He'd have been horrified, except that worse happened: he came to her call like the well-trained pet he'd once been-a long, long time ago.

"Tag," the witch purred as she walked around him. "Colin Taggart. A little on the small side...for a werewolf."

He was aware, though she was apparently not, of the tension that held Asil as he waited for her to discover how he'd misinformed her, without ever lying. "I told you he'd send Tag" was not "Look, there's Tag." Asil was trying, and Bran gave him credit for it, knowing how difficult to balance upon was the line he was treading.

From the fear radiating off of him, Asil knew what the consequences of a witch trying to make Bran a pet might be. There weren't many people left who would remember what had happened when Bran had broken free of his mother at last: Samuel, Asil...He couldn't think of a third, it had been a long time ago. Likely the witches themselves didn't know why it was forbidden to try to take a werewolf for a pet or familiar-not that most of them had the power to do it.

Bran would hold out for a while. First, the witch could make a mistake-especially if she didn't know whom she held. Second, he was afraid that this time no one would be able to kill him. It had been Samuel who brought him out of it before...and Samuel wasn't as certain of himself as he used to be.

The control the witch asserted over him had to be won by blood and flesh, and the only flesh and blood bonding he'd done was to his own pack. She must have used Asil to insert herself into his pack-but how?

While she looked him over, he searched his link to Asil for something that touched a witch. He paid very little attention to the witch as she talked at him. With the dexterity of a very long lifetime, Bran slid through Asil and found a dead woman-it could only be Asil's mate. It was an impossibility.

No one could link to a dead woman; he knew that because when Blue Jay Woman, Charles's mother, died, he'd tried to hold on to her.

But, impossibilities become possible when you added a witch into the mix.

He couldn't go exploring further; the woman was dead, and her link was through Asil-but the only way the witch's control of him made sense was if she was tied closely to Asil's dead mate. Then she could run her own magic through that link and take control of any of Bran's

He took the time to give Asil a cold look. Asil would have known that the bond to his dead mate was still in place-and he should have told Bran. He had the feeling that there were more things he should have known.

The witch had somehow kept the mating bond alive while she killed Sarai.

He hated witches.

"Colin Taggart," she purred. "You are mine now. Your will is mine."

He felt the magic she poured at him. Some of it slid off him like honey on warm toast: lingering a bit, here and there. But then it attached and solidified as she paced around him whispering the words of her spelling. It didn't hurt precisely, but it made him feel claustrophobic, and when he tried to move, he couldn't.

Panic flared, and something stirred where he had long ago buried it. He took a deep shuddering breath and tried to shut the witch out of his awareness. Panic was very, very dangerous-far more dangerous than this witch.

So he turned his attention to other things.

First, he tried to cut Asil off from the pack. If he broke the tie between him and Asil, he might stand a chance of freeing himself from the witch. He should have been able to do it, but the oddities in Asil's mate bond and the way the witch had twisted it fouled the pack magic until he wasn't certain that he could cut Asil free of anyone: Sarai, the witch, the pack, or Bran, even with a full blood-and-flesh banishment ceremony.

The beat of the witch's chant changed, and he felt her control tighten around him until he couldn't breathe...No.

He tuned the witch out entirely and set about minimizing the damage as best he could.

He constricted the connections he had to his pack until he could barely feel them. If he'd had a normal pack, he might have chanced dropping the reins entirely-but there were too many who could not stand on their own for long. Constricting them would help hide them from a witch's magic-and make it difficult for her to use them if she tried.

Through Asil she had him, but if he could help it, she wouldn't access any more of his pack. If Asil managed to keep her thinking he was Tag, she wouldn't even know where to look.

There were a few old ones whose control had become delicate; those he gave to Samuel, cutting them from him entirely. It would be a jolt to Samuel, but the wolves knew his son and wouldn't protest. Samuel could handle them for a while.

He didn't know if a witch who so obviously had some of the attributes of a werewolf would know enough about wolves to untangle what he did, but he would make it as difficult as he could. At the very least he would slow her down.

But the real reason for his urgency was so that when...if he went mad, he wouldn't take the whole pack with him immediately. Someone-Charles was his best hope, though Asil might manage it-would have a chance to kill him.

He finished his work before the witch finished hers. It had been centuries since he was so alone in his own head. Under different circumstances, he might almost have enjoyed it.

He didn't fight the witch when she snapped her fingers and told him to heel. He walked at her left side while Asil, in human form, escorted her from the right.

Somehow he didn't think that she perceived the shadow-creature that almost paced beside Asil. He wouldn't have noticed himself if he hadn't seen the snow dent ever so slightly under wolf paws he couldn't see-but he could smell her and the magic on her.

Guardians, they once called such things. A charismatic name for such abominations, he'd always thought. He had been pleased when he'd heard that the family with that spell had at last been eliminated. Obviously his information hadn't been completely accurate. Even at the peak of their power, though, he'd never heard of them making a guardian from a werewolf.

Bran looked at Asil, but he couldn't tell if the Moor knew part of his mate accompanied them-as if she'd been called into being so often she almost had a presence outside of her creator's call. Guardians, he recalled, were destroyed every seven years to prevent just such an occurrence. Sarai's wolf had been around for two hundred years-he wondered how much autonomy she had.

"Tell me, Asil," the witch commanded, her arm tucked into the Moor's as if he were some long-ago gentleman and she a lady strolling through a ballroom rather than two-foot-deep snow. "How did you feel when Sarai chose to protect me rather than stay true to you?"