"I don't know," said Bran. "Charles, is that what the problem is?"

Charles didn't know Isaac well, and talking in front of him was akin to dancing naked in public. But if his father could figure out a way to help - and if he couldn't, then no one could - then he would have stripped off his clothes and run naked down Congress Street in downtown Boston at lunch hour just to get a chance to talk with him.

"They've broken the link," Charles said.

"Who has?" asked Bran.

"The ghosts of the people I've killed who should have lived." He turned to look at his father, but all he saw was Isaac holding his cell phone open.

He smiled grimly at Isaac, who took a step back, and spoke to him. "Another man would probably have a mental breakdown - and blame all sorts of psychoses. But my grandfather was a shaman and he gave me the gift that allows me to see the ghosts of those I've wronged."

"So they are haunting you," Isaac said, his face quiet.

Charles hadn't expected the Alpha to get in his face and call him a liar - Charles was the Marrok's hatchet man, after all. But the simple belief he saw made him remember that Isaac's grandfather could see ghosts, too.

"And they are haunting me," he said, Brother Wolf standing down a little from immediate attack. Brother Wolf approved of Isaac, as long as the other wolf didn't get too pushy.

"Tell him why," Bran said into the silence. His voice was odd, as it got when he was following an impulse he didn't understand. The truth was, Charles got his ability to deal with magic from both halves of his heritage - but it sometimes bothered Bran when magic spoke to him, probably because Bran's mother had made the Wicked Witch of the West look like Cinderella's fairy godmother.

"Because my guilt holds them here," Charles answered Isaac, because Bran thought it might be important. "They should be off wherever dead people go, but I'm holding them here because I can't let them go."

"You feel guilty about what?" Isaac asked, sounding honestly bewildered. "We all know about Minnesota - no one gossips like us Alphas. Three wolves killed some old pedophile, half ate him, and then left him for the civilians to find - and it was some ten-year-old kid who found him. Probably, taking into account what the gossip says and the police reports I saw, the ten-year-old was the kid the old guy was after. The damned fools probably made so much noise fighting over the body that the kid came to investigate. At least they had the sense to run instead of killing the kid, but I think they racked up enough stupidity to register on the Top Five Dumbass Moves list for the next ten years or so."

Charles hadn't known that it had been the child who found the body. His father had told him that his job was to go find out if they had killed the man and left him for humans to find - and, if so, execute them. Brother Wolf had forced their confession - dominant wolves can do that if they are more dominant enough - and then carried out his Alpha's orders.

"Poor boy," murmured Bran. "No one told me it was the boy who found him." Someone, Charles knew, would contact the boy's family and make sure he got counseling. His parents would think it some sort of victim's organization or something. It was one of the jobs Charles used to handle or oversee.

"You feel guilty for executing them," Isaac said, dragging Charles's attention back to him. "I get that. But I don't get why you should. Were they crying like babies? Because that really sucks when they do that. Was it Robert, their Alpha? I heard that garbage he was passing around. Their victim was a bastard who deserved to die. Fine. If they were sure he was guilty, kill him somewhere quietly and get rid of the body. If you ask me, I'd have executed their Alpha, too, for being incompetent enough to let them get so out of control that they left him for civilians to find."

"Had this happened before we came out," Charles said, "I could have let them live."

"Could you?" Isaac said. He shook his head. "If they had been in my pack, I'd have killed them. Now, ten years ago, whenever."

Charles read the truth of that in Isaac's voice.

"It didn't matter to them that the guy was dirt," Isaac said. "If they were after a righteous kill, they wouldn't have eaten him. If they hadn't been hunting in a pack, they probably wouldn't have killed him, either. They were dumbasses. They were out of control. And you can't have dumbass out-of-control werewolves. Not now. Not ever. And it was their Alpha's job to make sure they weren't dumbasses. I know better than to send a pack out hunting when we don't want a bloody mess to result, and I haven't been a werewolf half as long as Robert has been Alpha of his pack. And he couldn't accept the blame - oh no. They were the good guys; he wasn't going to kill the good guys - because he knows it was his fault they needed to be killed in the first place. So Bran must send you out to kill them. I bet that f - " He cast a panicked glance at the phone and bit his lip and finished more quietly, "I bet he said all the right things, all the polite things, and still made you feel like a murderer, right? He did it because he knows it's his fault and he can't admit it to himself so he's looking for someone to blame. And they all know, we all know, that right now we werewolves cannot afford headlines like we've been seeing in Minnesota."

It was truth as Isaac felt it. And it sounded right. Maybe he'd been listening too hard to Robert and not thinking clearly.

Charles took a deep breath. "Anna knows how people work," he said. "She'd have seen it, too. But I don't bring Anna with me anymore."

"It makes sense, though, right?" Isaac said.

"If you weren't already worn-down with the killing," said Bran heavily, "you would have recognized the truth yourself. If I weren't so busy trying to justify something that has less to do with justice than expedience, I would have seen it, too. Just because it was necessary, doesn't mean that it wasn't the right answer anyway."

"One of the wolves had been a wolf for less than two years," Charles said.

"Too bad for them," said Isaac. "They chose to give in to the wolf at the wrong time. They chose to hang out with idiots. They chose to act as they did. They chose their own death and you were just the delivery system."

"I think," said Bran, "that the Minnesota pack needs a different Alpha."