His bright hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. He’d lost the stubble on his face, which had a tendency to lengthen into a bedraggled beard before he did anything about it. He wore slacks and a casual jacket over a button-up shirt.
Other than the long hair—and the outrageous color—he would not have looked out of place working at a bank. Or at least he didn’t look as though he intended to rob one at gunpoint—which was an improvement. And then he produced a pair of mirrored sunglasses straight out of the costume design for a 1970s antiestablishment movie sheriff and put them on.
Anna got into the SUV and started it, thinking about those sunglasses. She looked over her shoulder at Tag and cleared her throat.
“Um, why the cool shades?” she asked.
Charles belted himself in and snorted. “Vanity,” he said.
“Hey,” complained Tag, shutting his door. “I resemble that remark.”
“Don’t you mean resent?” Anna asked, pulling out of the campground.
Tag smiled and she got the full effect of all his white teeth—almost the only thing she could see of his features between the facial hair and the sunglasses. “Not at all,” he told her.
“The shades come off before you leave this car,” she warned.
Tag’s smile got sharper. “Of course.”
“If you laugh,” said Charles, “you only encourage him.”
And that made her laugh.
She found it interesting that she wasn’t the only one who had dressed up to face Dr. Connors—outside of Tag’s sunglasses. She knew why she had. She suspected that the men had done the exact same thing—for exactly the opposite reason: to look less dangerous. Or at least more civilized.
Happy Camp, California, was a very small town—about the size of Aspen Creek, though Anna was pretty sure that it had been bigger at one time.
Tag frowned, looking at a cleared area beside the highway. “Used to be a damn big lumber mill over there,” he said, sounding a little disconcerted.
“Things change,” said Charles. “When I was last here, there wasn’t a real town at all. More a series of small encampments while people sluiced and dug and mined for gold.” He turned his head to Tag. “Towns have life cycles, just like people do. They just take longer. It’s not any easier when they grow than when they shrink. Just talk to Asil about why he left Spain.”
Tag seemed to shrug off the odd mood. “Not on your life,” he said. “He and I deal better when we stick to events of the present time. We were on opposite sides of too many wars to discuss the past. Here’s a gas station, Anna. Might as well fuel the pig up.”
He was right; the SUV got better mileage than she’d expected, but it wasn’t a hybrid. The man working the gas station was a Native American somewhere in his fifties. He gave Charles a narrow-eyed look.
“Salish,” said Charles.
The clerk smiled. “Fishermen,” he said in satisfaction. “Karuk.”
“Fishermen,” agreed Charles gravely. “We drove down from Montana to do a little hiking. I’m Charles.”
“Rob,” offered the clerk.
They shook hands. Rob rang up their purchases—mostly water and Tag’s junk food.
“Lots of hiking around here,” he said. “Careful of fires. We’ve got one going about twenty miles away—started this morning. If you stay south or east of town, you should be okay.”
“Appreciate it,” Charles said gravely.
“Watch out for Sasquatch,” said Rob, tapping the side of his nose.
“I always do,” Charles agreed. “But I’m more concerned with the Singer in the Woods.”
Rob’s eyebrows went up. “That old story? Stay on the trails and you should be all right.”
“I’ve heard that some people built a town up thataway,” Anna said, unfurling her power a bit. Being Omega didn’t have as much of an effect on normal people as it did on the werewolves. But it did seem to lower hostility. She didn’t clarify where “thataway” was.
She hadn’t needed to. Rob gave her a warm smile and shook his head.
“I heard that, too,” he said confidentially. “One born every minute, isn’t there? I heard that something happened to them, they disappeared like that Virginia colony of Roanoke. Smart people don’t travel that way. My grandfather, he took me up near that place one time. Showed me a drawing someone had made on a rock—told me that if I saw that symbol, I should take it as a warning, like when you come upon a tree that a grizzly has marked. Something we didn’t want to meet has that territory claimed.”
