Wild Sign

by Briggs, Patricia

  “We are werewolves,” Anna told her, ignoring the way Dr. Bonsu’s—Tanya’s—eyes widened and she suddenly smelled of fear. Smart people worry when they are confronted with werewolves. Time would take care of that—but there were easier methods for dogs. “We should put your dog at ease with us before we go on.”

  Charles got up and the dog started to snarl at him—and then Charles met his eyes. The dog licked his lips and dropped all the way to the ground. Charles put his hand on the dog’s forehead and waited. First the dog’s tail started to wag and then he wiggled happily, licking at Charles’s hand.

  “Good dog,” crooned Charles, giving the dog a pat before returning to his seat.

  “That didn’t take very long,” Dr. Connors said thoughtfully, and a little unhappily. “I would have thought he would be more wary.”

  “No reason,” Anna said. “We aren’t going to hurt him—and my husband just told him that.”

  “As simple as that?” Dr. Connors sounded a little spooked.

  Was she worrying about how easily a witch could subdue this means of defense? She should be. But that couldn’t be Anna’s problem.

  “Dogs don’t lie,” Anna said. “Dr. Connors—”

  “Oh, call me Sissy, please,” said Dr. Connors, who was the least Sissy-like person Anna had ever met.

  She smiled suddenly at Anna’s expression and it took years off her face. “I know, I know. But I was cute when I was a baby.”

  She glanced at her wife, her dog, the letters on the bench beside her. Then she sighed.

  “You want to know about Wild Sign. Okay. About a year and a half ago, one of my dad’s people contacted him about this place in the Marble Mountains of Northern California where they’d put together a colony where they were safe from the black witches hunting them. He never told me why it was safer. I don’t think he knew when he headed out. And he never told me in any of his letters—though I could tell that he felt safe there. That’s the first time he’d felt safe since my mother killed his sister in our backyard.”

  She looked at Charles, having clued in, Anna thought, to the person who was really in charge. “Do you think that there is any way he could be alive?”

  “We have not found human bodies,” he told her. “Until we do, it is premature to write them off. But nearly six months is a long time to be missing.”

  Anna thought about what the Angel Hills doctor had said about Daniel Green knowing that Carrie wasn’t going to be visiting anymore.

  “What do you mean, human bodies?” asked Tanya. “Did you find other bodies?”

  “Pets,” Anna said. “All laid out in a row. Not sacrificed—we don’t think. It didn’t have that feel. But all of them dead—cats and dogs. Eighteen that we counted. We didn’t excavate, so it is possible that we missed some.” She paused. “Did your father like old Germanic tales?”

  “Kriemhild?” said Sissy. “Kriemhild is dead?” She swore. “Dad wouldn’t get a pet. He said he couldn’t keep himself safe, so he had no business taking responsibility for another being. Except for the pets, Dad never referred to anyone by name in his letters. He didn’t want to be inadvertently responsible for someone being hunted down. So Kriemhild belonged to the person he called the Opera Singer. I don’t know if she actually sang opera or just liked it.” She smiled wistfully. “My dad loved that dog.”

  She wiped her eyes furtively, then continued in a brusque voice, “There was also the Family of Hellions, who were Mommy Hellion, Daddy Hellion, Hell Bringer, Doom Slayer, and Baby Demon. Baby Demon turned six in December. There was the Sign Maker. He’s deaf, I think, and was dad’s lover for a while.” She frowned defensively at the three werewolves, waiting for a reaction that didn’t come.

  “I’m pretty sure that the Hellion family are—were—the Tottle-fords,” she continued. “I met Malachi Tottleford the year I spent with Dad. And I met his wife and two of their children later on.” She gave a small shrug. “I would have called the bunch of them hellions, too.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “the Hellion family found the place first, so Mommy and Daddy Hellion were treated as de facto leaders.” She hesitated. “I have all of the letters Dad ever sent me, but they are in storage. I won’t be able to access them until we head back home next week—we need to get back because Tanya’s teaching job resumes the following Monday. Anyway, I’ll print them off and give you copies. I don’t know that you’ll find anything in them that will help.”

