“We are here to take care of whatever is up in those mountains,” Anna told her. “But it would really help if we knew what happened in Wild Sign. We don’t know what we are dealing with. My mother-in-law—who was here two centuries ago—only remembers bits and pieces. Those letters are possibly our only eyewitness accounts to a threat we need to neutralize.”

“I don’t know anything about a Singer,” Dr. Connors said. “I sometimes stayed with my dad for a few weeks, but I had never been to Wild Sign until I hiked in looking for him and found the place deserted.”

“At this point,” said Charles, “we don’t know that all of those people are dead or if they are just missing.”

It was apparent in his voice that he didn’t think they were missing. Anna caught Dr. Connors’s flinch.

Charles caught it, too, and his tone was gentler as he said, “We need to find out what happened to them. So far, your father’s letters look like they might be the best clue we have, but anything you know about Wild Sign could be useful.”

Dr. Connors’s jaw firmed.

Anna said, “We can do things that the sheriff’s department cannot. We have the money and the personnel to throw at this investigation. Your best chance to find out what happened to your father is to help us.”

Dr. Connors looked down at the letters, as if reorienting herself. “They are in code because his family has been hunting him since he ran away at sixteen. Off and on.” She looked at Charles. “Connors is not the name he was born with. His family is one of the families. I won’t tell you which one. If it was black witches who found them up there, I imagine you’ll figure it out. If it wasn’t, I won’t speak their name where anything might hear me.”

Her voice shook a little. Charles nodded, eyes a little narrow. Anna wondered if he could make a guess.

“It doesn’t matter which one it was,” he said.

Dr. Connors cleared her throat and continued her story. “From the time he was eighteen until he was thirty-two, they seemed to forget about him. He got his PhD in applied mathematics and went to work in the aerospace industry. Got married. Had me and my brother. Enjoyed a normal life until my aunt Diana, his sister, showed up in the middle of a lunch. I was five and my brother was two. We were having a picnic in the backyard. My mom ran and my dad tried to keep us safe from his sister. She did something that had him on the ground, and then she pulled a knife and started cutting him—as if we weren’t there.”

Her mouth was tight and the edges of her lips were white. “My mother was a police officer. She came back with her service weapon and shot Diana in the head. She kept my dad alive until the EMTs got there. He still has the scars.” She stopped and swallowed. “Had the scars the last time I saw him. The shooting was ruled self-defense. But my dad left us that afternoon—left the hospital, left his job, left his life. And he never got it back.”

She looked at Anna. “You know about witches. I found out later that he could have gone gray and stayed with us. But my dad . . . he was a gentle soul. He made my mom divorce him. Came to visit sometimes for a day or two when he felt it was safe. When we all figured out I was witchborn, too, he collected me for a whole year when I was about twelve or so. I don’t have a lot of power. He taught me to hide it.” She gave the three of them a sour look that didn’t quite mask the fear in her eyes. “Apparently it doesn’t work.”

She’d be safe from witches, said Brother Wolf. Witches can’t smell a rabbit at five inches. She doesn’t feel like a witch, she just smells like one.

Anna was happy to repeat Brother Wolf’s assessment. “As long as they don’t have a pet werewolf, you’re still safe from witches. Witches don’t identify each other by scent.”

There was a woman walking a big dog on the far side of the parklike area they sat in. The first person they’d seen up and moving anywhere near them.

“He’d found a group of white witches to travel with by then,” continued Dr. Connors. Anna couldn’t tell if Brother Wolf’s reassurance had helped or not. “They were safer together—up to a point. If there were too many of them, their combined power could attract attention. So in small groups they would hike into remote places and set up camp, moving around a few miles here or there to avoid getting pushed out. Winters were rough up north or high in the mountains, but they learned how to manage because those places were safer.”

The woman with the dog was closer. She was African American. Her dark hair hung past her shoulders, cornrowed and beaded with lapis lazuli–colored beads that matched the blue in the blue-and-gold shirt she wore. Raw linen pants stopped midcalf to reveal muscled legs and bright blue flip-flops. She had lots of curves, but the end effect was of general fitness.

The dog, who looked like he had a German shepherd somewhere not too far up his family tree, had been roving around her on a loose leash. As they neared, he walked alertly at her side, his intent gaze upon the werewolves.

“Audience approaching,” murmured Tag.

Dr. Connors looked over her shoulder and her whole demeanor changed. Her face relaxed and the lines around her eyes softened. The other woman smiled at her, a joyous, bigger-than-life smile.

“Tanya, this is Anna Cornick; her husband, Charles; and their henchman, Colin Taggart.” Dr. Connors didn’t slow down or hesitate on the word “henchman,” though it made both Tanya and Tag, who had come to his feet, grin.

“This is my wife, Tanya, Dr. Bonsu to her students, who fear her.”

“As you are not my students, please call me Tanya,” she said, taking a seat next to her wife. The dog sat alertly next to her, his eyes on Tag, his ruff slightly raised.

“We are werewolves,” Anna told her, ignoring the way Dr. Bonsu’s—Tanya’s—eyes widened and she suddenly smelled of fear. Smart people worry when they are confronted with werewolves. Time would take care of that—but there were easier methods for dogs. “We should put your dog at ease with us before we go on.”

Charles got up and the dog started to snarl at him—and then Charles met his eyes. The dog licked his lips and dropped all the way to the ground. Charles put his hand on the dog’s forehead and waited. First the dog’s tail started to wag and then he wiggled happily, licking at Charles’s hand.

“Good dog,” crooned Charles, giving the dog a pat before returning to his seat.

“That didn’t take very long,” Dr. Connors said thoughtfully, and a little unhappily. “I would have thought he would be more wary.”

“No reason,” Anna said. “We aren’t going to hurt him—and my husband just told him that.”

“As simple as that?” Dr. Connors sounded a little spooked.

Was she worrying about how easily a witch could subdue this means of defense? She should be. But that couldn’t be Anna’s problem.

“Dogs don’t lie,” Anna said. “Dr. Connors—”

“Oh, call me Sissy, please,” said Dr. Connors, who was the least Sissy-like person Anna had ever met.

She smiled suddenly at Anna’s expression and it took years off her face. “I know, I know. But I was cute when I was a baby.”

She glanced at her wife, her dog, the letters on the bench beside her. Then she sighed.

“You want to know about Wild Sign. Okay. About a year and a half ago, one of my dad’s people contacted him about this place in the Marble Mountains of Northern California where they’d put together a colony where they were safe from the black witches hunting them. He never told me why it was safer. I don’t think he knew when he headed out. And he never told me in any of his letters—though I could tell that he felt safe there. That’s the first time he’d felt safe since my mother killed his sister in our backyard.”

She looked at Charles, having clued in, Anna thought, to the person who was really in charge. “Do you think that there is any way he could be alive?”

“We have not found human bodies,” he told her. “Until we do, it is premature to write them off. But nearly six months is a long time to be missing.”

Anna thought about what the Angel Hills doctor had said about Daniel Green knowing that Carrie wasn’t going to be visiting anymore.

“What do you mean, human bodies?” asked Tanya. “Did you find other bodies?”

“Pets,” Anna said. “All laid out in a row. Not sacrificed—we don’t think. It didn’t have that feel. But all of them dead—cats and dogs. Eighteen that we counted. We didn’t excavate, so it is possible that we missed some.” She paused. “Did your father like old Germanic tales?”