Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(25)

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.





CHAPTER





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.