CHAPTER

4

The pack came by twos and threes, on four-wheelers, on motorcycles, or driving various four-wheel-drive cars. Tag came on his backhoe.

They retrieved the invaders’ bodies first. Those went into Charles’s truck, all six of them, while Hester’s body was removed to the cabin. By the time they’d finished with that—the whole pack was present.

Charles put Leah in charge of figuring out how to get the four-wheelers, now grown into the forest, out, without leaving obvious signs that magic had been worked there. It was obviously the most difficult job and, to his surprise, she tackled it with enthusiasm.

He’d flattered her, he realized, in front of the pack. And as a result, she hadn’t even resented his giving her orders. Maybe Anna was right when she said that Leah wasn’t the only reason he and his stepmother had a difficult time with each other.

Leah grabbed a half dozen wolves and, eventually, several chain saws. It had taken a few hours, but Tag’s truck held the cage Hester had been trapped in as well one of the four-wheelers. Leah’s truck held the other three—chopped up into parts. Even removed from the forest, the mangled vehicles were an odd sight. Desultory leakage of various fluids attested that they had been running, but all of them had freshly sawn tree bits growing through the metal.

Charles didn’t know exactly what he was going to do with them. What he wasn’t going to do with them was stage them in his father’s backyard as art pieces—as Sage had advised.

Tag’s suggestion of finding out who they belonged to and giving them back was a better one, though the manner Tag wanted to do it in seemed a bit complicated. And violent.

Brother Wolf was in agreement with Tag.

While Leah’s team took care of the four-wheelers, Charles set most of the rest of the pack clearing the area around the cabin of anything burnable. He sent the rest out to find any evidence of the invasion, anything that would hold a clue as to who these people were and what they had been about. He didn’t expect them to find much, the people he’d killed today had seemed pretty professional. Professionals don’t leave clues if they can help it.

That’s why he was surprised when Asil came back almost immediately to report that he’d found electronic surveillance equipment up in the trees. Charles asked Asil to let the other evidence-hunting wolves know to look for more electronics. Once that was done, Charles pulled Tag off his backhoe and recruited Anna to help the two of them.

He and Tag because they knew what they were looking at when it came to tech. Anna because she kept him balanced.

The events of the day—the fact that Hester and Jonesy had died while under his protection—had left Brother Wolf beside himself. Most of the pack were afraid of him for one reason or another. Normally, it would not have been a problem, but now the others could sense Brother Wolf’s anger. Their increased fear enraged Brother Wolf more, creating a nasty snowball effect.

Anna took the edge off everyone’s emotions, so he didn’t end up killing some idiot for the crime of stepping in front of Brother Wolf at the wrong time. Some idiot that he was supposed to be taking care of for his da, who had not contacted anyone about Hester’s death.

Brother Wolf didn’t like that they hadn’t heard from Da either.

On the good side, as it turned out, none of the battery- or solar-powered surveillance equipment they found was functional.

“Jonesy probably zapped them,” said Tag from twenty feet up in a lodgepole pine, where he was using a battery-powered drill to extract a camera from its perch in the tree. “He should have told Hester, but he didn’t always tell her everything. He didn’t like to worry her. Having awesome godlike power meant that nothing much worried him even if it should have.”

“Zapped,” said Charles dryly.

Tag made a popping sound with his mouth. He liked to sound dumb, even in front of people he knew were wise to him. “Zapped. That’s why the innards are all melty-like and the out-ards are untouched. Only way I can think of to do that is magical zapping.”

He’d gotten the camera off the tree by that point and opened up the casing. None of the electronics was store-bought. This was equipment built from components by someone who knew what they were doing. That meant that someone, some person, had touched the insides with their hands.

Tag brought the opened camera to his nose for a good smell, reclosed the casing to preserve the scent, then tossed it down.

Charles caught it, then took a moment to reopen the casing and get a good smell of the ruined camera himself. Outside, it just smelled of the forest, but inside … the faint ozone of zapped electronics and the peppery smell of the man who’d put this one together.

All in all, there had been three people who had worked on the custom electronics placed around Hester’s cabin. All of them human—and one of them lay dead in Charles’s truck bed. But the other two were still at large. He’d know them by their scent when he ran into them again. Tag’s nose was pretty good; he’d know them, too. So would Anna.

