Charles agreed.

The other six letters were from Dr. Connors to his daughter, Dr. Connors. They were written on sequential days—April 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19. Other than the date and the “Dear Dr. Connors the Younger” salutation, they were all written in code.

Dr. Connors did not want anyone to read his letters except for his daughter. Charles thought about why someone living simply in the woods would not want his mail read.

The coded letters, like the warding signs carved into the trees, supported the hypothesis that the people of Wild Sign were hiding. The yurt he and Anna had explored had belonged to a white witch, and the whole area had a—well, not a real scent, but maybe a psychic scent he associated with white magic.

A group of white witches might very well have abandoned the town in a slow retreat that allowed them to tidy up after themselves—but not take much with them that might slow them down. He thought of the yurt ring—and he decided he was still of the opinion that any witch who owned such a potent protection would never willingly abandon it.

Possibly Wild Sign and what had happened did not have anything to do with Leah’s troubles here two centuries ago. From the stories Charles had heard, Sherwood had been a thorough man. Da hadn’t thought Sherwood would have left some monster for anyone else to handle. Possibly he’d rested, then gone back to clean up the mess he’d left. Bran wouldn’t know—he hadn’t communicated with Sherwood between that time and when the wolves had rescued him, three-legged and amnesiac, from the cellar of a black witch’s home nearly two centuries later. Possibly whatever Leah had faced was gone, and something else, black witches maybe, had happened to Wild Sign. Maybe it was a coincidence that Wild Sign had faced troubles in the same place. But coincidences, in Charles’s experience, were as rare as hen’s teeth.

Charles had been shuffling through Dr. Connors’s letters, Anna peering around him to watch, though she’d already been through them. She stiffened and closed her hand around his forearm.

“Are all of these the same letter?” she said slowly. “I didn’t notice it looking at them one at a time. But don’t they all look alike to you?”

She was right.

Anna took the letters from him, found a bare space on the ground, and set them out. She crouched, then sat down so she could see them all at once more easily. When the wind tried to play with them, she grabbed some rocks and weighed them down.

Tag knelt beside her wordlessly. After a minute he rearranged the letters in time order.

“Same letter,” Tag said, and, reaching out, he tapped the newest letter. “And when he wrote this last one, he was a lot more upset than when he wrote the first.”

Charles had never been much of a letter writer, but his father had. When email had replaced letters for communication, Bran had been unhappy. Because the letters were more personal, they carried scents—and handwriting, which, with certain well-schooled exceptions, were seldom just lines on a page. Here, as Tag pointed out, it was easy to see the hand holding the pen had gotten shakier and more emphatic as the days had moved by.

“We need to find Dr. Connors’s daughter,” said Anna. “Fortunately the FBI left us her number. If we had a cell phone, I’d do it right now.”

They’d left their phones behind. Charles was too cautious to bring traceable technology anywhere he wasn’t sure he wanted the government to know about. It did mean they couldn’t call for help, either. But Charles figured that if they found something the three of them couldn’t handle, all that calling for help would do was get their help killed, too.

“We will call her when we get back to camp,” Charles said.

In the meantime, they stuffed all of the letters into one of the envelopes. Then Tag produced a piece of twine to tie them together and put the resultant bundle into his pack.

He lifted the moldering mailbag. “Do we need this?”

Charles shook his head and Tag let the old bag fall.

“Found it by the side of the creek over there,” said Tag, pointing vaguely south and downhill. “Don’t know what it was doing there. Maybe wild animals dragged it around. Maybe someone just dropped it where I found it. Makes as much sense as anything else I’ve seen here. I found a couple of other odd things by the creek, too.”

“What did you find?” Anna asked as they started off with Tag in the lead.

He shook his head, and Anna gave him a gentle shove that had Brother Wolf sharpening his gaze on Tag and stepping to a better attack position. But Tag just laughed.

“It’s better if you see ’em. Faster, too,” he said. “I’d be all day describing, and Charles would take one look and tell me a dozen things I didn’t notice.”

Anna gave a huff of amused agreement and slanted a look at Charles. Brother Wolf wanted to preen at her recognition of their prowess. Charles just smiled at her.

Tag led them down the hill, toward a busy creek meandering around the side of the mountain. They encountered a path when they were about halfway there, and Charles looked back up the hill to see where it led to in Wild Sign.

“The smallest yurt,” said Tag, answering Charles’s unasked question. “Smelled like witches, too. White ones. I didn’t go in, though, because I was still running as wolf. That yurt and the one you and Anna explored, several of the tents, and two cabins all smelled of them. Too many witches in this place to be coincidence.”

Charles nodded agreement and Tag looked pleased.

Someone had cleared a stretch of bank of the stream and piled stones to keep back the grasses and bushes. They had dropped a tree across the creek, trimmed off the branches, and then used an adze to flatten the upper side of the trunk and make a passable bridge.

There were signs that the stream was a lot deeper in the spring, maybe tall enough to cover the top of the tree-cum-bridge, but it was still plenty deep. It was hard to be sure, because the water was very clear, but Charles judged it waist deep where it pooled next to the tree-bridge.

Tag took them across the bridge and then led them off the trail to where a thicket of willows, their leaves bright autumn yellow, grew in a section of spongy ground. Someone with big claws had, very recently, ripped up a swath of waist-high grasses and young bushes to reveal the dead.

“They killed them before they left,” Anna said, sounding faintly sickened. “These were witches. Did they sacrifice them for power?”

Charles knelt beside one of the skeletons. It wore a collar with a two-year-old expired rabies tag and an ID tag. The ID tag read Bear. Below the name was a phone number. On the other side the tag had been engraved with a heart. Charles rested a hand on the skull and waited to see what it could tell him.

He shook his head and met his mate’s anxious gaze. “No. Killed cleanly without harvesting anything.” There was a hollowness to the feel of creatures killed by witches in order to gain power. This dog had not been fed upon by black magic.

They found seventeen skeletons without much effort. Fourteen dogs and three cats. Charles thought that there might be more hidden under the bushes, but there was no need to disturb them further.

“I only discovered them because someone had spelled their grave to keep predators away,” Tag said. “Predators other than werewolves, anyway. Spell wasn’t strong, and it gave up as soon as I started digging.”

Charles had wondered. Mostly skeletons left on the surface were scattered by scavengers. Anna was reading the collars. He stifled the impulse to stop her. He would have saved her the pain—but she was an adult. She knew what she was doing; it wasn’t his job to protect her from her own decisions.

“Kriemhild,” she said. “One of the names given to Siegfried’s wife in the Norse sagas. I always liked it better than Gutrune, which was the one Wagner used.”

Anna sounded like her normal self, and she was holding it together. But he could tell the dead pets had brought home the knowledge that all of the people who had lived here were probably dead. He thought so, too.

This killing field, like the carefully cleaned composting toilets, had the feel of duty. The kind of thing a dying person might do—clean up his mess so no one else had to. Killing their pets because there would be no one to take care of their dependents—and a good person would not allow these animals to slowly starve to death in the wilderness. Or possibly they had been protecting the animals from whatever had happened to the citizens of Wild Sign.

Charles wasn’t sure yet exactly what it said about what had happened to the people in Wild Sign. Their story was just starting to take shape for him.

“Siegfried’s wife,” Tag was saying. “Someone liked opera?”