Wild Sign

CHAPTER 8

Anna still hadn’t talked to Charles about the weird glitch in her memory by the time they were getting ready to head out for Angel Hills Assisted Living.

After a good night’s sleep, she’d begun to think that she’d made a mountain out of a molehill. Nothing bad had happened. It hadn’t felt like an attack—not like when something had been looking for a way into her head after they’d gotten back from Wild Sign. Maybe it had just been a leftover from her experiences with the Singer in the Woods, a hiccup.

As she got dressed for the day, she decided she’d talk to Charles if she experienced something like that again.

Charles came back into the room after his shower and said, “I think we should keep the rooms here at the hotel until we set out for home so we can leave the grimoires in their room.”

Anna had noticed that he tended to speak about the books as if they were alive, which she found disturbing. She couldn’t see Charles doing that by accident. She wasn’t excited about driving all over Northern California dragging the books around with them like bait for any magically inclined whatsit who happened by.

Still, there were problems with leaving them in the room while they ran around looking for clues. Doubtless Charles knew all of the pros and cons, but she couldn’t help worrying.

“You want to leave them locked in a room that every maid and manager can just waltz into while we’re gone?”

Charles nodded. “That’s a consideration, but they seem a little understaffed here.”

Anna had gone back to the front desk for more towels the night before, because the only person on duty was the teenager at the front desk.

“A ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign should keep their overworked staff out while we’re gone. And if they go in, all they will see is a box and a bag of old books. The warding should be enough to keep anyone from accidentally getting into trouble—and if someone tries to get to them through my wards on purpose . . .” Brother Wolf grinned eagerly. “We’ll have a nice hunt.” Charles dimmed the grin down a bit. “I think it’s unlikely—given that they sat undisturbed in a storage locker for half a year.” He frowned at the wall between their room and the grimoires’. “It’s not ideal, but it’s the best of bad options.”

They left the books behind a door protected by the Do Not Disturb sign and a hotel lock anyone who worked at the hotel could open. None of them were happy about that except for Tag, who was visibly more cheerful the more distance they put between them and the books.

Anna, who had been watching for it, noticed that the old gas station was deserted except for the decrepit Subaru.

Charles must have seen her look, because he said, “It’s early for businesses to be open.”

“I was just surprised it didn’t disappear after we left it,” she informed him. “Like any self-respecting Sasquatch dwelling would.”

“They aren’t the fae,” Tag observed from his sprawled position in the backseat. “It’s too much work. They have to be really trying to impress you to do something like that.”

Something in his voice made Anna suspect that he had been wondering if it would be gone, too.

THEY ATE BREAKFAST in Yreka, then set out for Angel Hills Assisted Living, following the SUV’s GPS.

“Are you sure we are heading to the right place?” Anna asked as they bumped over the rutted dirt road. “Most assisted living facilities are somewhere an ambulance can actually reach.”

Yreka was edged with hill country, and they were nine miles up a road that ran around those hills. It had been four miles since they had seen the last house.

“If we reach the GPS’s target and it’s not right, we can go back to Yreka and ask around,” Tag said.

“Angel Hills doesn’t have a website,” said Charles. “Or much other information on the Internet.” He gave a thoughtful grunt.

“That’s odd,” agreed Anna. She held the steering wheel steady as a rut tried to force the SUV to the side. “Most assisted living places have to advertise for clients. Maybe Yreka is small enough that word of—”

They topped a rise and found themselves abruptly in the tamed greenness of a well-tended landscape. Two rows of trees lined a white vinyl fence line on either side of the suddenly paved road.

The road curved gently up to an opening in the high stone wall that surrounded Angel Hills Assisted Living. In case passersby were in any doubt of where they were, there was an elegant, if large, brass sign on the metal gates that were open to welcome them.

They drove through the impressive entry into a prosaic parking lot laid out before a large, graceful building that looked very much like a high-end private hospital or school. A very tall stone wall spread out from either side of the building and swept behind it, encasing something very securely. Anna gave a thoughtful look at the open gates.

“All but shouts ‘expensive place to store unwanted relatives,’ doesn’t it?” observed Tag.

“What do you do with grandma when she doesn’t remember who you are and starts trying to spend all of her money on QVC buying synthetic pearl brooches?” agreed Anna.

“That was oddly specific,” said Tag, sounding intrigued.

