Bran still looked confused. “All I see is our bond.”

Not-Bran nudged her again. “See. I told you, you knew.”

*

Bran was curious about what she seen. She untangled herself from him – apparently her body had sought comfort from him by climbing onto his lap, but it was awkward so he helped her back into her own chair. 

“He – Not-Bran – he’s the one who talks to me when you’re having bad nightmares,” she explained.

They didn’t talk about Bran’s nightmares. She wondered if what she had seen was his nightmare or some interpretation of it. Bran had been in that thing. She shivered and rubbed her bare arms.

“Does he,” Bran said, mildly.

“I always thought it was the, uh, other you.”

At this, her husband looked pained. “Leah…”

“Well, how was I supposed to know any different,” she said grumpily. Bran could expect so little of her at the same time as expecting so much. It was unfair.

“It would have been useful to know our bond has manifested an avatar to talk to you.”

“He doesn’t do it all the time. Just when you have the dreams.” She thought about it. “He usually warns me off.”

Bran then required a run-down of the ‘conversations’ she’d had with the mating bond. It didn’t take very long. He wasn’t precisely chatty.

When she was done, Bran drew a deep breath and sat back. He looked at her thoughtfully through his eyelashes. His silence meant he was thinking things through.

“Do you think of me as a little girl?” Leah asked, recalling her thoughts from earlier.

“Obviously, I do not.” This was said with something of a leer. She smirked. “But the bond – in some senses – is older than you and I. An old magic.” He rubbed his hands across his face and looked at the clock on the mantle above the fireplace. He grunted. “Four hours.”

“Four hours!” Her stomach, as if waiting for the opportunity, grumbled. “Did you do what you were meant to do?”

“Yes. You helped,” he added.

She was delighted. “I did? How?”

“Happy thoughts.” Bran leaned forward suddenly and she smiled as he kissed her. “I’ll make you lunch.”

She gasped, hands going to her chest in mock-shock. “Will you indeed!”

*

With Tom and Moira gone, and the ‘wall’ in place, she had quite a nice day with her husband, who seemed more-than-usually attentive. He made her lunch – burgers, of all things – and they ate on the decking, talking of small, easy topics.

Then, bracing herself, she fetched the necklace from her room. “Sam wanted you to look at it.”

“It’s old,” Bran said, lifting his eyebrows. He held it in the sunlight, turning it one way and another. “Older than I, perhaps. Roman? I'm not an expert in antiques but that would be my guess. I can’t feel anything. Nothing fae. Nor witch.” He sniffed it. Frowned and gave her a disapproving look. “Did you perchance feed it blood?”

She didn’t like the way he said it. Like it was a hungry, living thing. “I pricked my finger on the stone. In the middle.”

Contemplatively, Bran ran his index finger nail over the stone. “Hmm. Is there anyone left who knew your mother?”

“My mother?” Leah hadn’t expected this question. “No, I shouldn’t think so.”

“No one from your old pack?”

“No. It was a full thirty years before I joined them, after I had Changed. My mother died when I was a child.” She touched the necklace with the tips of her fingers.

“I know," Bran said, not unkindly. "What about your father? Would anyone remember him?”

She shrugged. “Same story. He introduced me to the Alpha but I never felt they knew of each other that well. Those wolves are gone, now. There might be one or two left but I wouldn’t know who or even where to look for them.” He would, she imagined.

Bran put the necklace back in the box, carefully hooking it back into place, touching the pendant with the tip of one finger himself, thoughtfully. “Sam thinks this is the most likely culprit?”

“In lieu of anything else.”

“I’ll see if I can dig up anyone from the original Great Plains pack, as it was. There are a few old wolves in that area who I could call upon. You said there were two other females?”

“Yes.”

“The Alpha’s wife and his second’s.”

“Yes.”

Bran closed his eyes. “Araminta and… Cordelia?”

Leah flushed, annoyed he could remember them. “Yes.”

“I remember they were both keen to be rid of you.” Bran smiled. “You were more dominant than they. And knew you could seduce their husbands.”

