Wild Sign

CHAPTER 4

They found a trail at midday. It looked just like several others they’d found. But this one, unlike the others, carried no recent human scent.

Tag discovered a candy wrapper, battered and faded to pale colors by the sun and weather. Charles nosed the wrapper, and after a moment’s consideration, set off on the trail. There was something—maybe it just headed in the right direction—that distinguished it in Charles’s mind from the others. Maybe the spirits who lived in the forest directed him. With Charles it was hard to tell. Tag waited for Anna to follow, and he took up the rear.

Save me from protective males, thought Anna with half-irritated amusement. She was a freaking werewolf, for heaven’s sake; she could take care of herself.

We protect our most dangerous weapon, Brother Wolf assured her.

Anna chuffed a laugh. She knew that Brother Wolf was serious. He could joke sometimes, but he never mocked. She just had no idea what prompted him to consider her more dangerous than Charles . . . or Tag.

The woods around them were full of deer, and at one point she caught the distant scent of elk. Coyotes abounded; one trailed them for a few miles out of curiosity. Twice, early in the morning, they had come upon bear sign—probably the bear that had been seen at their camp.

The woods were subtly different from those at home. Anna wasn’t a botanist, so she didn’t have names, but the evergreens were more diverse and the undergrowth smelled strange. The atmosphere of the land around them was different from home, too.

Charles talked about manitou sometimes, the spirit of a place, sort of an upper-level naiad or dryad, she thought. She’d come to her marriage with a better education on Greek and Roman beliefs than on those of Native Americans, and she still tended to conflate the vocabulary where the cultures intersected.

She didn’t have the senses, the ability, to see spirits the way Charles did, but there was a flavor to these woods that was different from the feel of the woods at home. Maybe something was sifting through her mate bond besides the general feel of caution overlying Brother Wolf’s fierce joy in this hunt. Maybe she just had an overactive imagination.

Though a lifetime of summer hikes with her dad and his handy-dandy pedometer (his words) had given Anna a very good sense of how far she’d traveled when walking on two feet, she had less of a feel for distance traveled while on four. They had set out at first light at a steady, ground-covering trot they could, and did, keep up all day.

So she didn’t know exactly how far they had traveled, maybe as much as fifty miles, when they started to find the sigils carved into the trees. Some of them were familiar, as if whoever had carved them had access to the same set of Nordic runes Anna and her brother had used.

The two of them had used it as a simple replace-the-letter code, but upon finding one of their notes, her father had pointed out that scholars were pretty sure the original users of the old runes had used them as symbolic of whole meanings rather than as parts of words, like letters were.

Probably, he’d told them, the runes had been used as magical symbols. Not that her father had believed much in magic back then—he was a believer in cold logic and science. He was a little more open-minded now that his daughter was a werewolf, but she knew he still thought there was some scientific reason for her ability to transform.

At any rate, admonished by their father, she and her brother had tried to find the linguist-assigned meanings for the runes and use those. But since they had had very little use for words like “horse” (they lived in town, where there were no horses) or various Nordic gods, they had given up and gone back to using it as a simple code with a few runic-looking letters they made up themselves to stand in for the extra letters. But she remembered some of the symbolic meanings.

A square sitting on one corner with two lines extending down at a right angle from each other was one that meant “property” or “belonging to” with a sense of rightful ownership, an inheritance. She remembered it because it looked to her like a goldfish nose pointing up and tail pointing down.

The goldfish rune was a few seasons old. The one just above it, so new that there was sap beading up in some spots and the wood revealed by the broken bark was raw, was the rune that Ford had given them. Ford had thought it had something to do with music. It certainly looked more like a musical instrument than the goldfish looked like “property.”

Charles, realizing that Anna had stopped, came back to stand shoulder to shoulder with her.

A claiming, Brother Wolf said. And Anna knew that he knew something of runes, too. Or maybe, if there was magic in these runes, he read the intent.

Tag huffed, lifted a leg, and marked the tree in approved werewolf fashion. Then he raked the ground in front of the tree and gave Anna a laughing grin full of teeth. Anna could feel Brother Wolf’s amusement—but she could also feel his rising excitement. They were closer to their prey.