“My father represented just such a grandma after her intrepid teenaged grandchildren broke her out of a facility her son had locked her up in for her own good,” Anna said, her tone a bit grimmer than she had planned.

She’d been doing homework when the two boys and their grandmother, still wearing stained hospital clothing and the remnants of plastic restraints, had knocked on her dad’s door.

“From your face I gather that the son regretted his actions,” Charles murmured.

“In his own way,” Anna said, “my dad is kind of a wolf, too.”

Anna had been heading toward a place near the main building when Charles made a soft noise. She glanced up at him, but he was watching the building.

“You think we should be wary?” she asked.

He nodded, so she drove back toward the gates. “Should I park outside?”

He gave the wall a look and shook his head. “We can get over the wall if we need to.”

She took a parking place just inside the gates. They got out, and Charles took a slow, sweeping look around. Anna wondered what he saw. She knew that he didn’t usually see ghosts, but she got the feeling he saw something here.

“Tag,” he said slowly. “I think you should stay with the car.”

“Watching our escape route,” said Tag, sounding a bit more Celtic than normal. “Oh, aye.”

“Magic?” Anna asked.

Charles jerked his head toward a light post. “We’re being watched—and maybe listened to.” Which wasn’t a no, she noted.

She narrowed her eyes and finally saw what he had. An extra little bump on the bottom side of the post that arched over to hold the light—camera.

“Reasonable enough,” she observed, “at a place that might have Alzheimer’s patients, and—” Her breath caught. She had been so worried about her memory lapses and the grimoires that she hadn’t actually thought about what it meant that Daniel was a relative of Carrie’s the same way Dr. Sissy Connors was the daughter of Dr. Connors Senior. Witches tended to occur along family lines. “And maybe especially a patient related to Carrie Green,” she said slowly.

If they were being watched, she couldn’t ask Charles if he thought they were being stupid for going into a place designed to keep people in, maybe even to detain witches against their will. They didn’t know if Daniel could tell them anything. Charles has thought of all of this, she told herself, and forced her shoulders to relax. All she had to do was not let him know that she hadn’t figured it out until just now.

She wished she hadn’t given the facility her real name. If this place was run by witches, that surname would alert people. Cornick was a good Welsh name, and there were doubtless hundreds of Cornick families in the US that were no relation to the Wolf Who Rules. But still . . .

In lieu of words, she reached out to Charles and stopped him when he would have walked toward the doors. He gave her a reassuring smile and covered her hand with his briefly. He didn’t think that they were in any danger he couldn’t handle. She slid her hand into the crook of his arm.

As they walked to the building, she saw that most of the windows were the kind with a metal mesh embedded in the glass, more discreet than bars but no less effective unless you were keeping in werewolves. She wondered how many of their patients were incarcerated here rather than held for treatment. Probably the same percentage of patients in any assisted living home, she thought. But the isolation of the place made it feel more like a prison than a place of healing.

Well, that and the surveillance equipment and escape-proof windows.

As if to make up for the imposing exterior, the glass-and-bronze entry would have done credit to a high-end hotel, an effect not lessened by the imposing reception desk. Anna gave their names to the young man behind the counter and told him they were there to see Daniel Green. He checked a list and gave them a bright smile.

“Dr. Underwood left a note that he wanted to escort you. Normally you would not be allowed in to see him at all. Daniel’s one of our special guests—that means that he can be obstreperous if he is in a mood.”

There was a hesitation before “obstreperous.” Anna would have bet that the word he’d been going to say was “dangerous.”

“It’s not Daniel’s fault.” The young man looked suddenly serious. “Dementia is a terrible thing—scary for those who suffer from it.”

The last few days had given Anna a visceral understanding of how frightening having undependable memories was. “Of course,” she said.

“If you’ll wait a moment, I’ll go get him.”

Dr. Underwood did not keep them waiting long. He was short, slender, and bearded, with warm blue eyes and a Mickey Mouse tie. He saw Anna’s glance and laughed.

“My daughter gives me ties,” he said. “She is eight. Yesterday’s tie was from Frozen. One of our clients sang ‘Do You Want to Build a Snowman?’ to me every time I checked in on her.” It didn’t sound as though it particularly bothered him.

