Wild Sign

CHAPTER 10

There was no more activity at the old gas station when they passed it for the second time that day than there had been the first. All three of them watched it go by. No one said anything about it, but Anna met Tag’s grin in her rearview mirror.

They had passed the Sasquatch gift shop sign before something that had been tapping at the edge of Anna’s instincts coalesced into certainty.

“Cathy Hardesty was pregnant,” she said. “It didn’t strike me as important at the time, but I think I was wrong about that.”

Charles nodded, and from his face she knew that he understood what she had. Maybe he’d seen it from the start.

“She let us go too easily,” Anna said. “And maybe that was because she was pregnant—and because you honestly scared her, Charles. But knowing black witches . . . If she, like Underwood, thought we were a path to greater power, she would never have let us get away without a fight.” She paused. “They would never have let us go.”

“Agreed,” said Charles.

“Just like they wouldn’t have let Carrie Green go, once they’d noticed the new power she carried,” Anna continued. “I don’t care what kind of artifact she had. And the Singer in the Woods—” She felt a flash of indignation. “I feel very unhappy that every time I say ‘singer’ I will have that thing in my head. ‘Singer’ is a thing you are, Charles, a thing we do that is ours. And I love the woods. I don’t want to give that word to some creepy primordial god.”

Charles gave her a half smile. “Creepy primordial god?”

“Whatever,” she said with a wave of her hand. She got back to her original point. “That thing wants walkers. And we think that means children.”

“It would have been easy enough for a witch or two to follow Carrie back to Wild Sign,” Tag said, proving that he’d been thinking along the same lines that Anna had. “They can hide themselves pretty well from most things that aren’t werewolves.”

“Would the magic on the trail to Wild Sign have kept them out?” Anna asked.

Charles shook his head. “It’s meant to keep mundane people from wandering in. Maybe if the Singer actively wanted to keep them out, it could. But the warding on the trail was easy enough to push through. A witch could do it without much trouble. Maybe even use the wardings to find what they were hiding, the way I did.”

“How far along is she?” Anna asked. “It is late September, and whatever hit Wild Sign did it in April. That is five, five and a half months. She could be that far if the baby is small.”

“I wonder,” said Charles softly, “how many of the witches who run that rest home are pregnant. How long that garden has been alive. How long they’ve had the power to waste on covering up the stench of black magic. As a rule, not even black witches waste magic on permanent spells.”

Chills swept up Anna’s spine. That was further than she’d thought through, but it made sense. She didn’t want to go up against witches again—not when they were also going up against the Singer. Maybe it was time to call in the troops.

“So maybe the witches followed Carrie back to Wild Sign,” Tag said heavily. “When they got there, they informed the Singer that the witches of Wild Sign would never supply it with mothers for its children. A witch could tell what other witches had done to themselves—we are of the opinion that was how they broke their bargain, yes? The white witches of Wild Sign—” He frowned. “And doesn’t that sound like a line from Gilbert and Sullivan? Anyway, those white witches had kept the women of Wild Sign from becoming pregnant—and the black witches told the Singer what they had done. What if black witches brought Wild Sign down—and offered the Singer a new bargain? Power for children who would be witches and walkers both?” He paused and said in a mild tone, “It is speculation, but that scenario would account for everything we saw up there, expect maybe for the pet graveyard.”

“Cemetery,” Anna said, the echoes of a long-ago monologue by her father ringing in her ears. He was something of a pedant. “Graveyards have to be next to churches.”

“I know that,” said Tag, with feigned indignation. “If that amphitheater wasn’t Wild Sign’s church, I don’t know where they worshipped.”

“I thought that you didn’t consider the Singer to be a god,” Anna observed.

Tag licked a finger and made an imaginary score in the air. “Point to you.” He paused. “But since I think that they considered it a god, I stand by my nomenclature. No point.” He put up the same hand and made an erasing motion.

“Proving you can believe two contradictory things at the same time,” Charles observed.

“It’s a talent,” agreed Tag.

Anna went back to the original discussion. “We haven’t found anything that sounds very good for the people who lived in Wild Sign. Are we counting them dead?”

