A hunt, said Brother Wolf with grim satisfaction. Hester has given us a hunt.
* * *
• • •
IN THE END, most of their finds fit in the blanket chest. The sword they wrapped in one of the discarded blankets. There was no disguising what it was, really, but at least no one would have details. Magical swords tended to have histories and be identifiable to someone with enough motivation. This way, all an observer would see would be him and Asil with random stuff—no details to attract someone (or something) out there looking for the silver shoe buckle of Asmodeus or some such nonsense.
Charles refolded the paper and stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans. They had agreed that it would be best not to talk to anyone except Anna about that note. If there was a traitor, the less said to anyone about it the better.
Charles was reasonably certain that Asil was incapable of betraying his da. It helped that Asil had vowed his loyalty to the Marrok and Bran (as if they were two different people) as soon as he had read the note through.
Asil closed the lid of the blanket chest and turned the latch so it wouldn’t fall open when they carried it out. “You know we did not find everything.”
“I do,” agreed Charles. “I also believe we have found everything we are going to.”
Asil smiled. “I do not miss being Alpha,” he said. “Especially at times like these I do not mind that you are more dominant in this pack than I. It means that I am not responsible for that which we have found—and more importantly, that which we have not found.”
Brother Wolf did not find Asil funny.
“Good for you,” Charles said.
Asil’s smile broadened, though he did not show his teeth. “Jonesy was a hoarder of the sort who make appearances on TV reality shows. Who knows how long he had been collecting? You and I will be out here as soon as the fire burns itself out—assuming Bran isn’t back, and probably even if he is. And we will still not find everything. And there is this, too. Jonesy, whoever he was when the world was young, could make the earth listen to his desires. If I had this ability, I would hide the prizes of my collection deep in the earth. You need to be very careful, or what you’ll have is a bunch of treasure-hunting fae invading the mountain, digging for treasure.”
He didn’t, Charles thought, have to sound so happy about it.
CHAPTER
5
The flat area of the valley resembled a parking lot, but one filled with an unusually high percentage of trucks and SUVs—even for Montana. The three tractors and the backhoe completed the picture.
Maybe, Anna thought, approaching Charles’s truck (and though they’d been married for a while now, it was still Charles’s truck), a parking lot of a feed store.
Her orders were to bring the truck as close to the front door of the cabin as she could so that Asil and Charles could load it with whatever they found in the cabin. Either there was a lot of it, or it had been difficult to secure, because it had taken them a long time to finish.
The truck had been pulled close to a trail to reduce the distance the bodies had to be carried. She almost just hopped in and drove, but as she stepped into the cab, she noticed that whoever had thrown the bodies into Charles’s truck hadn’t shut the tailgate. Even though they had gone to a great deal of trouble to secure the concealing tarp down. Fat lot of good that would have done to hide the load, with a leg sticking out the back.
Anna had to partially unhook the tarp in order to get at the macabre cargo and move the bodies around until she could close the tailgate.
Dear Dad. She composed a mental letter as she unhooked bungee cords. Life in Montana is pretty interesting. Killed a man today—it was justified. Really. But just in case, you should talk to your buddies and see if there’s a good criminal attorney in Missoula or Kalispell who wouldn’t mind representing a werewolf.
She considered whether or not she should explain exactly what she was up to just now—moving dead bodies around so she could shut the tailgate—to her father, even in an imaginary letter. She decided that there were some things he did not need to know.
She pulled the tarp aside—and a horribly familiar scent caught her off guard. She stopped everything and took a deep breath, knowing she must be mistaken. And for a moment after that, she couldn’t breathe at all. Once she could breathe again, she unhooked the tarp a little more so she could get a good look at the faces of the dead.
“Hello, hello,” said Sage—and Anna jumped.
It said something about Anna’s state that she hadn’t even noticed Sage approaching.
“What did you do to your hand?” Sage asked in a much more serious voice before Anna could say anything to her greeting.
Anna looked down blankly at the bright purple vet wrap that wound around her right hand. Charles had utilized the time between when he’d used Jonesy’s phone to call for help and when help started arriving, about fifteen minutes later (some members of the pack lived almost as remotely as the wildlings), to do a little first aid.
“They shot Hester with a silver bullet,” she managed to get out reasonably smoothly. “I held on to it too long when I recovered it. It’s fine.”
“I got sent over to see what was taking you so long,” Sage said briskly, sensing, with her usual perceptiveness, Anna’s volatile emotional state and that Anna would rather not expound upon it. Sage was very good at knowing exactly what to say and when to leave things alone. “Her royal highness is getting restless.” Though Sage got along with Leah just fine, it didn’t spare Leah (or anyone else for that matter) from Sage’s pointed comments. “I think she just wants to know what Charles and Asil have found, like all the rest of us.”
Sage’s voice was beautiful. Born in the Deep South, it flowed out like honey on a sore throat, soothing and sweet. The rest of Sage was beautiful, too. She was tall, though not as tall as Leah, and slender as a runway model. Sage was funny, sharp, and warm at the same time, a combination that let her get away with saying things that a lot of people were thinking—and not getting in trouble for it.
Before Anna could decide to tell her that she knew one of the dead people, Sage rounded the end of the truck and saw Anna’s initial problem.
“Ha,” she said. “Did the idiots who loaded the bodies forget that you’d have to shut the tailgate or risk dropping dead people all the way home?” She hopped up without a fuss and started shifting the bodies around.
“Some people have no sense at all,” Sage said. “And I include Charles in that. Sending you, of all people, out to deal with all the dead bodies.”
Anna found herself at a loss for words. Still reeling from . . . PTSD, she supposed, it took her a moment to realize that Sage seemed to be ascribing any oddity in her manner to all the dead bodies in the back of the truck.