“Daniel enjoys the gardens in the morning,” he said. “He’s more lucid outside; we find that is true of many of our clients. Indoors can feel a little alien, with strange noises and smells, but a garden is always filled with familiar things.”

He led them down a too-shiny-floored hall full of oversized solid-looking doors, most of which had dead bolts that locked the patients inside. The air smelled of cleaners that burned Anna’s sensitive nose, so it could give her no further hint of what lay beyond those doors.

“Daniel was as cheerful as he gets this morning,” Dr. Underwood said. “He had a good breakfast. I have every expectation you’ll have a good visit. But if you don’t mind, I will hover in view but out of earshot to make sure. Afterward, we should talk about Daniel’s future.”

“Of course,” Anna murmured, wondering how they were going to manage that part. Maybe she’d just give him the check and Leslie’s phone number and tell him to take it to the FBI.

The gardens were lower than the building, so when they stepped outside, Anna got a fair look at the whole thing. Five or six acres, she judged, completely enclosed by what looked to be a ten-foot wall. Hedges and the natural rise and fall of the land had been utilized to create small pockets of privacy. In the center of the garden was a good-sized water feature with a waterfall on one end and a natural-looking (other than it being aboveground) pond on the other end.

Charles gave her a thoughtful look as she started down the stairs ahead of him, following Dr. Underwood. She wasn’t sure what that look was about, but she thought she was missing something. She tried to figure out what that could be.

Outside, her nose should have been of use to figure out what Charles had noticed, but she didn’t find anything that shouldn’t be there: plants, birds, insects, and presumably Dr. Underwood’s aftershave or shampoo or something. He must have used a brand she didn’t know that smelled spicy and . . .

She frowned, closing the distance between them so she could get a better sniff. It didn’t smell like anything she had smelled before—and by now she was familiar with a lot of different scents. It was a blend of scents, she could tell that much—but none of the blend was anything she could pinpoint.

She couldn’t imagine that look on Charles’s face was because Dr. Underwood’s cologne/aftershave/whatever was complex. She decided she should stay alert. Which was, she noticed, harder to do than it should have been. The aura in the garden was very soothing. Perhaps too soothing.

She eyed Underwood as she considered that. Assuming Daniel Green was witchborn—it definitely ran in families—it followed that any assisted living home that could keep him safe would not be a normal facility. It might, for instance, have an unusually peaceful garden.

Anna couldn’t detect witchcraft anywhere around her, but she wasn’t good at it on her own—she needed her inner wolf for that. But she was sure as damn it that something was trying to pacify her with unnatural persistence. That was her job, and she could tell when someone else had put their hand in to have a try at it.

She coaxed her wolfish nature out—which was a bit harder than normal. As soon as she did so, the effects of the garden’s magic fell away. Her wolf told her that they were surrounded by magic so thick it felt as though she were breathing it. That was what she’d been smelling, but some spellcrafting had misdirected her into believing it was Underwood’s cologne or the flowers or anything else with a scent she wouldn’t pay too much attention to.

No wonder Charles had been wary.

Not all witches were evil. But she could not tell what branch of witchcraft had created the magic here, and there was something flattening out the smell. Even without her wolf close to the surface, she should have detected black magic under most circumstances. And if it was white magic they were using, there would have been no reason to hide what its origins were. It could have been gray magic.

But she didn’t think gray witches would go to so much effort to hide what kind of magic was at work here—that was a fair amount of power to waste if all you were hiding was gray magic.

As they wound around hedges and down steep flagstone steps, she wondered if that soothing spell had been meant specifically for them—and decided that was unlikely. There were all sorts of reasons that someone would want to calm the powerful residents of an assisted living home, and not a likely magic they would throw at a pair of werewolves.

She reached for her bond with Charles and felt his high-alert status and also a touch of “Not now.” Like the garden, Anna broadcast a soothing atmosphere almost unintentionally. Normally it was a useful—the most useful—aspect of her Omega condition. But calming Brother Wolf when he might have to fight was not ideal.

But his response gave her an answer of sorts. Charles felt that they were in danger. She probably should have been more worried about that. Maybe it was just the residual effects of the garden spell, but she thought it was probably her mate’s solid presence at her back.

Underwood led them down to a seating area that overlooked the pond side of the water feature. Stone benches edged the concrete platform where a single figure sat in a wheelchair that was angled to give him a view of the handful of black swans drifting amidst lily pads and a scattering of low fountains that burbled around the edge of the pond.

