Aha. That was why Charles had had her invite the FBI in—so his da could listen from outside the house. It had taken her a long time to adjust to the difficulty of a private conversation with other werewolves around. The walls of her house were no match for wolf ears.
“I see,” Anna said, because she had been ready to tell them they were wrong, and she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“If there is someone in charge, if that is you, we—that is to say, my …” Goldstein faltered.
“Superiors?” suggested Anna.
Owners, growled Brother Wolf, unhappy with Bran for asking his mate to put herself in harm’s way like this.
“Colleagues,” said Leslie, watching Goldstein. “Equals.”
Goldstein had been with the bureau for more than twenty years, Anna recalled. He wasn’t subject to political whim because he wasn’t quite that far up in the bureaucracy, but Charles had told her Goldstein was right on the edge. He could have toppled into high office had he wished it. Leslie Fisher was on her way to doing exactly that.
“Our job,” Leslie said intensely, “the job of the FBI, is to protect the citizens of the United States. We can do that better through an alliance with the werewolves.”
“Who are citizens of the United States,” said Anna.
“Yes,” agreed Goldstein after a damning hesitation. “An alliance between the FBI and the werewolves will make everyone safer.”
Anna wondered if that was true.
“We know an alliance will take time,” Leslie said. “But today is a start.”
Goldstein pulled out another folder and set it beside the other two. “To that end, as a demonstration that you might find us as useful to you as you are to us, we have a mystery for you.”
“There’s a town missing,” said Leslie, pulling a folded-up USGS map out of the folder and laying it on the table. Someone had used a black marker to circle an area, then taped a slip of white paper next to the circle. Written in a neat hand in blue ink were the words Wild Sign.
Leslie tapped the marked space. “A group of people, as few as thirty or as many as forty as best we can tell, went up into the Marble Mountains in Northern California to live off-grid. The first of them set up about two or three years ago. Their settlement was illegal—the mountains are a mix of designated wilderness, federal lands, and tribal lands. Probably they thought they were on federal lands.”
Lots of snow in the Marbles, Brother Wolf told her. And Anna got something that was very nearly a visual from him.
“We have confirmation it was an active site this spring, when one of the Forest Service rangers stopped in to check on them. One of the community wrote to his daughter and gave her this map. It was his habit to write to her regularly, but his last letter was this April—a few days after the ranger stopped by, in fact. When the daughter received no further correspondence, she hiked in and found it abandoned. They were just gone.”
“Like Roanoke,” said Goldstein, “they just all disappeared. Of the names we’ve found, none of them have relocated and none of their relatives know where they are.”
“And this concerns us how?” Anna asked.
“Because it was finally determined that the settlement is not on either federal or tribal lands. It’s on a private parcel owned by Aspen Creek, Inc.,” said Goldstein. “Which is why no one tried to move them along.”
He and Leslie were looking at Anna, and she had no trouble looking blank.
“Aspen Creek, Inc., was the owner of the condo you stayed in while you were in Boston,” Leslie said. “And Aspen Creek is where you live. Where your pack lives.” She hesitated. “Where the Marrok’s pack lives.”
The title “Marrok” was not a secret word, but it was one Anna had never heard from a government official before. Leslie’s tone of voice and her pause meant she knew how important that term was. Anna didn’t know what Bran wanted to do about his title being bandied about in the human halls of power, so she chose to do nothing.
After it became obvious Anna wasn’t going to admit to anything, Goldstein’s voice was dry when he continued, “And there is this: the original owner of the property was one Leah Fenwood Cornick.”
A light knock sounded and the front door opened. Bran came in with a sheepish smile on his face. Anna had heard Charles’s foster sister, Mercy, say Bran looked more like a pizza delivery boy than the Wolf Who Rules. She hadn’t quite understood it until just that minute.
