AN: So taken a very long time to update but finally got there. So this is dedicated to all those lovely people who have waited patiently for this especially Royslady51...Excitingly I have started Chapter 4. Hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 3

Haf opened her eyes slowly, allowing her eyes to become accustomed to the light. She lay there feeling boneless and as if her brain had detached from her head and was floating about in space laughing like a loon at her prone, pathetic, pitiful person.

It was an odd feeling but she seemed to be insulated from everything, not even worrying about feeling odd, and she did feel very, very odd. She lay there not attempting to move, just allowing her eyes to roam the room with a sort of fake yet real indifference. Hell's Bells she felt weird, and where in the name of those Bells from Hell was she?

It wasn't the motel room but she was too spaced to care. It was sparsely furnished but what was there looked comfortable and homey. There was a hard wood floor with a couple of patterned rugs. On the opposite side of the room, a large wooden bookcase complete with many books seemed to buttress the wall against the ceiling. The walls of the bedroom were painted a soothing green and they all appeared to be undulating gently while she lay there, it really was a very strange feeling, almost like being on one of the caterpillar rides on the fairground but at a fraction of the speed. Not fast enough to make her nauseous but definitely too quick for her to trust herself to move yet.
The bed she was on was bloody huge but very low to the floor. Idle thoughts rattled through her uncaring head; that maybe the bed's owners had a fear of heights or were regularly drunk, so being lower to the ground meant less pain when they fell out of bed.

She was distracted from those rambling images when she noticed that everything, literally everything was in shades of green. Light was coming through the half closed wooden blinds at the large picture window and they were tinted green too.

Perhaps she was in the lair of a leprechaun she thought with a sudden surprising snigger. The spooky calmness began to drift away and her brain was starting to fight to get back into her head again and make sense.

In the kitchen Anna was polishing off the pancakes her father-in-law had made for them. She and Charles had woken up to the smell of the breakfast cooking, she had nuzzled her husband and Charles had murmured sleepily "Da" and then pulled her back into his arms for a thoroughly satisfying good morning kiss before they had both showered, dressed and after a quick look in their spare room at their sleeping guest, made their way to the kitchen. Charles had studied his father blandly as he was puttering about putting the finishing touches to the large breakfast that awaited them.

His lips quirked, his Da had always liked to cook, especially when he was intending it as an act of bribery. The mocking light in Charles eyes became more pronounced and one of his eyebrows took a life of its own and raised itself with sardonic precision which Anna envied to the depths of her soul. She would love to be able to pull off that look but had never quite managed it. Charles merely told her to practice for another couple of centuries and she would get there.

Anna and Charles knew that he knew that they were there and he knew that they knew that he knew they were there but for a long moment the silence in the kitchen was absolute and they could barely hear each other breath. Anna's shrewd eyes moved from her father-in-law to her husband and she sighed gently, as she moved past her gorgeous husband stubbornly propping the kitchen door up and went to sit at the breakfast bar where she offered her father-in-law a sweet smile. As usual she addressed the elephant in the room rather than let the pair of them brood in silence.

"It will take some time for the sedative to leave her system" Anna murmured noncommittally trying to change the oddly charged silence into something more normal. Well as normal as it got when there were werewolves chatting and the topic of conversation was their kidnapping of a non werewolf teenage girl, Anna thought ruefully.

Charles grunted, displeasure obvious in his voice "You should have just left it to me Da" Anna raised her eyes to the heavens and shook her head with a no nonsense snort as the two male Cornicks tried to outstare each other until Bran looked at his son with one eyebrow fluttering above the other, in an exact copy of Charles expression.
"Why do you have to assume she's a threat?" now Anna rolled her eyes at her husband and her father-in-law.

"Lets be realistic about this" she announced firmly "three werewolves versus a mouthy oblivious slightly nuts foreign kid who is still in her teens" and she shook her head despairingly at the pair of them.
Charles eyes warmed slightly as they looked at her and she could feel Bran's almost smile.

