The logs were grayed by years of sun, rain, and snow. A battered four-wheeler with new cat tracks sat unobtrusively between the back of the cabin and the forest that crowded in behind.
Charles stopped Anna about thirty yards downwind, where the trees still hid them adequately. As soon as he stopped her, Walter flattened himself on the ground at her feet, just as if he were her devoted pet dog...who weighed about the same as the average black bear and was capable of considerably more destruction.
Walter's devotion was so obviously nonsexual that Charles couldn't find it in himself to object. He kept remembering Walter's impassioned, "I think I could sleep." He knew about being haunted by memories of death and murder. If she managed to give Walter some peace, he was welcome to it.
Charles stared fiercely at the cabin and wished he wasn't frightened. It had been a long time since he'd been afraid like this. He was used to being worried about Samuel, his father, and, more recently, Anna, but not about himself. The memory of how Asil's witch had held him obedient to her as if she were his Alpha cut through his self-confidence with a large dollop of reality.
He rubbed Anna's shoulder lightly. He knew she wasn't as fragile as she looked, no werewolf was that fragile. And the old soldier was a survivor; Charles took some comfort from that.
"I won't be able to help directly," Charles told her. "If I get in her line of sight, she'll have me again. With a pack Alpha, distance counts, and so does eye or body-to-body contact."
Neither Walter nor Anna was a member of his father's pack, so they had no connection to Asil. Except for Anna's wolf's bond to Charles, that left them as vulnerable as any lone wolf. But he knew it usually took witches a while to gain a hold on a lone wolf-long enough that he could offer himself up instead.
Her control of him had been instantaneous.
He hated witches. Other magic users' abilities didn't bother him so much. Druids influenced the natural world: weather, plants, and some animals. Wizards played with nonliving things. But witches used the mind and body. Anyone's mind and body. They toyed with things that were alive-or had been alive. White witches weren't so bad, though maybe that was only because most of them had less magic than he did. Black witches gained power by killing or torturing things: from flies to humans.
"All right," his Anna said, as if she'd faced witches every day of her life. "If they are here, you'll take on her wolf...and probably Asil. That should keep even you pretty busy."
The few hours of rest he'd had, a lot of food, and a slow, easy pace this morning had done much to restore Charles to himself. It gave him a chance at taking down the witch's pets.
Anna shivered a little under his hand, a combination of eagerness and nerves, he thought. She had reacted to that dream as if it had been an attack on him rather than on her, though she was the one who had stopped breathing.
Walter raised his eyes to Charles, and he saw in the other's gaze a determination to protect her by any means necessary. It bothered Brother Wolf to see that in another male's eyes, but under the circumstances, Walter was in a better position to save her than Charles was.
"I'm going to do a little recon. For this part, I'd like you to wait here, all right?"
"I'll wait," Anna said.
"Don't get impatient, this might take a while."
The cabin was backed up to the forest, with twenty feet cleared around the front and one side. It was not where he would have chosen to hide from werewolves...but then, he didn't think that she was afraid of him at all. He certainly hadn't given her any reason to fear him.
To his surprise, Walter followed him, disappearing into the shadows until the only way Charles knew the other wolf was there was from his scent. The spirits of this forest had indeed taken Walter as their own to lend him their protection. His grandfather had been able to disappear like that.
A stone's throw from the cabin, Charles became convinced it was empty. When Walter appeared a few yards ahead of him, tail wagging a slow message, he knew he was right. But he still waited until he'd circled the little structure and opened the door before he sent Walter back for Anna.
Inside, there was barely room for the narrow cot and small table that were the only furnishings, unless he wanted to count the narrow ledge of a mantelpiece above the fireplace. The cot was brand-new and still had sales tags on it. The table looked like it was older than the cabin.
The hearth showed signs of a recent fire. The dead animal on the floor in front of it advertised who was living here: witches and dead things went together. There were witches who didn't kill, but they were far less powerful than their darker sisters.
The plank floor had shiny new nails and crowbar marks where she had pried it up and nailed it back in again. When he stepped near the cot, he knew exactly why; he'd felt power circles before. Some witches used them to set guard spells to keep things they valued safe, and others used them to store power for drawing upon later. Since the cabin hadn't kept him out and he didn't feel the need to leave, he could only assume that the circle was the latter kind-which meant that there were more dead things under the floor. He took a deep breath, but the dead animal he'd already seen might account for the scent of death-and nothing was rotting. Either the animal she'd killed to draw her circle hadn't been dead long-it had frozen in the cold-or she had a spell to disguise it to keep away scavengers. Changing what the senses of others perceived was one of the major powers of the witch.
His father said that Charles might have been a witch if he'd chosen to study. Bran hadn't urged him to do so, but he also didn't discourage it, either; a witch in his pack would have given him even more power. But the subtler magics of his mother's people suited Charles, and he'd never regretted the path he'd chosen less than he did right now, standing in the middle of this poor cabin stained with evil.
The scent on the sleeping bag on the cot was fresh enough that he decided the witch had slept there the night before. The table held the remnants of a fat black candle smelling of blood more than wax, and a mortar with some ashes in the bottom-the remnants of Anna's hair, he thought. Something personal to allow her into Anna's dreams.
"What is that?" Anna said in a little voice from the doorway. He felt immediately better for her presence, as if she somehow lessened the evil that had seeped into the wood and brick.
Someday he'd tell her that, just to see the bewildered disbelief in her eyes; he was beginning to know her well enough to predict her reaction. It gave him some satisfaction.
He followed her gaze to the eviscerated and skinned body laid out in front of the fireplace. "Raccoon, I think. At least that's what it smells like." It also smelled of pain and had left claw marks on the floor, probably after it had been nailed down. He saw no reason to tell Anna it probably hadn't been dead when the witch mutilated it.