Wolf Song (Wolf Singer Prophecies Book 1)

of interesting to hear. "I just spelled out your name."
He looked at me expectantly, so I nodded. “Clearly, the only people who would be able to understand this would be the people who knew the code.”
Kirby nodded his head, the halo of his curls bobbed with him. “Exactly! You don’t even need electricity to use it, though that’s a popular way. During the old wars, they used to use radio waves. Easy way to keep top secret things, well, secret.”
The dawning of understanding warmed me. “So you're saying that the reason they used to use Morse code was to be able to communicate without worrying that there was someone listening in on the conversation?”
Where and what was my dad communicating? To whom, and why?
I turned Kirby, his face sweet and genuine. "Can you help me decode it?"
He lit up in a smile. "I would love to."

I followed Kirby down to the church basement. He led me through a maze—a hoarder's treasure trove of forgotten toys and signs for a rummage sale and trunk-or-treat. We ended up in the back of the basement, which I thought was just annexed classrooms and whatnot. I had a vague recollection of going into one of those classrooms when I was younger. Images of creating art pieces and sketches while I learnt about history from a child's perspective.
He opened one up and it was like a mini library. Where the outer maze was just filled with junk, inside this annex was a treasure trove of books.
"Whoa. These are more books than I've seen in a long time."
I knew there were things such as libraries. There were even digital ones. But those all went away and all I had were my parents' memories of the things. Of course the few books that my dad had couldn't really count as a library either, but he hoarded them whenever he found them.
Even if it was a book he didn't care for, he still kept it for the paper. He'd pulp it and create new books. "We gonna write our own, Soli," he'd tell me.
We never got the chance.
Kirby thumbed through one of the bookshelves, and it was a reference book. “Waste not, want not! This is what you need, I think!”
He brought the book to where I sat at one of the many donated tables, and opened it to the page he’d wanted me to see. There in front of my eyes was the chart for International Morse Code. Each dot-dash combination was given a letter or number. My heart soared to see this.
“Oh Kirby, this is perfect!”
“Right on,” he answered back. “I’ll letcha decode your letter message there. Gotta help clean some things up.”
I waited until he was gone completely to start transcribing. Whatever guilt I felt for not helping the town clean up after the attack was mollified by the fact that the sooner I saved my dad, the sooner they’d all be protected. Plus, he was a gifted healer—recovering Dad would be helping the town a hundredfold.
I finished my transcriptions, and was left with gibberish. None of the letters formed words, and then there was just a series of numbers written across the bottom. What the hell?
I scanned the sheet again and cross-referenced the chart more carefully, and I still came up with the same result. I buried my face in my hands. That was how Kirby found me when he checked on me again.
“Whoa, sorry, is this a bad time?”
I looked up and gave him a weak smile. “No, I was just frustrated is all.” I emphasized that by closing the reference book he’d given me. “Thank you for finding this for me. It sort of helped.”
Kirby took it and placed it on the shelf. “Sort of? Oh no! How didn’t it help?”
I bit my lip, weighing out if I should trust Kirby with what my dad had given me. I decided to show Kirby, for one, because the message was meaningless, and for two, he didn’t have to know that my dad gave it to me. As far as he knew, it could just be a silly game.
“Here. The message I’d wanted to translate turned out to be nothing.” I finished with a lame shrug.
A bright smile broke across his face, the freckles on his cheeks blooming. “Well, what did you expect? A straight message? That would be too easy!”
I launched my eyebrow up at him. “What do you mean? Too easy?”
“Well, you didn’t think that someone who had gone through the trouble of coding a message in something like Morse code would make it easy? They encrypted it, like a cipher. That’s how I’d do this thing, at any rate.” He wiggled his fingers at the limp paper in my hand.
I blinked at him. “So you’re saying…?”
Kirby tsked and rolled his eyes playfully. “I’m saying there’s some kind of encryption there, Sols! Haven’t you read your histories? Countries during war time always did stuff like this. Secret message. Codes. Code breakers. A stealthy spy that defies all odds to help his or her country win. It’s epic!”
I didn’t know Kirby well, but his infectious laughter actually rubbed off on me. “Well, you just made my day, but also made it worse at the same time. Because now, how am I supposed to decrypt this message?”
“Have no fear, secret agent, I think we got something special in the back just for you.”
I giggled at him playing at being a store clerk, grateful that he didn’t pry about the game or why it was so important to me. “After you.”
Kirby called to me from the depths of the church basement. "Hey, Sols, I think we got something here! Help me move this."
“This” was a bit of a bookshelf. Behind it were all kinds of typewriters and other office type things organized in a room. This place was more spacious than I would have assumed.
"Whoa. What is all this?" I said in awe.
My fingers trailed over the beautiful letters, the