“I think that’s a safe assumption at this point,” Charles said gently. “But we knew, given the length of time between when they disappeared and when we were called in, that this was unlikely to be a rescue. Our job was to get information.”

“Which we did,” Tag agreed. “So we tidy up our loose ends, and then what?”

“Intercept Leah,” said Charles. “After we have her safe, then we’ll lay it all out for Da. I don’t expect that we are going to leave this alone. I expect we’ll be back with more firepower to clean the Singer out of these mountains for good.”

Anna thought that if it weren’t for Leah’s involvement, Bran was quite capable of letting the Singer prey upon anyone it wanted to as long as it left the werewolves alone. She had very few illusions about her father-in-law. Charles, however, would not agree to let it be. Someday he and Bran were going to find themselves on opposite sides of something like this, but she didn’t think it would be this time.

She put her hand on Charles’s leg, reassuring herself that he was safe. For now.

And aren’t your current problems enough for you, Anna Banana? Her father’s imaginary voice echoed in her ears.

Charles watched her with curious eyes, but before he could ask her anything, Tag spoke.

“There’s another thing,” the wolf in the backseat said. “No one else has mentioned it, so I have to think maybe you didn’t notice. Dr. Connors is pregnant, too. I thought it odd at the time, but private business between her and her wife. They can do that nowadays. Have children without a man directly involved.”

“You are an advertisement for modern sensibilities.” Anna’s response was automatic despite her growing horror at what Tag seemed to be saying.

“She is two months along, I think.” He tapped his nose to show how he’d figured it out.

“When did she go up to Wild Sign?” Anna asked Charles urgently, her mouth dry. “This summer, right?”

“Yes,” Charles said. “July.”

“Does she strike you as the type of person who would give herself willingly to the thing that probably killed her father?” Anna asked.

“No.” Tag grunted, and then swore as if the grunt hadn’t been enough to express his feelings. “I can’t even get pregnant and that is revolting. Shades of Rosemary’s Baby.” Something about the lack of response made him pull himself forward to get a good look at their faces. “You two don’t know Rosemary’s Baby? Mia Farrow? Roman Polanski?”

With a huff of disgust, he dropped back into his seat with enough force that Anna could feel the SUV lurch. “You people. I get that it predates Anna’s arrival on this planet, but it is a classic horror movie. Gave me nightmares for weeks after I saw it—and I’m a werewolf.”

“What does it have to do with the present situation?” asked Anna to please him—though the title was a fair hint.

“Good Catholic girl is sold by her jobless actor husband to the Satanist neighbors, who need a vessel to carry Satan’s baby,” he said promptly. “Husband gets a part in a play. She gets drugged, raped, and then gaslighted,” Tag said. “Do we need to tell Dr. Connors?”

Anna was never going to watch that movie. She’d had enough of being helpless and told that black was white for a lifetime. Maybe Dr. Connors and her wife had been trying for a child. Anna herself had been looking into reproductive alternatives.

It didn’t feel like that.

“So the Singer is impregnating every woman who comes near it?” Tag said. “Do we need to start looking for its walkers?”

“That’s why they kept everyone away,” Anna said suddenly. “All those wards. It wasn’t about keeping the black witches out—the Singer did that for them, didn’t it? I had the impression that Dr. Connors the Younger thought it was out of the ordinary that she’d never gone up to visit her father while he was at Wild Sign. They were trying to keep possible victims away.”

“The Singer isn’t a new thing, though,” objected Tag. “Maybe we are hip-deep in the Singer’s walkers right now and just don’t know it?”

“Maybe not,” said Charles. “I don’t think that it would be making bargains unless it needed to.”

“She didn’t act like someone who had been assaulted,” said Anna.

“Rosemary didn’t remember it, either,” said Tag. “Not at first.”

“You think it affected her memory,” said Anna, keeping her eyes on the road so that Charles wouldn’t read her face. She hadn’t lost anything all day today. At least nothing that had left her with one of those odd teleport-feeling jumps. Nothing that she remembered, anyway.

Charles put his hand on her thigh, just above her knee. He’d felt her fear. She needed to tell him about that memory lapse yesterday. But before she could say anything, Charles spoke.

“We need to talk to Dr. Connors,” he said.