  “We were hopeful about the ones we brought you,” Anna said. “They seem to be mostly the same—copies of each other. Only the handwriting changes between them. If you look at them in time order, you can see it.”

  Sissy pulled the letters out and looked at them. Her hands shook as she saw for herself what Anna had pointed out. After a minute, her wife put a hand on her shoulder.

  “I see what you mean,” Sissy said, sliding them back into their envelopes with hands that were still unsteady. “I can’t translate them here. This is an older code we haven’t used in years—I don’t know why he switched back. If my brother still has his code key, I can get you a translation tomorrow. If not, I’ll have to go to my storage locker in Colorado and sort through boxes of stuff to find it.”

  She frowned. “If you are looking for general information about the community, Tanya’s boy crush spent some time up there last fall. Dad called him Snow Cone.”

  “That’s right,” Tanya said with a quick grin—though her eyes were worried. “Over on the far side of town there’s a coffee shop in a little hut. And more days than not there’s a snow cone stand. The kid—okay, I’m showing my age. He’s in his early twenties and a little different. He’s another traveler”—she gave her wife a warm smile—“like Sissy. He’s a photographer.” She held up a hand. “Wait a minute.”

  She handed the dog’s leash to Sissy and trotted off to their cabin.

  “He’s been traveling for years,” Sissy said. “He makes a little bit of money working as a ski instructor, fisherman, or guide. Things like that. But what he really does is take photos. He has three or four books out. I mentioned his name to an artist friend of mine, and he says he’s the real thing—and of course Tanya is a huge fan. He is apparently a well-known photographer of remote places—and a mystery himself. There are no photos of him, no biographical information.”

  Anna knew of a photographer who did that. She straightened involuntarily and Charles slanted a glance at her.

  “All that is calculated,” said Tanya, bearing a large coffee-table-type book under her arm. “Mysterious photographers sell better than wet-behind-the-ears kids. Like that artist—the one who sold a piece of art for over a million dollars and then it self-destructed.”

  Anna recognized that book. She couldn’t stop the anticipatory smile.

  “Banksy,” Sissy was saying. “One point four million dollars. Girl with Balloon.”

  “Right,” agreed Tanya. “The oldest of this kid’s books was copyrighted six years ago. He must have been sixteen—you’ll see what I mean when you meet him.”

  She handed Tag the book because he was the one who held a hand out for it. On the cover was an albino stag standing in a dark forest with fog rising from the ground around him, like a scene out of a fairy tale. The title of the book was Bright Things, the photographer listed only as Zander.

  Anna had a copy of that book—and the other five, too.

  “Zander is here?” Anna asked, feeling breathless.

  Tanya grinned and nodded. “I know, right? Sissy had no idea, either.” She patted her wife’s leg. “Yes, he is here—selling snow cones.” She rolled her eyes.

  “My dad mentioned Snow Cone, that he came up to visit them last fall, though he didn’t say much about him. But Tanya is the one who thought to stop and talk to the young man selling snow cones.” Sissy shook her head. “If he had been Lady Gaga, it would have been Tanya scratching her head and wondering what the fuss was about.”

  “I know who Lady Gaga is,” Tanya said indignan
tly. “I do live in the real world. Anyway, if you’re looking for an eyewitness who lived up there for a while, Zander might be useful. But he’s shy. If you take my advice, one of you should go talk to him.” She looked at the two men and shook her head. “Anna should go talk to him. It took me five snow cones before he said more than ten words to me. If Sissy comes, too, he still won’t talk to me.”

  IN THE END, Anna dropped Charles and Tag off at Happy Camp Mini Storage armed with the number of Carrie Green’s storage unit. Meanwhile, she went to buy a snow cone from the stand, which was within sight of the storage facility.

  The coffee shop was one of those miniature house–looking places. It was covered with cedar shake shingles that made it look vaguely hairy, appropriate for a shop called Sasquatch Express-O. It was set up as a drive-through, but the car lane had an A-frame signboard blocking it that read Sasquatch hunting. Back at 4 p.m. so you can be up all night.

