Wild Sign

by Briggs, Patricia

  His voice melted into her bones, a staccato warrior’s song that thrummed in her chest with its battle cry. There were words, powerful words that lent themselves to combat. She didn’t understand them but understood their import all the same. Those words formed both shield and sword for her battle. Which did not come.

  The thing that had its fingers sifting through her memories fled in the wolf’s wake, in the face of her mate’s song. She was left panting, sane, and, as far as she could tell, free of the Singer, whatever the hell the Singer was.

  The raspy martial lyrics of a folk metal band in her ears, she closed her eyes and rested her still-aching head against her mate’s shoulder as he sang the Hu’s “Wolf Totem” in a land thousands of miles and eight centuries from the steppes of Genghis Khan.

  As with the last Hu song he’d performed for her, Anna was pretty sure he would tell her he wasn’t getting the pronunciation right with this one, either—but if he’d been at the head of a Mongol horde, they would have known exactly what he meant when he sang.

  WHAT WITH ONE thing and another it was late afternoon before everyone was back to their human selves. Boneless in her chair, Anna licked her fingers clean of the last of Tag’s spicy barbecue sauce. It wasn’t sanitary, probably, but she wasn’t letting any of it go to waste.

  Besides, it made Charles’s eyes heat up as he went over the last day with his da on the phone. And Anna would do almost anything to wipe the ragged expression off her mate’s face. Her success at that lasted until her hand went to her neck to make sure Justin’s bite mark was really gone.

  One of the things that being plunged into the single worst memory of her life had done was to make very clear how hard Charles worked to empower her. Not only because Charles would always back her, but because he had taught her how to defend herself.

  She could fight now, in whatever shape she wore. And she knew how to weaponize the natural abilities being an Omega gave her. If she ever found herself the prey of a crazed band of damaged werewolves again, they could not hurt her. She was almost sure she knew how to quiet their beasts. How to make them hers.

  The woman I am now would never have had to suffer at the hands of Justin. She told herself that, but she couldn’t believe it. The memory of his teeth in her neck, his smell, his hands on her skin, was too near. Maybe tomorrow she would believe in her ability to fend off Justin.

  Charles was watching her, his jaw tense and his eyes yellow.

  Today, she decided, she wasn’t going to be afraid of a dead man. She was going to flirt with Charles instead.

  She put her index finger in her mouth and met her mate’s eyes as the spicy brilliance of Tag’s sauce filled her mouth. Charles flashed her a sudden grin and turned his back so she couldn’t distract him anymore.

  She got up and threw away her paper plate. Tag had done both the cooking and the cleaning for the meal and had returned to his Yeats. He was wearing earbuds with the volume low enough she couldn’t hear it. His head was nodding as he read.

  “Anna?” Charles said, turning back to her. “Da wants to hear your side of this.”

  “Do you have all your memories back, Anna?” Bran asked. She’d been politely ignoring their conversation until then. She couldn’t help overhearing everything, a condition of being a werewolf, but she felt it was polite to pretend she wasn’t.

  “No,” she said. Then paused. “I don’t know, really. I remember most of what happened at Wild Sign, I think. I’m a little foggy from the moment I picked up the recorder until I woke up this afternoon. But the only part I don’t remember at all is this morning. After we got back from Wild Sign, I went to sleep as a wolf. Around six in the morning I apparently shifted from wolf to human, panicked when Charles touched me, and made like a track star through the forest. They caught me, kicking and screaming—we are the only people at this campground, which is probably a good thing.”

  She’d been thinking about the noise. But she supposed it might also be good in another way. If there had been another group camping here, they could have been fresh victims for the Singer in the Woods. They had, she’d noticed, all adopted the name that she’d produced in the middle of its attack. She didn’t know how she’d gotten it—one of the things she couldn’t quite remember.

  “Do you think the Singer poses a danger for others?” Bran asked. “People near you? Or people near Wild Sign?”

  She held off her immediate “How should I know?”