He was right.

“Let me do it?” Anna suggested, though there were very few things that she wanted to do less. “If the situation is what we think, we shouldn’t overwhelm her with men, right?”

She was aware of Charles’s keen glance, but he didn’t argue with her.

“I think I’ll put a call in to Mercy,” Charles said unexpectedly. “If I had my pick of who to consult about our current situation, it would be Coyote. Maybe she can tell me how we could make that happen.”

ANNA HAD DEBATED about calling ahead, which would have been the polite thing to do. But she didn’t think she could manage the proper tone. She dropped Tag and Charles off at the storage facility and headed back to the RV campground where Dr. Connors was staying.

She pulled into the spot she’d used before. The Volvo wagon, hatchback open, was backed up to the little cottage Dr. Connors and her wife were staying in. There was luggage piled inside the car. She was pretty sure that they had not intended to leave today.

She heard them before she got to the porch. They kept their voices quiet; someone with mere human senses would not have heard them at all. Even she could not hear the words, just the tone: hurt and anger with a fair bit of fear on both of their parts.

She thought, Two months, maybe three, is about the time you’d have to quit denying what your body was telling you, isn’t it? She pictured Sissy’s hollowed-out face and wondered if some of the grim control she’d shown was because she was fighting nausea.

Anna knocked briskly at the door. All of the talking stopped. Quick footsteps came to the door and it opened just a crack.

Dr. Tanya Bonsu bore very little resemblance to the cheerful woman Anna had met the day before. Her face was tight and her magnificent black eyes were reddened. “Ms. . . . Anna,” she said, evidently having forgotten Anna’s last name. “I am afraid that this is a very bad time. If you could come back in an hour, I’ll be out of the way and Sissy would, no doubt, be happy to speak with you.”

“Have you,” Anna said, her hold on the door keeping Tanya from pulling it shut, “ever seen the movie Rosemary’s Baby?” She didn’t know why she went with Tag’s movie, but it did seem to cover all the bases and save Anna a long explanation with a hostile audience—assuming the movie was as well-known as Tag seemed to think.

Tanya quit struggling with the door. “That is not funny,” she said coldly.

“It isn’t a funny situation,” Anna said. “Carrie Green, one of the witches in Wild Sign, had a grandfather. We spent this morning visiting him at a rest home. We know something more about what might have happened in Wild Sign.”

“I don’t care what the fuck happened in Wild Sign,” said Tanya in a low, vicious voice. “Let go of the door and come back later. When I am gone.”

“You care,” Anna said, and she pushed out with the soothing Omega power. It seemed to her that things might go better with a little less anger. She wasn’t as effective on humans as she was with the werewolves, but it could help.

She softened her voice. “Unless you and Dr. Connors have been making use of modern science, I think the creature who kept the white witches of Wild Sign safe got your wife pregnant. It wants children, and it can screw with people’s memories.”

Shock loosened Tanya’s hold on the door, and Anna shoved it open with her shoulder, tempering her strength so she only moved the other woman back a few steps.

The cottage living room held a couch, a TV, and a two-person dining table. The kitchen was separated from the rest of the house by a door, which was open. Next to the kitchen was a narrow, enclosed stairway.

“Dr. Connors,” Anna said, keeping an eye on Tanya, who had backed all the way across the living room. Evidently the shove had been hard enough to make Tanya reevaluate what she knew about werewolves, because she smelled frightened now.

Though Tanya had smelled of fear before, there was a difference between fear of losing the person you love and fear of a monster. The word was the same in the English language, but it didn’t smell the same at all. A lot of emotions were like that. After years of Charles’s teaching, Anna’s nose was well calibrated enough to tell the difference. Anna just didn’t know if the change in Tanya’s fears was useful.

“Ms. Cornick.” Dr. Connors’s voice originated from upstairs. “This is a very bad time. Please go away.”

“Do you remember getting pregnant when you hiked up to Wild Sign?” Anna called. “Or did it steal your memories from you first?”

Anna knew the answer to that, of course.