Once she knew to look for them, the runes were all over—most of them not the one Ford had warned them about, the musician one. Some of the runes Anna was pretty sure were made-up. Most of them had probably been carved in the last couple of years judging by the way the sap dripped out of them. But there were older trees, forest giants, whose trunks held runes distorted by years of growth. All of that tallied with what Ford had said—which meant they were on the right path. Not that she had ever doubted Charles could find their way to Wild Sign.

With Ford’s description of petroglyphs in mind, she kept an eye out for marks on the rocks or stone outcroppings, but didn’t see anything. The sun was starting its trek downward when they topped a steep climb, the trail more like a suggestion up an almost-cliff, and found themselves in an open flat meadow surrounded by trees. Underneath the shelter of the forest canopy, fitted neatly into the shadows of trees and the swells of land, were the buildings of Wild Sign.

Charles changed. He wasn’t the quickest shapeshifter she’d ever seen. Mercy, his foster sister, could grab her coyote form in a blink of an eye—but she bore a different power. Today, Charles only took two breaths to make the shift that took any other werewolf of her acquaintance at least ten minutes longer. He’d told her it was because he’d been born a werewolf.

But that he arrived in his human form fully clothed . . . that was a different magical gift. His clothing at the end of a change was usually jeans, boots, and a T-shirt. And most of the T-shirts were his favorite color: red. But his magic could be capricious; she’d seen him end up in buckskins a time or two. And once, very oddly, a tuxedo. He looked good in a tux, but she’d never talked him into wearing one again. That particular tux had ended up in pieces he’d thrown away—the damage, she thought with an inward smile, had been her fault.

This time, he wore jeans and boots, but his shirt was a flannel button-down in a gray-green that blended into the forest nearly as well as Wild Sign. She wondered what that said about his current state of mind.

Anna, feeling the need for fingers and speech while she explored, changed back to human, too. Her change took a good deal longer. When she lay, panting and sweating, on the ground, Charles crouched by her, offering her one of the canteens from the pack Tag carried strapped to his back.

She took three big gulps of water, waited a breath, and drank some more. When she handed the canteen back to him, her hands had quit shaking. He helped her to her feet and presented her with her clothes, retrieved, like the canteen, from Tag’s pack. She dressed, did a few deep knee bends and toe touches to make sure all of her parts were working as they should be. And all the while she took in the camp—no, Ford had it right, took in the town.

“I picked up five scents,” Anna said, slipping on a pair of tennis shoes. “And maybe one more, but it is older. I got hints of a lot of people but nothing strong enough for me to follow.”

Charles nodded. “It last rained six weeks ago. The information I have is that, on the strength of Dr. Connors’s report, they sent in a chopper to investigate—a county deputy; the local Forest Service law enforcement officer; two rangers, one of whom is also part-time law enforcement for the Karuk tribe. The fifth scent, which was laid at the same time, I presume to be the pilot.”

That hadn’t been in the information Leslie had left with them.

“Maybe the older scent is Dr. Connors, then. No one else has been here in a while,” Anna said. “Shouldn’t there have been people looking?”

“For what?” Charles asked. “They know there was a settlement here and Dr. Connors’s father is missing. But no one else has been reported missing—they are only gone. Law enforcement investigated this site thoroughly and found no signs of violence. They are looking for Dr. Connors Senior as well as the people who had mail at the drop box in Happy Camp—which is the nearest established town—but that is best done electronically. They don’t think there is anything else examining the site can teach them.”

Anna nodded. The report had said they’d found no signs of violence. No signs of rapid departure, though some personal property had been left behind, along with fourteen permanent structures, three yurts, and evidence of tents.

“If this were on federal or tribal lands, they’d have come back and cleaned up,” Charles added.

“But it belongs to Leah,” Anna said. “So it is out of their jurisdiction.”

Charles nodded.

“I do have a question, though,” she said. “With all of the runes scrawled over the forest around here, why aren’t there any legends of Viking settlements in Northern California? Like the ones in Newfoundland or Minnesota?”

“The one in Newfoundland is real,” Charles observed seriously, though Anna had been joking. “And no one has seen the runes here.”

She’d missed something. She frowned at him. “After the first one—the goldfish below Ford’s musician—I saw several hundred runes. They aren’t exactly unobtrusive.”

He laughed—which was distracting, because he was beautiful when he laughed, especially with the edge of gold gleaming in his eyes.