  There were two metal picnic tables between the coffee shop and the snow cone stand. The stand itself was a ridiculous thing. The functional part, a circular workstation about six feet in diameter, was covered with a cone-shaped plastic top painted a bright rainbow of color.

  Anna thought the stand was supposed to look like a snow cone. Or maybe an ice cream cone. Hard to say. A cardboard sign duct-taped to the side listed the prices for small and large cones in wide black Sharpie written in an even and readable hand.

  On the top of the picnic table nearest the snow cone stand, a young man sat cross-legged with a guitar in his lap, the case open behind him. He looked like he was about Anna’s age, maybe a year or two younger, but not much. He hadn’t looked up when she parked next to the coffee shop. He didn’t look up while she walked over.

  Like his photographs, Zander—assuming this was Zander—was fascinating. Beautiful, too. But more than that. His hair was an odd shade between white and wheat, almost silvery. His eyes were deep blue. For some reason, after Tanya’s description, Anna had expected someone small and slender—but he was the size of a proverbial lumberjack, a lean lumberjack without a beard.

  He was singing the Cranberries’ “Zombie.”

  He had a very good voice—not as good as Charles’s; he lacked the timbre of her husband’s voice, but he had range. And someone somewhere had taught him how to sing.

  The guitar he played was a Gibson that was probably older than either of them. It looked a little battered, and someone who didn’t know as much about music as Anna did might think it was a cheap guitar. But his old Gibson cost at least as much as the Martin rotting in the amphitheater, possibly more, though Anna’s understanding of collectible guitar prices and models was hazy, beginning and ending with “old Gibsons are valuable.”

  He didn’t stop singing when she walked up, so she belted out the song with him. He looked up at that and smiled widely. He sang better than he played, but he didn’t play badly. When he was through with “Zombie,” he transitioned into the old folk song “Molly Bawn” without a pause. Though he called it “Polly Vaughn” and had a few other variants to the lyrics she knew. Folk music was like that.

  He grinned when she started the first verse with him, as if she’d passed a test of some sort. She followed his version of the old song with little trouble.

  When they finished, Anna said, “I’ve always found that song to be pretty unsatisfactory. Man shoots wife. Claims he thought she was a swan. Oops.” She blinked at him, then continued in sickly sweet sympathy, “That poor man, poor, poor man. Everyone feels sorry for him. How could he know it wasn’t a swan he shot? The end.”

  “It should end with a hanging, do you think?” he asked, almost seriously. “But what if he really just shot her by mistake? The guilt he must feel.”

  “If he can’t tell the difference between his wife and a bird, he needs to be hanged before he shoots someone else,” she said dryly. “And that would put paid to his guilt, too.”

  “But it’s a pretty song,” he coaxed, his fingers dancing lightly over the strings as he played a few random chords. He glanced up at her through his lashes in a look she didn’t think was supposed to be flirtatious. “A fun song.”

  “Yes,” she said, though she didn’t really agree.

  “The Ash Grove” was a pretty song. “Mary Mack” was a fun song. “Molly Bawn” was a song about a bastard who murdered his wife and got away with it. But arguing with someone she wanted to extract information from didn’t seem useful, so she moved the conversation along.

  “Cool guitar.”

  He lit up with enthusiasm. “She’s pretty awesome. I paid too much for her, but it’s not like these ladies grow on trees.” He nodded his head to the coffee shop. “If you came for coffee, I’m sorry. Dana closes up from two to four.”

  “I don’t look like the snow cone type?” she asked.

  He glanced at her silk shirt and jacket, shook his head, and laughed, an appreciative male sound. “No.”

  So her protective camouflage had worked on him, at least. But honestly, she didn’t want a snow cone, so there was that.

  “No,” she told him. “You are right. Excellent snow cone customer sensing. I am not here for coffee, either. I’m here to talk to you. A friend told me that you’d spent some time up at Wild Sign last fall.”

