"Christmas garlands and a rock?" he said, a smile in his voice. "Why not an ornament?"
"Wolves aren't fragile," I told him. "And they're . . . stubborn and hard to move."
"I guess that imagery works as well as anything," he allowed. "Do you know who this is? Can you feel how worried she is for you?"
"Mary Jo," I said. And once he'd pointed it out to me, I could feel it, too. Could feel that she was looking for me, running on four feet to use her nose to its best advantage. She wasn't hot on the trail - and I had the impression of miles traveled and miles to go stretching out both ways in weary infinity.
"It is not usually so clear," Bran said, pulling me out of Mary Jo. "Partially it is because I am with you - and I am the Marrok. Another part is that the fairy has locked you into your own head - I can tell that by the quality of my contact with you. That she has done this is an unforgivable offense" - once more I felt him try to contain his anger - "but that will give you strength here you would not otherwise have had." He paused. "The connection between you and me is stronger than it should be, too. I'm not getting words back, but there is something . . . No use getting distracted with the why of that now. We have other tasks."
He took me to another silver garland and had me tell him whom it belonged to. After the third, I could find the strands myself without his guidance. The fourth was Paul's. He was running with Mary Jo - and just as anxious to find me. He still didn't like Warren, though. I could see that his garland and Mary Jo's were intertwined and connected to all the other garlands, too. One by one we walked by the rocks that were the wolves in the pack.
Bran held me at Darryl's, when I would have hurried on because I wanted to find Adam.
"No," he said. "I want you to look here for a bit. Can you find Darryl's connection to Auriele? It's different from the pack bonds."
I looked and looked. I found Auriele's rock nearby, but I couldn't see anything. Finally, in desperation, I picked up Darryl's rock and saw that it moved Auriele's, too - as if they were tied together . . . and then I couldn't understand how I'd missed the blazing gold rope between them, it was so obvious. Maybe I'd been looking too hard for a silver garland and instead their bond was very different - softer, stronger, and deeper. Unlike the pack bond, it wasn't tied onto the rocks; it originated in one and ended in the other.
Bran took me by the elbow. "Okay, quit playing with them. You're making Darryl unhappy. I have another one to show you."
He led me to the center of all the strands of silver.
All but buried in the pack magic was a very, very black rock. It radiated anger and fear and sorrow so strongly it was hard to go near it.
"Don't be frightened," Bran said, and there was a rough affection in his voice. "Adam has been frightening quite enough people lately. Look and tell me what you see."
This was Adam? I ran up to the rock and put both hands on it. "He's hurt," I said, then corrected myself. "He's hurting."
"Where is your mate bond?"
It lay in the snow, a fragile and worn thing. There were a lot of places where it had been roughly knotted, just to keep it together.
"Hastily made in need, which isn't necessarily a bad thing," the Marrok said, "but that was compounded by rough handling by a bunch of idiots. Most of whom should have known better."
I could see that around the knotted places, the rope was worn, as if a dog . . . or a wolf had chewed on it until someone had tied it to keep it from breaking.
"Henry isn't in the pack anymore," said Bran. "Just in case you hadn't noticed. I've brought him to my pack for a little one-on-one. In a few months, I might let him go out on his own again. Most of that mess is his doing."
But I wasn't worried about the chewed sections anymore.
"It's broken," I said, kneeling in the deep snow. In front of me the rope came to an abrupt ending, as if sliced by a sharp knife. I'd thought that the reason I hadn't been able to feel Adam was still the overload from when he'd thought I was dead. Though it had been recovering from that, hadn't it? When had I lost the connection?
It hurt to know that it was broken.
"Now, that," Bran growled, "was cut by black magic."
His voice was so strong in my right ear that I turned - and got a glimpse of something huge and awful that didn't look anything at all like Bran in any form I'd ever seen.
"I couldn't see how it would be possible until Samuel told me there was a witch involved. Between the witch and the queen, they found a weakness and broke it," he told me. And then, in a curiously amused tone, he said, "And I don't scare you a bit, do I?"
"Why would I be afraid of you?" I asked - but my focus was on the broken rope. Would I hurt Adam if I touched it?
"Go ahead," said Bran. "He would give anything for you to touch it again."
"Mine," I said. "Mine."
But I still didn't touch it.
With that superior humor he occasionally used, which made me want to hit him every time, Bran said, "I'm sure he can find someone else who wants it."
I grabbed it with both hands - and not because I was worried there would be someone else, no matter what Bran thought. But because we belonged together, Adam bound to me, me to him. I loved it when he let me make him laugh - he was a serious man by nature and weighed down by the responsibility he held. I knew he would never leave me, never let me down - because the man had never abandoned anything in his long life. If I hadn't taken the gold rope of our bond, I knew Adam would have sat on me and hog-tied me with it. I liked that. A lot.
"Mercy!" This voice wasn't Bran's. This voice was demanding and half-crazed. A short pause, then much more controlled, Adam said, "About damned time. Found you. Mercy, we're coming to get you. Just sit tight."
I wrapped his voice around me and held on tighter to the rope between us until it settled into my bones, and I didn't have to hold on anymore. "Adam," I said, happily. And then added, because he'd know I was teasing, "Took you long enough. You were waiting for me to get myself out?"
I looked around my field of snow, by then littered with cheery garland and glowing rocks. I closed my eyes and wrapped the feel of pack around me like a warm cloak. I felt the fairy queen's magic touch the golden rope I shared with Adam - and this time it was the queen's magic that shattered.
* * *
MY GAZE WAS LOCKED WITH THAT OF THE TRAPPED forest lord. He blinked, and I jerked my eyes down - and saw that my arm was still dripping blood. From the amount I'd lost, I hadn't been out of it for more than a few seconds.