Sissy Connors rushed down the stairway. She was wearing Minnie Mouse pajama bottoms and a USMC oversized T-shirt that was the right size to have belonged to Tanya. She was barefoot and braless, and her face was a lovely shade between I-just-threw-up and watch-out-I’m-going-to-throw-up-again. Anyone who’d ever been to a college party would recognize it.

“What the hell did you just say?” she asked.

“Sit down,” Anna said, and she glanced at Tanya. “You, too.”

Tanya looked at Anna a moment and said, “Rosemary’s Baby?”

Anna nodded.

Sissy must have watched old movies, too, because comprehension lit her face. She clutched her stomach and the scent of her revulsion might have made Anna’s nose wrinkle if she hadn’t been prepared for it.

It wasn’t Anna’s story that Tanya believed; it was the expression of shock and comprehension on her wife’s face.

Tanya walked over to Sissy and wrapped her in her arms. They rocked a moment, cheek to cheek. Then Tanya whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“How sure are you?” Sissy asked.

“That the creature that destroyed Wild Sign got you pregnant?” Anna shook her head. “Occam’s razor sure. More certain after seeing your reaction than I was driving over here. I can tell you for certain that whatever that thing your father and the other white witches at Wild Sign made a bargain with, it can take your memories away.”

Sissy looked up at Anna and raised her eyebrows. You?

Anna gave her a sharp, single nod.

“I should have believed you,” Tanya said.

“It wasn’t believable,” Sissy said soggily.

“I should have believed you anyway,” Tanya told her. “And I read that letter, too. I could have made some connections.”

“It’s still weird witch shit,” Sissy told her. “I promised to keep it to a minimum. I broke my promise.”

“That was just a joke,” Tanya told her. She looked up at Anna. “She’s been having nightmares. Ever since she hiked to Wild Sign. That’s why I came down to stay with her.” She shook her head. “Rosemary’s Baby, huh?”

“You aren’t leaving me?” said Sissy—and Anna was pretty sure the reserved woman was going to writhe later when she remembered that Anna had been in the room for that. Or maybe not.

“If you don’t cheat on me, don’t lie to me, you aren’t ever getting rid of me,” Tanya vowed. It had the sound of a well-used phrase.

Sissy stepped back and let out a sound that might have been a laugh if there had been any happy in it. “So a complete stranger comes over and tells you that Satan raped me—and suddenly you believe her?” Her voice was a little caustic.

“Not Satan,” Anna said, though she didn’t think either of them was listening to her. “This is going to take a while. You really should sit down.”

She went to the table and got a chair. By the time she brought it back, the other two women had taken a seat on the narrow couch.

Tanya frowned at Anna. “I wish you’d dropped in to tell me this last night before I did my best to blow my marriage out of the water.”

“Sorry,” said Anna. “We only just worked it out ourselves this morning. And if Tag hadn’t figured out that Sissy was pregnant, I wouldn’t be here now.”

“Tag?” Dr. Connors asked, frowning.

“Henchman,” Anna reminded her. “The huge guy with the orange hair. He has a better nose than most of us do when we are running around looking human. He didn’t think anything of it—we’re used to getting all sorts of irrelevant but private information from our noses. It’s rude to use it against people who aren’t actively hostile.”

Sissy gave a jerky nod—then her eyes widened and she bolted back up the stairs. Anna could hear her throwing up.

“Is she safe?” Tanya asked urgently, while her wife couldn’t hear the question or its answer.

“Yes,” Anna told her. Leah had had a child and survived, after all. And they were pretty sure that Mercy’s conception was similar to what the Singer was trying to do with Sissy and the witches. Mercy’s mother was still alive. But all they really had were educated guesses, and Anna didn’t know what the Singer planned on doing with the mothers of its children. And “safe” meant more than survival.

She tempered her initial answer. “I think so, anyway. We’ll try to find out—we are still learning about this creature, too. But I think anything else I have to say should wait until Sissy is able to listen.”

“While we are waiting for her to revisit her breakfast and lunch—and possibly anything she has eaten this year—there’s something you should have.” Tanya got up and went to the little kitchen, coming back with a couple of sheets of lined paper filled with graceful, rounded letters.

“Sissy’s brother had the code key,” Tanya said. “She translated it last night. I’m not sure I’d have believed you about”—she nodded upward to indicate Sissy, her eyes worried—“if I hadn’t read this letter first.”