“A goldfish?” Charles’s amusement bled into his voice. “It’s called Othala, though I see how you’d think it looks like a goldfish.”

“The goldfish with the musician on top,” agreed Anna smugly, because she enjoyed making Charles laugh. “But seriously, there were runes all over the place. How could anyone miss them?”

“Witchcraft,” said Charles. “Someone warded the trail—that’s what all those runes were. I doubt most people would even have noticed the first one before they found themselves wandering off somewhere else.”

“That’s why you picked the trail,” Anna said. “Was there magic?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know why I picked it. It just felt right. But it stood to reason there must be a trail of some sort. One of the things missing from the report Goldstein and Fisher left for us was a note of how the people who lived in Wild Sign traveled back to civilization, which they obviously did, because they had a post office box—a real post office box—in Happy Camp. Law enforcement used a helicopter to get here. Dr. Connors’s daughter either has magic of some sort or she found a different way in. I . . .” He shrugged. “We are not what it was guarding against, so it let us in.”

“What were they hiding from?” Anna asked. “The people at Wild Sign, I mean. Do you think it found them? And maybe that’s what happened to them? Do you feel anything here?” She couldn’t help a little shiver as she glanced around, looking for a nonexistent threat. She knew it wasn’t there, because if there had been a threat, Charles would be more concerned.

Charles, ignoring her wariness, shrugged. “Other witches? The warding was all white magic—and laid by more than one person. And there is one thing white witches fear more than anything else.”

“Black witches,” said Anna. All witches started out as white. A white witch drew her power from within herself. A gray witch drew power from the suffering of others, from other people’s pain—but not from unwilling victims. A black witch tortured and killed for power—and white witches were their favorite victims.

“Do you think Wild Sign was settled by witches in the first place?” Anna asked. “Like some sort of white witch sanctuary? Did a black witch—or black witches—come destroy them?”

Charles glanced around at the deserted town. “Hopefully we’ll find some answers here. Keeping in mind there were several witches here, I think we should stay together.”

Because Charles could tell if someone left a magical trap for the unwary.

“What about Tag?” she asked.

Tag hadn’t bothered taking human shape before he set off exploring on his own. She couldn’t see him, but she could feel him through their pack bonds.

“Tag should be all right,” Charles said. “He knows his way around witchcraft. Where would you like to start?”

Anna brushed off the last of the tingles left over from her change. She was conscious of a deep and growing unease, as if something were watching—or waiting. It hadn’t bothered her until she’d changed back to human, so it probably wasn’t anything real. She had a lot less imagination when she ran on four feet. Still . . .

“Do you feel something wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing definite,” he said, which wasn’t a no. “The witchcraft doesn’t bother the wildlife, but it’s keeping the usual forest spirits at bay. That makes this place feel even more empty.”

He took her hand.

Immediately the eerie effect of the empty town lessened and the knots in her stomach eased. She was a werewolf, she reminded herself. Whatever had happened to these people, it had happened months ago. But it was Charles’s warm hand wrapped around hers that reassured her enough she regained a bit of the excitement she’d been feeling since she’d first heard of this place.

It wasn’t quite a lost civilization, but sure as God made little green apples, it was a mystery. She felt a little ghoulish for the thrill—she was pretty sure the only way the people who had lived in Wild Sign could be silenced for months was if they had been killed. But it looked like no one else was pursuing this the way they—her pack—could.

“Let’s go look at the post office,” she said. “Maybe we’ll find some clues about who lived here.”

The post office was easy to pick out—it had its own sign. The door was ajar and the two windows were open to the air, the shutters designed to protect the interior from bad weather still hooked back.

There was a flutter of black wings and caws when Anna stepped inside. Even after the birds had escaped out the windows, the interior smelled of crow. It wasn’t a large space, maybe ten feet by ten feet. Shelves lined the wall opposite the door, empty of everything except a couple of birds’ nests. A newish, dust-covered camp chair emblazoned with the name of its manufacturer had been shoved against the shelving—Anna could see the drag marks in the dirt floor.

“They cut this lumber themselves,” Charles said, a hand on one wall. “It was well done, but there’s just a little more irregularity than you’d expect to find in commercially produced boards.”