“I was and I didn’t,” Leah said smartly, if a little proudly. If Bran hadn’t come along she would have made sure to kill them first before she made a move on their mates. Any other way wouldn’t have been proper. Not that she could say something like that to Bran. He had outlawed that practice over a century before.

Bran pinched her chin. “Wild,” he teased.

She sighed. He had always enjoyed that joke but sometimes it struck a nerve with her - part of the reason she had wagered with him to stop him telling stories. “Bran, you know as well as I do what it was like.”

He waved a hand, shaking off the past, the old ways of their people that he had spent centuries wiping out, like it was nothing. “I know. You weren’t going to marry just anybody. Certainly not that rapacious Third. What was his name?”

She wasn’t fooled. “Clifford,” she said drily. “As well you know.” And ‘rapacious’ was flattering. He made Isabelle’s pack of wolves look like a picnic. Bran had made short work of him when the time came to kill him.

Leah stacked their plates and Bran grabbed the pitcher of lemonade and their glasses. “Shall we watch a movie?” he suggested, as they went back into the house.

*

Of course, she fell asleep almost immediately, woke up forty-five minutes later with the movie still going and her feet in Bran’s lap. He had a bowl of popcorn and… Tag was there.

When he saw she was awake, Bran paused the movie. “Tag, Leah and I would like to tell you something confidential.”

Tag paused, handful of popcorn midway to his mouth. He had his feet on the coffee table and when he saw Leah's alight on his shoes, he slid them off sheepishly.

Realizing what Bran was about, Leah rotated on the couch until she was closer to Bran. She felt a sparkle of nervousness but was confident Bran knew what he was about.

“Has this got anything to do with how much she’s sleeping and why Sam was following her around?” Tag asked, the popcorn resuming its journey. He munched loudly.

Bran slanted a look to Leah and then back to Tag. “It does. Tag, Leah is pregnant.”

Tag choked. Violently. Leah hopped up to get him a glass of water. He was still wheezing by the time she came back. “Sorry, sorry, I can’t have heard that right.” He took a slug of the liquid.

“Oh, no, you did,” Leah said. She had imagined telling people and this was following her imaginings pretty neatly. “I am a medical mystery that Sam is intending to solve.”

Tag was not often speechless. Careful with words, certainly, but rarely unable to say anything. He looked between them, face red. “You’re not joking? How?”

Bran shrugged, as if this was but a mild concern. “Time, I’m sure, will tell.”

“I’m coming up on thirteen weeks. Everything is apparently measured in weeks,” she told Bran, as an aside. She found she was able to tell him things in front of others where his reaction didn’t feel so personal. Then, to Tag, “You’re the first person to know in the pack.”

She wondered at Bran’s decision to tell Tag first. Perhaps just that he happened to be there? No. Bran planned. There was always a plan.  

“Charles and I will be away in the coming weeks. I would ask that you are particularly attentive to your Alpha’s wife. Leah cannot Change, at the moment.”

Well, that explained that, Leah thought.

Tag took a bigger gulp of his water. “I can’t believe this. I really – it’s too much.” He looked at Leah and for the first time she saw sheer wonder in his eyes. Sam had something similar, but it was tinged with his drive for answers. To Tag, she was just a miracle.

It was pleasing. She felt proud of her miracle body. Of her wolf – who could hold off the Change.

Then Tag did something more astonishing. He beamed and laughed. “Congratulations, to you both. This is— wonderful news.” He stood and offered Bran his hand and Bran, Leah could see, was equally dumbfounded as she. Tag pumped his hand forcefully no less, then leaned down and kissed Leah’s cheek.

She sat frozen, a somewhat bemused smile on her own face. “Thank you, Tag,” she managed. She had not practiced this part in her head. At no point had she imagined anyone happy for her.

Tag settled back down, still effusively grinning. “This is a big secret to keep. How long before you tell everybody else?”