THE FEEL OF Carrie Green’s spell casting and the weight of the grimoires had dissipated from the storage unit when Charles and Tag opened it again.

Charles nodded at Tag’s raised eyebrows.

The whole unit was ten by thirty, a little larger than a single-car garage. Originally it had been packed in a dense but tidy fashion.

“What a mess,” said Tag, looking at the room that had been a miracle of organization before the two of them had happened to it yesterday.

They had not worried about being either tidy or organized when they had moved boxes, furniture, and bins until they’d gotten to the grimoires yesterday. Then, wanting to get the books somewhere safe, they’d shoved everything back in with more haste than order. There was a pile of loose stuff, towels and clothing mostly, near the door where they had emptied boxes and bags to carry the grimoires in.

“How do you want to do this?” Tag asked.

“Can you find magic that a witch has tried to hide?” Charles asked. He had hunted with Tag before—Tag was very nearly the best tracker in the pack. But Charles hadn’t had the opportunity to look for magic with him. Da didn’t let Tag off pack land very often. And very few witches made it onto pack land.

Tag smiled. “My specialty.” He tapped his nose. “What are we looking for?”

“I can make guesses about spellcrafted things, but I’m not a trained witch,” Charles said. “I don’t want to leave anything that could hurt someone.”

“I can’t tell anything other than it’s been witched,” Tag agreed. “So we need to take anything with a hint of magic and sort it out later.” He looked into the depths of the unit and said, “At least she was a white witch—we aren’t likely to run into anything too awful.”

Charles couldn’t help giving him an ironic look.

Tag shrugged. “Had enough horrible for seven lifetimes,” he said. “I don’t like adding anything to it unless I have to.”

They worked in silence. Tag wasn’t naturally quiet, but he was a little afraid of him, Charles knew. That was all right. His reputation, even among his own pack, was another weapon that Charles could use. And Tag was not wrong to be afraid.

Charles had paid for the entire contents of the storage locker, but he had told the manager that once they had gone through everything for what they wanted, he was welcome to sell the remainder. Charles had thought at first that they had been lucky, given that the check was six months old, that the manager hadn’t already garage-saled or auctioned off the contents.

Then he’d shown them the locker. The manager hadn’t even been able to get his hand near the lock. Charles had managed it, using the manager’s key. Charles sent the unhappy manager, who had hoped to get a look at the contents of the unit, back to his offices before dealing with Carrie’s spells so they could open the door safely. Working with her magic, and seeing how she’d dealt with Daniel Erasmus, had made Charles move from respect for her to outright liking.

Going through the unit now—without the driving need to pin down the grimoires—only reinforced his opinion. He didn’t know if he’d have liked her if he’d met her in person—he liked very few people.

But her magic reminded him of the computer code written back in the early days, when memory space was at a premium. Programmers back then created elegant script without a wasted symbol to complete the necessary task. Carrie hadn’t had a lot of power, but she’d made good use of what she did have.

Not that he knew how witchcraft worked—he wasn’t a witch by anything except raw ability. His father had offered to teach him once, but that offer had been full of such . . . horrific hidden emotions that even as a child he had known to refuse. He couldn’t have reproduced Carrie Green’s work, but he could feel its delicacy.

“Here,” called Tag.

Charles found him crouched over a plastic bin filled with smaller boxes. He held one of the boxes in his hand and offered it to Charles.

The box was lined with silk and filled with dozens of charms. Handmade bracelets and necklaces crafted from inexpensive wooden beads. Each one marked with a paper tag that read Health and $15.

Together he and Tag sorted through the boxes of charms. Health, Joy, and Luck accounted for all but two of the boxes. One of those boxes held a single necklace, a jade bead strung on a silver chain. Protection from Evil had a price tag of two thousand dollars. And unlike the smaller charms, this one held real power. Made, he thought, after Carrie had been given more power by the Singer. He couldn’t be sure that it was labeled correctly, but her magic had an honest feel about it. He supposed that this necklace was imbued with the same magic as whatever she’d had that kept her grandfather from torturing her for her power. It wasn’t that one—Underwood had said it had been made with moonstone, and this necklace felt unused.

