Wild Sign

CHAPTER 12

It started to rain. A light pattering rain at first, blown a little by a breeze. But it wasn’t long before the rain was pelting down and the wind was blowing so hard that Anna had trouble keeping her hair out of her face so she could see.

“Are you cold?” Zander asked, concerned. “You should have brought a jacket.”

She pulled the now-wet flannel shirt around her protectively. “I’m fine,” she said. And it was true. Though the rain was cold, it didn’t seem to be chilling her as she would have expected.

“In Montana,” she told Zander, “a storm this late in the fall would probably be a snowstorm, not a rainstorm. A little rain won’t stop me.”

And then she wondered why in the world she’d been talking about Montana. She’d never been to—

She had a sudden vision of looking at a magnificent snow-covered landscape, unfolding below her in shades of blue. Of the cold biting her nose and the snow squeaking under her snowshoes, sounding a little like bedsprings.

She stumbled to a halt. Bedsprings.

“Stop lollygagging,” Zander said, smiling as he tugged on her arm. “We’ve got a few miles to go and we’re only going to get wetter.”

Zander seemed to have trouble seeing their path through the night-dark woods, stumbling over rocks and roots that Anna had no trouble with. She scrambled up a steep place in the trail, and waited at the top while he found his own path up.

“The last person I took up here was part mountain goat, too,” he complained cheerfully. “I’ve spent my life climbing mountainsides, and you show me up.”

She shrugged because she didn’t have an answer for him. She hadn’t done anything more athletic than marching band, but this hike didn’t feel as difficult as it looked. The few times she’d slipped as they climbed up wet rocks, she’d had no trouble catching herself. It felt like she’d suddenly turned into Spider-Man. But that made no sense.

If she’d been totally comfortable with him—and she felt bad that she wasn’t—she would have teased him about being slow. She didn’t know the elevation. Maybe it was lower than home and that was giving her an oxygen boost.

They emerged at last into an area that was a natural amphitheater, complete with seating that looked as though it had had some human help.

She stopped when she realized there were musical instruments scattered around the amphitheater.

Like sacrifices.

It went against every instinct she had to leave instruments to the mercy of the weather. Instruments were precious things. She broke away from Zander’s chosen path to see if she could rescue any of them.

Zander grabbed her arm again in a way that she was beginning to resent and tried to jerk her away. She stiffened, and when he pulled, she stayed where she was, skidding a little with the force he used when she did not yield.

He stopped, took a breath. “Come on,” he said, and she felt the effort he used to gentle his tone. “I’ve a dry place we can rest up in.”

That false gentle tone made her plant her feet like a Missouri mule.

“Stop trying to drag me,” she said. And then, with gritted teeth: “Get your hand off my arm before you lose it.”

He met her eyes and took a step back, frowning. “I thought your eyes were brown.”

They were. But she didn’t care what color he thought her eyes were.

“Look,” she said. “This has been a fun hike and all, but I think I am done. You go on.” She needed to go back to that hotel by the river, the one they’d driven by, so she could sit on the rock and watch the river, waiting for . . .

She pulled the flannel shirt up to her face, not wanting to bury her nose in it with Zander looking on. But the smell of musk and mint and home was still there, rising from the damp cloth.

“Sorry,” he said, and this time he meant it. “I am soaking wet, and even if you’re not cold, I am.”

There was a flash of lightning, and reflexively she started counting seconds—one thousand one, one thousand two . . . Thunder rumbled exactly at five. “That’s a mile off,” she said.

“Too close to stay out here,” he told her. He held out his hand—and she heard music, though he wasn’t singing. It came from the ground beneath her feet and shivered through her reluctant body, bringing with it the understanding of what she was doing here. That this was where she needed to be, with Zander.

She looked at his hand and couldn’t remember why she’d left him standing like that. It was rude. She took his hand—his was cold.

“You are warm,” he said, sounding startled.

“I told you,” she said.

“You did indeed,” he agreed. “Come this way, Anna mine.”

That was wrong, she knew. But she didn’t want to be offensive and tell him that he was mistaken. She didn’t belong to him. She belonged. Belonged to . . .