Bran looked at Leah speculatively, eyes drifting to her midriff for the first time. Today she was wearing shorts and a loose blouse that ballooned out over her breasts. “I guess that depends on how long Leah can hide it for. There will naturally be some questions. Some suspicion. Even fear. Not everyone will respond the way you did. The women will be upset.”

Leah hadn’t considered this. She pictured herself receiving this news – another Alpha’s mate and her ‘miracle’ baby. She did not like what she felt.

“We are trying to find out how this has happened. Even I, in my omnipotence, don't have the answer to that." Leah looked down at her lap, half a smile on her face. "And, regardless, we will keep this news to our pack alone, when we do announce it. I will be clear on that.” He looked at Leah. "We will need to have a story for everyone else outside of the pack. Adoption. Surrogacy."

He was right, of course. Until they knew more, it would be dangerous for word to get about to those they might not trust as they did their own people.

“Well, there’s only so long you can keep such a thing quiet.” Tag laughed, again. “A baby. Who would have thought.”

*

Sam called after the next full moon to say his return would be delayed and ask for an update. “How is everything? Do you have any other symptoms?”

Leah shook her head. “Nothing except the tiredness. And the eating. And the weight gain.” And, she thought, a positively vociferous desire for her mate. She was struggling to keep that one under wraps. With Bran home, for however long, he had reverted to type – sex was for the night, behind the closed doors of their bedrooms.

“When I come back, we’ll do a 3D ultrasound,” Sam said, excitedly. “I’ve got a friend in Helena who said we can use his. The same friend whose lab did the blood test.”

Leah had seen pictures. She thought they were a little creepy but part of Sam’s interest was purely professional. He was documenting her.

Sam asked her a few more questions before finally asking after Bran. “How’s Da?”

“Same as always. You heard about the witches?” Sam made a noise of agreement. “He has to go away again, teach our Alpha pairs how to prevent it.”

“He can’t leave that to someone else?”

“He’s splitting the load between Charles, Tom and Angus but there are a lot of Alpha pairs. And most of them wouldn’t trust anyone but the Marrok with this. Besides…”

“Da’s pretty hands on.”

“Yes.” Leah, who had just finished dressing when Sam had called, turned sideways to look in the mirror. It was a very hot day - likely they would see bushfires soon - and she was wearing another summer dress. This one pulled tight across her new and improved larger bust and flared out. She wasn’t absolutely certain it was working.

Bran came in from his room; she hadn’t known he was there. She gestured to herself, wordlessly, eyebrows raised in question. He nodded and left through her door. She supposed that meant she passed muster. Her husband was wearing checked shorts and a tight T-shirt, rolled up to the shoulders, showing his strong biceps. She experienced a moment of genuine distraction.

“How’s the fae business?” she asked, finding herself feeling warmer. This ‘side effect’ was ridiculous. Yes, she found her husband appealing but they had been together for decades. It shouldn’t be overwhelming. She should be able to control it.

Sam laughed. “Confidential.”

After she was finished with Sam, Leah bounded downstairs for breakfast. It was too hot to run today. She intended to spend it under a parasol outside with a pile of magazines and decaf iced tea.

In the kitchen, Bran was pulling something down from one of the top cupboards. She watched the play of muscles along his back under his tight T-shirt. He glanced at her, caught her pole-axed expression, and his eyes lit up with what could really only be described as a distinctly male pride. “Really?”

She scowled, even as she blushed – also ridiculous. She made herself a bowl of cereal, mutely, and went to eat outside.

As if to annoy her, her husband followed. “You know, I don’t tend to give Sam a detailed account of our goings on now.”

Leah felt immediately chastised. Of course, Sam was a lone wolf. He wasn’t actually part of their pack. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

Bran waved it off and drank his tea. “It’s not a problem. He’ll need to know some of it when it comes back. But I do exercise some caution, particularly when he's working on something that he won't share with us.”

She nodded, stirred her cereal. “Noted. He’ll have to do the ‘wall’ with Ariana?”

“Indeed.”