"More importantly, why haven't you opened the parcel she gave you?" she turned to stare at her father-in-law

Before he could answer, they heard a dull thud and a hoarse dry voice coughed and groaned "Buggering hell". The quiet vehement utterance was more than loud enough for all the Werewolves to hear, and for the moment all their attention was focused on their now conscious "guest".
Bran smirked and Charles swallowed an unexpected snort of laughter. Oddly it was Anna that remained impassive this time, a slight frown marring her smooth forehead.

There was a fraught silence again and each one of them could imagine the girl lying on the rug next to her bed where she had fallen off it. Then she began to mutter darkly to herself, of course with the werewolf enhanced senses it meant that all three of them could hear every word clearly.

"Getting up is good Haf, that's all you have to do is move your legs and your arms" there was a pause as if she tried to do something but nothing happened and then she continued talking to herself, her voice hoarse through the combination of sleep and dehydration.
"Okay, lying here is fine too, nothing wrong with that, rest is good, and being still is good. Just need a bit of time to think about getting up and get some feeling back into said arms and legs and if I happen to wee on your bloody floor in the meantime then payback's a bitch you complete and utter gits, and I don't even care if I get piss on my clothes." The voice faded into silence again as if even speaking was too hard for her.

"You are so not peeing on my floor you little …." Anna was amazed at the level of anger she felt and hastily left her food and headed towards the guest room.
Charles and Bran looked at each other in surprise but knew better than to make any overt sounds of amusement. Their Anna rarely showed anger and it was not in their best interests to be caught laughing when she did.

As she stood in the doorway, she surveyed the crumbled prone teenager; the curls of her long brown hair were wild and dishevelled and would be a nightmare to brush. Her hair had still been wet from the shower when Anna and Charles had brought her unconscious body to their home. Her eyes were closed, her lashes lay against dark circles emphasising how pale and weak she looked despite her brave or rather foolish words. Her scent was wrong. She still smelt of the drug they had used on her and it had obviously upset her system because Anna's sensitive nose could distinguish it from the girl's natural sleep smell.
There was sweat on her brow and her fingers were trembling. She looked incredibly young and vulnerable.

Suddenly the anger fled Anna, the kid was in this state because they had drugged her, and Haf didn't even have the strength to get herself up off the floor.

When she saw a single tear slide down one cheek from underneath those closed almost translucent eyelids, her shame was complete.

She cleared her throat, and the kid started, Anna could taste the swift fear that almost stilled the girl's breathing, so she gentled her voice and allowed her omega power to reinforce it, the kid needed a little bit of peace. "Let me help you up?" she asked softly as she moved closer to the girl.

She could see Haf try to clench her fists but with no success, so she opened her eyes and glared at Anna instead.

"Don't have much choice do I?" she sniped weakly but Anna ignored it and moved towards her. She could have lifted the kid up in one attempt and put her back on the bed but caution was always the best bet when dealing with "normal" people she didn't want to give the girl anything more to worry about. She must be frantic enough thinking she had been kidnapped and not knowing what was going to happen to her, although oddly after the initial burst of startled fear, the overriding emotion she could scent from the girl was a kind of pissed off exasperation and determination which fizzed through her nose like heated copper and burnt matches.

The kid was definitely intriguing and if she was related to Bran it was no wonder.

By the time she and Haf had exited the pale green bathroom suite, Anna's patience was sorely tried. The girl was beginning to regain ownership of her limbs and unfortunately her sarcastic mouth. Although Anna was of the firm opinion that not even a gag would restrain this kid's determination to make herself heard.

Haf had been relatively quiet when Anna had initially helped her to the bathroom, saving her strength to put effort into actually physically moving, of course the death glares didn't actually count as speaking, Anna thought wryly.

She had refused point blank to be helped into a shower or the bath, insisting with an evil smirk that she was happy to stink until she could perform the task herself, no really, thanks for asking, by herself, on her own, under her own steam, with no-one else's so called help, because if she hadn't been illegally drugged she wouldn't be in this state now, "getting the picture yet Mrs Abductress, and if that causes anyone a problem, then tough" Haf smiled sweetly but her eyes were blazing with outraged fury.

