Wild Sign

by Briggs, Patricia

  Her eyes turned to ice as her wolf nature rose.

  “No,” said Bran very quietly from the doorway. “You can’t go.”

  He had known she was listening—there was that question answered. She turned to look at him.

  “While it is possible that previous exposure to whatever it was Sherwood met up in those mountains might shield you,” he said in a gentle voice she didn’t believe for a moment, “it is my expectation that it would have the opposite effect. Magic isn’t like a disease you can build up an immunity to. Mostly it works like a vampire bite. The first one usually has only a small effect, and that effect fades away over time. The second or third bite leaves their victims permanently trapped.”

  He crossed the room to her, dropped to one knee, caught her hand, and brought it to his mouth. Then, keeping her hand against his lips, he bowed his head and said simply, “I am not willing to lose you.”

  She raised her gaze from the top of his head and looked again in the mirror, where a rag-clothed, filthy, bony woman with empty eyes the color of a still lake stared back at her. That woman met Leah’s eyes and began to sing.

  “WHERE HAVE YOU been?” asked Anna sleepily.

  She’d been vaguely conscious of Charles getting out of bed, but she’d drifted off before she could ask him where he was going. He usually did one last check on the horses before they went to bed for the night, but her internal clock told her he’d been gone for a couple of hours.

  “Talking things over with Da,” he told her.

  She rolled over and watched him strip out of his clothes with lazy appreciation.

  “Are we going to California?” she asked. “Do you want me to text Leslie?”

  Charles climbed into bed beside her and pulled her into his arms. “No,” he said, “don’t contact the FBI. This is family business. Yes, we are going to California.” And he told her how Leah came to be the Marrok’s mate.

  When he was finished, Anna said, “Your da should be shot. And I’m only withholding judgment on Sherwood because I don’t know his side of the story.”

  “Yes,” Charles agreed. “He thought you would see it that way.” He paused and said, “I’m not sure I don’t see it that way myself.”

  “I’ve only heard Leah discuss how she became a werewolf once,” Anna told him, then recounted as closely as she could remember what Leah had said at the restaurant in Missoula.

  “Huh,” said Charles when she was done.

  She gave him a mock punch in punishment, then flattened her hand on his bare chest. “So Sherwood Post is the only one who actually knows what happened? But your da never asked him what that was while Sherwood still remembered it?”

  Charles grunted. “He told me he asked. But once Sherwood was cognizant again, he refused to talk about it. Da thinks Sherwood did not believe he had killed or destroyed whatever it was he fought. Sherwood believed merely talking about it was a problem.” He paused. “And Da is pretty sure it was Sherwood who made certain Leah wouldn’t remember it, either, that blocking her memory of it was part of how Sherwood was trying to free her from it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Anna said. She’d known Sherwood for a while before he’d been shipped off to Adam Hauptman, but Charles’s story had revised her understanding of the quiet and stoic wolf a great deal. “Mind magic … that’s witchcraft, right? But Sherwood is a werewolf—and male witches are not usually powerful.”

  Charles drew in a breath. “Sherwood … the person Sherwood was, was a Power in the way my father or Bonarata is a Power. If one spoke of him, one would probably not call him a werewolf, even. That he was a werewolf did not define him in the way it defines me or you. I don’t know what category he would fit into, but it would involve magic.” He paused. “I don’t know how he managed to get captured by the witches. My da is more than half convinced Sherwood let them take him in the arrogant belief they couldn’t keep him—and found out he was wrong.”

  “So,” Anna said, feeling apprehension she wouldn’t have felt before hearing a bedtime story this serious, “are we going to California?”

  “Yes,” said Charles. “We are taking Tag with us.”

  “Because … ?”

  “Because magic has trouble latching onto him for whatever reason.”

  “Like Mercy,” Anna said in surprise.

  Charles shook his head, but said, “Maybe. I don’t understand the mechanisms of Tag’s resistance. Mercy’s immunity seems to be from the same heritage that allows her to change into a coyote and is far less reliable—and more effective when it does work—than Tag’s.”