“I don’t see any clues here,” Anna said, glancing at Charles to see if he had noticed something, something more than the lumber origin. But he shook his head in agreement.

So she said, “Your turn to pick where we go next.”

“Latrines.” He backed out of the post office and brushed aside a spiderweb trying to attach itself to the back of his neck.

She found herself grinning—because the speed of his decision had indicated he’d been thinking about it, and it was a very good place to look . . . and because it was honestly the last place she’d have suggested.

She followed him toward another clearly marked building behind the post office and a dozen yards downhill. She hadn’t noticed it before, but like the post office, there was a sign hung on the wall that read The Lavatories. There wouldn’t have been a real need for signs in a town this small. Someone must have enjoyed making them. Maybe the same someone who cut the lumber they’d used for their buildings.

“The Lavatories” was twice the size of the post office. There was a ladies’ entrance and a men’s, and each of them had two curtained stalls with composting toilets inside. Anna’s experience with composting toilets was nonexistent, but Charles didn’t flinch at opening them up and examining the waste receptacles—which were empty. All of them.

“Either whatever happened occurred just after they emptied the compost,” commented Charles, replacing the last one, “or they emptied them out themselves in preparation for dismantling the camp.”

“You think they knew they were abandoning camp?” Anna asked.

He shrugged. “It’s too early to tell. But I do think four composting toilets are not enough for forty people. They’d fill up with waste too soon. They require a little time to decompose.”

“Maybe some of them had their own?” suggested Anna. “Or maybe there are other lavatories hidden in the trees somewhere?”

He nodded.

“Where next?” Anna asked. “Cabins, tent remains, or yurts?”

“Let’s check out that big yurt,” he said after a moment’s thought, indicating the building he had in mind with his chin.

The yurt he’d pointed out was at the far end of the town. And as they walked, he said, “If someone were abandoning a town, what would they take with them?”

“Not wooden buildings,” Anna answered promptly. “Or composting toilets. If you don’t care about the environment or leaving the forest a better place for you camping in it—” Another of her father’s adages. Come to think of it, he probably knew all about composting toilets, Anna decided. “Then the tents are pretty easily replaced. Though people using composting toilets are probably not the sort who leave their junk all over for someone else to clean up.”

Charles nodded and stopped by the big yurt. The outer fabric was forest green, a little darker than his shirt. He touched it.

“Sturdy,” he said.

They walked around the yurt until they reached the far side, where the door faced the forest rather than the town. It was real wood and hand carved, with the trunk of a tree running up the hinged side, a raccoon peering around the edge with comically wide eyes.

A post had been buried in the ground beside the front door with fingerpost direction signs on it. One sign pointed toward the rest of the town and read Wild Sign 20 feet. Another, just below it, read Adventures ½ mile. The one at the bottom of the post read Tottleford Family Yurt. There was a pair of eye hooks on the bottom of that sign holding another that read Right where you’re standing.

It made her feel wretched. It wasn’t looking too promising for the residents of Wild Sign—and she liked the Tottleford family, liked the mysterious sign maker, too.

Anna couldn’t help herself—even knowing no one was here, she knocked at the door. No one answered.

The door had no doorknob and it didn’t just push in. Charles examined it for a minute, then pulled on a leaf set among the other leaves carved into the left-hand side of the door about knee height for Charles. It came loose, attached to a piece of twine threaded through from the other side. She heard a board slide.

“Pioneer trick,” Charles said. “Though usually it’s just a string all by itself. If I let the string go with the door shut, the latch will fall back down. It’s not a lock, just a way to keep the door closed.”

He pushed the door open, but stopped suddenly and put out a hand to keep Anna back.

“Witch,” he said in warning.

Anna could sometimes feel magic—though not like Charles. She was a lot more aware of magic in her wolf form; her wolf was better at accessing pack magic, too. She trusted her mate’s judgment and waited while he did whatever he felt he had to do to fix matters. The air was musty, but she also caught the faint smell of herbs and the various scents of an active household.

“It’s safe enough, I think,” he said to Anna. To the room he said, “We come seeking answers, no harm to this home or the family it encompassed.”

He tilted his head as if listening for something, then walked on in. Anna couldn’t tell if he’d gotten an answer or not.

She’d been in a few yurts before but never one this large; the interior was at least as big as their living room, dining room, and kitchen at home.