The king in exile, Anna thought, taking in the proud cant to his head and the straightness of his shoulders. Power had once rested upon him, and his body remembered.

A nurse sat on a stone bench that angled toward Daniel Green, her back mostly to the pond. Anna could catch the cheerful chatter of her voice as she knitted something pink with yarn emerging from a woven basket at her feet. She was a tall woman, big-boned and gaunt, with a mouth that smiled easily. She looked up and saw them coming, and her smile disappeared.

“Daniel,” she said, “you have visitors. I’m going to leave you with them for a while so you can have some privacy. But Dr. Underwood is here. If you feel any distress, you can call for him and he’ll come.”

She looked at Anna and Charles. “It is important for our clients to feel safe,” she said. There wasn’t active dislike in her voice, but she wasn’t friendly, either.

Daniel growled something, but he didn’t look around—or at the nurse, either. If Anna, with her werewolf ears, couldn’t hear exactly what he’d said, she figured no one could.

“Of course,” Anna told the nurse warmly, because her dad had been big on “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

“Well,” said the nurse, whose name tag read Mary Frank, LPN, apparently taken aback by Anna’s open friendliness. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes to take Mr. Green back to his room.”

She frowned at Dr. Underwood and he bowed. Deferentially. A doctor to a nurse. Among the witches, it was usually the women who had the most power. Between Dr. Underwood and Ms. Frank, clearly Ms. Frank was in charge. Something in Underwood’s posture, respectful as it was, told Anna he resented that.

Interesting, she thought, and wondered what unconscious social behaviors might betray the fact that a person was a werewolf.

Mr. Green made another noise, a grunt this time. Anna couldn’t tell what kind of a grunt it was. He was facing away from her, and even with Charles she usually had to see his face to interpret his grunts.

“I’ll be back to get you,” the nurse said. “You behave yourself, Daniel, and we’ll go have some ice cream afterward. Won’t that be nice, dear?”

Dr. Underwood bent his knees a little so that he could look into Daniel’s eyes. “I’ll leave you with Anna and her husband, but if you need me, you can just call out.” He stood up and said to Anna, “I’ll just be on the other side of the fountain. I can see you—and hear you if you shout.” It sounded like he knew that from experience.

She nodded—and waited until the doctor was well on his way before moving around the chair to where Daniel could see her. And she could see him.

Daniel Green’s face was deeply lined, making his already prominent features seem larger—he reminded her of the ents in The Lord of the Rings movies. He’d been built nearly on the scale of Tag at one time, but age had winnowed away his bulk and left only the crags behind. His jaw was solid and his deep-set black eyes burned fever-bright. He had the eyes of a roadside evangelist, she thought—intense and slightly mad.

“I don’t know you,” he said, his voice surprisingly soft. He looked like a man who should have had a battlefield voice. “They said you are Carrie’s sister-in-law. Carrie was an only child and she never married.”

“I lied to them,” Anna agreed. He was talking about Carrie as if she were dead, she noticed. If he was witchborn, maybe he could tell.

Based only on the way the young man at the reception desk had talked about him, she would place the odds of him being witchborn at about 95 percent. The way he carried himself made her think that he had been one of the rare men who were powerful witches. That made her very glad Charles was with her.

She sat on the bench that the nurse had abandoned, because it put her on eye level with him. “I’m Anna Cornick and this is my husband, Charles.”

At her gesture, Charles, who had been casting restless eyes around the garden, came around so Daniel could see him without moving his chair.

“Cornick,” the old man said, narrowing his eyes at Charles, who had moved to stand behind Anna. “I wondered if it was your family when they told me that name. But I did not really expect it. What do you think I’ve done this time?” He grinned suddenly at Charles, a wicked expression giving Anna a glimpse at the charisma this man must have once commanded.

He knew Charles and Charles knew him. She was sure that if Charles had known that coming here, he would have told her. She supposed that Daniel Green was a common name, or maybe Charles had known him under a different name.

“Plenty, I imagine,” answered Charles, his voice equally soft.

“Don’t worry,” Daniel Green said, and waved his fingers. There was a popping noise, and something small and dark that might have been a miniaturized camera bounced through the air and rolled on the ground.

