If he’d been thinking clearly when Anna had called, he would have had Anna use “Smith” or something else. But at that time, he hadn’t yet found the grimoires that proved Carrie Green was a witch. Just because there were witches in Wild Sign didn’t mean everyone living there had been a witch. Even knowing that Carrie had been a witch, until Charles had put his feet on the ground in the parking lot, he hadn’t been certain that Daniel Green was a witch, too.

He still should have cautioned Anna to use a pseudonym.

Should have, would have. Matters are as they are, snorted Brother Wolf, impatient with Charles for trying to see how they could have worked harder to avoid conflict.

Brother Wolf enjoyed conflict, and his happy anticipation lingered in the back of Charles’s mind up until the moment Charles got a good scent off the old man in the wheelchair.

Charles couldn’t tell if the instant white-hot rage was all his or if some of it belonged to his wolf brother. He had long ago thought that his vow to hunt down and kill this witch was going to go unfulfilled.

Most witchborn men were far less powerful than their female counterparts. The man Charles had known as Daniel Erasmus was one of the exceptions.

Back in the 1980s, the Wasatch Pack had been subject to a series of attacks that had started out so subtly it had taken weeks for their Alpha, a cunning old lobo named Aaron Simpleman, to figure out they were attacks. Only when Simpleman’s second, a wolf named Fin Donnelly, was found dead in his house with no sign of what killed him did the old wolf call the Marrok for help. There were, he’d told the Marrok, witches trying to take over his territory.

Charles had been sent down to find out what was going on. At that point the assumption was that the witches wanted a base for a drug operation, as Salt Lake had been experiencing an explosion of drug-related arrests. What he and Aaron had uncovered was a web of witches engaged in the trafficking of minors—such a clean term for what they’d found.

The witches had brought in children from all over the world—some of them in “adoptions,” some of them kidnapped, and others sold by their families, who mostly expected them to go on to better lives. The witches used magic to condition the children, who were as young as six or seven, to obedience, and shipped them off all over the US.

He and Aaron had been able to save a few of them, with the help of Charles’s brother, Samuel. But the damage the magic used on the children had done was irreversible after a few days. Most of those children had been unrecoverable.