Anna shook her head. “I am saddened by your innocent belief that a hundred dollars would keep him out if he was the type of man who would steal things from one of the storage lockers.”
Charles smiled, not unhappy to be caught out. “Then let’s just say that I was sorry I got his hopes up.”
They rounded the corner of the row of units where Carrie’s was, and Anna stumbled to a halt.
“Anna?”
She didn’t look at him but stared down the gravel road at Tag, who was loading his cauldron into the SUV. She reached out and grabbed Charles’s arm.
Honestly alarmed now, Charles said, “Anna? What’s wrong?”
She shivered, took a deep breath, and said, “Maybe a bit of a panic attack.” She took her hand off him and put it into her pocket, where a stray piece of paper rustled unhappily. “I’m glad I’m not going back to Wild Sign.”
“Anna?”
She shook her head and gave him a wobbly smile. “I think I’m just on edge.”
They finished packing the storage unit, and Anna seemed to recover from whatever had bothered her. She teased Tag about his cauldron as she helped them get the last of Carrie’s things back into the unit. By the time they were headed for the hotel, Charles was convinced that Anna was fine.
Tag and Anna carried in the items they’d collected from the storage unit and Charles added them to the collection of grimoires. He sent the other two out for a walk while he reinstated his safeguards. It was more difficult than it had been the last time, which he found worrying.
They are bored, said Brother Wolf in answer to Charles’s silent grumbles.
“Who?” asked Charles.
The grimoires, said Brother Wolf. They want to come out and play. Charles made very sure his wards were effective.
* * *
THE BED SQUEAKED again and Anna giggled. She hadn’t noticed that the bed squeaked last night, but once she noticed, she couldn’t quit hearing it. After a moment—during which she failed to control herself—Charles rolled away. She worried for a minute that she’d offended him. A giggling partner is hardly flattering when you are in the middle of lovemaking. But then he reached out and pulled her all the way on top of him, while she still snickered helplessly. He held out until the bed squeaked again, and then he was laughing, too.
Eventually she caught her breath. Charles’s laughter was rarer than blue diamonds and more precious. She wouldn’t have felt prouder of herself if she’d won Olympic gold.
She crawled up his body while he was still laughing and said, “I guess I can deal with three in the bed. Me.” She gave him an openmouthed kiss and felt the laughter flee his body in favor of something more urgent.
“You.” She undulated. At the increased pressure, every muscle in his body tightened, and she felt the joy of being desired by him.
She almost forgot where she was going with this, but managed to hold on to her self-control. She leaned down and dropped her hips abruptly. He gasped—and the bed let out a shrill complaint. “And the bed.”
She sank limply to his chest and started giggling again.
“Fair enough,” he growled, rolling over, but there was a quiet joy in his eyes that made her want to bask in his gaze.
“But,” he said, “I draw the line at three of us.” As if to prove his words a lie, his eyes brightened with Brother Wolf’s laughing spirit.
And then Charles made sure that Anna didn’t have the breath to tease—or, after a minute or two, the desire to do anything but soften for him. He was a man who knew what to do with hands and mouth and skin—and he was not satisfied until she had much better things to pay attention to than a squeaking bed.
The end result left her limp, facedown on the bed, her hand in his, and the bed squeaking softly with the force of their breathing.
“You,” she said, hearing the roughness of the past few minutes in her voice, “are dangerous.”
“How so?” he asked—which was a ridiculous response from the Marrok’s hit man, possibly the most feared and dangerous werewolf in North America.
She couldn’t help but laugh again as she rolled over—and the bed squeaking didn’t help with that. She had to let go of his hand to complete the maneuver, and felt ridiculously bereft until she rolled up against his damp side.
“To my heart,” she said seriously. “To my soul.”
He pulled her tight against him. “I will defend your heart and your soul with everything in me.”
She felt her eyelids close even as her mouth turned up. “I know,” she said. “Me, too.”
“Even if you insist on inviting squeaky beds to our lovemaking,” he murmured as she drifted off.
THE WIND WHISTLED outside, a forerunner to what felt like a fearsome storm. The energy overhead was wild and untamed. There would be lightning and thunder with this storm, she thought.
It was time.
She slipped out of bed, half aware of the big hand sliding off her hip. She felt hollow, as if there were nothing inside her except the music.
“Not Pachelbel’s Canon,” she said out loud. It felt like it was supposed to be defiant. But no one answered.
She dressed, not worrying about noise. No one would hear her. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that it was time for her to leave.
She pulled on clothing appropriate for a long hike in the mountains: jeans, hiking boots, shirt—and over that a red flannel shirt that was way too big for her and smelled like home. She fished the keys out of her purse but left the purse itself on the desk. She closed the hotel room door behind her with a feeling of accomplishment.
She got into the SUV and it purred to life. She smiled happily and petted the dashboard. How lovely to have the means at her disposal to complete her task. The smile stayed on her lips as she drove into Happy Camp.
She pulled over at the snow cone stand, which was dark and locked. But that was okay, too. She just had to wait a bit.
He knocked at her window and she opened the door.
