“But it’s a pretty song,” he coaxed, his fingers dancing lightly over the strings as he played a few random chords. He glanced up at her through his lashes in a look she didn’t think was supposed to be flirtatious. “A fun song.”

“Yes,” she said, though she didn’t really agree.

“The Ash Grove” was a pretty song. “Mary Mack” was a fun song. “Molly Bawn” was a song about a bastard who murdered his wife and got away with it. But arguing with someone she wanted to extract information from didn’t seem useful, so she moved the conversation along.

“Cool guitar.”

He lit up with enthusiasm. “She’s pretty awesome. I paid too much for her, but it’s not like these ladies grow on trees.” He nodded his head to the coffee shop. “If you came for coffee, I’m sorry. Dana closes up from two to four.”

“I don’t look like the snow cone type?” she asked.

He glanced at her silk shirt and jacket, shook his head, and laughed, an appreciative male sound. “No.”

So her protective camouflage had worked on him, at least. But honestly, she didn’t want a snow cone, so there was that.

“No,” she told him. “You are right. Excellent snow cone customer sensing. I am not here for coffee, either. I’m here to talk to you. A friend told me that you’d spent some time up at Wild Sign last fall.”

His face closed down, all the warmth gone.

“There’s no one there now,” he said.

“I know that,” she told him. “I was just up there. The land they were on is owned by my family. We’re trying to figure out what happened. Why the people abandoned Wild Sign and where they went.”

“You hiked all the way in?” he asked.

“The day before yesterday,” she confirmed.

“The day before yesterday,” he said, then gave her a sweet smile, as friendly as if he’d never shut down.

She didn’t know what about that made him change his mind about talking to her, but she was willing to run with it.

“Yes. And found a place that people put a lot of work into—and then abandoned. We—I feel responsible. It is our land. I need to find out what happened to them.”

“I can’t tell you that,” he warned her.

“I didn’t expect that you could solve the mystery for us. For me,” she told him. “But the more information we can get, the more likely we are to discover what happened, how a whole town of people just disappeared. To that end, I’d like to know a little about what folks up there were like.”

“People,” he said after strumming a few bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” Anna knew guitarists (especially guitarists who had worked in music stores) who would run screaming at the sound of the opening bars to that song.

“They were just people,” he told his guitar strings.

Anna, who had learned to listen from her mate, waited.

“There was an air of euphoria, of joy, about Wild Sign,” he said. “It felt like a little bit of paradise.” He played a few measures that sounded half-familiar, but Anna couldn’t place the song. “They didn’t have a lot—not money or things. But it didn’t matter. They had what they needed. A safe place to raise their children.” He smiled gently, his eyes distant, and spun out a few more bars.

In the manner of guitarists the world over, he talked a little bit as he played, drawing a picture of Wild Sign for her using words rather than his camera. At first the images came slowly, but as he talked, the picture became richer, nuanced and clear.

She would have been happier to just listen, but she dutifully noted down names. Like Dr. Connors, Zander didn’t know last names. But he did use actual first names—mostly. Dr. Connors Senior was Doc.

While he talked, his eyes on his fretboard, Anna brought forward her wolf self to check him out. He smelled of days camping in the sun and a little like cotton candy. He did not smell like witchcraft.

She thought, though, that there might be a little of that old earth magic—the kind that Wellesley, their painter, had. But to check that out, she’d have had to be on four feet, which would defeat the purpose of her visit—to get Zander to talk. It wasn’t worth it for something so faint, maybe some sort of good luck piece that carried a bit of magic. The important thing was that, not being a witch, he could not tell her about any magic that happened in Wild Sign. She was probably not going to learn anything important from him.

Listening to his soft-voiced storytelling, she had the sudden thought that, other than his talent for music, he could not have been more different from her intense mate if he had deliberately tried. There was a sweet, almost innocent air about him. Sensual, but in the way of the birds in the air and the beasts of the field. Earthy.

Zander liked to talk—once he got started. Even with her, most of the time Charles preferred to be quiet. She thought that was one reason her mate liked horses so much. They didn’t require words to communicate—they listened to his hands and body, and he heard them with more than his ears.

Zander might be shy, but he liked people. Though most of his photography was nature themed, he’d done one chapter in his Alaskan book on the people he’d worked with at the fisheries in Ketchikan. She could see it in the verbal sketches he drew of the people who lived in Wild Sign. She found out that Emily—who must have been Mommy Hellion—loved to cook and never went out without something purple on. Deaf from birth, Jack made signs to spread joy.

Charles liked very few people.

If she had met Zander before she’d been Changed, she might have fallen for him. Not just because she loved his art but because he was sexy and sweet. He reminded her of one of Wellesley’s paintings—deep and rich with meaning. Every time she looked, she saw something new. Something that made her think.

But she wasn’t that woman anymore. It was Charles, with his darkness, his violence and contrasting gentleness, whom she wanted to take to her bed, to share her life with.

She had gone through some truly awful times, but without them, she would not have had the courage to love someone like Charles. Charles, who had reached out of his own darkness to catch her. She had the strong feeling that Charles’s act had taken even greater courage on his part, though he had never told her so.

“Sounds like you knew some of the people in Wild Sign before you went up?” Anna asked, focusing once more on Zander’s words instead of his person.

“Sure,” he said easily. “The world’s wildernesses are finite, you know? There aren’t many of us who are driven to explore them. After a while, some faces are familiar. Emily and her family—the Tottlefords—I met a few years ago in Alaska. But they’re not the only ones I knew. I stayed a couple of weeks with Jenny and her husband at the time in the Andes.”

Anna was pretty sure that Jenny had been Dr. Connors Senior’s “Opera Singer” from the stories that Zander had shared. But she didn’t want Zander to know that they had another source for information about Wild Sign, so she didn’t try to confirm that.

“The Andes?” Anna asked. “In South America?”

He nodded. “Peru.” But something about the music he was playing had caught her ear.

“What is that song?” she asked.

He smiled. “Do you like it?” He played a few more measures before he spoke. “It’s something I’ve been working on. My only problem is that it sounds familiar to me. I don’t want to take credit for someone else’s work.”

“I hear you,” Anna said. “It sounds familiar to me, too.” She sighed. “Doubtless I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with the title, singer, and where I heard it last in my head. But it’s not coming to me now.”

There was a wordless call behind her. She turned to see Tag and Charles jogging across the street. Charles was carrying two fair-sized boxes, and Tag had a box and a bright-colored fabric bag.

She turned back to Zander. He’d closed up again, like a flower when the sun goes down. He did not look like someone who could be observant and funny or take world-class photographs. He wasn’t playing that odd song anymore—he’d switched to “The Ash Grove.”

She’d been thinking about “The Ash Grove” a little earlier. Music was like that, though; a chord progression could call up a dozen songs to any experienced musician. They’d probably both picked up on a chord progression in something he’d played earlier that was also in “The Ash Grove.”

“Thank you,” she told him sincerely. “I appreciate your help.”

He nodded without looking up. “Let me know if you find any of them? I’ll be here until the snow flies—October or thereabouts. Then I’ll follow the wind.” He looked thoughtful. “Colorado, maybe.”

“I’ll let you know,” she promised. “Safe travels.”

She met Charles and Tag at the SUV, where they were off-loading their burdens.

“Found some things?” she asked.

Charles nodded.

Tag said, “Good thing we went there. Or else when the owner of the storage facility had his next sale, someone would be the proud owner of the Green family grimoires.”