He wore a long-sleeved shirt that managed to conceal the hardness of his body, his shoulders hunched vaguely apologetically to match his smile. With a height that was just barely average and sandy blond hair worn a little untidily, Bran looked like a college student—or a pizza delivery boy.
“Hi,” he said pleasantly to the FBI agents without quite meeting their eyes. He patted Charles on the head as he padded around to slip between his son and Anna.
“May I?” he inquired of Anna as he pulled the map over toward their side of the table.
“Be my guest,” she said, unable to quite conceal her amusement.
He bent over the map. After a brief but thorough examination during which Anna returned Leslie’s inquiring look with a shrug, Bran gave an abrupt nod of his head. He looked his son in the eye for a moment, tapped the table with one brisk finger, then exited the house with a wave over his shoulder that might have been directed at the FBI agents—or just the room in general.
They feel earnest, Bran told her after he’d shut the door behind him. They at least believe everything they are saying. Tell them who I am. Tell them we will go looking. Tell them the rest of their visit might or might not be fruitful. The lessons Beauclaire learned are lessons we also take to heart. It might have been one of ours in the courtroom instead of Lizzie Beauclaire. I do not trust the humans.
Anna drew in a deep breath. “Despite your flattering suspicions, I am not the Wolf Who Rules.” She liked Mercy’s phrase for Bran’s title. “Marrok” didn’t mean much to humans until she explained it. “Wolf Who Rules” was self-explanatory. “The actual Wolf Who Rules just left through the front door. He believes you are sincere, but the lesson Beauclaire received—the lesson we all received—about how humans really think of us is concerning. You might not think we are monsters—or at least that we can be your monsters—but we don’t believe the rest of the citizens of this country agree. That doesn’t mean cooperation is out of the question, or that we won’t be available to give a certain amount of aid—but don’t consider us allies yet.”
“You can’t mean to tell us he is the wolf in charge.” Goldstein’s voice conveyed absolute disbelief. “I have met Hauptman. Hauptman would never take orders from someone like him.”
“But they would take orders from someone like me?” asked Anna, amused.
“They do take orders from you. I’ve seen it,” he said, as emotional as Anna had ever heard him.
Anna smiled. “I was Anna Latham the music student at Northwestern. I am twenty-six years old. I am married to the son of the Marrok—the Marrok who just left.”
She let the smile fall from her face, because this was important. She liked both FBI agents and didn’t want either of them to do something dangerously stupid—like underestimating Bran. “He is very good at blending in, my father-in-law. But don’t mistake him for anything but a ruthless bastard.”
Charles smiled, showing all of his teeth.
CHARLES SHOWERED FIRST, then dressed while Anna showered.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to go running in the mountains of California on a wild-goose chase. Brother Wolf, however, was eager—it had been a long time since they had hunted in those mountains. Werewolves tended to be territorial, and Brother Wolf was no exception, but he loved to go exploring, too. And he wanted to share all of the extraordinary places they had been with Anna.
There was a cave, he told Charles. Do you remember the cave?
Charles did. “The Marbles encompass a lot of ground,” he told Brother Wolf. He wasn’t sure the wolf cou
ld read maps. “That cave is maybe twenty miles from where we’re headed.” He considered. “We might manage the lake with the big trout, though—if it’s still there.”
The Klamath River, like most big rivers, had been dammed and its path forever changed. New lakes formed and others gone forever.
Anna came into the bedroom with a big red towel wrapped around herself and nothing else. Her reddish-brown hair was tied up on top of her head, and there was a drop of water on his favorite freckle.
They were all his favorite freckles.
“Stop that, you,” she said, but he could tell she didn’t really mean it by the heat in her eyes. “We have bigger problems. What was your da thinking, strolling in there like some meek little lamb? I don’t know if I managed to convince the FBI that he’s the Marrok.”
“That isn’t urgent,” Charles said. “He can convince them himself whenever he wants to. He came in to see the map—I think he knows something about what’s happened. And he came in to see if he needed to kill someone. It is a good thing the FBI sent Fisher and Goldstein. If they had sent someone more twisty, Da might have decided to kill them to send a message to their owners.” He used the term Brother Wolf had thrown out.