  “So we three are going to venture into a situation that disappeared a village and brought a legendary werewolf—no,” she corrected herself, “a legendary legend to his knees and killed who knows how many people. You and I and Tag.”

  “Information gathering,” Charles told her. “The idea is we go see what’s going on, and return to discuss what to do about it with Da. We are not to engage the enemy unless we cannot help doing so.”

  Anna considered that. “Your father’s orders?”

  “Yes,” confirmed Charles.

  “Has he met Tag?” Anna queried.

  Charles tightened his hold on her as he gave a huff of laughter.

  More seriously she asked, “How many monsters can control people’s minds?”

  Charles sighed. “Witches—but not all of them. There used to be a couple of families who specialized in that kind of magic, but they disappeared after the Inquisition. That doesn’t mean the rest of them can’t do it.”

  “Sage was in the restaurant when Leah told her side of the story,” Anna said somberly. “She was very interested.”

  They both contemplated that.

  “Vampires can control minds, too,” Anna said, breaking the silence.

  “All of the fae can work illusionary magic,” Charles said.

  “And the music thing ties in pretty well with the fae, doesn’t it?” Anna said. “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”

  “That one just springs to mind, doesn’t it?” Charles said. “I can think of a few of my uncle’s stories, too—and creatures native to this land were far more plentiful than fae, witches, or vampires back in the day.”

  “So we are clueless,” she said.

  “Absolutely,” he answered.

  “Just making sure.”

  He laughed again. “Good night, Anna.”

  A few minutes later Charles said, “Asian magic works differently—their mages are not divided up into witches and wizards and sorcerers. I haven’t had a lot of experience with it. But I do know they have creatures that could create this kind of trap.”

  “The Chinese came out to California with the railroad,” Anna said. “And for mining, right? It’s been a while since my American history class, but I associate all that with the Civil War. Were they here early enough to be Leah’s monster?”

  “All it would take would be one,” Charles said. “The monsters of the Old World came over with the first of the explorers.”

  “Now that we have established it could be anything,” Anna said, smiling into his shoulder, “can we go to sleep?”

  “I called Samuel this morning,” Charles said, his voice solemn. “I told him that I needed him to help us find a way to have a child.”

  Anna couldn’t breathe, her heart pounded, and her mouth was dry. They had applied for adoption with a few agencies—but the waiting list was very long. She’d thought Charles was against other options.

  She licked her lips and said, “What did he say?”

  “Not to go out looking on our own. He is concerned that if the public—the human public—finds out what we are trying, there will be an outcry that will make everything more difficult.”

  “We talked about that,” she said. It had been one of the reasons Charles had leaned toward adoption.

  She felt Charles nod. “We did. He says to wait until he can make it back and he’ll help. He has some ideas.”

  “Did he say when
he would be back?” Anna asked. Charles’s brother, Samuel, was traveling with his mate, a powerful fae named Ariana. The last Anna had heard, they were in Africa, and Samuel, who was a doctor, was working with Doctors Without Borders, though there had always been something vague about what, exactly, he was doing.

  “No,” Charles said. “He sounded … worried, I think. Unhappy. He wouldn’t tell me why. Da says Samuel hasn’t told him what’s going on.”

  “Which doesn’t mean Bran doesn’t know,” Anna said.

  “Yes,” agreed Charles. “And Da sounded worried, too.”

  “If there is anything we can do, either Samuel or Bran will let us know,” Anna told him.

  Her husband let out his breath in a huff of air. “This is true.”

  When the darkness pressed too deep as they both lay awake, Anna said, “Why is the music so important? Do you have any idea?”

  He gave a deep sigh and she couldn’t tell if he was relieved to change the subject or not. Children were something her husband had very complicated feelings about—and she wasn’t sure he understood them himself.

  As he spoke of parallels between magic and music and how they both could be used by various evil creatures, she felt his body relax. Monsters, she thought with drowsy humor, were apparently less frightening than children.