“That’ll ensure our privacy. There will be a fuss behind the scenes. Look down there—he’s getting the call.” He gestured toward Underwood, who was putting his phone to his ear. “I have no intention of giving you away. They don’t need to know that the son of the werewolf king is here in their power. Not yet, anyway. Have you come to kill me?”

He sounded, Anna noticed, almost hopeful.

“Not this time,” Charles told him, and even Anna couldn’t tell if he was just humoring the old witch or if he really regretted that Daniel’s death wasn’t Charles’s aim today.

“We are here trying to find out what happened to Carrie Green and the rest of the people in the camp she lived in,” Anna said, deciding that it was time to bring the conversation around to what they needed.

“Wild Sign,” said Daniel. “She’s dead. They are all dead.” He didn’t sound particularly broken up about it. “I suppose you’ve found the bodies.”

Anna shook her head. “No. But the whole town is empty. We hiked in a few days ago to see it for ourselves. Do you know what happened? Are you sure everyone is dead?”

“She was a fool,” he bit out, though he was still keeping his voice soft. “That’s what happened. She was a fool living with a whole bunch of do-gooder, pansy-assed twits trafficking with powers they had no business dealing with. If my Jennifer had survived, she’d never have let Carrie grow up such a mealymouthed puling idiot. Now, that was a witch worthy of the Green name.”

He rocked a little, lost in thought. Then he sighed. “But our only child was a son. He had no power at all, despite my own capabilities. He married a woman of good birth—it wasn’t until later we found out she was a throwback, with no power, either. Jude knew, though, and kept it to himself. My Jennifer died when Carrie was six years old, and Jude and the damned fool woman he married turned their daughter into a ‘moral’ woman.

“Moral,” he said again, his voice shaking with rage. “She had so much promise. She could have been a Power—but she was a Wiccan and would not break Wiccan precepts. ‘An it harm none’ and all that rot.”

He made “Wiccan” sound like a swear word.

He took a long breath and seemed to regain some control.

“So she died,” he said. “My only granddaughter. My only living kin. She died because she was a white witch, the last of our family—a mewling, moralistic weakling. Arrogant. I told her that they were all fools, but she wouldn’t listen to me.” He leaned over and spat on the ground. “I could forgive the rest, but not the stupid.”

“Something happened in Wild Sign,” Anna said. “What power did they traffic with?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Wild Sign was that place she lived in the mountains.” He sounded a little worried—as if he needed her reassurance that he’d remembered it correctly.

Anna nodded. “That’s right.”

He rubbed the back of his wrist with the top of the other, as if there was something bothering him. A vague look crossed his face, but when he spoke, he sounded lucid enough. “They met a being there . . . a primordial spirit of some sort. Carrie called it the Singer in the Woods—which is a stupid name.”

He watched her with suspicion, apparently waiting for her opinion.

“It sounds more like a description than a name,” she said.

He grunted and gave a sharp nod. “A pretty name,” he said. “And it made them think it was a friendly creature.”

“It wasn’t,” Anna said.

“They bargained with it,” he sneered. “Bargain with demons, bargain with the fae. That’s usually fatal, too, but at least you know the rules. They treated this Singer creature as if it followed the rules of the fae.”

“What was the bargain?” Anna asked the old man.

“Power,” he said. “And safety. You know what life is like for a white witch. Carrie might as well have painted a target on her back and held up a sign saying ‘All-you-can-eat buffet.’” He scowled, fisting his hand. “It promised them a safe place to live, free from being hunted.” Green’s face contorted. “A second bargain was that if they fed it, it would give them power.”

He looked off at the pond—or maybe at Underwood—or possibly at nothing.

“Fed it with music?” asked Anna, remembering what Leah had said, also remembering what it had felt like to play music in the amphitheater.

“What?” he asked, turning his head to frown at her. “What are you on about? Who are you? Where is my nurse?” With each question, he became more querulous.

CHARLES KNEW THAT Carrie Green’s dependent—be he father, brother, uncle, or lover—was a witch. It had only been a possibility until he put his feet on the asphalt of the parking lot, but at that moment he knew. This was a place of witchcraft.

The witches who ruled here must have done something to disguise it. He could tell that neither Anna nor Tag felt anything. But to him the very ground vibrated.