“What did it look like?” Charles asked.
“Like an upside-down capital V with lines hashed over both sides. I heard that the place where those people put their camp had those marks all over it. Lots of beautiful country around here, beautiful river, good places. Don’t know why people have to go poking hornet’s nests.”
He paused a second, then frowned at Charles with sudden suspicion. “If you folks intend to go hunting for Wild Sign, you’d better have good weapons.”
Charles smiled. “Thank you for the warning.”
Rob shook his head, but he had a smile on his face. “Young people always think they know best.”
“It’s a hazard,” agreed Charles.
THEY CALLED DR. Connors from the gas station. She gave them directions to the cabin where she was staying at an RV park in town.
“The RV park has a cabin,” said Anna cautiously.
“Don’t they all,” agreed Tag with a grin.
“Place like this,” said Charles, “you get creative about making a living—or you move on.”
The town showed signs of struggling, for sure, Anna thought. But it was set down in the heart of the mountains—she could see why people would fight to stay in a place like this.
Tag said solemnly, “You can feed your wallet, or you can feed your soul, but you seldom can do both at the same time.” He took in a deep breath out his open window.
They turned, as Dr. Connors had directed, in front of the Bigfoot statue.
“Do you reckon they got the size just right?” asked Tag, looking up at the scrap-metal giant. “I admit the only time I saw them in their real shape, they looked at least that big to me. But I expect that was more terror than reality.”
“Most men overestimate size,” said Anna, deadpan.
Tag sighed dramatically. “I disappointed her in that department, that’s for sure. She expected someone taller.” He gave Anna a wicked grin from the backseat.
They pulled into the RV campground and drove around until they found the cabin Dr. Connors had described to them, parking next to an aging but immaculate Volvo station wagon.
As they got out of the car, a woman opened the door of the small cabin and stood on the porch, watching them. She was a little taller than average. Her skin was tanned dark and her shoulder-length brown hair was sun-faded and caught back in an indifferent ponytail. She wore cutoffs that actually looked like they had begun life as jeans, rather than having been bought that way, and a gray tank top that showed just how lean and muscled she was. Her bare arms sported a few scars, mostly thin stripes.
If Anna had to pick out a word for her, it would have been “tough.” She remembered ruefully that she’d thought about going in jeans and a T-shirt instead of dressing for a boardroom. This woman evidently had had the same thought and made the other choice—or possibly not worried about it at all.
“Hello,” she said as they approached. “I’m Dr. Connors. You must be Anna Cornick.”
Anna nodded. “This is my husband, Charles. And our—” She hesitated too long and gave Tag time to chime in.
“Henchman,” he said with a grin that widened as Anna frowned at him. At least the sunglasses were nowhere in sight.
She shrugged. “Henchman, Colin Taggart.”
“Call me Tag,” he told Dr. Connors, who did not appear to be charmed.
Well, thought Anna, at least she didn’t run screaming. People who met Tag tended to one reaction or the o
ther.
“We would like to talk to you about Wild Sign,” Anna said.
“There’s a picnic table around the back.” Dr. Connors didn’t give much away with her body posture. Nothing other than hostility. Anna couldn’t decide if the hostility was a normal thing for Dr. Connors or if she was still mad about their opening her father’s letters.
They followed her around the little cabin. Anna took the opportunity of pointing a finger at Tag and shaking her head. His grin didn’t make her optimistic that he’d behave anytime soon.
The picnic table was right next to the back of the cabin, on the edge of a grassy expanse that stretched down between the various RV sites to create a park where guests could cook, sunbathe, walk their dogs, or anything else they’d like to do. Currently, they were the only occupants who weren’t squirrels or birds.
Dr. Connors was staring at the picnic table she’d promised with an unhappy frown. Anna got it. Picnic tables were fine for eating with friends—but they were a little close quarters for strangers. Anna didn’t think Charles or Tag would willingly sit at them the way they were intended anyway, because the table would get in the way of their rising to their feet in case of an attack.