She was sitting on a rock overlooking the river and felt his approach.

She would go to that rock when she and Zander were finished hiking, she decided. And her shoulders relaxed with that decision.

They walked another half of a mile, but they traveled now on an actual trail.

TAG HIT THE Suburban with the Land Rover. The Suburban gave way with a crunch and shriek of bending metal.

“Sorry,” he grunted.

Charles didn’t care about the damage done. They had lost signal ten miles before and he had begun to doubt that they were even on the right path. The sight of the Suburban through the trees had been welcome. He understood why Tag had punched the accelerator so they were going too fast to stop in the loose and muddy ground.

Even if the Rover had been destroyed—and he suspected it wasn’t even dented, given the resiliency of old steel—it had already taken them as far as it could.

He jumped out of the Rover and into the cold rain. The Suburban’s hood was warmer than the ambient temperature, but not by much.

“We’re an hour behind them,” he told Tag. “Maybe a little more.”

“Scent isn’t going to help us,” Tag offered. “Not after an hour of this much rain.” He loosened his shoulders. “Good thing that the two of us know how to track using mundane methods.”

Charles didn’t like it. Normally he could track darn near as quickly as he could run, but in the dark and in the rain, it was going to slow them down. Normally he could find Anna wherever she was by their mating bond, but right now all that he could tell was that she was alive.

“Here,” said Tag, pointing up the slope. “They went this way.”

“Wait,” Charles said. He opened the Suburban, taking in the scents.

A man, but not one that Charles had met. Or at least not one whose scent he had taken in. He drew in another breath and got a faint hint of sweetness. Like a snow cone.

“Zander,” he growled, though he wasn’t really certain of that.

Another growl came from his left, and he looked to see that Tag’s eyes were gold—and a little blind.

“Tag,” he said sharply, putting a little push through the pack bonds when he did so.

If Brother Wolf wasn’t allowed to go rogue tonight, Tag for damn sure wasn’t allowed to go berserker. Not until they needed it.

Tag shook himself a bit. “Pip-squeak human boy photographer,” he said in a voice that was very nearly a whine. “Our Anna wouldn’t have left us for something like that. Is he a witch? He doesn’t smell like a witch. How did he get her?”

Anna wouldn’t have left him because of the blandishments of a boy, even a pretty boy like Zander. Not of her own volition. Dr. Connors had said that Zander had been in Wild Sign. Anna had stopped in to visit him while waiting for the pizzas, and when she’d come back, Charles had heard the paper rustling in her pants pocket. Ergo, Zander wasn’t a normal human.

Not witchcraft on that paper, observed Brother Wolf. Some other kind of magic.

“Maybe he’s one of the Singer’s children. A walker. You were the one who thought there might be some of them around,” Charles said. “Or he’s another victim of the Singer who has been enslaved.”

If the stories Anna and Dr. Bonsu had told of Zander the photographer were true, he had certainly been walking the world. According to Anna, Zander had told her that he’d met several of the people of Wild Sign before they’d come here. Charles wondered if they had come here because Zander had told them to come.

Tag had been running his own calculations. “Right.” He looked back to where feet had disturbed the duff covering the forest floor. “Okay,” he said. “She was kidnapped by this thing that wants to be a god.”

It seemed to satisfy him, because he started off at a trot.

ZANDER PRESENTED ANNA with the mouth of a cave, a round hole about three feet in diameter. They were going to have to crawl or duckwalk to get into it.

“You can’t mean to go spelunking now,” Anna said, oddly reluctant to follow him. The cave was emitting a strange smell that raised her hackles. “What if there’s a bear inside?”

Zander laughed and reached into the cave, coming out with an electric lantern. “There isn’t a bear,” he told her. “I promise.”

“Well, if you promise,” she returned, her lips quirking up. He had an infectious smile.

“I do. There’s more light inside and it’s dry and warm. Come on, just follow me.”

After maybe a dozen yards the cave opened up so they could stand upright. The smell wrapped around them. It wasn’t unpleasant by itself, but something about it bothered Anna. Zander hit a switch and illuminated a string of light bulbs that stretched out until the passage bent out of sight.

