I thought it was because he was ashamed or because he knew I was angry.

“He tried to kill us,” Samuel said, and my heart stopped, then began to pound painfully in my chest because I’d been wrong about the bowed head. Very wrong. The “he” he was talking about was Samuel—and that meant that “he” was no longer in charge. I was talking to Samuel’s wolf.

I dropped to the ground like a stone and made damned sure my head was lower than the werewolf’s. Samuel the man regularly overlooked breaches of etiquette that his wolf could not. If I made the wolf look up at me, he’d have to acknowledge my superiority or challenge me.

I change into a thirty-odd-pound predator built to kill chickens and rabbits. And poor silly quail. Werewolves can take out Kodiak bears. A challenge for a werewolf I am not.

“Mercy,” he whispered, and lifted his head.

The first thing I noticed was hundreds of small cuts all over his face, and I remembered Jody the nurse saying that they’d had to get the glass out of his skin. That the wounds weren’t healed yet told me that there had been other, more severe damage his body had to address first. Nifty—just a little pain and suffering to sweeten his temper.

His eyes were an icy blue just this side of white, hot and wild.

As soon as I saw them, I looked at the floor and took a deep breath. “Sam,” I whispered. “What can I do to help? Should I call Bran?”

“No!” The word left him in a roar that jerked him forward until he was crouched on both hands, one leg knee up, one leg still down on one knee.

That one knee on the ground meant that he wasn’t, quite, ready to spring on me.

“Our father will kill us,” Sam said, his voice slow and thick with Welsh intonation. “I… We don’t want to make him do that.” He took a deep breath. “And I don’t want to die.”

“Good. That’s good,” I croaked, suddenly understanding just exactly what his first words to me had meant. Samuel had wanted to die, and his wolf had stopped him. Which was good, but left us with a nasty problem.

There is a very good reason that the Marrok kills any werewolves who allow the wolf to lead and the man to follow. Very good reasons—like preventing-mass-slaughter sorts of reasons.

But if Samuel’s wolf didn’t want them to die, I decided it was better he was in charge. For a while. Since he didn’t seem to want to kill me yet. Samuel was old. I don’t know exactly how old, but sometime before the Mayflower at least. Maybe that would allow his wolf to control himself without Samuel’s help. Maybe. “Okay, Sam. No calls to Bran.”

I watched out of the corner of my eye as he tilted his head, surveying me. “I can pretend to be human until we get to your car. I thought that would be best, so I held this shape.”