  “It hasn’t tried for Charles or Tag,” she said. “So maybe not people near me.” She paused and said slowly, “Or not unless it succeeds in taking me over and can reach out to people through me.”

  That felt right. And it led her to another thought. Since she’d been wanting to smack Bran for how he’d forced Leah through her first Change, bonding, and then mating ever since she’d heard the full story, there was a bite in her voice when she said, “I think that you were really lucky Leah is mule-stubborn, Bran Cornick, or your mating could have gone quite differently.”

  She didn’t give him time to respond—she wasn’t stupid. Her voice was overly chipper as she continued, “Anyway, at the end of this morning’s chase, Charles says he sent me to sleep with some sneaky magic trick. But I don’t remember that, either.”

  “I see,” said Bran. After a brief pause, he said softly, “And I have always known I was lucky in my choice of mate.”

  Charles’s eyebrows raised.

  “Doesn’t mean that you weren’t a bastard,” Anna said. She probably wouldn’t have said that if they hadn’t been communicating by phone.

  “Charles says that after you finished playing the recorder, you didn’t know who he or Tag were.”

  Clearly he was done with the topic of the events surrounding his mating. Trust Bran to ignore her rundown on what she didn’t remember and hit exactly where she wished she didn’t remember.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Whatever it was, while I was playing, it stuck me right in the middle of the worst moment in my life. In Chicago.” Bran would understand. He knew about Chicago. “It did not feel like a memory and I had the bite marks to prove it.”

  “Bite marks?” Bran’s voice stayed calm.

  “Justin,” Anna said flatly. “While he was still in human form, he bit my neck, blooding me to excite the pack. That was real. When I found myself standing in that gods-be-damned amphitheater facing Charles and Tag, I thought I’d been teleported from Chicago somehow. I didn’t have a clue who either of them were, where I was, or how I got there. The last thing I remembered was the pack house in Chicago. As if all of my memories between that day in Chicago and the moment in Wild Sign had disappeared.” Her voice was tight.

  Charles held out his hand and she grabbed it as if it were a lifeline. It was solid, warm, and strong, and it made her feel as if she could breathe.

  “The bite wound on her neck was still bleeding,” Charles growled.

  “I see,” Bran said. “I’ve heard of magic that could make your body remember wounds it had suffered, calling that damage from memory into flesh. I don’t remember where, or from whom, and I’ve never seen it myself.” He hesitated. “Not that I remember.” The very old wolves had lots of memories they couldn’t instantly recall. “I’ll make inquiries.”

  There was the sound of drumming fingers; Anna presumed they belonged to Bran.

  “Sherwood Post doesn’t remember his past,” Bran said. “I thought—we all thought—it was because he couldn’t bear to remember the way in which the witches removed his leg so it could not be regrown.”

  “You did not speak to Sherwood after he sent you back to Montana with Leah beside you,” said Charles. “What if he came back here? To make sure the Singer was dead?”

  “It does raise some questions,” agreed Bran. “He was, in his own way, one of the most powerful magic users I’ve ever known.”

  That hung in the air.

  “I always wondered how the witches got him,” Charles said neutrally.

  “Exactly,�
� said Bran. After a moment he said, “Well—”

  “You called it the Singer in the Woods.” Leah’s voice cut through Bran’s. “The one who attacked you.”

  Anna hadn’t known she was listening. From Charles’s face, he hadn’t known, either. Anna wondered if her dig at Bran would have gone differently if he’d been alone.

  “Yes,” Anna agreed. “I don’t know where I got that—it doesn’t feel like something I made up, though.”

  “No,” agreed Leah. “I don’t think you did.” Her voice was tight. “I wish I could help. I don’t remember a lot about that time, and most of it would not be useful to you.” She made a soft sound and then said, “There is something about memories. We fed it with music, I think.” Her voice grew hesitant, soft. “Not just with music. That was part of it. It did something with memories, too. But”—her tone turned ironic—“I don’t remember exactly what that was.”

  “Were there witches?” asked Charles.