She frowned disapprovingly. “That’s bad for the bats.”

He laughed. “It’s not used often enough to disturb the bats.”

She wasn’t so sure of that. She could hear the little creatures moving around restlessly. They didn’t like the light—and who could blame them? But she shouldn’t argue with Zander.

“How did you manage electricity in the middle of nowhere?” she asked instead.

“Solar panels,” he said. “They put them in last year. I have to admit that it makes getting down to the main cave a lot easier.”

There were a couple more narrow places—in one of them, she had to wait for him to squeeze through feetfirst, one arm up and one arm down. He held the lantern in his upward arm, lighting her way down because there was no room for the light bulbs that otherwise had marked out their path.

Tag would never make it, she thought, worried. And then worried more because she couldn’t remember who Tag was.

As if he’d heard her thoughts, Zander said, “There’s another way in, but I figured that if I could make it through here, so could you. The other way would have taken us another ten minutes, and there are worse obstacles in that direction.”

She had an easier time than he did, scooting through and thinking about waterslide tubes instead of the mountain sitting on top of her. It helped that the floor was damp.

At the end of the rocky tunnel was a . . . well, a room. Complete with bed and battery-operated lights. At the far side of the room the cave had lighted passages to the left and right.

She would have expected a cave to smell of earth and moisture and bats. And it did smell of all of that, though they had left the actual bats up closer to the cave mouth. But it smelled musty, too—like old death and something weird . . .

Magic.

If they’d still been out in the forest, she would have scoffed at the idea of magic. But in the secret depths of the earth, it felt different. And the existence of the king-sized bed in a room she had gotten to via a tunnel that Zander had barely made it through was an argument for magic.

But it wasn’t the magic that bothered her. She had been aware all night that her nose was a lot more sensitive than usual. Now she wished that she couldn’t smell at all. That weird, dry smell that her brain kept labeling death, though it wasn’t a putrid scent like roadkill or anything, was overpowering, as if the longer she was in this cavern, the stronger the smell got.

“What is that smell?” she finally asked.

Zander raised an eyebrow. “What smell? It smells like a damp cave. We left the bats behind.”

She didn’t want to tell him that there was something dead in his cave, and she didn’t know why she thought she should keep it to herself. “Maybe that’s it,” she said. “I haven’t been in many caves.”

“The sound you’re hearing is an underground river,” he said. “There are some places in the cave system where it surfaces—I’ll show you one of those in a bit.”

She’d known that was what the sound was, she thought. Who doesn’t know the sound of rushing water? But there was something about that last bit—the hint of anticipation in his eyes or excitement in his voice—that made her worry. And she could smell his arousal.

She breathed death and caught—something else, too, something that smelled like the depths of the ocean and the heart of a mountain. She had no idea what either of those would smell like—and she smelled them anyway.

She looked for something to distract both of them with. “How did you get a mattress down that tunnel?” she asked—and then thought that maybe a discussion about that bed wasn’t where she wanted to take his attention, either.

The bed was covered with a pair of sleeping bags, unzipped so that they functioned more like giant blankets, one that you were supposed to lie on, one to cover you up. There were two pillows and two more electric lanterns that Zander had switched on while she had still been coming down the tunnel.

He grinned.

“There’s not a mattress,” he said. And lifted the corner of the sleeping bags to reveal a two-inch foam pad laid over a raised stone platform, as if nature had created a king-sized mattress here.

Or something else had, she thought, and didn’t know why the thought was so compelling.

Anna hid her rising unease with a smile.

Because when she had wanted to get out of the moving car, and when she had told him, “This has been a fun hike and all, but I think I am done,” he’d twisted her thinking so she suddenly decided it was a good idea to go along with him after all. And she didn’t want him to do it again.

“You need to wait in here for me,” Zander said. He leaned forward and kissed her, lightly at first and then openmouthed.

She didn’t fight him—and that was an effort. But she wanted him to go away. Letting him kiss her seemed like the fastest way to that end.

