Wild Sign

by Briggs, Patricia

  Cheerful voices echoed in the quiet woods as Anna and Tag bickered about how best to cook their dinner, whose ace got played first, and whether to cook their dinner (because werewolves weren’t picky about raw meat, even if human teeth had trouble ripping through a steak). If anyone else had been arguing with Tag that way, they would end up thrown through a door or into a tree when he decided to take offense instead of laugh. Tag’s temper was a quick switch.

  But Anna was an Omega and Tag her devoted follower. She could even tell him the French lost at Waterloo without him going ballistic—or at least, Tag’s ballistic would be more measured. So they squabbled happily until Anna persuaded Tag into a duet.

  Tag’s voice was a soldier’s voice, learned on long marches between battlefields, which made it very well suited to the outdoors. Anna’s sweet alto was better trained and she knew how to make her singing partners sound good. Their singing would have benefited from the addition of a baritone or bass, but Charles was content to listen, Brother Wolf lulled into contentment as a prelude to battle by Anna’s presence and the forest setting.

  There was no campfire. The fire danger was too high—and he thought they were illegal in California even in the spring. They’d brought a propane stove for cooking.

  He fell asleep surrounded by the sounds of the evening: the wind in the trees, his wife’s sweet voice—and the crackle of a campfire that wasn’t there. It did not surprise him to find himself engaged in a game of chess with his uncle, who had been dead for two centuries, more or less.

  BUFFALO SINGER’S FOREFINGER, which he tapped lightly on the edge of the table, was twisted from a fall when he’d been a boy, and he had a faint scar on the corner of his mouth. Charles had remembered the finger, but he’d forgotten about the scar. His uncle, only fifteen years older than Charles, had not been an old man when he died.

  Buffalo Singer had been the one who most often took the boys on teaching expeditions or trained them in fighting, endlessly patient with the youngsters. He was the youngest of Blue Jay Woman’s brothers, and though he never played favorites, he had a softness for his dead sister’s son.

  Bran Cornick had taught Buffalo Singer chess and found in him a worthy opponent. Buffalo Singer had taught Charles. Bran had taught Charles what he needed to know about being a werewolf and a little about dealing with being witchborn; he did not play with his son.

  The battered chessboard balanced on a folding table made of sticks and buckskin—a device his da had fashioned for the purpose. Charles and his uncle sat on either side of it, staring at the board and thinking about possible moves. Charles had always thought those long evenings of motionless attention were how he had learned patience.

  A commotion behind them had Buffalo Singer rising to his feet, a welcoming smile on his face—and Charles realized what day in the past his dreaming had returned him to.

  Da was home, riding into camp with a strange white woman riding beside him. Horses were rare still, and his father had left on foot. These two were both chestnuts, and one of them had a great splash of white on her face that came down over one eye—and that eye was blue.

  Bran dismounted and handed the reins of his horse to Charles, which surprised him. After a long journey, his da usually avoided noticing his son for as long as possible. But today he gave Charles a nod of thanks and then took the reins of the blue-eyed horse and gave them to Charles as well.

  The woman slid down, landing lightly on her feet. Charles had time to notice both of her eyes were as blue as the horse’s eye—and Charles had never seen anyone with blue eyes—then his da spoke to him.

  Charles knew it was to him because Bran used English. Charles was the only one besides his da who spoke English in the whole camp.

  “This is Leah, my mate.”

  Then he turned to the rest of the camp and introduced her again. Charles looked up at the woman who would, the dreaming Charles knew, never be his mother and saw indifference. It didn’t matter, that boy told himself. He had his uncles and aunts and his grandfather, who all loved him. He did not need this woman as his mother.

  The dreaming Charles saw something else. He saw Leah’s cheeks were gaunt and her hands shook when she wasn’t paying attention. He saw the wildness of the wolf in her eyes—and a bottomless, aching, unassuageable grief too deep for tears.

