That they had seen, anyway.
“I thought at first you were playing front man to Charles,” Leslie said. “But he does your bidding, too.”
And they had added two and two and come up with twenty-two.
Anna opened her mouth to tell them they were wrong.
Wait. See what they have to say. Do not lie to them, that could come back and bite us. But for now, let them believe you are leading the packs. It was Bran’s voice in her head.
Aha. That was why Charles had had her invite the FBI in—so his da could listen from outside the house. It had taken her a long time to adjust to the difficulty of a private conversation with other werewolves around. The walls of her house were no match for wolf ears.
“I see,” Anna said, because she had been ready to tell them they were wrong, and she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“If there is someone in charge, if that is you, we—that is to say, my …” Goldstein faltered.
“Superiors?” suggested Anna.
Owners, growled Brother Wolf, unhappy with Bran for asking his mate to put herself in harm’s way like this.
“Colleagues,” said Leslie, watching Goldstein. “Equals.”
Goldstein had been with the bureau for more than twenty years, Anna recalled. He wasn’t subject to political whim because he wasn’t quite that far up in the bureaucracy, but Charles had told her Goldstein was right on the edge. He could have toppled into high office had he wished it. Leslie Fisher was on her way to doing exactly that.
“Our job,” Leslie said intensely, “the job of the FBI, is to protect the citizens of the United States. We can do that better through an alliance with the werewolves.”
“Who are citizens of the United States,” said Anna.
“Yes,” agreed Goldstein after a damning hesitation. “An alliance between the FBI and the werewolves will make everyone safer.”
Anna wondered if that was true.
“We know an alliance will take time,” Leslie said. “But today is a start.”
Goldstein pulled out another folder and set it beside the other two. “To that end, as a demonstration that you might find us as useful to you as you are to us, we have a mystery for you.”
“There’s a town missing,” said Leslie, pulling a folded-up USGS map out of the folder and laying it on the table. Someone had used a black marker to circle an area, then taped a slip of white paper next to the circle. Written in a neat hand in blue ink were the words Wild Sign.
Leslie tapped the marked space. “A group of people, as few as thirty or as many as forty as best we can tell, went up into the Marble Mountains in Northern California to live off-grid. The first of them set up about two or three years ago. Their settlement was illegal—the mountains are a mix of designated wilderness, federal lands, and tribal lands. Probably they thought they were on federal lands.”
Lots of snow in the Marbles, Brother Wolf told her. And Anna got something that was very nearly a visual from him.
“We have confirmation it was an active site this spring, when one of the Forest Service rangers stopped in to check on them. One of the community wrote to his daughter and gave her this map. It was his habit to write to her regularly, but his last letter was this April—a few days after the ranger stopped by, in fact. When the daughter received no further correspondence, she hiked in and found it abandoned. They were just gone.”
“Like Roanoke,” said Goldstein, “they just all disappeared. Of the names we’ve found, none of them have relocated and none of their relatives know where they are.”
“And this concerns us how?” Anna asked.
“Because it was finally determined that the settlement is not on either federal or tribal lands. It’s on a private parcel owned by Aspen Creek, Inc.,” said Goldstein. “Which is why no one tried to move them along.”
He and Leslie were looking at Anna, and she had no trouble looking blank.
“Aspen Creek, Inc., was the owner of the condo you stayed in while you were in Boston,” Leslie said. “And Aspen Creek is where you live. Where your pack lives.” She hesitated. “Where the Marrok’s pack lives.”
The title “Marrok” was not a secret word, but it was one Anna had never heard from a government official before. Leslie’s tone of voice and her pause meant she knew how important that term was. Anna didn’t know what Bran wanted to do about his title being bandied about in the human halls of power, so she chose to do nothing.
After it became obvious Anna wasn’t going to admit to anything, Goldstein’s voice was dry when he continued, “And there is this: the original owner of the property was one Leah Fenwood Cornick.”
A light knock sounded and the front door opened. Bran came in with a sheepish smile on his face. Anna had heard Charles’s foster sister, Mercy, say Bran looked more like a pizza delivery boy than the Wolf Who Rules. She hadn’t quite understood it until just that minute.
He wore a long-sleeved shirt that managed to conceal the hardness of his body, his shoulders hunched vaguely apologetically to match his smile. With a height that was just barely average and sandy blond hair worn a little untidily, Bran looked like a college student—or a pizza delivery boy.
“Hi,” he said pleasantly to the FBI agents without quite meeting their eyes. He patted Charles on the head as he padded around to slip between his son and Anna.
“May I?” he inquired of Anna as he pulled the map over toward their side of the table.
“Be my guest,” she said, unable to quite conceal her amusement.
He bent over the map. After a brief but thorough examination during which Anna returned Leslie’s inquiring look with a shrug, Bran gave an abrupt nod of his head. He looked his son in the eye for a moment, tapped the table with one brisk finger, then exited the house with a wave over his shoulder that might have been directed at the FBI agents—or just the room in general.
They feel earnest, Bran told her after he’d shut the door behind him. They at least believe everything they are saying. Tell them who I am. Tell them we will go looking. Tell them the rest of their visit might or might not be fruitful. The lessons Beauclaire learned are lessons we also take to heart. It might have been one of ours in the courtroom instead of Lizzie Beauclaire. I do not trust the humans.
Anna drew in a deep breath. “Despite your flattering suspicions, I am not the Wolf Who Rules.” She liked Mercy’s phrase for Bran’s title. “Marrok” didn’t mean much to humans until she explained it. “Wolf Who Rules” was self-explanatory. “The actual Wolf Who Rules just left through the front door. He believes you are sincere, but the lesson Beauclaire received—the lesson we all received—about how humans really think of us is concerning. You might not think we are monsters—or at least that we can be your monsters—but we don’t believe the rest of the citizens of this country agree. That doesn’t mean cooperation is out of the question, or that we won’t be available to give a certain amount of aid—but don’t consider us allies yet.”
“You can’t mean to tell us he is the wolf in charge.” Goldstein’s voice conveyed absolute disbelief. “I have met Hauptman. Hauptman would never take orders from someone like him.”