  “Like you think there were in Wild Sign? I don’t know,” Leah said. “I’m not witchborn.” She sighed. “It doesn’t feel like being witchborn mattered very much to the Singer, but I can’t be sure.”

  Silence fell and lingered.

  “If I remember more, I’ll let you know,” Leah said finally, sounding … Anna wished she could see Leah’s face so she could read it. She sounded odd. “I’ll call Anna.”

  “All right,” said Charles. “Thank you, Leah. Da. We’ll keep you apprised.”

  “Be careful,” Bran said. “Remember Sherwood.”

  “Yes,” Charles said, and ended the call.

  He looked at Anna. “I think we should have you contact Dr. Connors.”

  Tag looked up from his book and grinned wolfishly at Anna. “Charles and I are the muscle. You are our communications expert. By that we mean that you get to do all of the investigative work. We just get to kill things or, less interestingly, intimidate people.”

  Anna stuck her tongue out at him.

  “He’s not wrong,” said Charles, deadpan. “Annoying, but not wrong.” He still carried a bit of Brother Wolf in his eyes and the set of his shoulders, but if he was teasing, he would be okay.

  Anna rolled her eyes. “Okay, Brute Squad, give me the phone number. Getting information means giving some back. What do we want Dr. Connors to know? And what do we absolutely not want her to know?”

  “Why don’t you play it by ear,” Charles suggested. “Tell her we have some letters addressed to her and see where it goes from there.”

  “It occurs to me that I’d feel better about this if we hadn’t opened those letters,” Anna said. “In the household I grew up in, opening someone else’s mail just wasn’t done. I think my father would have forgiven murder before he’d have forgiven us interfering in the US mail.”

  “That’s why we’re making you call her,” said Tag. “You can blame us if you’d like. In the household I grew up in, opening letters without ruining the seal was an art form. It’s harder to make a modern letter look as though you haven’t opened it. Not impossible—but I generally don’t bother.”

  Charles consulted his laptop and gave Anna the number.

  The phone went to voice mail, which was a bit anticlimactic.

  “This is Anna Cornick,” Anna said. “I have your number from Special Agents Fisher and Goldstein of the FBI. My husband and I have been up to Wild Sign and we found some letters addressed to you that we’d like to talk about.” She left her number, repeated it, and disconnected.

  “What was the name of the place that check for Daniel Green was written to?” asked Anna. “If I’m making calls, I might as well try them, too.”

  “Angel Hills,” said Charles.

  “There’s an Angel Hills Assisted Living in Yreka,” said Tag. He had evidently started looking it up while Anna had been leaving a message for Dr. Connors. “You have about ten minutes before their regular hours are over. There’s an after-hours number.”

  Anna called and asked after Daniel Green.

  “Are you a member of his family?” asked the receptionist.

  Anna looked at Charles, who shrugged. Tag nodded vigorously.

  “Yes,” she lied. “This is Anna Cornick. I’m Carrie Green’s … sister-in-law.”

  “Ms. Cornick, if you will stay on the line? I will get someone who is authorized to speak with you.”

  Elevator music played with static-aided awfulness. The person who’d turned Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into elevator music should have been shot.

  Eventually a deliberately mellow voice came on the line. “Ms. Cornick, this is Dr. Sheldon Underwood. Letty tells me that you are calling about Daniel Green?”

  “That’s right,” Anna said. “Look, we were going through Carrie’s papers and found a check—” It had been enough to buy a new car.

  “Has something happened to Carrie?” he interrupted, losing the mellow tones.

  “We don’t know.” Anna managed to make her voice sound weary. “That’s what we are trying to find out. But no one has heard from her since this spring, and you know she lived out in the middle of nowhere. We can’t find her.”

  There was a long pause. “Daniel is—well, if you are a member of the family, Daniel has good days and bad. But they were very close; she came here every month to spend time with him. We were concerned when she stopped. It is possible that she told him something. He told us, you see, that Carrie wasn’t going to be coming around anymore. He might tell you more.”