  He remembered his da had told him one of the children he and Sherwood had buried had been Leah’s.

  In the way of dreams, Charles found himself seated on the ground, once more facing his uncle. But there was no camp, no Bran or Leah, no other people at all. The forest closed around them, dark and endless—but not dead. He could hear the birds and squirrels chittering at each other, feel the insects going about their business. Far away an eagle cried out.

  Buffalo Singer’s clever, callused fingers slid a pawn over to capture Charles’s queen. He tapped the fallen piece with a finger.

  “You be careful of her,” he told Charles. “If you lose her, you lose the whole game.”

  Charles took a careful look at the rough-carved queen who only vaguely resembled a woman. His da had many talents, but carving wasn’t one of them.

  He looked up at Buffalo Singer and asked, “Who is she?”

  But his uncle merely shook his head.

  Charles turned his attention to the chessboard and studied the game, trying to see where he’d made the mistake that had caused him to lose. It felt like it was important to see where he, where Charles, had gone wrong.

  His uncle reached over with a bent finger and tapped Charles on the forehead. “Keep a sharp eye out. The story is about her.”

  “Dinner!” called Anna cheerfully from somewhere.

  His uncle looked up, a quick grin crossing his face. “I like her,” he said. “She’s feisty.”

  Charles looked up into Anna’s face. “I like you, too,” he told her.

  She laughed and kissed him. He liked that, too.

  C H A P T E R

  4

  They found a trail at midday. It looked just like several others they’d found. But this one, unlike the others, carried no recent human scent.

  Tag discovered a candy wrapper, battered and faded to pale colors by the sun and weather. Charles nosed the wrapper, and after a moment’s consideration, set off on the trail. There was something—maybe it just headed in the right direction—that distinguished it in Charles’s mind from the others. Maybe the spirits who lived in the forest directed him. With Charles it was hard to tell. Tag waited for Anna to follow, and he took up the rear.

  Save me from protective males, thought Anna with half-irritated amusement. She was a freaking werewolf, for heaven’s sake; she could take care of herself.

  We protect our most dangerous weapon, Brother Wolf assured her.

  Anna chuffed a laugh. She knew that Brother Wolf was serious. He could joke sometimes, but he never mocked. She just had no idea what prompted him to consider her more dangerous than Charles … or Tag.

  The woods around them were full of deer, and at one point she caught the distant scent of elk. Coyotes abounded; one trailed them for a few miles out of curiosity. Twice, early in the morning, they had come upon bear sign—probably the bear that had been seen at their camp.

  The woods were subtly different from those at home. Anna wasn’t a botanist, so she didn’t have names, but the evergreens were more diverse and the undergrowth smelled strange. The atmosphere of the land around them was different from home, too.

  Charles talked about manitou sometimes, the spirit of a place, sort of an upper-level naiad or dryad, she thought. She’d come to her marriage with a better education on Greek and Roman beliefs than on those of Native Americans, and she still tended to conflate the vocabulary where the cultures intersected.

  She didn’t have the senses, the ability, to see spirits the way Charles did, but there was a flavor to these woods that was different from the feel of the woods at home. Maybe something was sifting through her mate bond besides the general feel of caution
overlying Brother Wolf’s fierce joy in this hunt. Maybe she just had an overactive imagination.

  Though a lifetime of summer hikes with her dad and his handy-dandy pedometer (his words) had given Anna a very good sense of how far she’d traveled when walking on two feet, she had less of a feel for distance traveled while on four. They had set out at first light at a steady, ground-covering trot they could, and did, keep up all day.

  So she didn’t know exactly how far they had traveled, maybe as much as fifty miles, when they started to find the sigils carved into the trees. Some of them were familiar, as if whoever had carved them had access to the same set of Nordic runes Anna and her brother had used.

  The two of them had used it as a simple replace-the-letter code, but upon finding one of their notes, her father had pointed out that scholars were pretty sure the original users of the old runes had used them as symbolic of whole meanings rather than as parts of words, like letters were.