The floor was made from closely fitted planks, and shoulder-high movable partitions constructed of wood and fabric separated off rooms. In the bedroom area, there were four hammock beds, one larger and three smaller, as if for children. In another space, a kitchen-type station was arranged on a section of wall. A large bucket stood by a canvas camp sink, with a dipper hooked over the rim of the bucket. The camp sink drain slid through the fabric side of the yurt to the outside. A half-size fridge proved to be clean and empty—but still cooling.

“There is a farm of solar panels somewhere near this yurt,” Charles said, though she hadn’t thought he was paying attention to what she was doing. He’d pulled back the curtain on a small private area, which turned out to be a bathroom with another composting toilet. “The report made note of them.”

He opened the waste container. “Empty,” he said.

“It looks like they cleaned up,” Anna said, moving on to the bedroom area. “It looks ready for the next set of guests.” She peered into one of the four hampers lined along the wall. “Except they left all of their clothing.”

There was a small bookshelf stuffed with books. The bottom shelf was filled with children’s books, the next two with well-loved paperbacks—but the top shelf held treasures. Anna pulled out a battered copy of Chambers’s The King in Yellow, which proved to be an 1895 edition. She slid it back and pulled out The Outsider and Others by H. P. Lovecraft. She thought it was a first printing, but she didn’t know enough to be sure. There were maybe a half dozen decrepit copies of the old pulp magazine Weird Tales from the nineteen thirties; each of them was dated in black marker scrawled on its clear plastic wrapping.

At Charles’s quiet hum, Anna looked over to see him stopped by a small folding table, his face intent, nostrils flaring.

“She left her tarot deck,” Charles said neutrally, and Anna noticed a thicker-than-normal deck of cards among the other objects on the table.

“The decks are usually highly personal, right?” Anna asked, joining Charles. Her human nose wasn’t keen enough to smell anything more than that the items on the table did indeed belong to one of the people who had lived here. But if Charles said it was a woman’s tarot deck, she trusted it was so. “Is it something she’d have left behind?”

“That depends upon the witch. This doesn’t feel like a witch’s personal deck—those sometimes are almost animate.” He touched the deck and shook his head.

He surveyed the room with a frown, turning in a slow circle. Anna, not knowing what he was looking for, stayed back. Then he glanced up.

She followed his gaze to the ceiling. The ceiling of a yurt consisted of wooden rafters fit into a central ring, which had the same sort of essential importance to a yurt a keystone had for a stone arch—it was the single item making the whole structure work. In the other yurts Anna had seen, the ring had been just that—a plain laminate wooden ring. This yurt’s ring was a series of three rings, which looked more like a wheel.

“That,” she said finally, “is really beautiful.”

Like the door, the rings forming the wheel were carved. Leaves wound around and through the spokes of the wheel, and little carved animals peered out in a way that reminded Anna of the raccoon on the door. The smallest ring and the largest were inscribed with runic symbols.

“They would never have left this behind of their own free will,” said Charles solemnly. He held up a hand toward the wheel and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened his eyes, he said, “This wheel has been used by generations of white witches, each leaving a blessing for her descendants.” He held up a hand, fingers splayed. “I didn’t feel it when we first came in because it is sleeping.”

“What does that mean?” Anna asked.

He shook his head. “I have no idea. She might have shielded it before she left—or it might be this way because she died. But she would not have left the wheel, even if she had to leave everything else. Not unless there was simply no time to take the yurt down. But they took time to clean the composting toilets.”

“Well.” Anna sighed and followed Charles out of the yurt. “We didn’t really think that they left willingly, did we?”

Charles closed the door behind them, listening for the latch to drop back into its bracket. He put a hand on the door and whispered, “Peace to those who sleep.”

“Found a few things,” said Tag, striding toward them. At some point he’d changed back to human. He’d dressed but was barefoot, having declined to carry the weight of his boots for the trip. He ran around the forest at home without shoes a lot, too.

CHARLES FOLLOWED BEHIND Anna and Tag as they headed over to the post office. Tag walked with energy, bouncing around like a puppy as he questioned Anna and responding to her story of their explorations with exuberant gestures. A person, Charles reflected with amusement, might be fooled into thinking Tag was just a big, happy sap. Around Anna, Tag was either lazing around like an overly large cat or vibrating with enthusiasm. Around Anna, Tag kept the lethal berserker tidily out of sight—because around Anna, he could.

