“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 h
ypothesis 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.”
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