  Probably, he’d told them, the runes had been used as magical symbols. Not that her father had believed much in magic back then—he was a believer in cold logic and science. He was a little more open-minded now that his daughter was a werewolf, but she knew he still thought there was some scientific reason for her ability to transform.

  At any rate, admonished by their father, she and her brother had tried to find the linguist-assigned meanings for the runes and use those. But since they had had very little use for words like “horse” (they lived in town, where there were no horses) or various Nordic gods, they had given up and gone back to using it as a simple code with a few runic-looking letters they made up themselves to stand in for the extra letters. But she remembered some of the symbolic meanings.

  A square sitting on one corner with two lines extending down at a right angle from each other was one that meant “property” or “belonging to” with a sense of rightful ownership, an inheritance. She remembered it because it looked to her like a goldfish nose pointing up and tail pointing down.

  The goldfish rune was a few seasons old. The one just above it, so new that there was sap beading up in some spots and the wood revealed by the broken bark was raw, was the rune that Ford had given them. Ford had thought it had something to do with music. It certainly looked more like a musical instrument than the goldfish looked like “property.”

  Charles, realizing that Anna had stopped, came back to stand shoulder to shoulder with her.

  A claiming, Brother Wolf said. And Anna knew that he knew something of runes, too. Or maybe, if there was magic in these runes, he read the intent.

  Tag huffed, lifted a leg, and marked the tree in approved werewolf fashion. Then he raked the ground in front of the tree and gave Anna a laughing grin full of teeth. Anna could feel Brother Wolf’s amusement—but she could also feel his rising excitement. They were closer to their prey.

  Once she knew to look for them, the runes were all over—most of them not the one Ford had warned them about, the musician one. Some of the runes Anna was pretty sure were made-up. Most of them had probably been carved in the last couple of years judging by the way the sap dripped out of them. But there were older trees, forest giants, whose trunks held runes distorted by years of growth. All of that tallied with what Ford had said—which meant they were on the right path. Not that she had ever doubted Charles could find their way to Wild Sign.

  With Ford’s description of petroglyphs in mind, she kept an eye out for marks on the rocks or stone outcroppings, but didn’t see anything. The sun was starting its trek downward when they topped a steep climb, the trail more like a suggestion up an almost-cliff, and found themselves in an open flat meadow surrounded by trees. Underneath the shelter of the forest canopy, fitted neatly into the shadows of trees and the swells of land, were the buildings of Wild Sign.

  Charles changed. He wasn’t the quickest shapeshifter she’d ever seen. Mercy, his foster sister, could grab her coyote form in a blink of an eye—but she bore a different power. Today, Charles only took two breaths to make the shift that took any other werewolf of her acquaintance at least ten minutes longer. He’d told her it was because he’d been born a werewolf.

  But that he arrived in his human form fully clothed … that was a different magical gift. His clothing at the end of a change was usually jeans, boots, and a T-shirt. And most of the T-shirts were his favorite color: red. But his magic could be capricious; she’d seen him end up in buckskins a time or two. And once, very oddly, a tuxedo. He looked good in a tux, but she’d never talked him into wearing one again. That particular tux had ended up in pieces he’d thrown away—the damage, she thought with an inward smile, had been her fault.

  This time, he wore jeans and boots, but his shirt was a flannel button-down in a gray-green that blended into the forest nearly as well as Wild Sign. She wondered what that said about his current state of mind.

  Anna, feeling the need for fingers and speech while she explored, changed back to human, too. Her change took a good deal longer. When she lay, panting and sweating, on the ground, Charles crouched by her, offering her one of the canteens from the pack Tag carried strapped to his back.

  She took three big gulps of water, waited a breath, and drank some more. When she handed the canteen back to him, her hands had quit shaking. He helped her to her feet and presented her with her clothes, retrieved, like the canteen, from Tag’s pack. She dressed, did a few deep knee bends and toe touches to make sure all of her parts were working as they should be. And all the while she took in the camp—no, Ford had it right, took in the town.

