Burn Bright (Alpha & Omega #5)(70)

“Which situation?” she asked. “Wellesley’s unexpected curse? Missing werewolf? Or bodies at the missing werewolf’s house?”

She couldn’t find it in herself to be as concerned about the bodies as she would have been before Hester was killed. They could have been random hikers who had gotten way, way, way off the beaten path and run into a crazy werewolf. But she was making the assumption that they were the enemy because cooler heads than hers were considering other possibilities.

“What are they trying to accomplish?” Charles said. “It’s bad to have an enemy with the kinds of resources these people apparently have—but it is infinitely worse to have crazy people as enemies.”

“Evidently,” Anna said, “you also consider it a certainty that the bodies that Leah found belonged to our enemy and not Canadian hikers who have been wandering around the mountains lost for a few months.”

He started to say something, then closed his mouth. He gave her an assessing look. “Why Canadian?”

She held up a finger. “Local hikers would figure out that downhill and south mean safety, uphill and north just gets worse. Downhill and south would take them away from our territory.” She held up a second finger, “Casual hikers would have fallen down and died before they ever reached anywhere near here—I don’t know exactly where Jericho lives because I’ve never heard his name before, but I’m assuming it’s in this general direction.”

“And lost Canadian hikers are the only ones who could get here by going downhill and south,” he said. He grinned at her. “It’s not quite true, we run hikers out of our territory all the time, and there’s a lot of federal land between us and Canada.”

“And,” Anna said, holding up a third finger, “Canadian hikers would be too polite to end up as bodies. Thus the bodies must not belong to random hikers.”

He gave a shout of laughter. “I love you. I came to the same conclusion by a different path. I’m pretty sure the bodies at Jericho’s belong to the same group who went after Hester and Jonesy.”

She looked at him. “How did you get there?”

“There are no such things as coincidences. The last time one of our wildlings interacted with a normal human was six years ago. Now we have two in two days.”

“Leah didn’t say how old the bodies were,” Anna commented. “When was the last time someone heard from Jericho?”

He shrugged. “Da has kept me busy with other things. I haven’t talked to any of the wildlings since last winter.”

The Marrok used Charles, Asil, and a couple other of the older wolves to check on the wildlings once a month or so as soon as the snow flew, saving a few of them to visit himself. Not that the wildlings couldn’t take care of themselves, most of them—it was what they would do to take care of themselves that worried Bran.

“Why do you think going after Jericho makes no sense?” Anna asked. “They went after Hester. What makes him different?”

“They have werewolves, so they don’t just need genetic samples.” A deer stepped onto the road, and he braked, slewing the big rig sideways in an effort to miss the doe. He stopped about three feet from the deer, who had frozen.

“Go on, little sister,” he told her. “There is no one hungry today.”

Released from whatever instinct had caused her to plant her feet and remain still, she bounced up the hill and into the trees.

Anna looked behind them, but there was no sign of Asil and Sage.

“There are several ways to get there from Wellesley’s,” said Charles, as he put his foot down on the gas again. “I expect Asil hopes to beat us there.”

The race is on, thought Anna, but she didn’t say it. It was either a guy thing or a dominant-werewolf thing. Either way, Charles and Asil would enjoy the challenge.

“So why does Hester make more sense than Jericho?” she asked.

“Jericho is an atomic bomb waiting to go off. Questioning Jericho makes no sense at all.”

“I’m not familiar with him,” Anna said. “But if he was on Leah’s list—didn’t she have the safer wolves?”

“Jericho was on Sage and my list,” Charles said. “One of the dangerous ones. I don’t know what Leah is doing there.”

“If they are recruiting,” said Anna, thoughtfully, “they are being stupid about who they are choosing.”

“Lethally so,” agreed Charles.

“The only thing that makes sense from our end is that they want to cause chaos while Bran is away. But even that doesn’t quite work,” she said. “Because then all the surveillance equipment at Hester’s is a lot of risk and money for an end that is easier to reach different ways. If they have a helicopter, they could just drop something nasty on your father’s house from the air. More effect and less risk.”

“They want something,” Charles agreed.

“Maybe Jericho will know what they wanted,” she said.

Charles made a noise.

“That wasn’t a hopeful grunt,” she said.

“Jericho can barely communicate on a good day,” Charles told her. “If there are bodies around, it isn’t a good day.”

“We don’t have enough information to make sense of what they want,” said Anna.