They hiked until the valley was behind them, and the dark feeling stayed behind, too, confirming his guess that it wasn't spirits.

"Lunchtime," he said, handing her a granola bar and stick of jerky.

She took them, brushed most of the snow off of a downed tree, then hopped up on it. "I was fine until we hit that valley. Now I'm bushed and frozen, and it's only one o'clock. How do humans do this?"

He sat beside her eating his own jerky-it tasted a lot better than pemmican, though it wasn't nearly as strengthening without all the fat. "Most of 'em don't, not this time of year. I pushed us a little hard to get out of that valley, that's what you're feeling." He frowned. "You haven't been sweating, have you? Are your socks dry? I brought spares. Wet socks mean frostbite-you could lose a toe."

She wiggled her snowshoes, which dangled a foot or so off the ground. "I thought being a werewolf meant indestructible, short of death."

Something in her face told him she was thinking about the beatings she'd been given to try to make her into something she was not.

"It might grow back," Charles said, soothing Brother Wolf, who didn't like it when Anna was unhappy. "But it wouldn't be fun."

"Cool." Then as an afterthought she told him, "My socks are dry."

"Let me know if that changes."

* * * *

The snowshoes were dragging at her feet. She gave Charles a mock-resentful glare-it was safe because she was glaring at his back. Bullet holes and all, he was obviously not having any trouble. He was barely limping as they scaled the side of another mountain. He'd slowed down, but that didn't help as much as she'd hoped. If he hadn't promised her an early camp at the top of the current climb, she probably would have just collapsed where she stood.

"Not far," he said without looking around. Doubtless her panting told him all he needed to know about how tired she was.

"Part of it is the altitude," he told her. "You're used to more oxygen in the air and have to breathe harder to make up the difference."

He was making excuses for her-and it stiffened her spine. She'd make this climb if it killed her. She dug the edge of her snowshoe into the snow in preparation for the next step, and a wild cry echoed through the trees, raising the hair on the back of her neck as it echoed in the mountains.

"What's that?" she asked.

Charles gave her a grim smile over his shoulder. "Werewolf. "

"Can you tell where it came from?"

"East of here," he said. "The way sound carries out here, he's a few miles away."

She shivered a little though she shouldn't be afraid. After all, she was a werewolf, too, right? And she'd seen Charles wipe the floor with her former Alpha despite having been shot several times.

"He won't hurt you," Charles said.

She didn't say anything, but he was watching her face and his eyes softened. "If you really don't like me using my nose to tell what you're feeling, you can try using perfume. It works a treat."

She sniffed and smelled only the people who had loaned Charles their clothing. "You don't use perfume."

He grinned, his teeth white in his dark face. "Too sissy for me. I had to learn to control my emotions instead." Then he removed whatever starch she had left in her knees when he added, a little ruefully, "Until I met you."

He started up the mountainside again, leaving her scrambling behind him. Who was she that she could touch this man? Why her? Was it just that she was an Omega? Somehow she didn't think so. Not with that wry admission hanging in the air.

He was hers.

Just to be certain, she counted on her gloved fingers. This time last week she'd been waiting tables at Scorci's, had never heard of Charles or walked a mile in snowshoes. Would never have dreamed of enjoying kissing a man ever again. Now she was tramping through the snow in below-zero weather with a silly smile on her face, hunting a werewolf. Or at least following Charles, who was hunting a werewolf.

Weird. And kinda nice. And there were fringe benefits to following Charles around-the view for one.

"Are you giggling?" Charles said in his Mr. Spock voice.

He looked back at her, then executed one of those complicated turns that snowshoes required in order to reverse directions. He pulled off a glove and touched her nose, right where she knew freckles gathered. His fingers drifted down to trace the dimple in her left cheek.

"I like seeing you happy," he said intently.

His perusal stopped her laughter, but not the warm fuzzy feeling in her stomach.

"Yeah?" she said archly. "Then tell me that was really the last climb, and that this big flat spot we're standing on is where we're going to camp, and that I don't have to walk anymore today."

* * * *

She stood there looking like a cat in the cream, and he had not the foggiest notion why. He wasn't used to this. He was good at reading people, damn it. He had lots of practice, and Brother Wolf was all but empathic sometimes. And he still had no clue why she stood there looking at him with secret laughter still dancing in her eyes.

He bent until he could press his forehead against her wool hat and closed his eyes, breathing her in and letting the warmth of her spread over his heart. Her scent broke free of the bindings he'd set upon it and rushed over him like the smoke of a hookah.

No more human scent for them, but, absorbed in her, he couldn't make himself mind.

He still should have heard it. Smelled it. Something.

One moment he was standing next to Anna, the next he was facedown in the snow with something-werewolf, his tardy nose informed him-on his back and Anna underneath.

Teeth dug into the tough fabric of his jacket and ripped at his pack. He ignored the werewolf for Anna's sake and pushed himself (and the other werewolf) up to give her room to get out from under him, knowing it was probably a fatal decision.

Anna wriggled out from underneath him as fast as any sleight-of-hand magician's assistant could have. But she didn't listen to his order to run.

The attacking wolf didn't seem to notice her. It was so busy ripping up Charles's backpack it wasn't paying attention to anything else. Rogue, Charles thought-out of control if it was so far gone not to release its first hold for something more immediately fatal. Not that he was complaining.

Charles's human form was a little more fragile than the wolf, but it was almost as strong. Without Anna beneath him, it took him a bare instant to rip the bindings on his snowshoes apart to free his feet.