The final box held a bone shard strung on leather. Its label read Death. There was no price. He thought at first it was a murder weapon. But there was no feeling of darkness to the magic.

“Don’t touch that,” said Tag. “It’s a cyanide pill.”

“She didn’t wear it,” murmured Charles. “Unless she made a second one.”

“It’s not the kind of thing you’d make two of,” Tag said. “One is useful, but you can’t commit suicide twice. She left it here in the end. I hope she didn’t regret that.”

“I thought you said you could detect witchcraft, but you didn’t know anything about it?” Charles asked.

Tag shrugged. “Maybe I picked up a thing or two along the way. But it’s not anything like vast knowledge.”

Outside of those two boxes, none of the charms would have been enough to get anyone into trouble. Even taken together, there was no harm in them. The purpose of each was very carefully set, and they would have been impossible to use additively. One charm for good health was as effective as wearing sixteen at the same time. It wasn’t Carrie’s doing—it was just the nature of this kind of charm.

They could have left the bin, minus the two small boxes, to the storage manager’s care without worry. But after exchanging a brief look with Charles, Tag moved it into the pile of things to take with them. Charles wasn’t sure what tipped the balance for Tag, but Charles didn’t want Carrie’s careful work to go to people who would not appreciate it.

Anna showed up, parking the SUV in front of the next unit over because they had filled the available space in front of Carrie’s unit with approximately half the contents of her locker. Anna looked tired, and the expression on her face when she got out of the rig made him open his arms.

She walked into them and buried her face in his shoulder and relaxed against him.

“She didn’t know,” she told him, her voice muffled. “They figured out she was pregnant after we left them yesterday—apparently she’d gone to see a doctor about her unusual tiredness and upset digestive tract. On the good side, her wife now believes that Sissy didn’t cheat on her and then lie about it. That is, believe me, the only good side.”

“Abortion?” Charles suggested.

Anna shook her head. “Apparently Dr. Connors has protested and fought for reproductive rights for others, but finds the idea personally unacceptable. Tanya disagrees. I found them fighting about one thing and left them fighting about another. If they aren’t careful, this will destroy them.”

She stepped back and gave him a smile that was a little thin around the edges. “And there’s nothing more I can do to affect that one way or the other.” She rubbed her upper arms and said briskly, “Have you found anything interesting?”

She looked over at the smallish pile of things he and Tag had set aside and let out a pleased sound. She knelt by the antique spool cabinet. It was about two feet square and a little older than Charles was, clearly a family heirloom. It had six drawers, and Anna opened each one and took in the spools of thread set on individual dowels—organized by color, black in the top drawer working down to white.

“Is it the thread or the cabinet that is magical?” Anna asked, brow furrowed. “Even calling on my wolf, I can’t tell for sure.”

“Both, we think,” said Charles. “But neither Tag nor I have a clue what they would be used for.”

Her fingers traced the bird’s-eye maple appreciatively, but she said, “What happens if Carrie wants her stuff back? Or one of her relatives?”

“I don’t think Da will agree to give back the grimoires,” Charles said in what he was fairly sure was a massive understatement. Anna’s quick grin told him she agreed with him.

“As to the rest . . .” He looked at the spool cabinet, then shrugged. “If she is not dead, we’ll give it back. If she is dead and there is a will—we are not thieves. Anything that isn’t dangerous we’ll hand over.”

She listened to his tone as much as his words—that was one of her gifts. “You don’t think that there’s anyone.”

He shook his head. “It feels like she was alone.” He tried to explain why he felt that way, but failed.

“Other than Daniel Green,” said Anna.

“We wouldn’t give him anything,” Charles said. “But I don’t think that will be an issue.”

“I wonder,” said Anna thoughtfully, “do you think that Carrie knew what she was doing when she entrusted him into the loving arms of the witches who run Angel Hills?”

“Yes,” said Charles. Someone as organized and thorough as the woman whose life he’d been invading was not the kind of person who would make a mistake on that scale. He wondered what Daniel Green had done to his granddaughter.

“He said she was Wiccan,” Anna said. “How does leaving him there jibe with ‘An it harm none’?”