It made Charles happy to see Tag like this. They hadn’t had to execute any of their old wolves since Anna had come—and some of those old wolves were almost stable again. Tag was only one example, and not the most striking. The pack was better with Anna in it, in ways far more subtle than he or his da had expected. They had hoped for calm—they had not expected happy.

There was a battered old blue canvas bag up against the wall of the post office. Tag surveyed it with an air of smug accomplishment.

“Mailbag,” he told them, then gave them a sheepish look. “Or at least, there are letters in it. I don’t think that it is an official US mailbag.”

Charles gave him a look. Brother Wolf thought Tag had found something else, too. Tag caught his eye and nodded. Yes. The bag was only the first of Tag’s discoveries.

The mailbag had been out in the elements for months, and it carried only eight letters—all of them from the inhabitants of Wild Sign. Tag, without the pesky scruples normal people were burdened with, had opened all of them, looked through the lot, and stuffed them back inside so he could present them singly to Anna.

“From the dates, these folks weren’t real keen on letter writing,” Tag said dryly. “This looks to be the product of about ten days.”

Anna sorted through the letters. “Eight letters, all from two people,” she said, handing a pair of envelopes to Charles.

They were both from Carrie Green, Wild Sign, CA, no zip. They were both checks. Presumably they had each been wrapped in the plain white paper now tucked to the side of the checks in the envelopes. There was no bill or note with either.

One, addressed to Happy Camp Mini Storage, seemed self-explanatory. Usefully, the locker number it was paying for was written on the check. If the owner of the storage facility hadn’t already cleaned out the locker for nonpayment, it might hold some clues—though Charles didn’t think the odds of that were high.

The second was addressed to Angel Hills and was for a significant amount. On the note line of the check, Ms. Green had written simply Daniel Green.

“Sounds like a rest home,” Anna said. “Or maybe an apartment, but for that amount, my money is on some kind of extended care facility.”

Charles agreed.

The other six letters were from Dr. Connors to his daughter, Dr. Connors. They were written on sequential days—April 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19. Other than the date and the “Dear Dr. Connors the Younger” salutation, they were all written in code.

Dr. Connors did not want anyone to read his letters except for his daughter. Charles thought about why someone living simply in the woods would not want his mail read.

The coded letters, like the warding signs carved into the trees, supported the hypothesis that the people of Wild Sign were hiding. The yurt he and Anna had explored had belonged to a white witch, and the whole area had a—well, not a real scent, but maybe a psychic scent he associated with white magic.

A group of white witches might very well have abandoned the town in a slow retreat that allowed them to tidy up after themselves—but not take much with them that might slow them down. He thought of the yurt ring—and he decided he was still of the opinion that any witch who owned such a potent protection would never willingly abandon it.

Possibly Wild Sign and what had happened did not have anything to do with Leah’s troubles here two centuries ago. From the stories Charles had heard, Sherwood had been a thorough man. Da hadn’t thought Sherwood would have left some monster for anyone else to handle. Possibly he’d rested, then gone back to clean up the mess he’d left. Bran wouldn’t know—he hadn’t communicated with Sherwood between that time and when the wolves had rescued him, three-legged and amnesiac, from the cellar of a black witch’s home nearly two centuries later. Possibly whatever Leah had faced was gone, and something else, black witches maybe, had happened to Wild Sign. Maybe it was a coincidence that Wild Sign had faced troubles in the same place. But coincidences, in Charles’s experience, were as rare as hen’s teeth.

Charles had been shuffling through Dr. Connors’s letters, Anna peering around him to watch, though she’d already been through them. She stiffened and closed her hand around his forearm.

“Are all of these the same letter?” she said slowly. “I didn’t notice it looking at them one at a time. But don’t they all look alike to you?”

She was right.

Anna took the letters from him, found a bare space on the ground, and set them out. She crouched, then sat down so she could see them all at once more easily. When the wind tried to play with them, she grabbed some rocks and weighed them down.

Tag knelt beside her wordlessly. After a minute he rearranged the letters in time order.

“Same letter,” Tag said, and, reaching out, he tapped the newest letter. “And when he wrote this last one, he was a lot more upset than when he wrote the first.”