  C H A P T E R

  3

  Anna found herself, not unexpectedly, at the wheel for the California trip. Charles actively disliked driving, and Tag … Tag drove with a joyous abandon that probably had not been as hazardous when the most common mode of transportation had been horses. A horse could decide not to run off a cliff or into a tree no matter what Tag did or failed to do. Automobiles tended to rely on their drivers to avoid accidents, so it was best if Tag didn’t drive.

  They borrowed an SUV. Charles’s single-bench-seat truck would have had a hard time containing the three of them. Charles was a big man and Tag was even larger, nearly seven feet tall and wide as an ox. Tag currently drove a Ford Expedition that would have held them all with room to spare if it weren’t for the territoriality plaguing all dominant males. Tag could have ridden in Charles’s truck, had they all fit, because Charles was easily more dominant than Tag. But Charles could not ride in Tag’s vehicle—except, possibly, if he drove.

  Anna had long since quit fretting about dominance issues except to be thankful she, as an Omega, was outside all of that. Bran had a small fleet of automobiles owned by the pack, and he made it available to them. The pack Suburban was neutral territory and plenty big enough for all of them. Charles rode shotgun and Tag stretched out in the backseat and went to sleep for most of the drive, for all the world as if he were a cat instead of a werewolf.

  The first day had been mostly interstate, and they’d stopped shortly after crossing the California state line, staying in a hotel in Yreka. The second day, Anna found herself driving on a narrow highway barely two vehicles wide as it twisted through mountains only a little more civilized than those at home.

  When she’d first moved to Montana, she’d driven these kinds of rural highways with a white-knuckled grip. Some of the roads around pack territory were little more than two ruts through the woods, so the narrow highway now only bothered her when they got stuck behind slow-moving RVs or semis.

  They traveled along the edge of a mountain valley where the only sign of civilization was a few fence lines. She hadn’t realized that California had places that were so isolated. The road followed the edge of a mountain, so she had no warning when they rounded a curve and found what looked to be a gas station, though it was hard to tell because it was all but buried in trees.

  “Pull in at this stop,” said Tag. His voice was high-pitched for a man as big as he was, and when he sang, he had a beautiful Irish tenor. Uncharacteristically he’d been upright and watching the scenery for the past half hour. The urgency in his voice made her wonder if he’d been keeping an eye out for a bathroom break.

  Pulling into the gravel parking lot, Anna got her first clear view of the place. The battered, flat-roofed building sported a ruff of cedar shakes like a tonsured monk on top, and cheap paneling everywhere else. The siding was painted a blue that had once been dark but had faded to a blue gray.

  There was a pair of old gas pumps out front wrapped in battered yellow caution tape, indicating that part of the business was no longer in service. The lighted beer signs in the small dirty windows obscured what lay beyond.

  Despite the dilapidated appearance of the business, six cars filled the parking lot: four late-model SUVs, a pickup truck, and a dented, ancient Subaru. It might have been silver a few accidents ago but was now mostly primer gray. Anna pulled in on one end of the lot, her left wheels on grass instead of gravel.

  “Is this a bar?” asked Anna.

  “Sometimes,” Tag admitted, pulling on his boots and beginning to lace them up without hurry. “Was a gas station when I was here last.”

  “You know this place?” asked Charles.

  Tag grunted.

  A Native American man opened the door of the business, whatever it was, and stepped out, staring at their SUV. He looked to be somewhere in his midfifties, though his short hair was still glossy and dark.

  He was not overly tall, but when he stopped, folded his arms, and squared his stance, he looked pretty badass. Anna softly whistled the opening notes of the theme song of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

  At the sound, Tag paused, looked up, and saw their observer. “Good. I was worried it might have passed to other hands.”

  Apparently they weren’t here for a bathroom break.

  Tag slanted a quick glance at Charles. “Do you mind if I go talk to him first? I think these folks might be useful, and they know me.”