  “I picked up five scents,” Anna said, slipping on a pair of tennis shoes. “And maybe one more, but it is older. I got hints of a lot of people but nothing strong enough for me to follow.”

  Charles nodded. “It last rained six weeks ago. The information I have is that, on the strength of Dr. Connors’s report, they sent in a chopper to investigate—a county deputy; the local Forest Service law enforcement officer; two rangers, one of whom is also part-time law enforcement for the Karuk tribe. The fifth scent, which was laid at the same time, I presume to be the pilot.”

  That hadn’t been in the information Leslie had left with them.

  “Maybe the older scent is Dr. Connors, then. No one else has been here in a while,” Anna said. “Shouldn’t there have been people looking?”

  “For what?” Charles asked. “They know there was a settlement here and Dr. Connors’s father is missing. But no one else has been reported missing—they are only gone. Law enforcement investigated this site thoroughly and found no signs of violence. They are looking for Dr. Connors Senior as well as the people who had mail at the drop box in Happy Camp—which is the nearest established town—but that is best done electronically. They don’t think there is anything else examining the site can teach them.”

  Anna nodded. The report had said they’d found no signs of violence. No signs of rapid departure, though some personal property had been left behind, along with fourteen permanent structures, three yurts, and evidence of tents.

  “If this were on federal or tribal lands, they’d have come back and cleaned up,” Charles added.

  “But it belongs to Leah,” Anna said. “So it is out of their jurisdiction.”

  Charles nodded.

  “I do have a question, though,” she said. “With all of the runes scrawled over the forest around here, why aren’t there any legends of Viking settlements in Northern California? Like the ones in Newfoundland or Minnesota?”

  “The one in Newfoundland is real,” Charles observed seriously, though Anna had been joking. “And no one has seen the runes here.”

  She’d missed something. She frowned at him. “After the first one—the goldfish below Ford’s musician—I saw several hundred runes. They aren’t exactly unobtrusive.”

  He laughed—which was distracting, because he was beautiful when he laughed, especially with the edge of gold gleaming in his eyes.

  “A goldfish?” Charles’s amusement bled into his voice. �
��It’s called Othala, though I see how you’d think it looks like a goldfish.”

  “The goldfish with the musician on top,” agreed Anna smugly, because she enjoyed making Charles laugh. “But seriously, there were runes all over the place. How could anyone miss them?”

  “Witchcraft,” said Charles. “Someone warded the trail—that’s what all those runes were. I doubt most people would even have noticed the first one before they found themselves wandering off somewhere else.”

  “That’s why you picked the trail,” Anna said. “Was there magic?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know why I picked it. It just felt right. But it stood to reason there must be a trail of some sort. One of the things missing from the report Goldstein and Fisher left for us was a note of how the people who lived in Wild Sign traveled back to civilization, which they obviously did, because they had a post office box—a real post office box—in Happy Camp. Law enforcement used a helicopter to get here. Dr. Connors’s daughter either has magic of some sort or she found a different way in. I …” He shrugged. “We are not what it was guarding against, so it let us in.”

  “What were they hiding from?” Anna asked. “The people at Wild Sign, I mean. Do you think it found them? And maybe that’s what happened to them? Do you feel anything here?” She couldn’t help a little shiver as she glanced around, looking for a nonexistent threat. She knew it wasn’t there, because if there had been a threat, Charles would be more concerned.

  Charles, ignoring her wariness, shrugged. “Other witches? The warding was all white magic—and laid by more than one person. And there is one thing white witches fear more than anything else.”

  “Black witches,” said Anna. All witches started out as white. A white witch drew her power from within herself. A gray witch drew power from the suffering of others, from other people’s pain—but not from unwilling victims. A black witch tortured and killed for power—and white witches were their favorite victims.