The woods were subtly different from those at home. Anna wasn’t a botanist, so she didn’t have names, but the evergreens were more diverse and the undergrowth smelled strange. The atmosphere of the land around them was different from home, too.

Charles talked about manitou sometimes, the spirit of a place, sort of an upper-level naiad or dryad, she thought. She’d come to her marriage with a better education on Greek and Roman beliefs than on those of Native Americans, and she still tended to conflate the vocabulary where the cultures intersected.

She didn’t have the senses, the ability, to see spirits the way Charles did, but there was a flavor to these woods that was different from the feel of the woods at home. Maybe something was sifting through her mate bond besides the general feel of caution overlying Brother Wolf’s fierce joy in this hunt. Maybe she just had an overactive imagination.

Though a lifetime of summer hikes with her dad and his handy-dandy pedometer (his words) had given Anna a very good sense of how far she’d traveled when walking on two feet, she had less of a feel for distance traveled while on four. They had set out at first light at a steady, ground-covering trot they could, and did, keep up all day.

So she didn’t know exactly how far they had traveled, maybe as much as fifty miles, when they started to find the sigils carved into the trees. Some of them were familiar, as if whoever had carved them had access to the same set of Nordic runes Anna and her brother had used.

The two of them had used it as a simple replace-the-letter code, but upon finding one of their notes, her father had pointed out that scholars were pretty sure the original users of the old runes had used them as symbolic of whole meanings rather than as parts of words, like letters were.

Probably, he’d told them, the runes had been used as magical symbols. Not that her father had believed much in magic back then—he was a believer in cold logic and science. He was a little more open-minded now that his daughter was a werewolf, but she knew he still thought there was some scientific reason for her ability to transform.

At any rate, admonished by their father, she and her brother had tried to find the linguist-assigned meanings for the runes and use those. But since they had had very little use for words like “horse” (they lived in town, where there were no horses) or various Nordic gods, they had given up and gone back to using it as a simple code with a few runic-looking letters they made up themselves to stand in for the extra letters. But she remembered some of the symbolic meanings.

A square sitting on one corner with two lines extending down at a right angle from each other was one that meant “property” or “belonging to” with a sense of rightful ownership, an inheritance. She remembered it because it looked to her like a goldfish nose pointing up and tail pointing down.

The goldfish rune was a few seasons old. The one just above it, so new that there was sap beading up in some spots and the wood revealed by the broken bark was raw, was the rune that Ford had given them. Ford had thought it had something to do with music. It certainly looked more like a musical instrument than the goldfish looked like “property.”

Charles, realizing that Anna had stopped, came back to stand shoulder to shoulder with her.

A claiming, Brother Wolf said. And Anna knew that he knew something of runes, too. Or maybe, if there was magic in these runes, he read the intent.

Tag huffed, lifted a leg, and marked the tree in approved werewolf fashion. Then he raked the ground in front of the tree and gave Anna a laughing grin full of teeth. Anna could feel Brother Wolf’s amusement—but she could also feel his rising excitement. They were closer to their prey.

Once she knew to look for them, the runes were all over—most of them not the one Ford had warned them about, the musician one. Some of the runes Anna was pretty sure were made-up. Most of them had probably been carved in the last couple of years judging by the way the sap dripped out of them. But there were older trees, forest giants, whose trunks held runes distorted by years of growth. All of that tallied with what Ford had said—which meant they were on the right path. Not that she had ever doubted Charles could find their way to Wild Sign.

With Ford’s description of petroglyphs in mind, she kept an eye out for marks on the rocks or stone outcroppings, but didn’t see anything. The sun was starting its trek downward when they topped a steep climb, the trail more like a suggestion up an almost-cliff, and found themselves in an open flat meadow surrounded by trees. Underneath the shelter of the forest canopy, fitted neatly into the shadows of trees and the swells of land, were the buildings of Wild Sign.

Charles changed. He wasn’t the quickest shapeshifter she’d ever seen. Mercy, his foster sister, could grab her coyote form in a blink of an eye—but she bore a different power. Today, Charles only took two breaths to make the shift that took any other werewolf of her acquaintance at least ten minutes longer. He’d told her it was because he’d been born a werewolf.

But that he arrived in his human form fully clothed . . . that was a different magical gift. His clothing at the end of a change was usually jeans, boots, and a T-shirt. And most of the T-shirts were his favorite color: red. But his magic could be capricious; she’d seen him end up in buckskins a time or two. And once, very oddly, a tuxedo. He looked good in a tux, but she’d never talked him into wearing one again. That particular tux had ended up in pieces he’d thrown away—the damage, she thought with an inward smile, had been her fault.

This time, he wore jeans and boots, but his shirt was a flannel button-down in a gray-green that blended into the forest nearly as well as Wild Sign. She wondered what that said about his current state of mind.

Anna, feeling the need for fingers and speech while she explored, changed back to human, too. Her change took a good deal longer. When she lay, panting and sweating, on the ground, Charles crouched by her, offering her one of the canteens from the pack Tag carried strapped to his back.

She took three big gulps of water, waited a breath, and drank some more. When she handed the canteen back to him, her hands had quit shaking. He helped her to her feet and presented her with her clothes, retrieved, like the canteen, from Tag’s pack. She dressed, did a few deep knee bends and toe touches to make sure all of her parts were working as they should be. And all the while she took in the camp—no, Ford had it right, took in the town.

“I picked up five scents,” Anna said, slipping on a pair of tennis shoes. “And maybe one more, but it is older. I got hints of a lot of people but nothing strong enough for me to follow.”

Charles nodded. “It last rained six weeks ago. The information I have is that, on the strength of Dr. Connors’s report, they sent in a chopper to investigate—a county deputy; the local Forest Service law enforcement officer; two rangers, one of whom is also part-time law enforcement for the Karuk tribe. The fifth scent, which was laid at the same time, I presume to be the pilot.”

That hadn’t been in the information Leslie had left with them.

“Maybe the older scent is Dr. Connors, then. No one else has been here in a while,” Anna said. “Shouldn’t there have been people looking?”

“For what?” Charles asked. “They know there was a settlement here and Dr. Connors’s father is missing. But no one else has been reported missing—they are only gone. Law enforcement investigated this site thoroughly and found no signs of violence. They are looking for Dr. Connors Senior as well as the people who had mail at the drop box in Happy Camp—which is the nearest established town—but that is best done electronically. They don’t think there is anything else examining the site can teach them.”

Anna nodded. The report had said they’d found no signs of violence. No signs of rapid departure, though some personal property had been left behind, along with fourteen permanent structures, three yurts, and evidence of tents.

“If this were on federal or tribal lands, they’d have come back and cleaned up,” Charles added.

“But it belongs to Leah,” Anna said. “So it is out of their jurisdiction.”

Charles nodded.

“I do have a question, though,” she said. “With all of the runes scrawled over the forest around here, why aren’t there any legends of Viking settlements in Northern California? Like the ones in Newfoundland or Minnesota?”

“The one in Newfoundland is real,” Charles observed seriously, though Anna had been joking. “And no one has seen the runes here.”

She’d missed something. She frowned at him. “After the first one—the goldfish below Ford’s musician—I saw several hundred runes. They aren’t exactly unobtrusive.”

He laughed—which was distracting, because he was beautiful when he laughed, especially with the edge of gold gleaming in his eyes.