But he didn’t bother handing her this camera—she’d already gotten the scent of the three people from the other equipment they’d found. If he could count on Tag’s letting him know if he found someone different, Charles wouldn’t have to have Brother Wolf check each one out. But Tag was Tag. Tag took great pride in letting you fall if you leaned on him too much.

“You knew them pretty well,” Anna observed to Tag in a gentle voice. “Hester and Jonesy.”

Tag had been ready to drop down, but at Anna’s gambit, he paused, hanging from a branch, like a nearly seven-foot-tall orange-maned monkey, swinging gently. He nodded at Anna’s comment without looking at her.

“You could say I knew them,” he said, dropping a hand to scratch at his head, his body as relaxed as if he were standing in the living room—or, Charles thought, dangling a thousand feet over an abyss. You didn’t get a permanent spot in the Marrok’s pack if you could function properly on your own.

“Hester better than Jonesy,” Tag told Anna. “Hester and I were lovers a few centuries ago.” He paused to consider that, his body stilled—so the swinging had been on purpose. Eventually, he added, “give or take a few centuries, I guess. She tossed me back in the sea, figuratively and literally speaking as it happens, but we stayed friendly anyway, mostly because she fished me out so I didn’t drown. Then she found Jonesy.”

He loosed his grip with seeming carelessness that nonetheless gave him a clear drop despite the hazards of the proliferation of tree branches and small trees between him and the ground. He landed lightly on his feet for such a big man jumping from thirty feet up, though he took a little hop like a gymnast who hadn’t quite stuck the landing.

An accident of position had Tag meeting Charles’s eyes, just as he landed.

Brother Wolf thought it would be interesting to pit himself against Tag. In Tag’s suddenly gold eyes, Charles saw the same desire. Tag was a little bit afraid of him, Charles knew. Other wolves might have let that fear cow them, but not Tag. Fierce joy and love of battle sparkled through the pack bond they shared. Wouldn’t it be fun? Tag’s wolf asked, and Brother Wolf agreed heartily.

Sometimes Brother Wolf was as crazy as all the rest of the wolves in his da’s pack.

“Another time,” Charles told Tag and Brother Wolf, both. “Someday when there isn’t a job to do.”

“Just for fun,” agreed Tag.

Anna looked back and forth between them and rolled her eyes.

“I guess since Hester fell for both Jonesy and me, she had a thing for dangerous men,” Tag told Anna. He grinned, but there was an edge to it that might have had something to do with the exchange with Charles, or it might have been grief. Or both. “Jonesy was all right back then,” he said. “Mostly. Mostly all right. But there was a dust-up with some of his people, some of whom died who shouldn’t have. He went from being wobbly at times to full out tilt-a-whirl. Hester took care of him.”

“I thought Hester was supposed to be wobbly, too,” said Anna. “Though she seemed pretty sharp today.”

“Hester is … was as stable as me,” Tag told her. “Well, no. Better than I am.” He looked at Charles for a moment, then shook his head. He tipped his chin toward Anna. “As sane as you are.”

“She tried hunting Da down last time he was here,” Charles said dryly. “Sane people usually don’t try that.”

Tag gave him an agreeable look under his brow. “Hester and Bran, they went out of their way to make Hester sound crazier than she was. Especially if Jonesy was having troubles, more than usual. Make sure that no one except he or I came up here. Keep everyone wary of Hester. Like all the wildlings, they were here on sufferance, and the Marrok’s power kept the other Gray Lords from bothering Jonesy. If Bran made them leave, they would have been on their own, and that would have been disastrous. For everyone.”

“Other Gray Lords,” Charles said.

Tag made a noise. “Well. Well. He wasn’t a Gray Lord, not really. Not by his choice, anyhow. But with his parentage, it wasn’t something he could easily get out of. And if any of the fae with an ounce of sense had talked to Jonesy this past fifty years, they’d have hunted him down and killed him. Had to. They take care of their problems, same as us.”

“Would they?” asked Anna. “Did they? Do you think this was something aimed at Jonesy because one of the fae found out he was here?”

