Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(32)

“Charles?” Anna said, her voice thin.

He knelt beside her to see what she’d found: the top of a small skull, suspiciously round. A shape more common among humans than dogs.

Gently, he unearthed the rounded skull, Anna tense beside him. He couldn’t help the sigh of relief he let out when he turned it over to see the skull supported sharp canine teeth. He kissed the top of her head.

“Chihuahua,” he said. “And that makes eighteen.”

She took a deep breath. “Someone needs to dig through these,” she said. “If they killed their pets . . .”

“I’ll do it,” Tag said. “While you and Charles go through the rest of the camp.” He reached down and held out his hand; Anna took it and let him pull her to her feet. “Come on. I have something else to show you.”

He tugged her after him without releasing her hand. Charles couldn’t tell if Tag was trying to comfort her—or himself.

Charles rose, but instead of following them, he raised his head and drew in a deep breath, letting Brother Wolf sort through the information the air held. Outside of the normal scents of a forest, he detected the faint trace of witchcraft lingering all around Wild Sign, though that was more intuition than scent. There was acrid smoke from distant fires.

Finally, he attended to the subtle scent he’d been catching the whole time they’d been there. He thought it had been strengthening every hour they stayed, but it was difficult to be certain. Like the feel of witchcraft, it was not quite something he could smell.

He waited until Tag and Anna were farther away and tried again. This time he was sure it was stronger than before—and not as unfamiliar as he had thought.

Unbidden, he saw Leah as she dismounted from her blue-eyed horse once more. He’d been close enough, holding his da’s horse next to Leah’s, that he’d caught an unfamiliar and unpleasant scent—an odor he had not perceived with his nose.

Had it really been the same? Or was he trying to find threads between what had happened to Leah and what had happened here at Wild Sign? He wasn’t sure he could trust his memory of a trace so old. But Brother Wolf was sure it was the same . . . and Brother Wolf also thought they had let their charges get too far away if there was a possibility of danger.

He hurried after Anna and Tag, who had started back down the trail. He slanted a glance at the sky. They would stay another hour, he decided. He wanted to get them away from this place before the scent grew much stronger.





CHAPTER





5


A quarter mile along the trail they came upon a sign that read Here there be Music. Charles was becoming quite fond of the signs scattered around the settlement with abandon. He wondered if the sign maker had intended a large-scale pun on the name of the town.

Here there be signs, thought Brother Wolf with amused agreement. Signs in the Wild.

Brother Wolf had not spoken to him in words before they had found Anna. He was pretty sure it was because Brother Wolf didn’t trust Anna to read the images he’d used to communicate with Charles.

Our da always regretted he didn’t take the time to learn our mother’s tongue, Brother Wolf told him unexpectedly. He always wondered what stories she would have told him, what thoughts of hers he will never know. If he could have talked her out of dying had he been able to argue with her more effectively. I chose not to make the same mistake.

Charles wondered how Brother Wolf knew that, because he was sure his da had never said so much in his hearing. Not that he remembered, anyway.

Given the sign, Charles wasn’t entirely surprised when the trail dropped through a copse of trees and ended in an amphitheater. Most of the basin was natural, a trick of the regional geology that backed the flat clearing with stone cliff faces to reflect sound on three sides.

But it wasn’t untouched by human hands. Nature had never gathered all of the seat-sized boulders into a circle. They weren’t large boulders; a strong human could have rolled them, or they could have used the four-wheeler he’d seen signs of. He wondered absently if they’d taken the machine with them or if it was somewhere around here, hidden in the forest, even as he registered that some of those stones had been there much longer than three years. Had Leah’s people moved them? Had there been a Native tribe here at one time?

The tree stumps had been moved here during the time of Wild Sign, though; he could tell by the chain saw marks. The stumps had been used to fill in the gaps between rocks, as well as to form the bottom half of the arrangement, so there was a full circle of crude seating. Wild Sign folk, at least, had not used the area to perform before an audience; they’d used it to perform for themselves.

The amphitheater alone would have been interesting enough for Tag to bring them here. But he’d had a better reason—Charles understood why he’d wanted them to see it rather than explaining. The impact was startling.

Tag had stopped beside Charles, waiting until Charles looked at him with a raised eyebrow before speaking.

“I said it was weird,” Tag said, and Charles reflected that Tag was a musician, too. He’d understood the meaning of what he’d found here.

Instruments, battered by months of wind and weather, lay where their owners had left them. Guitars, a couple of violins, at least one bodhran, and a tarnished flute were balanced on the sitting stones. What looked like the remains of a bagpipe were strewn across the ground, with grass growing thick around them.