Leah’s voice, breathless and hoarse, replied. “I asked, are Asil and Anna there?”
Asil took the phone from Wellesley. “We are here.”
“I’m calling from Jericho’s phone,” she said. “We’ve got bodies here but no Jericho. You should come.”
“Charles and Sage are here, too. Do you want us all?”
She made an exasperated sound. “What did you do? Decide to get together for a party? Never mind. Yes. Everyone should come and help me search for Jericho. We don’t want him running around loose—or in someone else’s hands, for that matter.”
She left them in a fit of dial tone.
“Are you up for this?” asked Charles.
It took Anna a minute to realize he was asking her.
She put her feet on the floor and stood up. “I’m okay,” she said. “I won’t be up to a wild hunt, but I’ll be fine.”
Wellesley said, “I need to eat and rest.”
Asil gave him a frown. “You weren’t invited, my friend. I’m very glad that your wolf has evidently been freed from a witch’s curse—but that’s a long way from being safe and dependable.”
Wellesley laughed, but his eyes were wary. “I suppose it is.”
“I could stay with him to make sure he’s okay,” offered Sage. She gave the artist a brilliant smile. “I’ve been a fan for a long time. I’d love to commission something if you are willing.”
Wellesley shook his head. “I’d rather be alone if you don’t mind. I have a lot to absorb. A little rest and a lot of food will see me right as rain. As far as a painting is concerned—I’ll get back to you on that. Most of my paintings were done to stave off madness. I don’t know what I’ll want to paint now.”
“Leave him,” said Charles.
“Come on, children,” said Asil. “You are dawdling.”
• • •
WITHOUT DISCUSSION, CHARLES climbed into the driver’s seat of Sage’s SUV, setting the Viking’s axe in the back. He nodded to Anna to get into the passenger side. Evidently, the keys were in the SUV because it started right up. Sage didn’t look happy about her car being co-opted—or maybe just about being left to ride with Asil. But when Anna started to get out, Sage waved her hand and gave her a quick grin.
There was no room to turn around, which didn’t seem to bother Charles a bit. He gunned the engine and backed up the twisty, scary, narrow track up the cliffside about thirty miles per hour.
Anna choked back a laugh, made sure her seat belt was tight, and closed her eyes. “I hope Sage has good insurance,” she said.
“I don’t like this situation at all,” Charles said instead of responding to her banter—unless he had flashed her that quick grin of his. Had she missed it by being a coward?
The SUV took a sharp turn and reversed directions. She opened her eyes, and they were back on the safer track, headed down it at what would have been a crazy speed if anyone else were driving.
“Which situation?” she asked. “Wellesley’s unexpected curse? Missing werewolf? Or bodies at the missing werewolf’s house?”
She couldn’t find it in herself to be as concerned about the bodies as she would have been before Hester was killed. They could have been random hikers who had gotten way, way, way off the beaten path and run into a crazy werewolf. But she was making the assumption that they were the enemy because cooler heads than hers were considering other possibilities.
“What are they trying to accomplish?” Charles said. “It’s bad to have an enemy with the kinds of resources these people apparently have—but it is infinitely worse to have crazy people as enemies.”
“Evidently,” Anna said, “you also consider it a certainty that the bodies that Leah found belonged to our enemy and not Canadian hikers who have been wandering around the mountains lost for a few months.”
He started to say something, then closed his mouth. He gave her an assessing look. “Why Canadian?”
She held up a finger. “Local hikers would figure out that downhill and south mean safety, uphill and north just gets worse. Downhill and south would take them away from our territory.” She held up a second finger, “Casual hikers would have fallen down and died before they ever reached anywhere near here—I don’t know exactly where Jericho lives because I’ve never heard his name before, but I’m assuming it’s in this general direction.”
“And lost Canadian hikers are the only ones who could get here by going downhill and south,” he said. He grinned at her. “It’s not quite true, we run hikers out of our territory all the time, and there’s a lot of federal land between us and Canada.”
“And,” Anna said, holding up a third finger, “Canadian hikers would be too polite to end up as bodies. Thus the bodies must not belong to random hikers.”
He gave a shout of laughter. “I love you. I came to the same conclusion by a different path. I’m pretty sure the bodies at Jericho’s belong to the same group who went after Hester and Jonesy.”
She looked at him. “How did you get there?”
“There are no such things as coincidences. The last time one of our wildlings interacted with a normal human was six years ago. Now we have two in two days.”
“Leah didn’t say how old the bodies were,” Anna commented. “When was the last time someone heard from Jericho?”
He shrugged. “Da has kept me busy with other things. I haven’t talked to any of the wildlings since last winter.”
The Marrok used Charles, Asil, and a couple other of the older wolves to check on the wildlings once a month or so as soon as the snow flew, saving a few of them to visit himself. Not that the wildlings couldn’t take care of themselves, most of them—it was what they would do to take care of themselves that worried Bran.
“Why do you think going after Jericho makes no sense?” Anna asked. “They went after Hester. What makes him different?”
“They have werewolves, so they don’t just need genetic samples.” A deer stepped onto the road, and he braked, slewing the big rig sideways in an effort to miss the doe. He stopped about three feet from the deer, who had frozen.
“Go on, little sister,” he told her. “There is no one hungry today.”
Released from whatever instinct had caused her to plant her feet and remain still, she bounced up the hill and into the trees.
Anna looked behind them, but there was no sign of Asil and Sage.
“There are several ways to get there from Wellesley’s,” said Charles, as he put his foot down on the gas again. “I expect Asil hopes to beat us there.”
The race is on, thought Anna, but she didn’t say it. It was either a guy thing or a dominant-werewolf thing. Either way, Charles and Asil would enjoy the challenge.
“So why does Hester make more sense than Jericho?” she asked.
“Jericho is an atomic bomb waiting to go off. Questioning Jericho makes no sense at all.”
“I’m not familiar with him,” Anna said. “But if he was on Leah’s list—didn’t she have the safer wolves?”
“Jericho was on Sage and my list,” Charles said. “One of the dangerous ones. I don’t know what Leah is doing there.”
“If they are recruiting,” said Anna, thoughtfully, “they are being stupid about who they are choosing.”
“Lethally so,” agreed Charles.
“The only thing that makes sense from our end is that they want to cause chaos while Bran is away. But even that doesn’t quite work,” she said. “Because then all the surveillance equipment at Hester’s is a lot of risk and money for an end that is easier to reach different ways. If they have a helicopter, they could just drop something nasty on your father’s house from the air. More effect and less risk.”
“They want something,” Charles agreed.
“Maybe Jericho will know what they wanted,” she said.
Charles made a noise.
“That wasn’t a hopeful grunt,” she said.
“Jericho can barely communicate on a good day,” Charles told her. “If there are bodies around, it isn’t a good day.”