Tag pursed his lips, but before he or Charles could say anything, Anna was already shaking her head. “No. Sorry. This was a werewolf thing—werewolves working with humans and technology.” She indicated Charles’s already mostly filled backpack. “A Gray Lord wouldn’t need technology to spy on someone.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Charles. “It’s too early to rule anything out. It doesn’t look like it from where we are standing, but that could change.”

“A Gray Lord might put all the cameras in place and zap them himself, just to watch us run around like half-wits,” muttered Tag. “Some of those guys are really off-kilter.”

Charles took pride in the self-control that allowed him not to respond to the maybe-unintentional irony in that statement. His self-control was aided by the short time it had to stay strong because, from somewhere out of sight, Asil called, “I’ve got another one up here for you techies. Está roto. What is it you said about the last one, Tag? Pretty borked. This one is pretty borked, too.”

“Coming,” Tag called back.

The three of them headed toward Asil. Ducking through some underbrush, they came upon a fresh break in the ground some three feet across, fifteen feet long, and maybe twelve feet down. Probably the crack was due to Jonesy’s earthquakes. Roots were stretched from one side to the other, the damage from the sudden wrenching obvious. One tree leaned precariously, its root ball rising out of the otherwise stable side of the tree.

Next storm or heavy snow, and it would fall, Charles judged. Several hundred years of life now dying a slow death. It was not the oldest fatality this day, nor the only tree to fall. But Charles was tired of death, and the trees were entirely innocent.

Brother Wolf wasn’t tired of death, just tired of the deaths of those who had belonged to them, who were theirs to protect. He would be happy to kill all of the ones responsible for this attack on their territory. Very happy.

Anna slipped her hand under Charles’s tee, just at the small of his back, and let her fingers rest against the skin there. Brother Wolf relaxed. Anna made Brother Wolf happier than killing their enemies would have.

“Not sure it wouldn’t have been smarter to have put Jonesy down when he went funny,” Tag said thoughtfully, looking at the damage. “Lugh’s children are too damn powerful by half to let run around without the sense God gave a goose. But he was Hester’s mate, and she wouldn’t have survived his death any more than he survived hers.” On the last word, he jumped across the broken ground.

Charles waited for Anna to make the jump. She had no trouble with it, and he didn’t expect her to, but some things were ingrained. And he liked to watch her move. She was economical, so much so that it was easy to underestimate just how strong she was. He liked that about her, the way she could pass for human. It made her safer.

As he jumped, part of him was locked onto how well Anna’s jeans showed off her muscular curves, part of him noted that she still had that witchcrafted gun tucked in the waistband of her jeans, but the biggest part of his attention was still stuck on Tag’s rambling dialogue. “Lugh’s children,” he’d said.

There was only one Lugh Tag could have been talking about when referring to a fae. Charles had met a son of Lugh once. In Boston. He’d rather that none of the ancient fae god’s progeny had ever been located within a thousand miles of his home.

He regretted Jonesy’s death, but the chasm, small as it was, gave evidence of how much more Hester’s death could have cost his pack. He thought of what he would do if someone killed his Anna—and part of him, Charles and Brother Wolf both, thought the less of Jonesy for not defying Hester’s wishes and laying waste to the world for her sake.

“Finally, children. I had despaired of you reaching me in this century.” Asil’s voice came from somewhere in the mass of evergreen branches directly over their heads. “Your slowness has not been without benefit, however. It allowed me leisure to locate three more devices of some sort in a direct line from this one in this tree. Our enemies were very industrious.”

• • •

OVER THE COURSE of the next few hours, if they didn’t find all of the electronics the invaders had left, they probably found everything within a mile of Hester’s house. Charles was, at least, absolutely certain that the pack left nothing any human-based investigators would be able to find.

“You seem to be awfully worried about human authorities,” commented Asil, dusting off the dirt and debris that an afternoon of tree-climbing had left on him. “Do you think this might be the US government who dropped in to visit?”

Sage, who was seldom to be found too far from Asil if he was present, looked at Charles, echoing Asil’s question without speaking a word.

“I don’t,” Charles said. “At least not directly. As far as I can tell, the government is as happy with werewolves as they have ever been. But a government is made of individuals, and there are plenty of those who are afraid of us, of the fae, and all the other things they know are out there in the night.”