Charles walked to the far side of the table and picked up the bench, carrying it around and placing it opposite the other bench with considerably more distance between them than the mere table had offered. He then made a soundless gesture that invited Dr. Connors to pick her bench.
She took the one nearest the table, Anna and Charles sat on the other—and Tag sprawled out on the grass, as a henchman, presumably, would.
Anna dug into her purse and brought out the letters. Charles had taken photos of them, so they had electronic copies. She handed all of the originals and their envelopes to Dr. Connors. Anna had to half stand to stretch across the distance. Dr. Connors took the letters carefully and set them beside her on the bench, tucking them under one leg to hold them against any chance wind. She made no move to look at them.
If Anna had been easily intimidated by awkward atmospheres, she would have been totally tongue-tied by now. But she’d been playing her cello solo since elementary school, and she’d performed before tougher audiences than a grumpy, antisocial white witch who, according to the FBI report on her, spent most of her time in the jungles of South America. The FBI hadn’t known about the white witch part, of course.
Anna hadn’t caught the scent herself, but Brother Wolf had whispered White witch as soon as the wind blew past them as they had been walking around the cabin.
“We”—Anna gestured at herself, her husband, and Tag, who was playing with a strand of grass—“are werewolves.” Which was something she wouldn’t have told Dr. Connors without Brother Wolf’s information.
The only reason Anna knew she’d scared Dr. Connors was the change in her scent. Anna decided to let Dr. Connors believe she’d kept her reaction to herself. So Anna didn’t offer reassurances.
“Around two hundred years ago,” she said, “one of our kind encountered a being in the mountains northeast of here. He thought it had been killed, but he acquired the land, just in case. Ownership has remained with our pack. And the thing—we have heard it referred to as the Singer in the Woods—was inactive so far as we knew from that time until this. A few days ago, the FBI landed on our doorstep to tell us that there had been an entire town built on our land. Some damn fools apparently decided that a parcel of land in the mountains that was neither federal land nor tribal was a wonderful place to build an off-grid town. They were, as far as we could tell, mostly white witches like you.”
She let the words hit Dr. Connors and then said gently, “And those foolish witches woke it up.”
“I don’t know about all of that,” said Dr. Connors, sounding suddenly weary. “I am out of the country for months at a time, Ms. Cornick. The last trip should have been two months and turned into ten for—” She shook her head. “For reasons that have no bearing on today. By the time I got back, my father had been out of contact for months. That’s not like him. Nor is writing to me every day for the better part of a week. He writes a letter to me every week on Wednesday. My mother, his ex-wife, gets a letter once a month. My little brother gets a letter written on each Thursday.”
She raised her chin and stared straight ahead, swallowed visibly, and said, “Got. We all got letters.”
“In code,” said Anna neutrally.
“In code,” Dr. Connors agreed.
“We are here to take care of whatever is up in those mountains,” Anna told her. “But it would really help if we knew what happened in Wild Sign. We don’t know what we are dealing with. My mother-in-law—who was here two centuries ago—only remembers bits and pieces. Those letters are possibly our only eyewitness accounts to a threat we need to neutralize.”
“I don’t know anything about a Singer,” Dr. Connors said. “I sometimes stayed with my dad for a few weeks, but I had never been to Wild Sign until I hiked in looking for him and found the place deserted.”
“At this point,” said Charles, “we don’t know that all of those people are dead or if they are just missing.”
It was apparent in his voice that he didn’t think they were missing. Anna caught Dr. Connors’s flinch.
Charles caught it, too, and his tone was gentler as he said, “We need to find out what happened to them. So far, your father’s letters look like they might be the best clue we have, but anything you know about Wild Sign could be useful.”
Dr. Connors’s jaw firmed.
Anna said, “We can do things that the sheriff’s department cannot. We have the money and the personnel to throw at this investigation. Your best chance to find out what happened to your father is to help us.”