It was a prison, he thought, looking up at the carefully beautiful facade of the “assisted living” facility. Witches were practical people; they would not waste the power of family members just because those people could no longer be left loose to roam freely.

This place was, to the witches, what his da’s pack was for the werewolves. The difference was that his da didn’t feed on their old wolves. He’d heard rumors of places like this, but the witches knew how to keep secrets. He’d never managed to run one down.

When Underwood came to greet them, Charles let Anna take point, leaving him to guard her back. He was happier when they moved on to the garden. He was pretty sure that if they wanted to leave, the walls of the garden, spelled to keep witches in, would not be effective against a pair of werewolves.

He also let the spell be that Underwood had laid upon Anna, designed, Charles was certain, to bind her—and thus him—to talk to Underwood after they spoke to Daniel Green. If he had dispelled Underwood’s will, it would only have warned him that he was not facing someone helpless against witchcraft. The Cornick name should have told the good doctor that much, and if it had not . . . well, Charles was happy to let his enemies make mistakes.

If he’d been thinking clearly when Anna had called, he would have had Anna use “Smith” or something else. But at that time, he hadn’t yet found the grimoires that proved Carrie Green was a witch. Just because there were witches in Wild Sign didn’t mean everyone living there had been a witch. Even knowing that Carrie had been a witch, until Charles had put his feet on the ground in the parking lot, he hadn’t been certain that Daniel Green was a witch, too.

He still should have cautioned Anna to use a pseudonym.

Should have, would have. Matters are as they are, snorted Brother Wolf, impatient with Charles for trying to see how they could have worked harder to avoid conflict.

Brother Wolf enjoyed conflict, and his happy anticipation lingered in the back of Charles’s mind up until the moment Charles got a good scent off the old man in the wheelchair.

Charles couldn’t tell if the instant white-hot rage was all his or if some of it belonged to his wolf brother. He had long ago thought that his vow to hunt down and kill this witch was going to go unfulfilled.

Most witchborn men were far less powerful than their female counterparts. The man Charles had known as Daniel Erasmus was one of the exceptions.

Back in the 1980s, the Wasatch Pack had been subject to a series of attacks that had started out so subtly it had taken weeks for their Alpha, a cunning old lobo named Aaron Simpleman, to figure out they were attacks. Only when Simpleman’s second, a wolf named Fin Donnelly, was found dead in his house with no sign of what killed him did the old wolf call the Marrok for help. There were, he’d told the Marrok, witches trying to take over his territory.

Charles had been sent down to find out what was going on. At that point the assumption was that the witches wanted a base for a drug operation, as Salt Lake had been experiencing an explosion of drug-related arrests. What he and Aaron had uncovered was a web of witches engaged in the trafficking of minors—such a clean term for what they’d found.

The witches had brought in children from all over the world—some of them in “adoptions,” some of them kidnapped, and others sold by their families, who mostly expected them to go on to better lives. The witches used magic to condition the children, who were as young as six or seven, to obedience, and shipped them off all over the US.

He and Aaron had been able to save a few of them, with the help of Charles’s brother, Samuel. But the damage the magic used on the children had done was irreversible after a few days. Most of those children had been unrecoverable.

Aaron had passed on his leadership of the pack and gone out witch hunting for the next decade or so. He’d significantly reduced the number of practicing black witches in Utah before one of them had killed him in Royal, a ghost town in Price Canyon.

Daniel and Jennifer Erasmus—and now that he thought on it, she had been born into the Green family—had been the masterminds behind the trafficking and the magic that broke those children’s minds. Charles had killed Jennifer himself. He had hunted Daniel off and on for years, but even whispers and rumors of the witch’s activities had died. He’d assumed someone else had managed to kill Daniel, but apparently not. Daniel had taken on his wife’s name, possibly because the Green family had been a prominent one. Daniel was the only witch Charles knew of who carried the Erasmus name. Maybe Daniel had changed it to throw off the werewolves who were looking for him. If so, Charles was embarrassed it had worked.

Charles glanced up at the huge building looming behind them. Just walking through those halls had left Charles wishing for a shower to wash the ichor of foulness from his skin. They were torturing the old and infirm for magical power. He did not think that Erasmus, that Daniel Green, was an exception.