Bran let her eat, then, sipping his tea and looking out at the forest that bordered their property. After a moment, a line of tension flickered through his body. She glanced out and smirked, spotting the flickering movement of a wolf. “You could just forbid him from doing it,” she said, very softly.

“It’s fine.”

“It annoys you.”

This, her husband denied. Asil liked to Change and stalk through Bran’s immediate territory. It was a little game he played, purposefully leaving scent trails. Plenty of their wolves walked through the forest near their home. Only Asil did it as a challenge, a challenge that Bran liked to think he was too human to take up.

“He’s insane,” Leah murmured, shaking her head.

She leaned forward to grab Bran’s tea, took a sip. Bran’s arm reached out and he dragged a finger over the fuller curve of her breast. “This is,” he said, thoughtfully, “a very nice dress.”

She sipped his tea again, more to give herself something to do that wasn’t climbing onto his lap. “When are you going away?”

“Thursday.”

Two days from now. “Let’s go to bed,” she suggested, putting down his cup.

Bran nodded and offered her his hand.

*

Her extraordinarily responsive libido and Bran’s imminent departure meant that she and her mate spent most of the following two days in and out of bed. They both had an excuse for such slovenly behavior, she mused, as she sat on the little stool in their walk-in and watched him pack.

“This is familiar,” she said.

“Except you’re wearing the much disliked shirt,” he pointed out, tossing pants to his duffel.

She was. She couldn’t be bothered to dress. The t-shirt didn’t fit as she liked it though, it now stretched across her stomach. If someone from the pack saw her, they’d all know what it was.

Unless they thought she’d been possessed, she supposed. Or the victim of an alien abduction.

A nasty thought occurred to her. “I take it you’re going to the Tri-Cities.”

“No,” Bran said, patiently. “I asked Charles to do that.”

Leah reflected she didn’t think this was better, all in all. Now it felt like he was avoiding Mercedes. Like there was something to hide.

“Stop it,” Bran said and it had a hint of a growl.

She pouted. “I can’t help it.”

“It’s beneath you to be this paranoid.”

“You’d be paranoid too if you—" She didn’t finish, knowing it was pointless. Bran didn’t feel jealousy. No, that wasn’t true. She was his and he guarded what was his but it was basically perfunctory. He didn’t imagine her with other men like she did him with, well, anyone. It didn’t make him feel physically sick. Or like he would rend his opposition with his claws. Except she didn't have claws now. She had nothing.

Bran sighed and he came over, stroked her hair. “You are impossible.”

Leah looked up at him and for the first time felt no compunction to be compliant. Her anger and hurt sky-rocketed to the surface. “Oh? So it was all my imagination then?” she said sharply.

“I would never cheat on you.”

“That,” she snapped, “is not what I asked.”

“It is,” he said, equally angry, eyes sparkling and his gentle hand slipping from her hair, “all you are going to get from me.”

Tears prickled her eyes and she couldn’t stop them falling. Hormones, she thought. Nothing to do with decades-old pain. She got up, walking away from him, and went to her room, closing the door behind her.

She lay on her back on the bed and let the tears fall. He would leave without saying goodbye; he always did. She tormented herself with old, twisted thoughts, then with new ones. How he ignored the obvious signs of her pregnancy, how he never talked of their child or asked her questions – how he was always away when she needed him.

The door between their bedrooms opened and she cried harder, covering her face with her hands and trying to muffle the sound. She felt the bed dip and she curled up, predicting his anger at her feelings. Instead, he cuddled her close, smoothed a hand through her hair and fought through her hands to kiss her. She found herself – unspeakably – clinging to him, unable to stop crying. It was a river of tears. She felt each one fall, felt her breath catch as if it was her last.

Bran was making noises – the kind of nonsense noises a parent made to a distraught child, she thought. It made her cry harder. He rubbed her back in big, broad sweeps.  

It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, eventually she managed to speak. “It’s fine. You can go,” she said, not looking at him. It didn’t sound convincing to her ears.

Her husband curled around her. “It can wait.”