“Even the most peaceable people have their limits,” Charles suggested. “And putting him there certainly reduced the harm that he could cause.”

“You like her,” Anna said.

He considered that. “I like what I know about her.”

“You gonna sit around, or are you gonna work?” asked Tag, hauling a wingback chair out to the bigger pile.

Anna snorted a laugh at Tag, so Brother Wolf didn’t remind Tag who gave the orders.

“Sissy translated the letter her father wrote. She said there were a few differences between the letters, but most of it was word for word.” She pulled a couple of pieces of paper out of her back pocket and handed them to Charles. Tag took up a position where he could read them, too.

“It would have been nice if he’d spelled everything out,” Charles murmured.

“At least we know what happened to the pets,” Tag replied.

“Has Mercy called you back?” Anna asked.

“She says she’ll try, but Coyote doesn’t carry a cell phone and is usually disinclined to be useful.”

“So no help there,” translated Tag.

“Not yet,” Charles said as he read the letter a second time, looking for anything that might be of use. “Mercy will figure out how to get in touch with him. After that, it’s up to Coyote.”

He folded the pieces of paper, and, as Anna had, he put them in his back pocket. “We should get back to work here.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Anna asked.

Charles shook his head. “Carrie is pretty good at hiding her magic. I don’t think you’d be able to find anything unless you changed to wolf.”

“I can’t open boxes or move them easily in wolf form,” Anna said regretfully. “There’s a pizza place down the block. How about I get some food for us?”

Tag staggered over—a huge old cauldron over his shoulder—and dropped to his knees in front of Anna. “Food?” he said in a quavery voice. “Food for us, mistress?”

He never played the fool around Charles unless Anna was present. Charles couldn’t decide if it was because Tag only played like this in front of Anna or if it was because he figured Charles was less dangerous if Anna was in the vicinity.

She laughed at him. “Two large pizzas, loaded,” she said. She rose on her tiptoes to kiss Charles and climbed back into the Suburban.

Tag waited until she was backing up before popping to his feet without effort. The cauldron was doubtless heavy—anything cast iron and that big had to be—but Tag was a werewolf.

“Magic?” asked Charles.

Tag gave the cauldron a surprised look, as if he’d forgotten he had it on his shoulder. “No—though it’s old,” he said, and carried it over to the proper pile. He set it down and contemplated it.

“Everyone should have a proper cauldron,” he said, picking it up and putting it in their keep pile.

“You want to cook beans over a campfire?” Charles asked.

“Was that a joke?” asked Tag, sounding truly dumbfounded.

“Would I tease you?” Charles said, picking up a box of things that were not magic and hauling them to the pile of boxes they were just going to have to carry back.

The freshness of the breeze caught Brother Wolf’s attention, and Charles looked up into the sky with a frown at the gathering clouds. “I hope the rain holds off until we get this done.”

Tag glanced up, too. “Not supposed to rain, according to my weather app.”

Charles said, “It’s going to rain. Help me get the dining table out.”

It wasn’t heavy, but it was awkward. It marked the edge of how far they’d gotten in their hunt for what turned out to be the grimoires. When they’d refilled the unit, he and Tag had put the table over the top of where the grimoires had been. They’d found the books in the center of the unit, surrounded by a pair of room dividers and a chalk circle.

It had been a good circle, competently drawn—as far as Charles could judge. It wasn’t a pattern that he’d seen before, but the intent had been obvious. Such a circle should have cut off the effect of so much magic—but he’d felt the grimoires when he’d stepped foot on the ground at the storage center. He didn’t think it was a problem with the magic Carrie had used, only the length of time since she’d renewed her protections.

They had taken out one of the dividers and set it aside but left the second one up. Now Charles took down the second one—and found himself confronting a small open area that someone had clearly set up as an office.

Had there been a path from the door to here before they had destroyed Carrie’s organization? He couldn’t say one way or the other. He inhaled and caught a hint of vanilla and also a woman’s scent. Carrie Green had definitely used this.