Charles remembered the first group of children he and Aaron had found in a mobile home out in the mountains. They had been looking for cocaine, and they’d found that—nearly half a million dollars’ worth—stored behind the skirting around the building. They hadn’t been expecting the children. They hadn’t been able to save any of that group, though all of the children were still upright and breathing when they’d found them. Whatever the witches had done to them had destroyed their minds. Charles had laid them all to rest himself because Aaron hadn’t been able to bear it that first time. The next time, the Wasatch Alpha had helped.

Charles could not imagine a better place for Erasmus to end up than this house of horrors. He hoped the old witch lived forever.

He was glad that Anna knew neither what Erasmus was nor what they were doing to him in this place. They needed the information that he had, and Anna’s usual charisma was getting Erasmus to talk. If she knew what the witch had done, she wouldn’t be able to give him the smile that was keeping the weasel talking.

Charles kept quiet, kept his senses open, and stayed just out of the old man’s sight.

“What was the bargain?” Anna asked the old man, her voice soft and coaxing, as if she were dealing with a human being instead of Daniel Erasmus. Doubtless she was more effective that way.

“Power,” the old man said. “And safety. You know what life is like for a white witch. Carrie might as well have painted a target on her back and held up a sign saying ‘All-you-can-eat buffet.’” He scowled, fisting his hand.

Charles wondered how Carrie had protected herself from the old man if she had chosen the least powerful path open to a witch. He had no doubt that Erasmus would have taken every scrap of power she had, granddaughter or not, once she had defied his wishes.

“It promised them a safe place to live, free from being hunted.” Erasmus’s voice was tight. “A second bargain was that if they fed it, it would give them power.”

Something drew the old man’s attention. Charles felt it, too, glancing to the source: Underwood. Erasmus had broken the technology that was listening in—but Charles had no doubt that Underwood had some other means of eavesdropping. Because he used his magic to tug on one of the spells wrapped around the old man.

“Fed it with music?” hazarded Anna, oblivious to the currents of magic in the air.

She’d made a good guess, Charles thought. Whatever lived in those mountains had pounced on Anna while she played “The Minstrel Boy.”

“What?” Erasmus asked, turning his head to frown at Anna. “What are you on about? Who are you? Where is my nurse?” With each question, he became more querulous.

“What did they feed the Singer in the Woods?” Anna asked.

The old man snarled at her. “What the fuck do I care?”

Charles stepped in front of Erasmus, breaking Underwood’s line of sight. Anna scooted over on her seat, but Charles went down on one knee in front of the old man.

“I am Charles Cornick,” he said, his voice harsh as he used the old man’s fear to brush away Underwood’s cobwebs. “You know who I am. What did your granddaughter do for the thing in the mountains? What did it want in return for safety? For power?” There had been two bargains.

“Carrie?” His old voice was shaky, but the volume had increased to the point that Charles was sure Underwood could hear it from the path he was hurrying up. “She was a musician. A fiddler.”

“She played music for it?” Anna asked, her voice gentle. Charles felt Anna’s power encompass the vile old man, and he wanted to snarl.

It would be so easy to reach out and break his neck.

“They fed that thing music and it gave them power,” said the old man, face twitching as he fought whatever Underwood’s leash was doing to him. “It should have been mine.”

We could tear out his throat, offered Brother Wolf.

His death would be too quick, Charles returned grimly.

We are not cats who toy with our prey, said Brother Wolf, but he didn’t sound scolding. He was thinking about those children, too. They hurt him here?

Yes, said Charles. He had not seen absolute proof of that, but he knew black witches.

Good.

“What did the Singer in the Woods want from Carrie in return for keeping them safe?” Charles asked again. “What did it want that they didn’t give it? How did they break their bargain with it?”

The old man blinked at him, his mouth opening and closing, a drop of saliva beading on the corner for a moment before he licked his lips.

Charles knelt, holding the old witch with his eyes, letting Brother Wolf brush aside Underwood’s magic, which would have kept Daniel silent. “Daniel Erasmus. By your true name, I require you answer me.”

The old man tried to break his gaze, his face twisting in pain at being caught between two magics. Charles didn’t care about Daniel Erasmus’s pain. At all.

Not until he heard Anna’s unhappy intake of breath, anyway.

We will make this quicker, agreed Brother Wolf, drawing power from the pack to increase the pressure they were putting on the witch.

The old witch jerked his head forward and snarled at Charles, “It wanted walkers in the world. Walkers to find things out for it and bring back food.”

