Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(76)

“At least we know what happened to the pets,” Tag replied.

“Has Mercy called you back?” Anna asked.

“She says she’ll try, but Coyote doesn’t carry a cell phone and is usually disinclined to be useful.”

“So no help there,” translated Tag.

“Not yet,” Charles said as he read the letter a second time, looking for anything that might be of use. “Mercy will figure out how to get in touch with him. After that, it’s up to Coyote.”

He folded the pieces of paper, and, as Anna had, he put them in his back pocket. “We should get back to work here.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Anna asked.

Charles shook his head. “Carrie is pretty good at hiding her magic. I don’t think you’d be able to find anything unless you changed to wolf.”

“I can’t open boxes or move them easily in wolf form,” Anna said regretfully. “There’s a pizza place down the block. How about I get some food for us?”

Tag staggered over—a huge old cauldron over his shoulder—and dropped to his knees in front of Anna. “Food?” he said in a quavery voice. “Food for us, mistress?”

He never played the fool around Charles unless Anna was present. Charles couldn’t decide if it was because Tag only played like this in front of Anna or if it was because he figured Charles was less dangerous if Anna was in the vicinity.

She laughed at him. “Two large pizzas, loaded,” she said. She rose on her tiptoes to kiss Charles and climbed back into the Suburban.

Tag waited until she was backing up before popping to his feet without effort. The cauldron was doubtless heavy—anything cast iron and that big had to be—but Tag was a werewolf.

“Magic?” asked Charles.

Tag gave the cauldron a surprised look, as if he’d forgotten he had it on his shoulder. “No—though it’s old,” he said, and carried it over to the proper pile. He set it down and contemplated it.

“Everyone should have a proper cauldron,” he said, picking it up and putting it in their keep pile.

“You want to cook beans over a campfire?” Charles asked.

“Was that a joke?” asked Tag, sounding truly dumbfounded.

“Would I tease you?” Charles said, picking up a box of things that were not magic and hauling them to the pile of boxes they were just going to have to carry back.

The freshness of the breeze caught Brother Wolf’s attention, and Charles looked up into the sky with a frown at the gathering clouds. “I hope the rain holds off until we get this done.”

Tag glanced up, too. “Not supposed to rain, according to my weather app.”

Charles said, “It’s going to rain. Help me get the dining table out.”

It wasn’t heavy, but it was awkward. It marked the edge of how far they’d gotten in their hunt for what turned out to be the grimoires. When they’d refilled the unit, he and Tag had put the table over the top of where the grimoires had been. They’d found the books in the center of the unit, surrounded by a pair of room dividers and a chalk circle.

It had been a good circle, competently drawn—as far as Charles could judge. It wasn’t a pattern that he’d seen before, but the intent had been obvious. Such a circle should have cut off the effect of so much magic—but he’d felt the grimoires when he’d stepped foot on the ground at the storage center. He didn’t think it was a problem with the magic Carrie had used, only the length of time since she’d renewed her protections.

They had taken out one of the dividers and set it aside but left the second one up. Now Charles took down the second one—and found himself confronting a small open area that someone had clearly set up as an office.

Had there been a path from the door to here before they had destroyed Carrie’s organization? He couldn’t say one way or the other. He inhaled and caught a hint of vanilla and also a woman’s scent. Carrie Green had definitely used this.

It was an area about five feet square, with a six-foot-tall bookshelf filled with books shoved in every which way, in direct contrast to the order Carrie had imposed upon her storage unit. But the battered old Steelcase desk—a relic of the Cold War era, complete with government serial plate along the edge of the desktop—was tidy enough.

On the upper left corner of the desk was a black coffee cup with Witch scrawled across it in red letters. It held two pens, a pencil, and a highlighter. On the lower left corner was a lined notebook. When he opened it, it proved to be blank, though roughly half of the sheets had been torn out.

On the upper right corner of the desk were three books that had never been commercially produced. He held a hand over them before he picked up the first one. It looked to be a handwritten diary, but he couldn’t find the date because it was in Russian—or some other Cyrillic tongue. There were five bookmarks that each marked a passage that Carrie had highlighted.

“Do you read Russian?” Charles asked Tag, who had paused in his own work to look at Carrie’s workspace.

“No,” he said. “But the next one down is in English.”

And so was the third one. Charles handed one to Tag and took the other. Charles’s looked to be a detailed study of the deaths of various fae. It didn’t appear to be a fae-hunter’s diary but a scholarly study based mostly upon folklore. The methods of killing (or manner of dying) were all highlighted.