“Can’t blame them,” said Sage softly. “They call us monsters for a reason—and werewolves are just the tip of the iceberg. I could tell you some stories …”

Sage had her own nightmares suffered at werewolf hands. That his da had found out about her and rescued her as soon as he heard didn’t mean that she loved being a werewolf any more than most of those who’d been changed against their wishes.

Anna—who, as far as Charles could see, seemed to have embraced her wolf without bitterness—gave Sage a sharp look. “Hating all werewolves or fae makes as much sense as hating all humans,” she said mildly.

Asil smiled at her, a smile both patronizing and affectionate. “Ah,” he told her. “But you are a child of your generation. Raised by people who grew up in the 1960s and taught that people are not to ‘be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’ That profiling by race, religion—or species—is anathema, no matter how useful.”

If Asil had realized his expression was also wistful, doubtless the old Moor would have found a different smile for Anna.

“Werewolves are a bit more frightening than a black man in an all-white restaurant,” said Sage.

Anna pursed her lip. Her father was a high-profile liberal lawyer who’d started his practice defending protestors, which gave her a certain perspective on the subject.

“Not to someone raised in ignorance,” she said. “The unknown is a lot more scary than something you understand, no matter how bad that is.”

“It isn’t the ignorant,” said Asil softly, “who fear our kind. And their fear is not baseless. What do you think would happen if Bran chose to take over the government?”

Sage started to speak, then her face went blank except for the narrowing of her eyes.

Asil nodded toward her. “Yes, you see it, don’t you? We hear all the time that the fae couldn’t do it—they are too few for all of their power. Human weapons have advanced unimaginably far since my birth. Eventually, in any match of strength to strength, they would win an outright battle with any of us on the supernaturally endowed spectrum. The vampires … I think the vampires believe that they are in control. That spider in Europe could no more resist allowing the government to run without unwitting slaves in key positions than he could resist … poking his fingers into the Nazi pie in the middle of the last century. But if Bran wanted it?”

Anna, her eyes bright, was still mouthing “supernaturally endowed spectrum” at Charles, when Sage murmured, “Bran is more subtle than the vampires. Even Bonarata. Bran is … like everyone’s favorite big brother. He’s charming. He looks so harmless until he doesn’t. And you know that he really does care.”

“My da,” said Charles dryly, “Dictator at Large.”

“Well, yes,” said Anna, recovering from her amusement. “Of course, he could make a fine stab at it. But since he really doesn’t care about anyone who doesn’t turn furry in the full moon, I’d rather he leave the government to the humans.”

“And so would Da,” agreed Charles.

“But if he wanted to …” said Sage, her voice soft.

“No,” said Charles firmly. “It wouldn’t be as easy as Asil makes it sound.”

“I’d help,” said Asil.

But the seriousness had gone out of the moment. Anna made a pithy sound.

“Seduce the women,” she said, her accent a flawless copy of Asil’s. “It is the women who run everything, anyway. If a man’s wife says, ‘do this’ he does. Simple. If you want a government to do thus and such, get their wives and mistresses on board.”

It sounded like a quote. Charles gave Asil an interested look.

“I was teaching Kara about your Revolutionary War,” Asil said with dignity.

Sage grinned—she was a beautiful woman, but her grin transformed her face. Made her less beautiful and more approachable. “Or how Benjamin Franklin’s skill between the sheets managed to win the war.”

“Which is true,” said Asil.

“True-ish,” admonished Sage. “And, in current times, incredibly sexist. A lot of the people in power are women. What are you going to do, seduce their husbands?”

Asil smiled slowly, his eyes bright. “Want to watch?”

“Getting back to your question, children,” said Charles, deliberately using the word Asil liked so much, “assuming we can put world domination, sexual politics of the seventeenth century, and flirting aside for the moment, I don’t think this is a government operation. Too much money in some areas and not enough in others. That doesn’t mean there isn’t some glory hound watching for a chance to change the game. I don’t want to give anyone something they can hold over us.”

He dumped his overfull backpack on the bed of the nearest convenient truck, and Anna did the same with hers. Laid out in the open, it made an interesting pile in several ways.

Tag pursed his lips. “Helicopter. Trained men and werewolves. Twenty thousand dollars of equipment. You’re right: too much money to be casual but not enough for official government.”