Inevitably, she fell asleep, and then woke with a jolt, mortified. “Why are you still here?” she asked. Her skin felt tight with salt from her tears.

Bran lifted his head from the pillow, where he had been dozing. “Better?”

Leah did feel better. She felt… clearer, somehow. She sat up on her elbows. “Um. They’re expecting you.”

“They can wait,” her husband said, watching her, his eyes softly green in the half-light.

She lay back down. The situation was unreal; he’d never been this kind to her before. Then again, it had been a very, very long time since she had cried on him. She looked at him. “Bran, are you happy about the baby?” she asked, the question that had been on her mind since almost the moment she had believed it to be true.

Bran breathed out. “I don’t know,” he said, honestly.

She was too tired, too worn out – and yes, too ashamed of herself - to cry any more. “I understand,” was what she said.

*

Leah worked out that Bran, at least, was never further than half a day’s travel away from her, which was some consolation. Particularly given she estimated – one night with each pack, travel in between – he was probably going to be away for nearly a month.

Another full moon. Another four weeks of hiding her pregnancy.

She tackled her burgeoning Pinterest board with ideas for the house, then ran into a mental stumbling block. Did they make the guest room the baby’s room? It would mean they had nowhere for guests to stay.

She went to stare at it, this new thought alarming her. Bran wouldn’t want that. This house was supposed to be the pack house, which meant they frequently had people staying with them. Frequently had people who needed to stay with them for their own safety.

She paced the layout of the top floor.

There was another, much smaller room in which she kept her sewing supplies, a small desk, as well as storage of other assorted crafts she’d taken up over the years as hobbies. It wasn’t a room she used often and she could clear everything, put it into her newly freed up loft space.  

Babies were small, she reasoned. There was room enough for a crib, a dresser, a chair. She could make it look lovely.

Of course, it wouldn’t be big enough for a child. A full size single bed would dwarf the space. Perhaps they could convert the loft? Or perhaps they could share a room. They had used to. It had been her who had suggested when they built the house that there be two bedrooms - she had wanted to give herself some distance from him. Until then, they had shared a bed, except when they argued. Which was a lot.

Leah decided she was getting ahead of herself. She just needed a plan for the next few months. And she would have to wait, she thought. Couldn’t create a nursery until after the pack had been told.

Tag, following Bran’s edict, visited her every day and was the unwilling sounding board for her ideas. An expression of pure pain barely left his face as she described her decoration plans in detail. He was intensely relieved when Sam arrived.

“Where’s Ariana?” she asked, almost before he had got out of the car.

“At the house. Airing the place out. She says it smells like dust and damp.” Sam looked her up and down in a way that would have definitely offended her months ago. His eyes crinkled. “Look at you!”

Smiling, Leah tugged the dress she was wearing closer to her body. “I think I felt it move the other day. But it might have been wishful thinking.”

“It’s more than possible.”

It was good having Sam home. She felt safer, in a way. Not in the physical sense – even without her ability to Change, Leah was still powerful. She could still pull on the pack bonds, even lift one of their armored, tank-like trucks. She could still fire a weapon. With Sam back, the number of people who knew about the pregnancy increased to three, four if she included Ariana. That felt safer, somehow.

“I’m sorry to keep missing Da,” Sam told her, off-hand one evening as they ate dinner together with his mate and Tag.

He spoke too soon, however, because his father made a surprise visit two days later.

“What are you doing here?” Leah asked, then immediately chastised herself for sounding annoyed rather than delighted. She didn’t like surprises. “I’m glad to see you.”

Bran leaned down to kiss her forehead. She had been reading outside. “I had to come get something. I have to leave tomorrow.”

“Seems like a costly use of the jet,” she said, for the moment the joy of seeing him outweighing the loss of him leaving the next day. “Is it not something I could have had sent to you?”

Her husband laughed, properly. “I suppose you could have. Which is this?” His eyes dipped to her book.

She showed him the cover. “The Hobbit.”