Anna grimaced. “I thought that might be it.” She looked at Charles. “I would have defended them.”
He knew that—and it would have been obvious to his da as well. That knowledge might have been the thing keeping both agents alive. He didn’t think it was because Bran was seriously considering an alliance.
“Unofficial offers from government officials are notoriously dangerous,” he observed. “Secret alliances were the powder keg that blew up into World War I.”
“That doesn’t mean friendly relations wouldn’t be useful,” Anna countered.
He nodded agreement. “Friendly, yes. But wherever such a relationship ends up, it will be far short of an us-against-them alliance of humans and werewolves against all comers.”
“Especially since Bran doesn’t really like mundane humans,” added Anna, wiping her cheek on the end of her towel.
Charles closed the distance between them. He put a finger over the towel where her breasts came together and formed a valley, but he left the towel where it was. He never touched her without her consent, and never would.
She smiled, and it was a wicked, hungry thing.
“Yes,” she said.
C H A P T E R
2
Charles spread the map that Goldstein had left with them on his da’s desk. He had taken a silver Sharpie and inked in the boundaries of Leah’s land before he’d left Anna sleeping in their bed and gone to find his da—as his da had requested before he’d left Anna and Charles to deal with the FBI.
Charles had known about the land, of course. He took care of all of the pack’s properties, and the personal properties owned by his family. Taxes, upkeep, and, when appropriate, renters or rental agencies were all under his aegis. It wasn’t the only section of land owned by the Cornick family, so he hadn’t been too curious about it.
He’d thought his da had bought the property for Leah sometime in the nineteen forties—during World War II. But if her name had been on the original deed … He couldn’t remember how that part of California had been settled. Had that been one of the areas settled by homesteading? That would mean Da had acquired that land a lot earlier than Charles had believed.
Bran studied the map for a minute and then shrugged. “I haven’t been there in a long time. I doubt I could find my way there without a map and a guide. Too much has changed—the entire course of the river, logging, trails, and towns.”
Charles nodded. He had the same problem. He’d traveled all over the west in the early nineteen hundreds. Some of that had been business for his da, and some of it had been to get away from his da. He’d been to most of the towns nearest to Leah’s land at one time or another. He didn’t remember much about many of them, and he doubted he’d recognize them.
“You are sending Anna and me to check out the missing people,” Charles said. It wasn’t a question.
“I don’t like to send you there,” his father replied, arms folded across his chest and an expression on his face so neutral that Charles knew Bran was very, very unhappy.
Since his da had sent him to some nasty situations over the years, Charles was intrigued.
“Do you know what could have happened to them?” he asked. “Is there something—someone dangerous?”
Bran frowned. “Yes. But I don’t know much more than that. The only one who might be able to tell us something is Sherwood Post, and he’s forgotten it all.”
His da’s voice held a growl that told Charles it was a good thing Sherwood was safely out of his da’s long reach at the moment. Da had always blamed Sherwood for the memory loss, though from the outside it had seemed grossly unfair. Doubtless Da had reason for it—he usually did—but he hadn’t shared it with Charles. At any rate, the old three-legged wolf was a member of Hauptman’s pack now—and the Columbia Basin Pack was the only pack in North America that did not owe fealty to Bran Cornick.
Charles waited.
“Leah’s been singing again,” Bran said in an apparent non sequitur.
“What do you mean, singing?” Leah didn’t sing. He hadn’t thought about it much; some people sang, some people didn’t.
Leah had used to sing, though, hadn’t she? He remembered her singing when he was a boy. But there had been something unsettling about her when she had.
“Do you mean like she used to sing?” he asked. “When you first brought her home? Brother Wolf used to make us leave when she was singing. He didn’t like it.”
