Anna hadn’t caught the scent herself, but Brother Wolf had whispered White witch as soon as the wind blew past them as they had been walking around the cabin.

“We”—Anna gestured at herself, her husband, and Tag, who was playing with a strand of grass—“are werewolves.” Which was something she wouldn’t have told Dr. Connors without Brother Wolf’s information.

The only reason Anna knew she’d scared Dr. Connors was the change in her scent. Anna decided to let Dr. Connors believe she’d kept her reaction to herself. So Anna didn’t offer reassurances.

“Around two hundred years ago,” she said, “one of our kind encountered a being in the mountains northeast of here. He thought it had been killed, but he acquired the land, just in case. Ownership has remained with our pack. And the thing—we have heard it referred to as the Singer in the Woods—was inactive so far as we knew from that time until this. A few days ago, the FBI landed on our doorstep to tell us that there had been an entire town built on our land. Some damn fools apparently decided that a parcel of land in the mountains that was neither federal land nor tribal was a wonderful place to build an off-grid town. They were, as far as we could tell, mostly white witches like you.”

She let the words hit Dr. Connors and then said gently, “And those foolish witches woke it up.”

“I don’t know about all of that,” said Dr. Connors, sounding suddenly weary. “I am out of the country for months at a time, Ms. Cornick. The last trip should have been two months and turned into ten for—” She shook her head. “For reasons that have no bearing on today. By the time I got back, my father had been out of contact for months. That’s not like him. Nor is writing to me every day for the better part of a week. He writes a letter to me every week on Wednesday. My mother, his ex-wife, gets a letter once a month. My little brother gets a letter written on each Thursday.”

She raised her chin and stared straight ahead, swallowed visibly, and said, “Got. We all got letters.”

“In code,” said Anna neutrally.

“In code,” Dr. Connors agreed.

“We are here to take care of whatever is up in those mountains,” Anna told her. “But it would really help if we knew what happened in Wild Sign. We don’t know what we are dealing with. My mother-in-law—who was here two centuries ago—only remembers bits and pieces. Those letters are possibly our only eyewitness accounts to a threat we need to neutralize.”