Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(51)

She glanced at her wife, her dog, the letters on the bench beside her. Then she sighed.

“You want to know about Wild Sign. Okay. About a year and a half ago, one of my dad’s people contacted him about this place in the Marble Mountains of Northern California where they’d put together a colony where they were safe from the black witches hunting them. He never told me why it was safer. I don’t think he knew when he headed out. And he never told me in any of his letters—though I could tell that he felt safe there. That’s the first time he’d felt safe since my mother killed his sister in our backyard.”

She looked at Charles, having clued in, Anna thought, to the person who was really in charge. “Do you think that there is any way he could be alive?”

“We have not found human bodies,” he told her. “Until we do, it is premature to write them off. But nearly six months is a long time to be missing.”

Anna thought about what the Angel Hills doctor had said about Daniel Green knowing that Carrie wasn’t going to be visiting anymore.

“What do you mean, human bodies?” asked Tanya. “Did you find other bodies?”

“Pets,” Anna said. “All laid out in a row. Not sacrificed—we don’t think. It didn’t have that feel. But all of them dead—cats and dogs. Eighteen that we counted. We didn’t excavate, so it is possible that we missed some.” She paused. “Did your father like old Germanic tales?”

“Kriemhild?” said Sissy. “Kriemhild is dead?” She swore. “Dad wouldn’t get a pet. He said he couldn’t keep himself safe, so he had no business taking responsibility for another being. Except for the pets, Dad never referred to anyone by name in his letters. He didn’t want to be inadvertently responsible for someone being hunted down. So Kriemhild belonged to the person he called the Opera Singer. I don’t know if she actually sang opera or just liked it.” She smiled wistfully. “My dad loved that dog.”

She wiped her eyes furtively, then continued in a brusque voice, “There was also the Family of Hellions, who were Mommy Hellion, Daddy Hellion, Hell Bringer, Doom Slayer, and Baby Demon. Baby Demon turned six in December. There was the Sign Maker. He’s deaf, I think, and was dad’s lover for a while.” She frowned defensively at the three werewolves, waiting for a reaction that didn’t come.

“I’m pretty sure that the Hellion family are—were—the Tottlefords,” she continued. “I met Malachi Tottleford the year I spent with Dad. And I met his wife and two of their children later on.” She gave a small shrug. “I would have called the bunch of them hellions, too.

“Anyway,” she continued, “the Hellion family found the place first, so Mommy and Daddy Hellion were treated as de facto leaders.” She hesitated. “I have all of the letters Dad ever sent me, but they are in storage. I won’t be able to access them until we head back home next week—we need to get back because Tanya’s teaching job resumes the following Monday. Anyway, I’ll print them off and give you copies. I don’t know that you’ll find anything in them that will help.”

“We were hopeful about the ones we brought you,” Anna said. “They seem to be mostly the same—copies of each other. Only the handwriting changes between them. If you look at them in time order, you can see it.”

Sissy pulled the letters out and looked at them. Her hands shook as she saw for herself what Anna had pointed out. After a minute, her wife put a hand on her shoulder.

“I see what you mean,” Sissy said, sliding them back into their envelopes with hands that were still unsteady. “I can’t translate them here. This is an older code we haven’t used in years—I don’t know why he switched back. If my brother still has his code key, I can get you a translation tomorrow. If not, I’ll have to go to my storage locker in Colorado and sort through boxes of stuff to find it.”

She frowned. “If you are looking for general information about the community, Tanya’s boy crush spent some time up there last fall. Dad called him Snow Cone.”

“That’s right,” Tanya said with a quick grin—though her eyes were worried. “Over on the far side of town there’s a coffee shop in a little hut. And more days than not there’s a snow cone stand. The kid—okay, I’m showing my age. He’s in his early twenties and a little different. He’s another traveler”—she gave her wife a warm smile—“like Sissy. He’s a photographer.” She held up a hand. “Wait a minute.”

She handed the dog’s leash to Sissy and trotted off to their cabin.

“He’s been traveling for years,” Sissy said. “He makes a little bit of money working as a ski instructor, fisherman, or guide. Things like that. But what he really does is take photos. He has three or four books out. I mentioned his name to an artist friend of mine, and he says he’s the real thing—and of course Tanya is a huge fan. He is apparently a well-known photographer of remote places—and a mystery himself. There are no photos of him, no biographical information.”

Anna knew of a photographer who did that. She straightened involuntarily and Charles slanted a glance at her.

“All that is calculated,” said Tanya, bearing a large coffee-table-type book under her arm. “Mysterious photographers sell better than wet-behind-the-ears kids. Like that artist—the one who sold a piece of art for over a million dollars and then it self-destructed.”