“Nor do I,” admitted his da. The growl in his voice was almost subvocal, raising the hairs on the back of Charles’s neck in response.
The obvious question was “Why not?” but Da’s growl and the memory of Brother Wolf’s unease kept him quiet. There had been something wrong about Leah’s singing. Da would tell Charles about it when he was ready to do so.
Bran looked back at the map. “April was the last time anyone heard from the people living in this village?”
“That they know of,” Charles said. He’d taken time to go through the file the FBI had given them before he’d left his house. “Dr. Connors’s daughter is the only relative who has come out and identified her father as missing. The rest of the names they got from the post office box, but the relatives of those people have been singularly unhelpful. Apparently people who want to live off-grid are not big on communicating with the outside world. The last letter Dr. Connors’s daughter received was dated early April. That seems to be the last communication from Wild Sign.”
“Leah started singing last April,” Bran told him.
“You believe there’s a connection?” Charles asked.
“I don’t like coincidences,” Bran told him. “There is something magic in whatever she’s singing. It feels like a summons of some sort. But I can’t tell if Leah is trying to summon something to her, or if she’s hearing a summons.”
Charles looked up from the map. “Leah doesn’t work magic.” He was as sure of it as he was of his own name. “Not outside of pack magic. But you aren’t talking about that kind of magic.”
“No,” Bran agreed. “It doesn’t feel like her—she smells wrong for a while afterward.”
Charles sat back. “Then why haven’t you done something about it?” He didn’t know what he’d do, but if Anna started smelling wrong, he wouldn’t have sat on his thumbs for five months.
“At first she used to sing all the time,” Bran said, and Charles wasn’t sure he was talking to Charles until he looked directly at him. “Do you remember that?”
“I remember that she sang,” Charles said. “And her song made Brother Wolf uneasy. But I don’t remember her singing all the time.”
Bran didn’t seem surprised. “Mostly she’d stopped by the time we got back here, I think. You haven’t heard her sing recently?”
Charles said, �
�No.” It wasn’t surprising. Neither Leah nor he sought out each other’s company.
Bran nodded. “I was told, back at the beginning, to ignore it and hope it went away.” He gave Charles a wry smile. “I wasn’t told what to do about it if she didn’t quit. I don’t know what to do about it now—and the only person who might know—” He growled in frustration. “We didn’t talk about it because we were worried that talking about it might give it power.”
There were things that grew more powerful when spoken of—some of the fae, those who had died, demigods, and some of the spirits of place. Speaking something’s name could draw its attention, and that held its own dangers. Charles could not immediately think of any kind of magic—not a magical being—made worse by speaking of it, but his da knew a lot more about magic than Charles did.
“You think there is something or someone yanking on Leah’s chain,” said Charles. “And that it is all connected to the plot of land where the off-grid squatters disappeared from?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Tell me what you can,” Charles said.
Da nodded. It took him a while to begin, but Charles was patient.
Finally, his da said, “I wasn’t actually out looking for a mate when I left you with your grandfather. The wolf was restless and I couldn’t stay where she …” He stopped speaking and his eyes flashed yellow with grief that belonged both to him and to his wolf.
Charles had heard stories of his mother from his grandfather and his uncles, not from his da. He knew the battles between his parents had lit the forest with their fury. He knew neither of them could speak more than a few words in each other’s language. He knew their love had been a rare and amazing thing to watch. His grandfather liked to claim his only daughter had been soft and dutiful until she met Bran, and that made Charles’s uncles laugh behind their hands. But Charles knew all of that secondhand.
When he had been a child, he’d pretended he would happen upon his mother someday. He dreamed of walking with her in the forest. He wanted to know the extraordinary Blue Jay Woman who had fought with Bran and won. Over his da’s objections, she had carried Charles to term, fighting off the werewolf’s need to change under the full moon. She had died in the process because the spirits exact a price from those who defy the natural order of things, and werewolf women were not meant to bear children.
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