  His face closed down, all the warmth gone.

  “There’s no one there now,” he said.

  “I know that,” she told him. “I was just up there. The land they were on is owned by my family. We’re trying to figure out what happened. Why the people abandoned Wild Sign and where they went.”

  “You hiked all the way in?” he asked.

  “The day before yesterday,” she confirmed.

  “The day before yesterday,” he said, then gave her a sweet smile, as friendly as if he’d never shut down.

  She didn’t know what about that made him change his mind about talking to her, but she was willing to run with it.

  “Yes. And found a place that people put a lot of work into—and then abandoned. We—I feel responsible. It is our land. I need to find out what happened to them.”

  “I can’t tell you that,” he warned her.

  “I didn’t expect that you could solve the mystery for us. For me,” she told him. “But the more information we can get, the more likely we are to discover what happened, how a whole town of people just disappeared. To that end, I’d like to know a little about what folks up there were like.”

  “People,” he said after strumming a few bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” Anna knew guitarists (especially guitarists who had worked in music stores) who would run screaming at the sound of the opening bars to that song.

  “They were just people,” he told his guitar strings.

  Anna, who had learned to listen from her mate, waited.

  “There was an air of euphoria, of joy, about Wild Sign,” he said. “It felt like a little bit of paradise.” He played a few measures that sounded half-familiar, but Anna couldn’t place the song. “They didn’t have a lot—not money or things. But it didn’t matter. They had what they needed. A safe place to raise their children.” He smiled gently, his eyes distant, and spun out a few more bars.

  In the manner of guitarists the world over, he talked a little bit as he played, drawing a picture of Wild Sign for her using words rather than his camera. At first the images came slowly, but as he talked, the picture became richer, nuanced and clear.

  She would have been happier to just listen, but she dutifully noted down names. Like Dr. Connors, Zander didn’t know last names. But he did use actual first names—mostly. Dr. Connors Senior was Doc.

  While he talked, his eyes on his fretboard, Anna brought forward her wolf self to check him out. He smelled of days camping in the sun and a little like cotton candy. He did not smell like witchcraft.

  She thought, though, that there might be a little of that old earth magic—the kind that Wellesley, their painter, had. But to check that out, she’d have had to be on four feet, which would defeat the
purpose of her visit—to get Zander to talk. It wasn’t worth it for something so faint, maybe some sort of good luck piece that carried a bit of magic. The important thing was that, not being a witch, he could not tell her about any magic that happened in Wild Sign. She was probably not going to learn anything important from him.

  Listening to his soft-voiced storytelling, she had the sudden thought that, other than his talent for music, he could not have been more different from her intense mate if he had deliberately tried. There was a sweet, almost innocent air about him. Sensual, but in the way of the birds in the air and the beasts of the field. Earthy.

  Zander liked to talk—once he got started. Even with her, most of the time Charles preferred to be quiet. She thought that was one reason her mate liked horses so much. They didn’t require words to communicate—they listened to his hands and body, and he heard them with more than his ears.

  Zander might be shy, but he liked people. Though most of his photography was nature themed, he’d done one chapter in his Alaskan book on the people he’d worked with at the fisheries in Ketchikan. She could see it in the verbal sketches he drew of the people who lived in Wild Sign. She found out that Emily—who must have been Mommy Hellion—loved to cook and never went out without something purple on. Deaf from birth, Jack made signs to spread joy.

  Charles liked very few people.

  If she had met Zander before she’d been Changed, she might have fallen for him. Not just because she loved his art but because he was sexy and sweet. He reminded her of one of Wellesley’s paintings—deep and rich with meaning. Every time she looked, she saw something new. Something that made her think.

  But she wasn’t that woman anymore. It was Charles, with his darkness, his violence and contrasting gentleness, whom she wanted to take to her bed, to share her life with.

  She had gone through some truly awful times, but without them, she would not have had the courage to love someone like Charles. Charles, who had reached out of his own darkness to catch her. She had the strong feeling that Charles’s act had taken even greater courage on his part, though he had never told her so.