Anna sorted out the tech by nose until she had three piles. “Tech guy the first,” she said, pointing at one pile. “Tech girl” was the second pile. “Tech guy the second” was the third pile. “Just guessing, but from the wear and tear and the scent of tech gurus, this was set up in three waves.”

Tag nodded his agreement. “That first group was out here last fall—you can see the effects of winter—maybe eight months ago. The second was put out this spring. The third batch looks new. Two weeks, maybe a month. Each set of equipment is topflight, bleeding-edge stuff. I was off by maybe ten thousand on the cost.” He tapped his finger on the first group. “Prices on this have gone down since last winter. Someone spent thirty grand on tech to keep watch on Hester and Jonesy—who mostly didn’t do anything interesting.”

“I bet they wanted to know what they were going to be dealing with,” Sage said thoughtfully. “I mean, they came here specifically for Hester—that damned cage was meant to hold a werewolf. Maybe they were being careful, trying to make sure they knew what they were getting into.”

Tag grinned suddenly, showing his teeth. “Jonesy. I didn’t catch it until it was all laid out.” He looked at Charles. “Do you see the pattern?”

He did.

“Jonesy found all of the tech when it went up—probably right away,” Charles said, thinking of the forest spirits. The fae probably had some other name for them, interacted with them in some other fashion than Charles did, but they had been much too in tune with Jonesy and with his death for them not to have had some kind of contact with him. “The oldest set were simply disabled, the power destroyed with a surgical blow.”

“Zap,” said Tag, popping his lips.

“The second bunch were damaged a little more severely,” Charles said.

“Double-zap,” said Tag.

“That is not a technical term, I hope,” murmured Asil.

“Only the most technically advanced people can use ‘double-zap’ correctly,” Anna told Asil sotto voce. “You and I shouldn’t try it.”

“By the third wave,” Tag said, “Jonesy was insulted. He was a chess player—and these idiots had used the same gambit three times in a row and expected different results. Thus this third wave of tech is not just zap or double-zap but truly borked.”

“So why didn’t he tell Hester about them?” Anna asked. “Or did he? Did she know they were being watched? Why didn’t she tell Bran?”

Somberly, Sage said, “The only people who know the answer to that are dead.”

Charles found himself considering that last question. Tag said Hester was faking her troubles so that she could protect Jonesy. He said, and Charles agreed with him, that probably Bran had known that.

So why hadn’t she called his father about the planes that had been flying over them? Had she known they had people trying to spy on them?

But as Sage said, the only people who knew that were dead. Unless, he thought, Hester had called his da. He considered that for a moment—and decided that, while certainly possible, the idea that his da had known about someone’s flying over Hester’s cabin and not alerted the pack carried some uncomfortable possibilities with it.

• • •

THE GROUND AROUND the wooden building was raw where the backhoe Tag brought up had done its work. After careful consideration, the chain saws that had cut the ATVs free had been employed again to cut down a tree that stood midway between the house and the rest of the forest. Better to lose one centuries-old tree than thousands of them.

They laid Hester on the bed next to the remains of her mate. The room was too small to hold the pack, so they entered the cabin in twos and threes while the wind played background music, with the trees as its instrument.

Charles let Leah and Anna sort the shuffle of pack and sought out Asil, who stood a little distance from all the hustle.

“Fire,” Charles said, “may be a purifying force. But it is not one of the usual methods of destroying fae magic.”

Asil made a considering noise. “Do you think there are fae artifacts in that cabin?”

“I didn’t feel anything when Anna and I were in there earlier,” he told the old Moor honestly. “But according to Tag and to Brother Wolf’s independent assessment, Jonesy was a power. I think he could hide his toys well enough that they would not attract my casual attention.

Asil said nothing for a moment. “You think I could find them?”

Charles chose his words carefully because flattery was not something he did. Anna had (often) suggested it as a good way to get cooperation from Asil—and pointed out that the most effective flattery had only truth.

Charles decided that now was as good a time as ever to test out her advice.

“I think that any wolf who has survived as long as you have has at least as much a nose for fae magic as I do. I would appreciate it if you would come down there with me and help look. I’ve asked Anna and Tag to keep the crowd occupied with stories about Hester while we go in.”

The Moor snorted. “You just want help searching the field for land mines and are looking for cannon fodder.”

But despite his words, he came with Charles and slipped into the cabin with him under the guise of paying last respects. It shouldn’t take them too long, Charles thought. Tag could tell stories all night, though, so they had time.