“Hello, darling,” said Zander, leaning over to kiss her mouth, one hand at the back of her neck.
That made her stomach tighten—and not in a good way. She stiffened under his hold.
“Shh,” he urged, and kissed her again.
It still felt wrong.
“We’ll give it a little time, shall we?” he suggested, and she could have wept in gratitude. She wanted to make him happy. She just … she just needed time.
He released her and gave her an odd smile. “Anna,” he said. “How old are you?”
That was a stupid question, she thought. Who greets someone with a how-old-are-you?
“Jailbait,” she said primly, to punish him.
He laughed. He had a beautiful laugh. She liked to make … well, it had to be him, right? She liked to make … people laugh.
“How old is that?” he asked.
“Seventeen,” she said.
His eyes were soft and deep. Gentle. He was everything she’d ever dreamed of, she thought. Why was there some part of her that wanted to run? He wouldn’t hurt her. He wasn’t the kind of man to be afraid of. Not like … She couldn’t quite complete that thought, and it made her worry.
“Of course,” he said, reaching out to smooth her forehead with a thumb. It seemed as though her worries fled before his touch like birds flushing before a wolf. “Jailbait indeed.”
“How old are you?” she asked, because turnabout was fair play.
“Older than you,” he said with a wry smile. “Here, move over. I’m doing the driving tonight.”
She climbed over the center console obediently and put the seat belt on. She pressed her face into the leather and inhaled. It smelled of mint and musk and … something familiar. Something safe.
“What are you doing?” he asked her, a smile in his voice.
“It smells good,” she said, feeling as though she was being held, warmth against a storm. She pulled up the flannel shirt and found herself
huddling down deep. Some part of her was lying low, and that part thought that the shirt was a way to hide.
“Are you cold?” asked Zander. He turned up the heat and then started forward without waiting for her answer. “I thought you might bring something waterproof. It’s going to rain tonight.”
“I don’t mind the rain,” she said truthfully, pressing her cheek against the window and staring out into the darkness. Her right leg began bouncing with her growing agitation. It was probably the storm that had her tense. There was such energy in the air.
The dash lights hollowed out his cheeks and hid his eyes. For a moment he looked like a stranger. She averted her eyes and saw the big Sasquatch statue.
“Do you think,” she said, because it felt like the right question, “that Sasquatches are as big as that statue?”
“I’ve never seen one,” he said shortly. He lied.
“I have.” Which was a lie, too, right? But it didn’t feel like a lie. She had never been in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest before.
What was she doing here? In this car with this beautiful stranger? She made a sound like a whine. There was something wrong. She wanted … not her dad. She wanted … She reached for the door handle, though they were going faster than the thirty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit.
He started singing. There were words to his song, but they weren’t in English. Or any other language she’d ever heard.
“Not Pachelbel,” she said as her hand dropped away from the door.
He didn’t quit singing, but she could hear the smile in his voice.
No. This song that he had been working on did not have Pachelbel’s chord progression at all. She wasn’t sure why she’d been so certain that it had. Her hands moved, as if she were trying to play on her cello, though she wasn’t certain if she wanted to play a harmony to his song—or Pachelbel.
Bereft of cello, she hummed its part in Pachelbel’s Canon—which was boring. She had done it so often that she felt as though the notes were engraved on her bones. People liked to listen to songs they knew, her orchestra teacher used to say. We’ll give our audience a few favorites among the unfamiliar pieces.
Everyone knew Pachelbel.
Zander stopped singing. “Anna, that’s rude,” he chided her. “Don’t sing something else while someone is singing.”
The tone of his voice set her back up. She had to remind herself that he was right. She pressed her hand on the glass as they drove past a hotel/campground on the river, and felt a sharp longing. She wished that she were sitting on a rock watching the river rush by instead of encased in this car heading into the darkness. It felt suffocatingly like the blackness was going to reach out and consume her.
She wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore, she reminded herself. I’ve met plenty of scary things in the light. She heard that last part ringing in her ears in her own voice. As if she’d said it more than once.
But she had been afraid of the dark when she was seventeen. She was seventeen now, right? She couldn’t remember when she’d learned to love the night.
Zander was singing again, and this time she politely hummed along with him. She preferred Pachelbel to the new tune, which was weird. There was nothing wrong with Zander’s song, and, like many cellists, she was really very tired of Pachelbel.
But the music was soothing, and humming it made her feel better. When Zander quit singing, he asked, “So, what is your favorite subject in school?”
As she answered, she forgot that she couldn’t remember how she happened to be traveling in the dark with a stranger who didn’t feel like a stranger. Or maybe with someone familiar who felt like a stranger.
She was seventeen and headed to Northwestern in the fall, the daughter of a lawyer. Other than her mother’s death, nothing bad had ever happened to her.
That was an odd thought, too. Why did she think something bad was going to happen to her quite soon?
“Tell me about your favorite family vacation,” Zander asked. Before she could answer, he muttered, “You are obstinate, aren’t you? I’ve never had this much trouble, especially not with someone my father has already caught. It’s like everything just wants to flow off the top.”
