Burn Bright (Alpha & Omega #5)(36)

He’d have burned Anna’s past for her if he could have—but memories are not so easily set alight as a cabin.

? ? ?

ANNA AND CHARLES left after most of the others. There were still flames, so five of the wolves stayed—and would stay until the last ember was out.

Charles got into the passenger seat, but before Anna started the car, he put a hand on her arm.

“Wait,” he said, then pulled a folded paper out of his pocket. “Asil and I found this in the bedroom while we were looking for things that might blow up the mountain if they caught fire.”

She spread it on the seat, but it was too dark to read. Before she could turn on the cab light, Charles illuminated the page with the much dimmer light of his cell phone. Kara had brought both of their cell phones with her. Hiding Hester’s home was no longer a directive; if they couldn’t find a blazing house fire, the feds were welcome to track their phones. It would be a long time before anyone lived near this clearing again.

She read it and absorbed the implications. Hadn’t she just been thinking that there was no way any member of the pack would betray the others? It looked like maybe she’d been wrong.

“Traitor,” she said slowly. “Do you know how we have been betrayed?”

“For a start,” Charles said. “someone told our enemy where Hester lived. And probably the timing of the attack means that they knew Da was not here. I’ve been thinking about other things, too, since I found this note. Maybe Gerry Wallace didn’t go out looking for someone to finance his weirdly complex assassination plot against Da. Maybe someone recruited him. Last winter, someone fed a lot of information about Adam’s pack to the rogue CANTRIP agents.”

“Right,” said Anna after a moment. “Jonesy left this for you?”

Charles nodded. “It looks like it. After Hester died.”

“She could talk to him, mind to mind, the way Brother Wolf and I do?” Anna asked.

Charles shrugged. “I don’t know—though Tag might. But it sounds as if she had some way of communicating with him.”

Anna nodded slowly. “She told him some of it before they managed to kill her. He tried to tell us what she’d want us to know.”

She started the truck up, and he turned off the light.

Still thinking about the implications, she said, “Can you keep an eye out on the phone reception? I want to send a photo of the dead man to both of the Chicago Alphas to see if they recognize him, too. Maybe they can give us a name.”

“All right,” he agreed.

They drove awhile in silence. The track was not made better by being negotiated at night. “Hester knew,” said Anna. “She knew who it was—or they thought she knew. That’s why they killed her. So she couldn’t tell us.”

“That’s what I think,” agreed Charles.

“Is it someone in the pack?” Anna’s stomach was tight at the thought. These were her family as much as her birth family had been. Some of them might be difficult or horrifying—but they were still family. “Or is it one of the wildlings?”

“Jonesy was notably unhelpful in that,” said Charles apologetically. “I suppose that ‘us’ could mean the fae, but in this context, that is unlikely bordering on ridiculous.”

“Okay,” said Anna. “How many wildlings are there? I know three, and I’ve heard of a couple more.”

Bran kept the wildlings away from the pack. Part of it was they were dangerous and needed to be isolated—and part of it was that a lot of them were very old. Very old werewolves tended to collect enemies. As far as she knew, only Bran himself, Leah, and Charles knew all of them. They weren’t kept completely isolated, and some of them sometimes joined in the hunt—but no one spoke about them when they did.

“Eighteen,” Charles said. “Now that Hester and Jonesy are dead.”

She made an involuntary noise of surprise. “That’s a lot more than I thought. But it’s still a reasonable suspect pool.” She did not want to think about its being someone she knew.

He nodded. “Asil knows—he was there when I found the note. But I don’t want to tell anyone else until we know more. Here.”

“What?”

“There’s reception here.”

She stopped the truck and uploaded the photo and an explanatory note. Her phone had a contact list that included all of the Alphas under Bran’s rule, so she didn’t have to ask Charles for the number.

“Jonesy said that they asked her about the wildlings,” Anna said, once they were moving again. “If their agent was one of the wildlings, why would they have questions about them?”

Charles grunted. It was his “I’m puzzled, too” grunt. But then he said, “The wildlings don’t all know each other. Some of them do, but a lot of them are very isolated because they want to be. Or they need to be. Most of our wildlings change their name when they come here—Hester was an exception. Collectively, I expect that there is a lot of knowledge that our wildlings have that exists nowhere else on the planet. I can think of four things, just offhand, that would start a frenzied hunt if anyone knew about them.”

“Or maybe it’s an item—like all the things you brought out of Jonesy’s house.”

Charles nodded. “Of what we found, only the sword would really attract interest by itself.” He made an unhappy noise. “There were a couple of other things, too, I guess. But even without those, the whole collection represents a fair battery of power for someone who knows how to release or use it.”