With a sigh, she looked for somewhere to put the bloody piece of fabric. She'd taken off her pack when she'd done her earlier reconnoitering. It sat in unharmed glory amidst foil-covered meals scattered in fanciful patterns with bits and pieces of Charles's backpack.

Typical man, she thought with experimental exasperation, leaving the woman to clean up the mess.

She gathered Charles's clothes and shook them free of snow. She stuffed them into her pack and then started putting the foil-clad meals on top. With a little organization, she was able to put most of the undamaged food in her backpack, but there was no way she would be able to stuff anything more into it. She gave the remains of Charles's backpack, sleeping bag, and snowshoes a frustrated look.

It wouldn't have bothered her so much, except this was a wilderness area and they weren't supposed to leave anything behind. She looked closely at Charles's backpack, but it had been ripped to shreds. The gun had taken damage, too. She didn't know much about rifles, but she suspected that they needed a straight barrel to work right.

She hit the jackpot, though, when one of the pieces of backpack turned out to be the ground cloth they'd slept on last night.

She smelled something as she knelt to spread the tough fabric out. She tried not to react to the scent, collecting all the leftover bits and throwing them in the center of the cloth. Everything except the gun. Even though it was bent, it was still reassuringly solid.

Whoever it was stayed very still, watching her-a human, not a werewolf.

Tied together, the cloth made a tidy bundle that they could carry out. As Anna moved the makeshift pack next to her backpack, she heard her watcher move out of the trees behind her.

"Looks like you had a mess on your hands," said a friendly voice. "Did you run into a bear?"

She sounded friendly enough. Anna turned to look at the woman who'd come out of the trees after watching her for too long to be entirely trustworthy.

Like Anna, she was wearing snowshoes, but she had ski poles in each of her hands. Deep brown eyes peered out from under her hat, but the rest of her face was covered in a woolen scarf. Underneath her gray hat, dark brown curls fell to her shoulders.

Anna took a deep breath, but all her nose told her was that the woman was human. Would a human's hearing be poor enough that all the noise of the fight might have been made by a bear rather than a pair of werewolves? Darned if she knew.

"A bear. Yes." Anna gave her a smile she hoped would cover up the amount of time it had taken her to reply. "Sorry, I'm still a little off. I'm a city girl, and I'm not used to Mother Nature in all her glory. Yes, a bear. We scared it off, then discovered it had one of our-" What would they need so badly that a human man would have to go chasing after a bear? "-small packs. The one with the lighter in it."

The other woman threw back her head and laughed. "Isn't that the way it always works? I'm Mary Alvarado. What are you doing out here in the middle of winter if you're not used to the wild country?"

"I'm Anna...Cornick." Somehow it seemed right to use Charles's name. Anna gave Mary Alvarado another wry smile. "We haven't been married long. I'm not used to a new last name. You must be out looking for the hunter, too. We were told that no one else was going to be this far out. I may be green as grass, but my husband knows his way around."

"Search and Rescue, that's me," said Mary.

"Isn't everyone supposed to go by twos?" Anna asked. She wasn't about it, but it only seemed sensible. Heather and Jack had been hunting together.

Mary shrugged. "I have a partner around here somewhere. We had an argument, and she took off in a huff. But she'll get over it soon and let me catch up." She grinned conspiratorially. "She's pretty hot-tempered."

The woman took a step closer to Anna, but then stopped abruptly and looked around. Anna felt it, too, like a great wind of evil flowing through the trees.

Something growled.

Chapter NINE

In his hothouse, Asil trimmed dead blooms from his roses. They weren't as glorious as the ones he'd had in Spain, but they were a vast improvement over the commercially grown flowers he'd started with. His Spanish roses had been the result of centuries of careful breeding. It hadn't bothered him to leave them at the time, but now he regretted their loss fiercely.

Not as fiercely as he regretted losing Sarai.

He hoped that someone had taken them over, but the state he'd left his property in almost ensured his flowers had died before anyone figured out what to do with the estate. Still, he'd been exchanging cuttings and rootstock with other rose aficionados for several decades before he'd been forced to leave, so his work had not all been in vain. Somewhere in the world there were probably descendants of his roses. Maybe if Bran made him live a few more years, he'd go out looking for them.

Someone knocked briskly at the inner door, then opened it without waiting for a reply. He didn't even bother looking up. Sage had been invading his hothouse almost since he'd built it. He would have long ago reduced anyone else to shreds for interrupting his solitude. Slapping down Sage was as rewarding as beating a puppy: it accomplished nothing except to make him feel abusive.

"Hello, hello?" she called out, though her nose certainly told her exactly where he was.

It was her usual greeting-he thought that it was to make sure that he wasn't feeling homicidally reclusive that day. He'd had a few of those right after he'd come to Aspen Creek. When she first started showing up, he'd wondered if the Marrok wasn't sending her to make sure he was still sane enough to leave alive. If so, it had been only prudent, and he'd long since quit caring one way or the other.

"I'm here," he told her, not bothering to raise his voice. She'd hear him if he whispered, and he was finished pretending to be human.

He didn't look up from his work when she walked up behind him. His standards of beauty had broadened over the years, but even if they hadn't, Sage would have hit every chime he had.

Sarai had often thumped him soundly on the head for looking at other women, though she'd known he'd never stray. Now that she was gone, he seldom even looked. Flirting didn't make him feel disloyal to his dead mate, but he'd found he missed that thump too badly. Of course, given the opportunity to irritate the so-composed Charles, he had happily dealt with his memories.

"Hey, 'Sil. You're smiling-someone die?" She obviously didn't expect him to answer that, but continued, "You have something I can do?"