Anna was torn between irritation and amusement, at least the brat had brushed her teeth but then she had sprayed on so much deodorant, that Anna had a sneezing fit which had seemed to give Haf a helping of vicious glee and she deliberately squirted the deodorant again. Anna had just tilted her head and given her the kind of exasperated scolding expression that an adult would give to an unruly 5 year old. Haf had curled her lips in a mocking smirk.

She had walked the kid (half carried her) to the bed and sat her gently down, refusing to give in to the temptation to just dump her back on the floor where she had found her although it would have been immensely satisfying to see her struggle to get up. Maybe it would wear out that mighty motor mouth. Instead she turned to collect some clothes for the girl. She had laundered and dried all the clothing Haf had brought with her and put them away in the wardrobe. The kid was going to be with them for a while, until Bran decided she could leave, so they might as well start as they meant to go on.

She grabbed some underwear, a pair of faded blue jeans, a black tee and a red well won hoodie with the words "Keep calm I'm Welsh" printed across the front.

Whilst Haf was struggling to put the clothes on, Anna went and fetched a pair of thick woollen socks because the girl was still shivering slightly. Werewolves didn't need the central heating until winter was at its worst, and even then it wasn't on for long, just to take the chill off, and it wasn't as if she and Charles often had human "guests". So they had forgotten to turn up the temperature in the house, and the kid was feeling the cold.

By the time Haf was dressed, Anna could see the kid was exhausted, she sat slumped on the bed, trying to regulate her breathing. Guilt snaked its way once again through the female werewolf's veins, she wasn't sure how that snarky sarcastic pain in the butt girl managed to do it because every word that she had uttered since she had woken up would have rewarded her with some serious punishment if she had been in the care of any other wolf. But the girl seemed unaware to the danger, even dismissing the incredibly scary scowls and growls of Anna's deadly mate. Dear God had Anna ever been that oblivious and dismissive of danger as a teenage human, she didn't think so.

She spoke softly "Why don't you rest here and I will bring you some breakfast?" but she might as well have held her breath because the stubborn little jackass just struggled swaying to her feet with grim determination on her face as she muttered in that singsong voice
"If I stay in this room much longer the leprechauns will pin me down and paint me green too"

Anna tried her best to scowl at her, she wasn't going to laugh, she wasn't. Charles liked the different shades and textures of green in this room, she refused to admit that it might be too much of a good thing and that she had been gently working on him for months to dilute the overwhelming greenness of the green spare room.

Anna could feel Bran's amusement in her bones. Dear God she hadn't known him this relaxed and light-hearted since she had met him. Something about this lunatic kid seemed to appeal to the old wolf, and what was even more surprising was that after Charles first huff of irritation at the kid's words, she could actually sense her sneaky impassive husband struggle not to laugh. Had the kid put a spell on them? Seriously what the hell was going on? Although she couldn't sense anything supernatural about her, was she some sort of disguised fae with a talent for disarming her enemies through laughter and then sacrificing them to ensure her insanely curly hair continued to curl. Oh for the love of just about anything right now, the insanity was infectious. Don't laugh don't laugh she scolded herself desperately

She could feel her wolf shake her head in despair at her nonsensical human.

With a resigned sigh she offered the brat her arm and was surprised by the strength with which Haf had used Anna's help to pull herself properly to her feet. Once she was sure Haf was as stable as possible, she walked Haf to the kitchen, where Bran had created another stack of pancakes and Charles sat at the kitchen breakfast bar, lightly drumming his fingers as he refused to take his gaze away from his father..

Haf tried to look unimpressed at the plentiful breakfast but all three werewolves could smell her hunger and hear her desperate stomach start to gurgle.

"Planning on poisoning me now?" she snarked but couldn't take her eyes away from the mouth-watering sight in front of her. Bran responded mildly "Well if you don't want it," as he motioned to take the dish away but stopped when she hissed at him like an enraged cat

"Touch that plate and I will curse you with bad breath and flatulence for the rest of your days"

Menace flooded the kitchen as Bran's eyes narrowed and Charles growled in warning, his hands fisting barely hiding his claws. Had they trapped themselves in the same house as a powerful witch?

AN: No infringement intended. Hope it was worth waiting for. Next chapter in two weeks. Off on a cruise to see the Fjords for a week...