Under his hands, Anna’s tight muscles began to soften. Charles wasn’t really healing her, but Anna’s sore muscles hadn’t come from overuse. They had come from Anna’s struggle to drive the Singer—to steal Anna’s name for it—away. Her wolf had borrowed energy from her body to shield her mind. It was the way wolf magic worked.

Generally the pack never noticed the drain—most of their kind of magic was something they used for a few minutes or less. The kinds of things that took longer than that, like the constant magic used to make humans see dogs where there were werewolves, tended to be shared among the pack as a whole.

But Anna’s wolf had battled for the better part of a day. And it had not been an easy battle. Efficiency only came when you understood what you fought. She had used a huge amount of energy, and it had damaged her body.

She would have healed with some rest combined with eating well—both he and Tag had been putting food in front of Anna. But he saw no reason that she should wait when he could do something about it.

If Brother Wolf had settled down sooner, he could have done this earlier in the day.

“Mmmpf,” Anna said, her voice drowsy. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but it feels good.”

He fed energy into his mate’s body until it began washing back at him. He stopped—and was very, very careful not to take any of that energy back into himself, in case some of it was not his. He’d done that once when he had been very young, and he’d felt as though he was going to turn into the Hunger that Devours. Except that he wasn’t hungry for flesh, not even human flesh.

He’d gone to his grandfather because going to his da would have been disastrous. It had taken days of the old man’s prescription of fasting and sweats to make Charles feel normal again.

“Gray witchcraft,” his da would have called it. “Poison” was what his grandfather had said. Charles just knew he never wanted to feel like that again.

Anna fell asleep with a happy sigh. Likely she’d have been asleep earlier if she hadn’t been hurting. Charles moved away from her, found a comfortable position, and sat cross-legged, hands loose, eyes closed, and sought balance as a precursor to binding the witchcraft away again. If Anna hadn’t been there, he’d have sung one of his grandfather’s songs. He used those songs to heal his spirit and cleanse his mind the way a shower cleansed his body.

He paused. Had that been what Anna had done when the Singer caught her? She had played a lament to the broken land—which is exactly how his grandfather would have begun to heal it. It was a way of connection, of opening up to the damaged spirit.