They began in the basement.

Asil paused beside the bed and touched the surface of the blanket between the remains that had been people just this morning. Then he raised both hands, palms flat, and said, “ Allāhu akbar.”

Charles, recognizing the sacred when he heard it, in whatever language or religion, fell still, folding his arms and saying his own prayer, as Asil folded his hands in front of his chest.

Asil’s prayer was soft for the most part, punctuated by several calls of “ Allāhu akbar.” When he was finished, the Moor touched his hand to Hester’s hip, and said, “Good-bye, formidable lady.”

“I thought that the funeral prayer was only for Muslim people,” said Charles.

Asil’s face lit with a smile that he was using to hide some emotion he didn’t want Charles to see. “But I am a very bad Muslim—and Hester was old. One believes many things in a very long life. Who knows if she was not Muslim in her heart of hearts?”

“You knew her?” Charles asked.

Asil shrugged. “I knew of her—the stubborn woman who would belong to no pack. She killed a dozen wolves—some of them Alphas—before they let her alone. I did not meet her. Bran said that she and her mate wished to be isolated, or I would have paid my respects. It saddens my heart when the great ones die. This world is the less for her passing.”

He glanced where the earth lay on the bedding. “The fae?” he said, as if Charles had asked a question. “Him I am less saddened by. I never met him either, but I have seen too much of what their kind have wrought in carelessness. He was certainly not Muslim, so the Salatul Janazah was not for him.”

“And yet,” said Charles, whose silent prayer had been for both the dead, “Hester loved him.”

Asil shrugged. “It is impossible to account for the taste of women.” But his eyes were sober.

The first thing they looked at was the sword. It was obviously old and well used and of fae making—the blade was something other than steel. Charles had felt nothing from it when he picked it up earlier. He picked it up again, paying attention—and still felt nothing.

“It is magic,” Charles told Asil. “But I can’t sense it.”

He handed it to Asil, who raised his eyebrows. He took it in a two-handed grip and brought it up and around in a quick practice swing.

“Remarkable,” Asil said, dropping his left hand away and making a second, more complex swing with just one hand. “A great weapon,” he pronounced, when he had finished. “I am sure it has killed almost as many as I have.” He didn’t say “I, too, am a great weapon,” though Charles had no trouble hearing it.

Asil looked at the blade closely then, let it drop to a less ready position. “It doesn’t feel magical to me in any way,” he said. “But it most certainly is.”

“How do you know?”

“How did you?” Asil countered.

“The blade isn’t steel. It is some sort of silver alloy.” Charles knew silver. “Or an alloy with silver in it—a metallurgist would tell you the silver content was not high. The fae like to use silver in their magical weapons. It holds the power better than other metals.”

“A metallurgist would have to despoil this blade to tell anything,” Asil said distastefully. “But that is an interesting answer. I expected that you might have made that assumption because Jonesy used it to kill himself. Such a one would never die by an ordinary blade. But there is a more sure way to know that this blade is A Blade.”

Charles could hear the capitals in Asil’s voice.

Asil turned the blade to the light and moved it until Charles could see three runes set into the blade, all three of them together no larger than a thumbprint.

“This is the mark of the Dark Smith of Drontheim,” said Asil, indicating the runes without touching the blade. “That one did not bother with magicless blades.”

Charles looked around the room and sighed. “We’re going to have to come back after we burn this place and look for anything that emerges unscathed.” Maybe his da would be back by then.

“Probably,” Asil agreed. “But do not despair, this is difficult magic, even for the fae. I do not believe that there are a dozen such objects of power here.”

An hour later, Asil was not so sanguine.

“At least we know it isn’t the Gray Lords we’re facing,” Charles said, holding a broken, decorative hair clip he’d found in Hester’s dresser drawer.

“How so?” Asil was emptying out a blanket chest so they could use it to store what they were finding.

“If the fae had any idea of what a hoarder Jonesy was, they wouldn’t have bothered with cameras. They’d have broken down the walls and taken everything as soon as they knew it was here.”

There were amulets, cups, gems, knives, a spear, four arrows from three different regions, three rugs—two simple rag rugs and a small Persian rug. There was a bone bowl and a handful of coin-like items.

