Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(60)

“Something happened in Wild Sign,” Anna said. “What power did they traffic with?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Wild Sign was that place she lived in the mountains.” He sounded a little worried—as if he needed her reassurance that he’d remembered it correctly.

Anna nodded. “That’s right.”

He rubbed the back of his wrist with the top of the other, as if there was something bothering him. A vague look crossed his face, but when he spoke, he sounded lucid enough. “They met a being there . . . a primordial spirit of some sort. Carrie called it the Singer in the Woods—which is a stupid name.”

He watched her with suspicion, apparently waiting for her opinion.

“It sounds more like a description than a name,” she said.

He grunted and gave a sharp nod. “A pretty name,” he said. “And it made them think it was a friendly creature.”

“It wasn’t,” Anna said.

“They bargained with it,” he sneered. “Bargain with demons, bargain with the fae. That’s usually fatal, too, but at least you know the rules. They treated this Singer creature as if it followed the rules of the fae.”

“What was the bargain?” Anna asked the old man.

“Power,” he said. “And safety. You know what life is like for a white witch. Carrie might as well have painted a target on her back and held up a sign saying ‘All-you-can-eat buffet.’” He scowled, fisting his hand. “It promised them a safe place to live, free from being hunted.” Green’s face contorted. “A second bargain was that if they fed it, it would give them power.”

He looked off at the pond—or maybe at Underwood—or possibly at nothing.

“Fed it with music?” asked Anna, remembering what Leah had said, also remembering what it had felt like to play music in the amphitheater.

“What?” he asked, turning his head to frown at her. “What are you on about? Who are you? Where is my nurse?” With each question, he became more querulous.



* * *



*

CHARLES KNEW THAT Carrie Green’s dependent—be he father, brother, uncle, or lover—was a witch. It had only been a possibility until he put his feet on the asphalt of the parking lot, but at that moment he knew. This was a place of witchcraft.

The witches who ruled here must have done something to disguise it. He could tell that neither Anna nor Tag felt anything. But to him the very ground vibrated.

It was a prison, he thought, looking up at the carefully beautiful facade of the “assisted living” facility. Witches were practical people; they would not waste the power of family members just because those people could no longer be left loose to roam freely.

This place was, to the witches, what his da’s pack was for the werewolves. The difference was that his da didn’t feed on their old wolves. He’d heard rumors of places like this, but the witches knew how to keep secrets. He’d never managed to run one down.

When Underwood came to greet them, Charles let Anna take point, leaving him to guard her back. He was happier when they moved on to the garden. He was pretty sure that if they wanted to leave, the walls of the garden, spelled to keep witches in, would not be effective against a pair of werewolves.

He also let the spell be that Underwood had laid upon Anna, designed, Charles was certain, to bind her—and thus him—to talk to Underwood after they spoke to Daniel Green. If he had dispelled Underwood’s will, it would only have warned him that he was not facing someone helpless against witchcraft. The Cornick name should have told the good doctor that much, and if it had not . . . well, Charles was happy to let his enemies make mistakes.

If he’d been thinking clearly when Anna had called, he would have had Anna use “Smith” or something else. But at that time, he hadn’t yet found the grimoires that proved Carrie Green was a witch. Just because there were witches in Wild Sign didn’t mean everyone living there had been a witch. Even knowing that Carrie had been a witch, until Charles had put his feet on the ground in the parking lot, he hadn’t been certain that Daniel Green was a witch, too.

He still should have cautioned Anna to use a pseudonym.

Should have, would have. Matters are as they are, snorted Brother Wolf, impatient with Charles for trying to see how they could have worked harder to avoid conflict.

Brother Wolf enjoyed conflict, and his happy anticipation lingered in the back of Charles’s mind up until the moment Charles got a good scent off the old man in the wheelchair.

Charles couldn’t tell if the instant white-hot rage was all his or if some of it belonged to his wolf brother. He had long ago thought that his vow to hunt down and kill this witch was going to go unfulfilled.

Most witchborn men were far less powerful than their female counterparts. The man Charles had known as Daniel Erasmus was one of the exceptions.

Back in the 1980s, the Wasatch Pack had been subject to a series of attacks that had started out so subtly it had taken weeks for their Alpha, a cunning old lobo named Aaron Simpleman, to figure out they were attacks. Only when Simpleman’s second, a wolf named Fin Donnelly, was found dead in his house with no sign of what killed him did the old wolf call the Marrok for help. There were, he’d told the Marrok, witches trying to take over his territory.

Charles had been sent down to find out what was going on. At that point the assumption was that the witches wanted a base for a drug operation, as Salt Lake had been experiencing an explosion of drug-related arrests. What he and Aaron had uncovered was a web of witches engaged in the trafficking of minors—such a clean term for what they’d found.