“Of course.” He kissed her forehead again – Leah pressing herself against him - and went back inside. She heard him on the phone for the rest of the afternoon, a happy backdrop to her reading. She reflected if she ever got trapped in the mind-cave with his monster, this would be one of her ‘good thoughts’.

Sam emerged from the forest around their property, arm in arm with Ariana. They were both smiling. Leah noted that Ariana looked very ‘right’ in the environment of Aspen Creek. She had thought she looked a little grey when she had arrived. Now her brown skin had taken on warmer hues.

“I heard Da made a surprise visit,” Sam said.

“He did!” This time Leah’s voice was suffused with cheer. “He’s in his office if you want to go say hello.”

He clapped a hand on her shoulder as he passed. “I’ll do that.”

Leah gestured to the other lounger. “If you’d like to join me?” she offered politely to Ariana.

“Delighted,” her step-daughter-in-law replied quietly.

Ariana was not talkative and though it was unnerving having a powerful fae on her immediate right, Leah was able to continue reading as if it didn’t matter. She was mated to Sam, part of the family, as Bran told her time and time again. They had a history far longer than hers and Bran’s.

After a while, it occurred to her she would have to prepare dinner for more than just herself that evening. With an irritated sigh, she put her book down.

“Oh, Sam says he and Bran have gone to get pizza,” Ariana said without opening her eyes.

Unnerving, Leah thought. “How did you know I was about to go make dinner?”

Ariana opened her eyes. “Coincidence.”

Leah wasn’t sure whether to believe her and said so. This honesty made Ariana smile, broadly. She was suddenly quite beautiful.

Leah was disarmed. “I’ll go set the table.”

If they’d gone to get pizza, it would be the good kind – and that restaurant was more than a forty minute round trip. She would need to put the oven on to crisp it up and she fixed a big salad and made a quick garlic bread.

It was a nice, informal family meal – low in contention - and she felt Bran’s longing for his other son, out in the Midwest with his mate doing the Marrok’s work.

“When do you go again?” Sam asked. “We were planning to go to Helena tomorrow to do the scan. You could come.”

Bran shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t; I leave in the morning.” He gave Leah an apologetic look. “What scan is this?”

Sam chewed a bite of his pizza. “It’s an early anatomy scan. My friend has better equipment than we do. We’ll do another at twenty weeks but I want to get as much data as I can whilst I’m here.”

Leah pushed a tomato around her plate. The anatomy scans, her reading had told her, were important. They could show birth defects.

“I’m sorry to miss it,” Bran said, as if it was true. A flicker of consternation passed over Sam’s face; he smelled the partial lie, just as Leah did. Her mate sighed but didn’t correct himself, let the words stand.

“Ice cream, anyone?” Leah said. She wasn’t going to let herself, or anyone else, spoil a perfectly nice surprise.

In the evening, still wrapped around him, Leah asked if he’d had any luck approaching people who might have know her parents.

Bran had his face pressed into the crook of her neck. He huffed. “I did, actually. Naturally, neither are convenient to speak to so I will visit them myself.”

She pursed her lips. “I think I would like to visit them. If they know about my parents.”

He was quiet for a moment, breathing small puffs of air on her skin. “I can only agree to that if we wait until you are able to Change again.”

Leah tried to weigh whether time was of the essence or if this was something that could wait. “It would help me to understand what it is you are thinking they might know. They can’t possibly know details of a piece of jewelry in my father’s possession.”

Bran propped himself up on his elbow, eyes running over her face. “No, that I don’t believe. But if that necklace is the reason for your surprising fertility, I do question whether it has been used before.”

“My mother was human,” Leah said.

“You aren’t in a position to know otherwise.”

She dwelt on this. She supposed Bran could be right. It wasn’t something she’d ever had need to question.

“Equally, perhaps your father brought it over from Britain and it has heritage there. You don’t know if he was Changed here.”

“I always thought he’d been ‘expelled’ from Britain. Maybe because he was a werewolf?”

“Maybe.” Bran ran a finger over her bare breast, a faint smile lifting his lips as he traced the outline of her nipple. His thoughts were no longer on the mystery of her family.