Dr. Connors looked down at the letters, as if reorienting herself. “They are in code because his family has been hunting him since he ran away at sixteen. Off and on.” She looked at Charles. “Connors is not the name he was born with. His family is one of the families. I won’t tell you which one. If it was black witches who found them up there, I imagine you’ll figure it out. If it wasn’t, I won’t speak their name where anything might hear me.”
Her voice shook a little. Charles nodded, eyes a little narrow. Anna wondered if he could make a guess.
“It doesn’t matter which one it was,” he said.
Dr. Connors cleared her throat and continued her story. “From the time he was eighteen until he was thirty-two, they seemed to forget about him. He got his PhD in applied mathematics and went to work in the aerospace industry. Got married. Had me and my brother. Enjoyed a normal life until my aunt Diana, his sister, showed up in the middle of a lunch. I was five and my brother was two. We were having a picnic in the backyard. My mom ran and my dad tried to keep us safe from his sister. She did something that had him on the ground, and then she pulled a knife and started cutting him—as if we weren’t there.”
Her mouth was tight and the edges of her lips were white. “My mother was a police officer. She came back with her service weapon and shot Diana in the head. She kept my dad alive until the EMTs got there. He still has the scars.” She stopped and swallowed. “Had the scars the last time I saw him. The shooting was ruled self-defense. But my dad left us that afternoon—left the hospital, left his job, left his life. And he never got it back.”
She looked at Anna. “You know about witches. I found out later that he could have gone gray and stayed with us. But my dad … he was a gentle soul. He made my mom divorce him. Came to visit sometimes for a day or two when he felt it was safe. When we all figured out I was witchborn, too, he collected me for a whole year when I was about twelve or so. I don’t have a lot of power. He taught me to hide it.” She gave the three of them a sour look that didn’t quite mask the fear in her eyes. “Apparently it doesn’t work.”
She’d be safe from witches, said Brother Wolf. Witches can’t smell a rabbit at five inches. She doesn’t feel like a witch, she just smells like one.
Anna was happy to
repeat Brother Wolf’s assessment. “As long as they don’t have a pet werewolf, you’re still safe from witches. Witches don’t identify each other by scent.”
There was a woman walking a big dog on the far side of the parklike area they sat in. The first person they’d seen up and moving anywhere near them.
“He’d found a group of white witches to travel with by then,” continued Dr. Connors. Anna couldn’t tell if Brother Wolf’s reassurance had helped or not. “They were safer together—up to a point. If there were too many of them, their combined power could attract attention. So in small groups they would hike into remote places and set up camp, moving around a few miles here or there to avoid getting pushed out. Winters were rough up north or high in the mountains, but they learned how to manage because those places were safer.”
The woman with the dog was closer. She was African American. Her dark hair hung past her shoulders, cornrowed and beaded with lapis lazuli–colored beads that matched the blue in the blue-and-gold shirt she wore. Raw linen pants stopped midcalf to reveal muscled legs and bright blue flip-flops. She had lots of curves, but the end effect was of general fitness.
The dog, who looked like he had a German shepherd somewhere not too far up his family tree, had been roving around her on a loose leash. As they neared, he walked alertly at her side, his intent gaze upon the werewolves.
“Audience approaching,” murmured Tag.
Dr. Connors looked over her shoulder and her whole demeanor changed. Her face relaxed and the lines around her eyes softened. The other woman smiled at her, a joyous, bigger-than-life smile.
“Tanya, this is Anna Cornick; her husband, Charles; and their henchman, Colin Taggart.” Dr. Connors didn’t slow down or hesitate on the word “henchman,” though it made both Tanya and Tag, who had come to his feet, grin.
“This is my wife, Tanya, Dr. Bonsu to her students, who fear her.”
“As you are not my students, please call me Tanya,” she said, taking a seat next to her wife. The dog sat alertly next to her, his eyes on Tag, his ruff slightly raised.
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