  Charles, his gaze pinned on the waiting stranger, said, “These are friends of yours?”

  His tone was odd, something Anna couldn’t quite read. He’d seen something Anna had missed—or he knew something she didn’t.

  “‘Friends’ would be stretching it a bit,” Tag said judiciously as he got out of the SUV, bringing a leather over-the-shoulder pack with him. “But we know each other.”

  He didn’t bother to close his door as he strode over to the man who waited, so neither she nor Charles had to strain to hear, even with the sounds of the nearby river.

  “Carrottop,” said the stranger. “Long time since you came this way.”

  Tag said something in a liquid tongue Anna couldn’t pinpoint, and the other man laughed.

  “Call me Ford,” he said, sounding a lot friendlier, as if Tag had spoken some sort of code when he’d switched languages. “And it is rude to talk in a language everyone doesn’t speak. Your accent is atrocious anyway.” He looked over at their SUV.

  Charles opened his door, so Anna climbed out, too.

  “Call me Ford,” said the stranger again, this time to Charles. He wasn’t looking at Anna, but she felt like he was very aware of her.

  “Charles Cornick,” Charles said after waiting long enough Anna could have spoken if she wished. “And my wife, Anna.”

  Ford rocked on his feet, looking at Charles a little differently than he had before, less welcome and more wary. He glanced at Tag. “You keep dangerous company, Carrottop.”

  Tag didn’t lose the goofy smile designed to draw attention away from his cool gray eyes. “So do they.”

  Ford grinned appreciably, and the tension in the air dropped back to where it had been before Charles introduced himself.

  “Welcome to the Trading Post,” said Ford.

  THE TRADING POST was a lot of things stuffed into one building. The room smelled of tobacco, coffee, and cinnamon, all overlain with a strong smoky scent, as if someone was smoking meat nearby. She’d smelled a little smoke outside—it was fire season—but this smelled less like burning trees and more like a cook fire.

  The carpet was threadbare, with the floorboards peeking through here and there. Four card tables, of the folding sort, were squished together in one co
rner with chairs that looked like the same kind Anna’s high school orchestra had used—cheap, easy to stack, easy to clean.

  Roughly half of the space not dedicated to tables was stocked like a tiny grocery store, with refrigerated goods stored in a double-sided, glass-fronted fridge. One of the walls consisted of a big walk-in freezer. A hand-lettered sign on the freezer door advertised locker space available above a price list for beef, pork, and venison sold in quarters, halves, or whole.

  The remaining space was a very basic clothing store carrying jeans, blue T-shirts, a variety of flannel shirts, and brown leather lace-up boots. A glance at Ford showed he had done his clothing shopping here, and his boots looked suspiciously like black versions of the ones the store had for sale.

  Along the back wall, shelves offered enough ammunition to arm a good-sized militia. In the corner next to the shelves was a huge old metal safe that looked very much like it belonged in a Hollywood Western-and-bank-robbery movie. Anna suspected it was more likely a gun safe than a bank safe, but there were no signs, so she couldn’t be absolutely sure.

  There were two other people in the store, neither of them Native American. One of them was a woman of about Anna’s age with reddish-brown hair, and the other was a towheaded boy who looked about five. Both of them had also gotten their clothing from the store. Anna wondered where the drivers of the other cars were—and why people with cars didn’t drive the hour or so to Yreka to get clothes.

  Without a word to the others in the store, Ford escorted them to one of the tables. Charles pulled out a chair for Anna. Tag pulled out another and looked at it doubtfully. Anna got it—he was a big man for such an insubstantial chair.

  “Sit,” advised Ford. He glanced at the woman—but she was already bringing a glass water pitcher foggy with cold in one hand and four glasses in the other.

  As Tag sat gingerly on the edge of the chair, the boy opened a door in the back and left the building. Anna caught a glimpse of him running as the door swung shut behind him. No one seemed worried about such a young child running out where there was nothing but forest, highway, and the river Anna had heard but not seen when she’d gotten out of the car.