“Like an iceberg,” agreed Anna. “There’s a lot more under the surface that you can’t see.”
“Like what?” he asked.
But she couldn’t answer him. It was a gut feeling. As if his music should slide off her. She had a big hollowness inside her head that felt denser than hollowness should feel. Something important was hidden there, something with fur and sharp teeth. She felt herself reaching toward that—
“You were going to tell me about your favorite family vacation,” Zander prompted, putting a hand on her thigh. Warmth seeped into her flesh from that hand.
“Yes,” she said hesitantly. “Um, I was about six and my brother was eight—”
And as the SUV turned off the paved road and onto a dirt track, she was lost in the feeling of lake water on bare feet and how her brother had tried and failed to teach her to skip rocks on the last vacation they’d taken as a family of four.
“That’s it,” Zander murmured. “Remember.”
Something pulled Anna’s attention away from the memory. A tug in her chest. She brought a hand up to rub at the spot, but the pressure didn’t go away.
The SUV bounced and jostled over the ground, sides and underside scraping in such a way that she was glad it was this SUV and not … not some other beloved vehicle. Some thoughts just slid away from her in a way that was distracting.
She caught the reflection of a wild animal’s eyes just past Zander’s shoulder. She lost track of her family’s vacation entirely and focused her attention on the darkness of the forest.
“Wolf,” she said.
Zander glanced quickly in the direction she was looking in, but he had to return his attention to the road. They had already passed the place where the wolf had been standing anyway.
“I don’t think so, not here,” he said with assurance. “There is a pack a fair bit south of here, and there are some in southern Oregon. But not here. You probably saw a coyote. Size can be deceptive in the dark.”
The wolf was gone from view, but Anna could feel her presence. She pressed a hand to her chest where that certainty lived. There was a wolf out there—and she was following them. It should have frightened her, but like the flannel shirt she wore, it gave her an obscure sense of comfort.
Pack.
The whispered word echoed out of that inaccessible hollowness. But she didn’t know its import. Pack what? Her carry gun was in its usual holster. Was that what that inner voice had meant?
She didn’t know how to shoot a gun.
“Anna,” Zander’s voice called her attention away from thoughts that made her worry.
“Are we there yet?” she asked cheerfully, in an effort to thank him for making her feel better.
LEAH WAS TIRED. It had dawned on her, not two hours after she’d started out for Wild Sign, that she should have taken the car. No one would have thought it unusual if she’d gone for a drive—and she’d have gotten here a lot easier.
But the need to move, the sheer strength of the summoning, had been so overwhelming. One moment she had been out running down the trail of a rabbit, and the next she’d changed direction and loped toward Wild Sign. That wasn’t the name she’d known that place by, of course. And it wasn’t exactly in the same location, either—though the amphitheater had been familiar. But she couldn’t remember what it had been, so she held on to the designations she was given.
She was hungry, too. She’d eaten such things as had come her way on her run, mostly squirrels and rabbits, though she’d driven a coyote off of a deer and feasted for a half hour, letting her body recoup its strength. Most of the time, aided by the supernatural nature of werewolf endurance and speed, and her ability to draw upon the pack energies, she’d spent running flat out.
She knew that she could not, should not, arrive this tired. She
needed to find a safe place to rest for a few hours, some food to eat, before she got any closer. She paused next to a fallen tree with a hollow under it.
She had started to burrow into the space when she became aware of the sound of an engine. Abruptly reversing direction, she shook off the dirt and looked toward the noise.
She watched the headlights bounce off trees and rocks, lighting a rough track she hadn’t noticed. The engine sounded familiar, one of the pack vehicles. Charles had taken that Suburban.
She started off toward where her trail and the track the SUV was taking would intersect. As she approached her chosen vantage point, she was still debating whether or not to approach Charles. She closed her eyes as the SUV came over a rise, shining bright lights that would ruin her night vision. But the track dropped right afterward.
As soon as the lights dimmed, she opened her eyes in time to get a good look inside the cab.
She’d expected to see Charles driving, because Tag would already have wrecked on that track, and Anna would be creeping along at a quarter of the speed the SUV was making. But the face that the dash lights illuminated behind the wheel belonged to none of them.
She froze in her tracks, her eyes briefly meeting Anna’s before the SUV’s direction made it impossible to see anything inside the vehicle.
She heard herself whine, though it wasn’t an intentional sound. She had seen the face of the driver—and she knew that the man it belonged to was nearly two hundred years dead. There was something scratching in the memories she no longer had.
She took a deep breath and cut across country to the location that she could not have pinpointed on a map but her wolf had no trouble pointing her nose toward. That would be where he was taking her.
Where her father had taken her.
Where she had been summoned to return to. Where he waited. This chapter in her life would finally have a proper ending. She wasn’t sure if the thought terrified her or left her exulted.
* * *
TAG WOKE FOR what felt like the hundredth time that night. He had slept fine out in the woods, but it had been a long, long while since he’d tried to sleep in a hotel next to a highway. Or anywhere the sound of a car was more than an occasional irritant, for that matter.
Wild Sign Page 24
