Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(29)

He opened the waste container. “Empty,” he said.

“It looks like they cleaned up,” Anna said, moving on to the bedroom area. “It looks ready for the next set of guests.” She peered into one of the four hampers lined along the wall. “Except they left all of their clothing.”

There was a small bookshelf stuffed with books. The bottom shelf was filled with children’s books, the next two with well-loved paperbacks—but the top shelf held treasures. Anna pulled out a battered copy of Chambers’s The King in Yellow, which proved to be an 1895 edition. She slid it back and pulled out The Outsider and Others by H. P. Lovecraft. She thought it was a first printing, but she didn’t know enough to be sure. There were maybe a half dozen decrepit copies of the old pulp magazine Weird Tales from the nineteen thirties; each of them was dated in black marker scrawled on its clear plastic wrapping.

At Charles’s quiet hum, Anna looked over to see him stopped by a small folding table, his face intent, nostrils flaring.

“She left her tarot deck,” Charles said neutrally, and Anna noticed a thicker-than-normal deck of cards among the other objects on the table.

“The decks are usually highly personal, right?” Anna asked, joining Charles. Her human nose wasn’t keen enough to smell anything more than that the items on the table did indeed belong to one of the people who had lived here. But if Charles said it was a woman’s tarot deck, she trusted it was so. “Is it something she’d have left behind?”

“That depends upon the witch. This doesn’t feel like a witch’s personal deck—those sometimes are almost animate.” He touched the deck and shook his head.

He surveyed the room with a frown, turning in a slow circle. Anna, not knowing what he was looking for, stayed back. Then he glanced up.

She followed his gaze to the ceiling. The ceiling of a yurt consisted of wooden rafters fit into a central ring, which had the same sort of essential importance to a yurt a keystone had for a stone arch—it was the single item making the whole structure work. In the other yurts Anna had seen, the ring had been just that—a plain laminate wooden ring. This yurt’s ring was a series of three rings, which looked more like a wheel.

“That,” she said finally, “is really beautiful.”

Like the door, the rings forming the wheel were carved. Leaves wound around and through the spokes of the wheel, and little carved animals peered out in a way that reminded Anna of the raccoon on the door. The smallest ring and the largest were inscribed with runic symbols.

“They would never have left this behind of their own free will,” said Charles solemnly. He held up a hand toward the wheel and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened his eyes, he said, “This wheel has been used by generations of white witches, each leaving a blessing for her descendants.” He held up a hand, fingers splayed. “I didn’t feel it when we first came in because it is sleeping.”

“What does that mean?” Anna asked.

He shook his head. “I have no idea. She might have shielded it before she left—or it might be this way because she died. But she would not have left the wheel, even if she had to leave everything else. Not unless there was simply no time to take the yurt down. But they took time to clean the composting toilets.”

“Well.” Anna sighed and followed Charles out of the yurt. “We didn’t really think that they left willingly, did we?”

Charles closed the door behind them, listening for the latch to drop back into its bracket. He put a hand on the door and whispered, “Peace to those who sleep.”

“Found a few things,” said Tag, striding toward them. At some point he’d changed back to human. He’d dressed but was barefoot, having declined to carry the weight of his boots for the trip. He ran around the forest at home without shoes a lot, too.



* * *



*

CHARLES FOLLOWED BEHIND Anna and Tag as they headed over to the post office. Tag walked with energy, bouncing around like a puppy as he questioned Anna and responding to her story of their explorations with exuberant gestures. A person, Charles reflected with amusement, might be fooled into thinking Tag was just a big, happy sap. Around Anna, Tag was either lazing around like an overly large cat or vibrating with enthusiasm. Around Anna, Tag kept the lethal berserker tidily out of sight—because around Anna, he could.

It made Charles happy to see Tag like this. They hadn’t had to execute any of their old wolves since Anna had come—and some of those old wolves were almost stable again. Tag was only one example, and not the most striking. The pack was better with Anna in it, in ways far more subtle than he or his da had expected. They had hoped for calm—they had not expected happy.

There was a battered old blue canvas bag up against the wall of the post office. Tag surveyed it with an air of smug accomplishment.

“Mailbag,” he told them, then gave them a sheepish look. “Or at least, there are letters in it. I don’t think that it is an official US mailbag.”

Charles gave him a look. Brother Wolf thought Tag had found something else, too. Tag caught his eye and nodded. Yes. The bag was only the first of Tag’s discoveries.

The mailbag had been out in the elements for months, and it carried only eight letters—all of them from the inhabitants of Wild Sign. Tag, without the pesky scruples normal people were burdened with, had opened all of them, looked through the lot, and stuffed them back inside so he could present them singly to Anna.