Anna chuffed a laugh. She knew that Brother Wolf was serious. He could joke sometimes, but he never mocked. She just had no idea what prompted him to consider her more dangerous than Charles … or Tag.

The woods around them were full of deer, and at one point she caught the distant scent of elk. Coyotes abounded; one trailed them for a few miles out of curiosity. Twice, early in the morning, they had come upon bear sign—probably the bear that had been seen at their camp.

The woods were subtly different from those at home. Anna wasn’t a botanist, so she didn’t have names, but the evergreens were more diverse and the undergrowth smelled strange. The atmosphere of the land around them was different from home, too.

Charles talked about manitou sometimes, the spirit of a place, sort of an upper-level naiad or dryad, she thought. She’d come to her marriage with a better education on Greek and Roman beliefs than on those of Native Americans, and she still tended to conflate the vocabulary where the cultures intersected.

She didn’t have the senses, the ability, to see spirits the way Charles did, but there was a flavor to these woods that was different from the feel of the woods at home. Maybe something was sifting through her mate bond besides the general feel of caution overlying Brother Wolf’s fierce joy in this hunt. Maybe she just had an overactive imagination.

Though a lifetime of summer hikes with her dad and his handy-dandy pedometer (his words) had given Anna a very good sense of how far she’d traveled when walking on two feet, she had less of a feel for distance traveled while on four. They had set out at first light at a steady, ground-covering trot they could, and did, keep up all day.

So she didn’t know exactly how far they had traveled, maybe as much as fifty miles, when they started to find the sigils carved into the trees. Some of them were familiar, as if whoever had carved them had access to the same set of Nordic runes Anna and her brother had used.

The two of them had used it as a simple replace-the-letter code, but upon finding one of their notes, her father had pointed out that scholars were pretty sure the original users of the old runes had used them as symbolic of whole meanings rather than as parts of words, like letters were.

Probably, he’d told them, the runes had been used as magical symbols. Not that her father had believed much in magic back then—he was a believer in cold logic and science. He was a little more open-minded now that his daughter was a werewolf, but she knew he still thought there was some scientific reason for her ability to transform.