“I want to come too,” she decided.

He nodded and lowered his mouth.

*

Bran woke her in the morning. “I know it infuriates you when I leave before you wake up,” he said, seriously, kissing her.

“Why are you breaking a habit of a lifetime? We can only have had two hours sleep last night,” she complained grumpily.

He kissed her again. “To enjoy this annoyed face.”

She was extremely tired but he tasted of mint toothpaste and smelled of their soap and she loved him. Leah sighed into his mouth and tugged him down to her. She was tired, which made her weak, so she whispered, “Please stay.”

Bran made a noise. On anyone else it might have been a whimper, but she was sure her ears were mistaken. “I will be home in two weeks,” he promised, though he lingered, kissing the corners of her lips, the point of her chin, softening the blow. “You won’t even be on The Return of the King.”

“Is that a comment on my slow reading?”

“Yes.” He laughed, bit her bottom lip, and sat up. His hand came to rest on the swell of her stomach. “I’m not unhappy, you know,” he clarified.

Her heart flip-flopped. “I know. I meant it when I said I understood. I probably feel the same way.”

He nodded once, sighed, and got up. “I’ll call,” he said.

“I know you will.”

“Hopefully the presence of Ariana will allow the overly officious members of our pack to relax,” Bran mused, as he picked up his duffel.

Leah grunted and flipped the pillow over to the cool side. “I would rather chew off my own arm.”

“I know,” he said, leaving with a smile on his face.

Leah closed her eyes, banking the entire conversation as one of her happy memories. The entire night, indeed.

*

They drove back from Helena in much the same way as they drove there – with multiple rest stops for Leah to use the facilities which gave her plenty of opportunity to sit alone and reel about hearing the baby’s heartbeat, about seeing its fingers and toes, its folded arms and mouth.

It was real.

Sam was patient with her lengthy rest stops. When she got back into the car, she would find him peering at the 3D picture of her squashed baby on his phone. The first time it unnerved her – she thought he’d seen something wrong and was checking it again. Then she realized he was just marveling at the miracle.

“We should send it to Da,” he said.

Leah hesitated. “Let’s… wait on that.”

Sam took her at her word and tuned the radio station to one of his and Bran’s preferred stations. Leah herself preferred more recent music, dare she even say it, more popular music.

They discussed, a little, the work Sam and Ariana were planning on the house – a small extension to make the kitchen bigger, bring some more light into the downstairs. Leah smiled; Bran would be happy that Sam was turning his Aspen Creek house into a home. It suggested permanency, that perhaps Sam would finally settle. 

“I was thinking about doing the loft,” she found herself saying.

“Another guest room?”

She nodded. “I think it’s big enough. Maybe even for a bathroom.”

“Would be useful to have more room,” Sam admitted, obviously skirting around the reason they might need more room.

She told him about Bran’s theory regarding the necklace.

“But he still didn’t sense anything?”

She shook her head. “No, so it could still be a dead end.”

“Maybe it’s just you.”

“You said there’s nothing abnormal about me.”

“You could be an evolved species,” Sam said lightly.

She smiled. “Oh, yes, me of all people.”

“I don’t know. Your wolf and you have always been very simpatico. More so than many.”

“And, what, she decided now was the time to overcome the pull of the moon just by choosing not to?” Leah lifted her eyebrows. “Now, versus, anytime in the last two centuries?”

“Maybe she thought your relationship was in a good place.” Leah made a ‘pfft’ noise that made Sam laugh. Then laugh again. “Well, Da’s pretty twisted up. So there might be something to it.”

“Twisted up?” She was concerned.

Sam glanced at her. “Leah, he flew back to spend the night with you.”

“He did not. He came back for something.”

“Yes. You.”

She shook her head. “He’s not like that.”

“Leah, I am the only person alive who remembers what Da was like when Charles’s mother was pregnant. He is exactly like that.”