Charles had never been much of a letter writer, but his father had. When email had replaced letters for communication, Bran had been unhappy. Because the letters were more personal, they carried scents—and handwriting, which, with certain well-schooled exceptions, were seldom just lines on a page. Here, as Tag pointed out, it was easy to see the hand holding the pen had gotten shakier and more emphatic as the days had moved by.

“We need to find Dr. Connors’s daughter,” said Anna. “Fortunately the FBI left us her number. If we had a cell phone, I’d do it right now.”

They’d left their phones behind. Charles was too cautious to bring traceable technology anywhere he wasn’t sure he wanted the government to know about. It did mean they couldn’t call for help, either. But Charles figured that if they found something the three of them couldn’t handle, all that calling for help would do was get their help killed, too.

“We will call her when we get back to camp,” Charles said.

In the meantime, they stuffed all of the letters into one of the envelopes. Then Tag produced a piece of twine to tie them together and put the resultant bundle into his pack.

He lifted the moldering mailbag. “Do we need this?”

Charles shook his head and Tag let the old bag fall.

“Found it by the side of the creek over there,” said Tag, pointing vaguely south and downhill. “Don’t know what it was doing there. Maybe wild animals dragged it around. Maybe someone just dropped it where I found it. Makes as much sense as anything else I’ve seen here. I found a couple of other odd things by the creek, too.”

“What did you find?” Anna asked as they started off with Tag in the lead.

He shook his head, and Anna gave him a gentle shove that had Brother Wolf sharpening his gaze on Tag and stepping to a better attack position. But Tag just laughed.

“It’s better if you see ’em. Faster, too,” he said. “I’d be all day describing, and Charles would take one look and tell me a dozen things I didn’t notice.”

Anna gave a huff of amused agreement and slanted a look at Charles. Brother Wolf wanted to preen at her recognition of their prowess. Charles just smiled at her.

Tag led them down the hill, toward a busy creek meandering around the side of the mountain. They encountered a path when they were about halfway there, and Charles looked back up the hill to see where it led to in Wild Sign.

“The smallest yurt,” said Tag, answering Charles’s unasked question. “Smelled like witches, too. White ones. I didn’t go in, though, because I was still running as wolf. That yurt and the one you and Anna explored, several of the tents, and two cabins all smelled of them. Too many witches in this place to be coincidence.”

Charles nodded agreement and Tag looked pleased.

Someone had cleared a stretch of bank of the stream and piled stones to keep back the grasses and bushes. They had dropped a tree across the creek, trimmed off the branches, and then used an adze to flatten the upper side of the trunk and make a passable bridge.

There were signs that the stream was a lot deeper in the spring, maybe tall enough to cover the top of the tree-cum-bridge, but it was still plenty deep. It was hard to be sure, because the water was very clear, but Charles judged it waist deep where it pooled next to the tree-bridge.

Tag took them across the bridge and then led them off the trail to where a thicket of willows, their leaves bright autumn yellow, grew in a section of spongy ground. Someone with big claws had, very recently, ripped up a swath of waist-high grasses and young bushes to reveal the dead.

“They killed them before they left,” Anna said, sounding faintly sickened. “These were witches. Did they sacrifice them for power?”

Charles knelt beside one of the skeletons. It wore a collar with a two-year-old expired rabies tag and an ID tag. The ID tag read Bear. Below the name was a phone number. On the other side the tag had been engraved with a heart. Charles rested a hand on the skull and waited to see what it could tell him.

He shook his head and met his mate’s anxious gaze. “No. Killed cleanly without harvesting anything.” There was a hollowness to the feel of creatures killed by witches in order to gain power. This dog had not been fed upon by black magic.

They found seventeen skeletons without much effort. Fourteen dogs and three cats. Charles thought that there might be more hidden under the bushes, but there was no need to disturb them further.

“I only discovered them because someone had spelled their grave to keep predators away,” Tag said. “Predators other than werewolves, anyway. Spell wasn’t strong, and it gave up as soon as I started digging.”

Charles had wondered. Mostly skeletons left on the surface were scattered by scavengers. Anna was reading the collars. He stifled the impulse to stop her. He would have saved her the pain—but she was an adult. She knew what she was doing; it wasn’t his job to protect her from her own decisions.