Most of the items held fae magic, or fae-like magic. But the bone bowl was witchcrafted and stank of blood magic as soon as Charles touched it. There was an arrowhead that looked neolithic to Charles—and something slept within it. Brother Wolf warned him not to wake it up, whatever it was, because it smelled bad.

There were powerful items, but most of them, as far as Charles could tell, were just junk that happened to contain a spark of something. A bronze knife burned clear and bright with magic, like an artesian well. There was a blue-and-purple pottery jar that made him want to wash his hands after he touched it.

A lot of the magically charged things they found were broken pieces of larger items. Sometimes Charles could tell what it was part of—like the bowl of a clay pipe or the tongue of a buckle. Jonesy, he thought, was not very picky about what he collected. “Hoarded” was probably the right word for it.

The search took Asil and Charles too long to keep what they were doing a secret. If there was any doubt, it was dispelled when Leah opened the door, and said, “Everyone knows what you are doing in there—I didn’t tell them, Tag did. Is there any way you can hurry this up?”

Charles hadn’t told Tag what they were doing, but he couldn’t remember where Tag had been when he approached Asil. Tag, for all of his orange hair and size, could avoid being noticed if he wanted to.

“No,” Asil said shortly. “We will be done when we are finished.”

Asil liked Leah considerably less than he liked Charles—and he only tolerated Charles for Anna’s sake.

On their third search of the basement, Charles noticed an oddity in the soil on the bed—a straight line where there shouldn’t be one. With a grimace, he freed a folded piece of paper from Jonesy’s remains—a page ripped from a book.

“What do you have?” Asil asked from the other side of the bed.

“A page from The Simarillion,” Charles said, opening it. Across the typeset letters of Christopher Tolkien’s foreword, someone had written in a jerky hand without punctuation:

Hester Hester says they were asking about the wildlings there is a traitor and it is one of us Hester Hester

Hester’s name, repeated on either end of the message, was in written in noticeably smoother strokes of the pen than the rest of it.

Of course there was a traitor, Charles thought. How would anyone know about Hester’s isolated cabin if there wasn’t a traitor?

“Well,” said Asil, who had approached so he could read over Charles’s shoulder. “He could have been more helpful. Is the traitor one of the wildlings? One of the fae? One of the pack? At least we know they were looking for one of the wildlings.” He paused. “Or all of the wildlings.”

A hunt, said Brother Wolf with grim satisfaction. Hester has given us a hunt.

• • •

IN THE END, most of their finds fit in the blanket chest. The sword they wrapped in one of the discarded blankets. There was no disguising what it was, really, but at least no one would have details. Magical swords tended to have histories and be identifiable to someone with enough motivation. This way, all an observer would see would be him and Asil with random stuff—no details to attract someone (or something) out there looking for the silver shoe buckle of Asmodeus or some such nonsense.

Charles refolded the paper and stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans. They had agreed that it would be best not to talk to anyone except Anna about that note. If there was a traitor, the less said to anyone about it the better.

Charles was reasonably certain that Asil was incapable of betraying his da. It helped that Asil had vowed his loyalty to the Marrok and Bran (as if they were two different people) as soon as he had read the note through.

Asil closed the lid of the blanket chest and turned the latch so it wouldn’t fall open when they carried it out. “You know we did not find everything.”

“I do,” agreed Charles. “I also believe we have found everything we are going to.”

Asil smiled. “I do not miss being Alpha,” he said. “Especially at times like these I do not mind that you are more dominant in this pack than I. It means that I am not responsible for that which we have found—and more importantly, that which we have not found.”

Brother Wolf did not find Asil funny.

“Good for you,” Charles said.

Asil’s smile broadened, though he did not show his teeth. “Jonesy was a hoarder of the sort who make appearances on TV Reality Shows. Who knows how long he had been collecting? You and I will be out here as soon as the fire burns itself out—assuming Bran isn’t back, and probably even if he is. And we will still not find everything. And there is this, too. Jonesy, whoever he was when the world was young, could make the earth listen to his desires. If I had this ability, I would hide the prizes of my collection deep in the earth. You need to be very careful, or what you’ll have is a bunch of treasure-hunting fae invading the mountain, digging for treasure.”

He didn’t, Charles thought, have to sound so happy about it.