Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(49)

Dr. Connors was staring at the picnic table she’d promised with an unhappy frown. Anna got it. Picnic tables were fine for eating with friends—but they were a little close quarters for strangers. Anna didn’t think Charles or Tag would willingly sit at them the way they were intended anyway, because the table would get in the way of their rising to their feet in case of an attack.

Charles walked to the far side of the table and picked up the bench, carrying it around and placing it opposite the other bench with considerably more distance between them than the mere table had offered. He then made a soundless gesture that invited Dr. Connors to pick her bench.

She took the one nearest the table, Anna and Charles sat on the other—and Tag sprawled out on the grass, as a henchman, presumably, would.

Anna dug into her purse and brought out the letters. Charles had taken photos of them, so they had electronic copies. She handed all of the originals and their envelopes to Dr. Connors. Anna had to half stand to stretch across the distance. Dr. Connors took the letters carefully and set them beside her on the bench, tucking them under one leg to hold them against any chance wind. She made no move to look at them.

If Anna had been easily intimidated by awkward atmospheres, she would have been totally tongue-tied by now. But she’d been playing her cello solo since elementary school, and she’d performed before tougher audiences than a grumpy, antisocial white witch who, according to the FBI report on her, spent most of her time in the jungles of South America. The FBI hadn’t known about the white witch part, of course.

Anna hadn’t caught the scent herself, but Brother Wolf had whispered White witch as soon as the wind blew past them as they had been walking around the cabin.

“We”—Anna gestured at herself, her husband, and Tag, who was playing with a strand of grass—“are werewolves.” Which was something she wouldn’t have told Dr. Connors without Brother Wolf’s information.

The only reason Anna knew she’d scared Dr. Connors was the change in her scent. Anna decided to let Dr. Connors believe she’d kept her reaction to herself. So Anna didn’t offer reassurances.

“Around two hundred years ago,” she said, “one of our kind encountered a being in the mountains northeast of here. He thought it had been killed, but he acquired the land, just in case. Ownership has remained with our pack. And the thing—we have heard it referred to as the Singer in the Woods—was inactive so far as we knew from that time until this. A few days ago, the FBI landed on our doorstep to tell us that there had been an entire town built on our land. Some damn fools apparently decided that a parcel of land in the mountains that was neither federal land nor tribal was a wonderful place to build an off-grid town. They were, as far as we could tell, mostly white witches like you.”

She let the words hit Dr. Connors and then said gently, “And those foolish witches woke it up.”

“I don’t know about all of that,” said Dr. Connors, sounding suddenly weary. “I am out of the country for months at a time, Ms. Cornick. The last trip should have been two months and turned into ten for—” She shook her head. “For reasons that have no bearing on today. By the time I got back, my father had been out of contact for months. That’s not like him. Nor is writing to me every day for the better part of a week. He writes a letter to me every week on Wednesday. My mother, his ex-wife, gets a letter once a month. My little brother gets a letter written on each Thursday.”

She raised her chin and stared straight ahead, swallowed visibly, and said, “Got. We all got letters.”

“In code,” said Anna neutrally.

“In code,” Dr. Connors agreed.

“We are here to take care of whatever is up in those mountains,” Anna told her. “But it would really help if we knew what happened in Wild Sign. We don’t know what we are dealing with. My mother-in-law—who was here two centuries ago—only remembers bits and pieces. Those letters are possibly our only eyewitness accounts to a threat we need to neutralize.”

“I don’t know anything about a Singer,” Dr. Connors said. “I sometimes stayed with my dad for a few weeks, but I had never been to Wild Sign until I hiked in looking for him and found the place deserted.”

“At this point,” said Charles, “we don’t know that all of those people are dead or if they are just missing.”

It was apparent in his voice that he didn’t think they were missing. Anna caught Dr. Connors’s flinch.

Charles caught it, too, and his tone was gentler as he said, “We need to find out what happened to them. So far, your father’s letters look like they might be the best clue we have, but anything you know about Wild Sign could be useful.”

Dr. Connors’s jaw firmed.

Anna said, “We can do things that the sheriff’s department cannot. We have the money and the personnel to throw at this investigation. Your best chance to find out what happened to your father is to help us.”

Dr. Connors looked down at the letters, as if reorienting herself. “They are in code because his family has been hunting him since he ran away at sixteen. Off and on.” She looked at Charles. “Connors is not the name he was born with. His family is one of the families. I won’t tell you which one. If it was black witches who found them up there, I imagine you’ll figure it out. If it wasn’t, I won’t speak their name where anything might hear me.”