  She opened her mouth to refuse—Daniel Green would know that she wasn’t related to him. But Dr. Underwood had continued speaking.

  “Daniel’s memory isn’t good, and some days he doesn’t know anyone. But if you come in the morning on a good day, he’s very nearly himself.”

  “I can come tomorrow,” Anna said. “I’ll bring the check. What time in the morning, do you think?”

  “Tomorrow won’t work,” the doctor said firmly. “He’s having a procedure in the morning. Perhaps the day after?”

  She hung up the phone having confirmed a time.

  Tag said, “So why are we visiting an old man with a faulty memory?”

  Charles replied before Anna could. “Because witchborn is a genetic condition. If, as we suppose, Wild Sign was a witch colony, then there is a chance that Daniel Green is also a witch. He might be able to tell us more about Wild Sign—and possibly what happened there.”

  “He knew that Carrie—Do you suppose she was his daughter? Anyway, he knew that Carrie would not be visiting him anymore,” Anna said. “Maybe he knows why not.”

  They were packing up the camp for a quick departure in the morning when Anna’s phone rang.

  “This is Dr. Connors,” said a woman’s voice.

  “Anna Cornick,” Anna returned. “We have some letters—”

  “So you said,” interrupted Dr. Connors. “Who are you and what were you doing at Wild Sign?”

  “Wild Sign was located on property owned by my family, Dr. Connors,” Anna said.

  There was a little pause.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “What was in the letters?”

  “We have no idea,” Anna told her. “They were in code.”

  “You did open them,” Dr. Connors said coolly.

  “Your father and his friends built a town on my family’s land,” Anna said, her voice neutral. “Then they all disappeared—without reappearing anywhere else that the FBI can find them. Yes, we opened letters we found in a bag that had been discarded by the side of the trail.”

  “Letters,” said Dr. Connors, and for the first time Anna heard something other than rigid self-control.

  “Two from a woman named Carrie Green, both of them payments. Six from your father to you, dated sequentially from April fourteenth through the nineteenth. We didn’t try to break the code, but they seem to be identical letters.”

  “I see.”

  Anna said, “Look, we are going to be down here for a couple more days. When I get home, I can scan
the letters and email them to you. Or you can give me an address and I’ll send them to you.”

  “You are looking for them, too, aren’t you?” Her tone made it not a question. Dr. Connors gave a sigh. “I am staying in Happy Camp for the time being. Assuming you are still nearby, I can drive to wherever you are—or you can come here.”

  Happy Camp, Anna remembered, was the town nearest to Wild Sign. They hadn’t driven through it on the way from Yreka, so it was presumably located farther down the highway.

  “We’re camping tonight,” Anna said. “We can drive to Happy Camp tomorrow if that’s convenient?” She glanced at Charles to double-check and he nodded.

  “Is there something other than my father’s letters you wish to talk about?” Dr. Connors asked.

  What Anna could tell Dr. Connors really depended upon a lot of things that she wouldn’t know until they met face-to-face.

  “Maybe,” Anna said. “Let’s meet and”—she chose Charles’s phrase—“we can play it by ear.”

  “Fine,” Dr. Connors said. “Call me when you get to town.” And she disconnected without further ado.

  “Hardball player, that one,” murmured Tag approvingly.

  CHARLES FELT EDGY, uncomfortable in his skin. He had to work not to pace. Anna had tightened their mate bond back down when she realized that her inner turmoil was affecting Charles. He’d allowed it because she had enough to deal with without also brushing up against his agitation. She didn’t need to know that blocking the easy flow of emotional communication only allowed him to hide his own struggles more effectively. Let her believe she was helping him.

  Brother Wolf had been enraged that they had not perceived that Anna was still caught in that thing—whatever it was Anna had called it—in the Singer in the Woods’ net. As a consequence, Brother Wolf had refused to let Charles direct their actions after Anna had run from them this morning. He hadn’t trusted Charles to be able to keep her safe.