“Kriemhild,” she said. “One of the names given to Siegfried’s wife in the Norse sagas. I always liked it better than Gutrune, which was the one Wagner used.”

Anna sounded like her normal self, and she was holding it together. But he could tell the dead pets had brought home the knowledge that all of the people who had lived here were probably dead. He thought so, too.

This killing field, like the carefully cleaned composting toilets, had the feel of duty. The kind of thing a dying person might do—clean up his mess so no one else had to. Killing their pets because there would be no one to take care of their dependents—and a good person would not allow these animals to slowly starve to death in the wilderness. Or possibly they had been protecting the animals from whatever had happened to the citizens of Wild Sign.

Charles wasn’t sure yet exactly what it said about what had happened to the people in Wild Sign. Their story was just starting to take shape for him.

“Siegfried’s wife,” Tag was saying. “Someone liked opera?”

“Someone liked old Norse sagas,” Anna said. “Gutrune was Wagner’s choice for the Ring cycle, and this dog was named Kriemhild.”

“Old Norse sagas aren’t outside of the ordinary among the witchborn,” Charles observed. “Or it could be there is an anime series or heroine of a computer game with that name.”

Anna smiled at him, a genuine smile despite the edge of sadness remaining on her face. That had been a reference to an in-joke between them. He missed a lot of pop culture references, and she liked to tease him about it.

“If they didn’t use their deaths for power, why did they kill their pets?” Anna asked.

“If they had to leave them behind,” said Tag, “it would be a kindness to put them down rather than let domestic animals loose to fend for themselves out here.”

“Sounds right to me,” said Charles. That Tag had come to the same conclusion Charles had made it more convincing.

Charles couldn’t think offhand of the exact circumstances that would allow a group of people time to clean up their camp and kill their pets before disaster overtook them—it spoke of a resignation that seemed oddly wrong. The people who had come to this mountainside and created a place where they could be safe did not strike him as the kind of people who would be resigned to their deaths. Wild Sign was an optimistic place, built with ingenuity by people fighting for a good life. The kind of people who had lived here should have fought—and there was no sign of any kind of battle.

“Charles?” Anna said, her voice thin.

He knelt beside her to see what she’d found: the top of a small skull, suspiciously round. A shape more common among humans than dogs.

Gently, he unearthed the rounded skull, Anna tense beside him. He couldn’t help the sigh of relief he let out when he turned it over to see the skull supported sharp canine teeth. He kissed the top of her head.

“Chihuahua,” he said. “And that makes eighteen.”

She took a deep breath. “Someone needs to dig through these,” she said. “If they killed their pets . . .”

“I’ll do it,” Tag said. “While you and Charles go through the rest of the camp.” He reached down and held out his hand; Anna took it and let him pull her to her feet. “Come on. I have something else to show you.”

He tugged her after him without releasing her hand. Charles couldn’t tell if Tag was trying to comfort her—or himself.

Charles rose, but instead of following them, he raised his head and drew in a deep breath, letting Brother Wolf sort through the information the air held. Outside of the normal scents of a forest, he detected the faint trace of witchcraft lingering all around Wild Sign, though that was more intuition than scent. There was acrid smoke from distant fires.

Finally, he attended to the subtle scent he’d been catching the whole time they’d been there. He thought it had been strengthening every hour they stayed, but it was difficult to be certain. Like the feel of witchcraft, it was not quite something he could smell.

He waited until Tag and Anna were farther away and tried again. This time he was sure it was stronger than before—and not as unfamiliar as he had thought.

Unbidden, he saw Leah as she dismounted from her blue-eyed horse once more. He’d been close enough, holding his da’s horse next to Leah’s, that he’d caught an unfamiliar and unpleasant scent—an odor he had not perceived with his nose.

Had it really been the same? Or was he trying to find threads between what had happened to Leah and what had happened here at Wild Sign? He wasn’t sure he could trust his memory of a trace so old. But Brother Wolf was sure it was the same . . . and Brother Wolf also thought they had let their charges get too far away if there was a possibility of danger.

He hurried after Anna and Tag, who had started back down the trail. He slanted a glance at the sky. They would stay another hour, he decided. He wanted to get them away from this place before the scent grew much stronger.