Charles nodded.
“Wait,” she said, waving a hand with one finger extended. “Wait. There are at least three. Because this guy”—she pointed to a set of tracks where they cut into the dirt because the four-wheeler turned—“is heavier, his bike digs in deeper in the same kind of soil. All going in the same direction.”
“Right,” he agreed, and waited.
She frowned at him, looking at the tracks again to see what she’d missed. But no matter how intently she looked around, she didn’t see any boot marks, or convenient scraps of fabric bearing scent, empty beer cans, or cigarette butts that might hold vital clues as to who had been traveling this road before they came here.
She narrowed her eyes. What would Gibbs see? She might have a minor addiction to a certain police-procedural TV show.
“A week ago we had rain,” he told her before she could get too frustrated. “You can see there is still some mud under the trees where the sun doesn’t reach. These tracks were made after the soil dried—you can tell by the loose dirt. I expect these were made today.”
“And because you got a call today,” she said, “it’s highly probable that these tracks and the call are related.”
“That did lead me to look for reasons those tracks might be more recent,” he agreed. Tracking, he’d told her, was not just about what your senses told you; it was also about using what you knew.
He took a deep breath of air. She did, too. She smelled the pines, the firs, and a hint of cedar and hidden water. There was a cougar nearby. She glanced around, looking up in the trees, but couldn’t spot it. They were good at hiding, but sometimes their tails twitched and gave them away. Not today.
Somewhere within a mile or so, but not much nearer than that, either, there was a small group of blacktail deer. She caught the scent of the usual suspects: rabbits, various birds, and what Tag liked to call tree tigers because the squirrels were brave and made a big uproar when someone entered their territory.
None of those were what was making Charles look so intent.
“What is it?” she asked.
He looked around again. Breathed in again. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know. Something.”
“Your spidey senses are tingling,” she said.
He gave her a blank look. He had weird cultural gaps, as if there were entire decades during which he had not turned on a TV or talked to anyone. She hoped he had just not paid attention, but the “not talking to anyone” was a distinct possibility.
“Intuition,” she said. “Your subconscious knows something that you can’t put into words yet.”
“From Spider-Man,” he said in as serious a voice as he would have used if she’d been quoting from Shakespeare.
She nodded.
He took one last deep breath, then headed around to the driver’s side of the truck. “Get in. I’ll take it from here. My spidey senses,” he said, his voice a touch dry on the unfamiliar syllables, “are telling me that we should hurry after all.”
“Oh, thank the hairy little men in the moon,” she said sincerely, climbing gratefully into the passenger seat.
It wasn’t that she was afraid she’d kill them—they were werewolves; killing them in a car wreck at ten miles an hour would take some doing. It was that the old truck was something Charles loved—and every time she heard the scrape of tree branch on paint, she could see him not-wince.
But she understood why he’d preferred her snail’s pace and the damage she’d dealt to his truck—he hadn’t really wanted to get to their destination.
When there were incidents involving any of Bran’s wildlings, it usually meant that Charles had to kill one of the old wolves. She knew, better than anyone, that her mate was very tired of being his father’s executioner.
She hopped into the truck and impulsively slid over, rose up, and kissed his cheek. As she settled back and put on her seat belt, she said merely, “Remember not to drive in the ruts.”
* * *
• • •
THE LAST THING Charles thought he would do, on his way into the mountains to (probably) kill one of his da’s beloved wildlings, was laugh.
But life with Anna was like that.
Once she was safely belted in, he set out getting to Hester’s as quickly as possible. His wolf spirit’s growing unease—something separate from his dislike of killing wolves who needed to meet death—rode the back of his neck and told him that they needed to be at Hester’s now.
He navigated the track that wound around the mountain with a speed that could have been fatal (to the truck, anyway) if he didn’t have a werewolf’s reaction time and a familiarity with the area. Anna made small sounds now and then and kept a death grip on the door that made him grateful for the Detroit steel that held up under her hand.
As he’d told Anna, it had been some years since he’d been up here. Once Hester and Jonesy moved in, his da had decreed that this area was off-limits for casual runs. After that, he’d only traveled this road by necessity. But he’d been here often before that, in the truck this one had replaced nearly fifty years ago. He knew where the road turned and twisted, though he had to maneuver around a few more trees that had not been here the last time he’d traveled this way.
The truck roared and growled and occasionally, when he found some of the mud left over from the rainstorm, howled. But he piloted it to the top of the ridge at the edge of Hester’s valley without coming afoul of anything larger than a few aspen fingerlings that gave way under the pressure of his bumper.
He paused there on the top of the ridge—a strategic move. He noted the clear-from-the-truck-cab marks that told him the four-wheelers had turned off the track here. Charles hesitated, but the path the other people had woven through the trees was too narrow for the truck. So he turned down the track to the little valley where Jonesy and Hester lived.
As they bounced down the road toward the still, small building, Charles noted absently that the windows were old-fashioned double panes that they should replace with vinyl soon. Other than that, the structure was in good shape. For all that it had been cobbled together over years, the house appeared all of a piece. There were flower boxes on either side of the door, filled with the black-eyed Susans that grew wild in the mountains around here. Those hadn’t been here when Charles had helped put in solar panels the last time he’d been up.
He stopped the truck and let it idle for a moment, unhappy with the quiet. But as soon as he turned off the engine, the front door of the house opened and Jonesy emerged.
Hester’s mate looked like a throwback to a bygone time, mostly an effect of his hand-spun clothing. His pinesap-colored hair was rough-cut to stay out of his eyes. There were a few leaves and a twig or two tangled in its ragged length.