“You want to cook beans over a campfire?” Charles asked.

“Was that a joke?” asked Tag, sounding truly dumbfounded.

“Would I tease you?” Charles said, picking up a box of things that were not magic and hauling them to the pile of boxes they were just going to have to carry back.

The freshness of the breeze caught Brother Wolf’s attention, and Charles looked up into the sky with a frown at the gathering clouds. “I hope the rain holds off until we get this done.”

Tag glanced up, too. “Not supposed to rain, according to my weather app.”

Charles said, “It’s going to rain. Help me get the dining table out.”

It wasn’t heavy, but it was awkward. It marked the edge of how far they’d gotten in their hunt for what turned out to be the grimoires. When they’d refilled the unit, he and Tag had put the table over the top of where the grimoires had been. They’d found the books in the center of the unit, surrounded by a pair of room dividers and a chalk circle.

It had been a good circle, competently drawn—as far as Charles could judge. It wasn’t a pattern that he’d seen before, but the intent had been obvious. Such a circle should have cut off the effect of so much magic—but he’d felt the grimoires when he’d stepped foot on the ground at the storage center. He didn’t think it was a problem with the magic Carrie had used, only the length of time since she’d renewed her protections.

They had taken out one of the dividers and set it aside but left the second one up. Now Charles took down the second one—and found himself confronting a small open area that someone had clearly set up as an office.

Had there been a path from the door to here before they had destroyed Carrie’s organization? He couldn’t say one way or the other. He inhaled and caught a hint of vanilla and also a woman’s scent. Carrie Green had definitely used this.

It was an area about five feet square, with a six-foot-tall bookshelf filled with books shoved in every which way, in direct contrast to the order Carrie had imposed upon her storage unit. But the battered old Steelcase desk—a relic of the Cold War era, complete with government serial plate along the edge of the desktop—was tidy enough.

On the upper left corner of the desk was a black coffee cup with Witch scrawled across it in red letters. It held two pens, a pencil, and a highlighter. On the lower left corner was a lined notebook. When he opened it, it proved to be blank, though roughly half of the sheets had been torn out.

On the upper right corner of the desk were three books that had never been commercially produced. He held a hand over them before he picked up the first one. It looked to be a handwritten diary, but he couldn’t find the date because it was in Russian—or some other Cyrillic tongue. There were five bookmarks that each marked a passage that Carrie had highlighted.

“Do you read Russian?” Charles asked Tag, who had paused in his own work to look at Carrie’s workspace.

“No,” he said. “But the next one down is in English.”

And so was the third one. Charles handed one to Tag and took the other. Charles’s looked to be a detailed study of the deaths of various fae. It didn’t appear to be a fae-hunter’s diary but a scholarly study based mostly upon folklore. The methods of killing (or manner of dying) were all highlighted.

“How to kill a fae,” Charles told Tag. “Though I didn’t see anything that someone who wasn’t armed with a supernatural weapon could manage.”

“Her bookmarks in mine are all about how to kill vampires,” said Tag. “Some of the methods I know are effective. Some of them I’ve never heard of. But there are enough here that I personally know do not work that it might as well be a study on how to get yourself killed.” He pulled out a folded sheet of lined paper that had been tucked in the back and showed it to Charles.

Back-slanted script, messy but easily readable, covered the page.

Interesting that wooden stake kills vampire when steel or silver does not. What is the difference in the materials? Silver is purifying—which is why it works on werewolves. So why doesn’t it work on vampires? Wood doesn’t work on werewolves. Why doesn’t it work on werewolves?

Why does nothing not magical work on all fae? Not even cold iron.

Then in overlarge letters, as if in frustration:

How do we kill it? Will it stay dead? Emma thinks the Singer is like some of the Native American entities. In the stories, Coyote comes back if he is killed. How do we kill the Singer so he doesn’t come back?

There was a lot of space, and then on the bottom were the words:

I figured it out. But do I have the courage? I don’t know.

Anna drove up with pizza and water bottles—and when Charles kissed her mouth in thanks, she tasted like bubble gum. He pulled back and frowned at her.

“Bubble gum?”

She laughed. “While the pizza was cooking, I bought a snow cone.” She gave Charles a smile. “But the reason I went there was to tell Zander I knew why his song sounded familiar.”

They sat down at the dining table—it was handy—and ate.

“What song?” asked Tag.

“When I talked to Zander yesterday, he was playing guitar,” she explained around a bite of hot pizza. “He was noodling around on a piece that sounded familiar to me—and he didn’t know what it was, either, just something he was working on. You know how it is when you can’t quite remember a song . . .”

Tag shook his head.

“And you know what it is now?” asked Charles. He was glad that the shadow of telling Dr. Connors what she was pregnant with had left Anna, even if he’d rather it hadn’t been the pretty boy selling snow cones who’d accomplished that.

She laughed. “It is such a relief. It was the chord progression: D major, A major, B minor, F sharp minor . . .” She raised her eyebrows.

He closed his eyes and “heard” the progression in his head. “Pachelbel’s Canon, among other songs,” he said.

“And a dozen other songs at least,” she agreed. To Tag she said, “It’s one of those chord progressions that just sounds good—so it was stolen by a whole bunch of pop musicians. I have no idea what song Zander’s mother sang to him—but I know Pachelbel.” She mimicked playing the cello.

“Why didn’t you pick it up sooner?” asked Tag. “It’s mainly a cello piece, right?”

“For sure,” she said. She shook her head. “I have no idea why I couldn’t figure it out.” She looked at the unit and asked, “Are you going to be able to get all the way through that before the rain hits?”

Charles said “Yes” and Tag said “No” at the same time.

“What he means,” said Tag, “is that we aren’t going to keep going through it. We’re putting it all back. There’s too much to put in the SUV. We found a cache of historical diaries written by the Green family of witches. They aren’t magic per se, but we aren’t leaving them for anyone. We’ll get a crew in here to clear out the whole unit—take ’em home and sort them out there.”

Charles nodded. “I’ll pay to keep the locker and we’ll take what we’ve already sorted out with us now. Once we do that, there isn’t anything with enough magic left here to draw predators.”

Tag tilted his head and then looked at Anna. “Do you know that he doesn’t talk unless you’re present?”

She laughed, and the sound made Charles and Brother Wolf happy. He wasn’t sure he’d known what happy had felt like before they’d found her.

CHAPTER

11

Anna and Charles went to the office to find the manager while Tag continued repacking the storage unit. The manager was not pleased to learn they had decided to keep the contents—but he was too intimidated by Charles to argue. Charles further softened the blow by paying him six months of rent, sixty dollars (refundable) for the key Charles had been using, and a hundred dollars for the manager’s trouble.

“Bribery is bad,” chided Anna as they walked back to Tag.

“Bribery will keep him happy and out of the storage unit,” said Charles.

Anna shook her head. “I am saddened by your innocent belief that a hundred dollars would keep him out if he was the type of man who would steal things from one of the storage lockers.”

Charles smiled, not unhappy to be caught out. “Then let’s just say that I was sorry I got his hopes up.”

They rounded the corner of the row of units where Carrie’s was, and Anna stumbled to a halt.

“Anna?”

She didn’t look at him but stared down the gravel road at Tag, who was loading his cauldron into the SUV. She reached out and grabbed Charles’s arm.

Honestly alarmed now, Charles said, “Anna? What’s wrong?”

She shivered, took a deep breath, and said, “Maybe a bit of a panic attack.” She took her hand off him and put it into her pocket, where a stray piece of paper rustled unhappily. “I’m glad I’m not going back to Wild Sign.”

“Anna?”