Leah felt unexpectedly like she had just tapped a gold vein. Early on in their relationship, Leah had tried – perhaps not subtly – to glean what she could about Blue-Jay Woman from Sam, only to have her efforts violently rejected. Not that she thought Sam had a particular fondness for her – more that he felt it was his father’s business and therefore nothing to do with his new mate. “Go on.”

Sam kept his eyes on the road. “It’s not natural for him to leave you like this.”

She thought about it. Thought about how unlikely it was to compare the two situations. “It was different, with her. She was suffering.” And he loved her. “I’m fine.”

“That probably makes it worse.”

Leah stared out of the window, watching the trees go past. She didn’t believe everything Sam was saying. To her, Bran was behaving much like his usual self. It was her that was changing – becoming weepy and tired and more prone to outbursts. Perhaps he was responding to that?

“Was it very bad? For her?” Leah asked. In the past she had not dwelt much on this aspect of Blue-Jay Woman. Her suffering to bring her child into the world. Her sacrifice. Just to acknowledge that Leah herself didn’t have that kind of sacrifice in her, which, in turn, just went to show how different she was from the woman Bran had loved. Insurmountably different.

“The first three, four months were okay. I’ve always thought that if they’d known what it was going to be like later, maybe she wouldn’t have gone through with it. Wouldn’t have been able to,” he admitted. He indicated at their turning. “Then she started to lose weight, got sick. Her hair fell out. Her teeth.”

Leah’s eyes widened. She touched her tongue to her own teeth.   

“Da was beside himself. They argued. He wanted her to stop, to let the baby go, but she refused.”

“No wonder he almost lost his mind,” she realized. For Bran, being unable to help would have been unbearable.

“It was like he had been tortured for months, living on the tiny hope that perhaps once Charles was born, she would recover.”

But she didn’t.

For the first time in her life, she felt sorry for them both. Felt sorry for Blue-Jay Woman who had poured her life into a child she would never see grow. Devastated for Bran, whom she loved. She imagined watching him die slowly, unable to help. She felt her eyes sting with tears and she pressed her face to the cold glass of the window. Sam was silent for the rest of the journey home.

Later that evening, she sent the picture from the ultrasound to Bran via the messaging app. He looks very squashed in there but Sam says that’s normal.

A few minutes later, Bran replied. He?

Just an expression, she typed back. I’ve decided to be surprised.

The next day, she emptied out the sewing room, packing up everything into the loft.

*

It was actually three weeks before Bran came home again and his absence was a physical ache that their nightly phone calls couldn't soothe. Another full moon passed. Leah was more than halfway through her pregnancy. Sam and Ariana had architects come and draw plans for their extension. The same firm had taken a look at Leah’s loft and agreed to draw up some initial ideas there, as well. “No rush,” she said firmly.

This time, she knew his arrival schedule because – miracle of miracles – he had sent it to her. She wasn’t precisely waiting at the door but it was close. She’d had the TV on mute for a full half hour before she estimated he would get home, just in case.

Leah had spent decades crafting a carefully un-needy appearance, believing that was the key saving herself from not being loved by him. It didn't feel necessary now. He knew, regardless.

She was kneeling on the couch, looking at the hallway when he walked in. She immediately saved his smile for the monster cave and gave him one in response.

“Hello, husband,” she said, warmly.

Bran dropped his bag. He came over to the couch, staring at her like he was seeing her for the first time. Anticipatory heat spread through her. Then he climbed over the back of the couch to kiss her and it was everything she wanted, like he was drinking her down. She gasped, when he pulled back, and saw the surprise in her own eyes reflected in his.

“Hello, wife,” he replied softly, and leaned in to kiss her once more, just a light press of his mouth to hers, then a longer, more lingering kiss. He stroked a hand down the side of her face, tenderly, touched his thumb to her bottom lip. She listened for it and could hear his heart was beating faster than normal, just as hers was. "Leah I-" He stopped himself and she saw consternation cross his face. He pressed his forehead against hers.

Her breath hitched with awareness that something had changed and she closed her eyes, capturing this for the monster cave. "Take me to bed, Bran," she said.