Outside, Anna pulled the emergency blanket out of the truck and climbed into the truck bed. She shook the blanket out, then, with a graceful flick of her wrists, flipped it to cover Hester.
“She was old,” Tag was saying. “And tough. She survived things that would make your red fur turn gray—and she did it with style. On her own terms. She deserves what we can do for her.”
“I agree,” Charles said. “Tell Sage I’ve changed my mind. We’ll still gather all the pack up here to check things out—but it will be a funeral, too. We’ll need food and drink. Fuel enough to burn the house to the ground.”
“Gasoline and diesel?” Tag asked as Anna came into Hester’s living room.
“Ask Asil,” said Charles.
“Asil?” Tag said doubtfully. “He’s old. Older’n me. What’s he know about setting a house on fire?”
Sage said something that Charles couldn’t quite catch.
“Oh, okay,” said Tag. “That’s all right, then. I’ll make sure Asil knows he’s in charge of the fire. No worries. We’ll organize this end of it.”
Sage took the phone back. “Don’t worry,” she said dryly. “Leah and I will organize this end of it.”
CHAPTER
4
The pack came by twos and threes, on four-wheelers, on motorcycles, or in various four-wheel-drive vehicles. Tag came on his backhoe.
They retrieved the invaders’ bodies first. Those went into Charles’s truck, all six of them, while Hester’s body was removed to the cabin. By the time they’d finished with that, the whole pack was present.
Charles put Leah in charge of figuring out how to get the four-wheelers, now grown into the forest, out, without leaving obvious signs that magic had been worked there. It was obviously the most difficult job and, to his surprise, she tackled it with enthusiasm.
He’d flattered her, he realized, in front of the pack. And as a result, she hadn’t even resented his giving her orders. Maybe Anna was right when she said that Leah wasn’t the only reason he and his stepmother had a difficult time with each other.
Leah grabbed a half dozen wolves and, eventually, several chain saws. It had taken a few hours, but Sage’s SUV held the cage Hester had been trapped in as well one of the four-wheelers. Leah’s truck held the other three—chopped up into parts. Even removed from the forest, the mangled vehicles were an odd sight. Desultory leakage of various fluids attested that they had been running, but all of them had freshly sawn tree bits growing through the metal.
Charles didn’t know exactly what he was going to do with them. What he wasn’t going to do with them was stage them in his father’s backyard as art pieces—as Sage had advised.
Tag’s suggestion of finding out who they belonged to and giving them back was a better one, though the manner Tag wanted to do it in seemed a bit complicated. And violent.
Brother Wolf was in agreement with Tag.
While Leah’s team took care of the four-wheelers, Charles set most of the rest of the pack clearing the area around the cabin of anything burnable. He sent the rest out to find any evidence of the invasion, anything that would hold a clue as to who these people were and what they had been about. He didn’t expect them to find much; the people he’d killed today had seemed pretty professional. Professionals don’t leave clues if they can help it.
That’s why he was surprised when Asil came back almost immediately to report that he’d found electronic surveillance equipment up in the trees. Charles asked Asil to let the other evidence-hunting wolves know to look for more electronics. Once that was done, Charles pulled Tag off his backhoe and recruited Anna to help the two of them.
He and Tag because they knew what they were looking at when it came to tech. Anna because she kept him balanced.
The events of the day—the fact that Hester and Jonesy had died while under his protection—had left Brother Wolf beside himself. Most of the pack were afraid of him for one reason or another. Normally, it would not have been a problem, but now the others could sense Brother Wolf’s anger. Their increased fear enraged Brother Wolf more, creating a nasty snowball effect.
Anna took the edge off everyone’s emotions, so he didn’t end up killing some idiot for the crime of stepping in front of Brother Wolf at the wrong time. Some idiot that he was supposed to be taking care of for his da, who had not contacted anyone about Hester’s death.
Brother Wolf didn’t like that they hadn’t heard from Da, either.
On the good side, as it turned out, none of the battery- or solar-powered surveillance equipment they found was functional.
“Jonesy probably zapped them,” said Tag from twenty feet up in a lodgepole pine, where he was using a battery-powered drill to extract a camera from its perch in the tree. “He should have told Hester, but he didn’t always tell her everything. He didn’t like to worry her. Having awesome godlike power meant that nothing much worried him even if it should have.”
“Zapped,” said Charles dryly.
Tag made a popping sound with his mouth. He liked to sound dumb, even in front of people he knew were wise to him. “Zapped. That’s why the innards are all melty-like and the out-ards are untouched. Only way I can think of to do that is magical zapping.”
He’d gotten the camera off the tree by that point and opened up the casing. None of the electronics was store-bought. This was equipment built from components by someone who knew what they were doing. That meant that someone, some person, had touched the insides with their hands.
Tag brought the opened camera to his nose for a good smell, reclosed the casing to preserve the scent, then tossed it down.
Charles caught it, then took a moment to reopen the casing and get a good smell of the ruined camera himself. Outside, it just smelled of the forest, but inside . . . the faint ozone of zapped electronics and the peppery smell of the man who’d put this one together.
All in all, there had been three people who had worked on the custom electronics placed around Hester’s cabin. All of them human—and one of them lay dead in Charles’s truck bed. But the other two were still at large. He’d know them by their scent when he ran into them again. Tag’s nose was pretty good; he’d know them, too. So would Anna.
But he didn’t bother handing her this camera—she’d already gotten the scent of the three people from the other equipment they’d found. If he could count on Tag’s letting him know if he found someone different, Charles wouldn’t have to have Brother Wolf check each one out. But Tag was Tag. Tag took great pride in letting you fall if you leaned on him too much.
“You knew them pretty well,” Anna observed to Tag in a gentle voice. “Hester and Jonesy.”