“What is a walker in the world?” Anna asked.

Charles had a horrible thought—because he knew someone who was a walker.

“They come in the afternoon,” Daniel Erasmus told Anna, then let out a sound of rage and horror. “Fuck you. Fuck you all. They come in the afternoon and they feed upon me until there is nothing left.”

He laughed, a sly sound that made Anna sad for the lost titan. Charles could see it on her face.

“But I know something they don’t.” Erasmus gestured for her to lean closer.

Charles held her back with a hand on her shoulder; he wasn’t letting his mate get any nearer than she already was.

“They thought that it bargained like the fae,” Charles said. “That the words mattered. But this creature bargains with intent.”

“Words don’t matter to a god,” said Erasmus. “Stupid bitch. She was a ripe plum ready for me to pluck. So much power for a white witch. I could have eaten her and taken that power. Then when they came for me, there would have been such a reckoning.” He shook with frustrated rage as he spat out, “And then she got her stupid self killed. Fuck her.” His voice dropped to a raspy growl. “And fuck you, Charles-fucking-Cornick, for not hunting me down and killing me like you should have done.”

In the midst of his words, he flung out a hand, and a wave of oily black power poured out of him like a mist of darkness—as if Charles would let the old man harm Anna. Charles blew and the wind followed his request, dissipating the blackness into the air, where the hungry magic spells of the garden sucked in the power with more efficiency than a Hoover vacuum.

It would not, Charles thought, be a good idea to use magic in this place.

“Daniel,” said Dr. Underwood in a soothing voice that was somewhat contradicted by the heaving of his breathing as he trotted up the last step. “We need to remember that these are our guests.”

He is out of shape, observed Brother Wolf. And there is something wrong with his lungs. Can you smell the illness in him?

Brother Wolf was in full hunting mode.

Erasmus scowled and half rose out of the chair. The blankets that swathed him were dislodged, revealing the cuffs on his ankles and the binding around his waist. His arms would look unbound to eyes unable to perceive the world as it was. To Charles, the faint marks of a tattoo only a little darker than Daniel Erasmus’s parchment skin stood out like a brand. The inked spell held him with greater sureness than the steel chain attached to his ankles.

“Rest now,” soothed Underwood, touching the riled patient on the forehead. Someone else would not have seen the brutal magic that subdued the old man.

Yes, thought Charles, remembering the children, this was a very good place for the old witch. But the old man had been powerful and Underwood was not.

“She stole it from me,” Erasmus roared, spittle spraying the doctor as the old witch rocked forward in the chair. “She was mine to feed upon. That power was mine. Mine. Mine, and she gave it to a fucking god that sings in the woods. Stupid little—”

“Danny, be a good boy,” said the returning nurse, power in her voice.

Charles wasn’t worried about Erasmus or Dr. Underwood, but the nurse was a different matter entirely. As Erasmus collapsed back in his chair and Underwood straightened, smoothing out his jacket, Charles put himself between Anna and the nurse. He pushed Anna (gently) to the edge of the concrete platform they stood on.

Mary Frank invaded the space in a cloud of Chanel No. 5. He still could not smell the black magic stink, but his skin and spirit knew what had created this place, what kind of witch she was.

And still, in his prime, Erasmus could have destroyed this witch with a few words. Now he subsided in the chair, listing to the left, dull-eyed and drooling a little out of the corner of his mouth.

“Were we being bad?” the nurse chided, straightening the blankets. She looked at Underwood and raised an imperious eyebrow. “We’ll just head along to our room,” she said. “It’s time for Mr. Green’s constitutional.”

There was a bite to that last word, and Daniel Green, who had once been Daniel Erasmus, began to sob and mumble. As his eyes fell on Anna he said, “Help me, please. Such a nice lady. Help?”

Anna stirred, and Charles put a hand on her shoulder and made a soothing noise as the nurse rolled her victim up the garden path. Anna glanced up at him and he could almost read the words in her face.

Are they doing what I think they are? Why don’t you stop it? Why don’t you want me to stop it? The man I love would not let a helpless old man be tortured.

What she actually said was, “Charles?”

He touched her face lightly. “I knew him before,” he told her.

She took that in and gave him a shallow nod. Trust, he thought, but verify. Her face told him that he owed her a good explanation when they were out of here.