It was an area about five feet square, with a six-foot-tall bookshelf filled with books shoved in every which way, in direct contrast to the order Carrie had imposed upon her storage unit. But the battered old Steelcase desk—a relic of the Cold War era, complete with government serial plate along the edge of the desktop—was tidy enough.

On the upper left corner of the desk was a black coffee cup with Witch scrawled across it in red letters. It held two pens, a pencil, and a highlighter. On the lower left corner was a lined notebook. When he opened it, it proved to be blank, though roughly half of the sheets had been torn out.

On the upper right corner of the desk were three books that had never been commercially produced. He held a hand over them before he picked up the first one. It looked to be a handwritten diary, but he couldn’t find the date because it was in Russian—or some other Cyrillic tongue. There were five bookmarks that each marked a passage that Carrie had highlighted.

“Do you read Russian?” Charles asked Tag, who had paused in his own work to look at Carrie’s workspace.

“No,” he said. “But the next one down is in English.”

And so was the third one. Charles handed one to Tag and took the other. Charles’s looked to be a detailed study of the deaths of various fae. It didn’t appear to be a fae-hunter’s diary but a scholarly study based mostly upon folklore. The methods of killing (or manner of dying) were all highlighted.

“How to kill a fae,” Charles told Tag. “Though I didn’t see anything that someone who wasn’t armed with a supernatural weapon could manage.”

“Her bookmarks in mine are all about how to kill vampires,” said Tag. “Some of the methods I know are effective. Some of them I’ve never heard of. But there are enough here that I personally know do not work that it might as well be a study on how to get yourself killed.” He pulled out a folded sheet of lined paper that had been tucked in the back and showed it to Charles.

Back-slanted script, messy but easily readable, covered the page.

Then in overlarge letters, as if in frustration:

There was a lot of space, and then on the bottom were the words:

Anna drove up with pizza and water bottles—and when Charles kissed her mouth in thanks, she tasted like bubble gum. He pulled back and frowned at her.

“Bubble gum?”

She laughed. “While the pizza was cooking, I bought a snow cone.” She gave Charles a smile. “But the reason I went there was to tell Zander I knew why his song sounded familiar.”

They sat down at the dining table—it was handy—and ate.

“What song?” asked Tag.

“When I talked to Zander yesterday, he was playing guitar,” she explained around a bite of hot pizza. “He was noodling around on a piece that sounded familiar to me—and he didn’t know what it was, either, just something he was working on. You know how it is when you can’t quite remember a song . . .”

Tag shook his head.

“And you know what it is now?” asked Charles. He was glad that the shadow of telling Dr. Connors what she was pregnant with had left Anna, even if he’d rather it hadn’t been the pretty boy selling snow cones who’d accomplished that.

She laughed. “It is such a relief. It was the chord progression: D major, A major, B minor, F sharp minor . . .” She raised her eyebrows.

He closed his eyes and “heard” the progression in his head. “Pachelbel’s Canon, among other songs,” he said.

“And a dozen other songs at least,” she agreed. To Tag she said, “It’s one of those chord progressions that just sounds good—so it was stolen by a whole bunch of pop musicians. I have no idea what song Zander’s mother sang to him—but I know Pachelbel.” She mimicked playing the cello.

“Why didn’t you pick it up sooner?” asked Tag. “It’s mainly a cello piece, right?”

“For sure,” she said. She shook her head. “I have no idea why I couldn’t figure it out.” She looked at the unit and asked, “Are you going to be able to get all the way through that before the rain hits?”

Charles said “Yes” and Tag said “No” at the same time.

“What he means,” said Tag, “is that we aren’t going to keep going through it. We’re putting it all back. There’s too much to put in the SUV. We found a cache of historical diaries written by the Green family of witches. They aren’t magic per se, but we aren’t leaving them for anyone. We’ll get a crew in here to clear out the whole unit—take ’em home and sort them out there.”

Charles nodded. “I’ll pay to keep the locker and we’ll take what we’ve already sorted out with us now. Once we do that, there isn’t anything with enough magic left here to draw predators.”

Tag tilted his head and then looked at Anna. “Do you know that he doesn’t talk unless you’re present?”

She laughed, and the sound made Charles and Brother Wolf happy. He wasn’t sure he’d known what happy had felt like before they’d found her.