She was also starting to feel panicky about the things that her nose was telling her. She had a bad feeling about what was going to happen in this cave that smelled of some primordial ocean. And death.

But she couldn’t make herself kiss him back.

He pulled away and gave her a quizzical look. “Tough nut,” he said, touching her bottom lip with his thumb. He’d figured out that she was starting to think for herself. Before she could decide what to do about that, he pulled her against him, as if they were slow dancing, and began to sing.

She could feel him aroused against her—and that focused her attention. She didn’t want this—whatever this was. She needed to get out of here.

She was very much afraid that meant she needed to figure out what was beyond this room. What it was that smelled like death, and what smelled of magic and old power.

Wait.

If she had listened to that inner voice in the first place, if she’d run when they got out of the Suburban, she might be back in that hotel by the river. She thought of the miles they had driven and amended herself. She would at least be on the way to the river by now—though an odd part of her remained convinced she could have made it to the river.

He stepped back and shook his head, then walked over to a dark corner of the room and pulled out an instrument case. If he hadn’t been standing between her and the tunnel, she’d have taken her chances. But without a head start, she wasn’t going to be able to get far enough into the tunnel fast enough that he couldn’t simply grab her ankles and drag her out.

She wondered why he’d brought her here. The kisses—and that bed—were making her very uncomfortable.

Wait.

He pulled out a mandolin that was a lot older than the case it was stored in. As he began tuning, he said, “You are not going to be hurt, Anna.”

She’d had a dentist who used to say that right before he stuck the needle in. It was a lie then—and it was a lie now. Even if he thought he was telling the truth.

And then he began to play. She loved music—it spoke to her, and always had. It gave her joy when she was sad and comforted her when she was afraid. And she had been so afraid.

After a while he put the mandolin back in its case.

“Hello, Anna,” he said.

“Hey, Zander.” She gave him a shy smile.

“How old are you?”

She laughed. “Jailbait for you. Seventeen.”

“Good,” he said. “Would you go sit on the bed and wait for me? I won’t be a long time. Maybe a half hour.”

She didn’t mind waiting. She liked to use downtime to work through the solo that she was going to play for auditions for Northwestern. There were a couple of spots that weren’t as smooth as they could be. And she still wasn’t sure that slowing down that movement in the middle a little more wouldn’t make the music better, even if it might mean that the adjudicators thought she was doing it to make the piece easier.

He gave her a soft kiss she didn’t pay much attention to and then gently propelled her to the bed. She couldn’t help wrinkling her nose. The sleeping bags had been here long enough to absorb the smell of death and whatever that other weird scent was. It wasn’t a pleasant smell. Her instincts told her not to react. There was something wrong here, and she needed him to go away.

“All right?” he asked.

She wished he’d shut up; she wanted to work on her music. If she’d been a mathematician, she would have solved equations or counted in prime numbers or something. Music would clear her head.

She gave him a perfunctory smile. “Yes, fine.”

He watched her for a second, then he nodded and walked out.

As soon as he was out of sight, something rose out of the hollow place inside her, something vibrating with life and strength and rage. Her hands curled and every muscle in her body tensed. She needed to get out of here. Her head was foggy as all hell, but she knew that much.

She was on her way out, halfway up the squeeze-chute tunnel, when she heard a soft click and all the lights in front of her went out. She paused. Could she find her way out in the dark? The darkness of the cave was not the darkness of night. There was no light. She’d be able to make it out of the narrow passage, where there was only one direction to go, but after that? When her memory of how they had made the trip in was foggy?

She slid back out into the bedroom cavern. Improbably, given that it was presumably attached to all of the other lights, the single bulb was still lit, but the lanterns on either side of the bed were out. She picked one of them up and pressed the red button to turn it on. Nothing happened.

It had just been lit. It was a simple, battery-operated device. She tried the other one with the same result.

She was trapped.

And that was when she became aware of the sounds. Muffled scuffling noises with an odd wet edge to them. Groaning. A shushing sound almost like a croon that ended in a sound like grain spun in a basket. Then a wet squishy smacking sound, like someone had thrown a giant sponge out of an airplane so it could land on pavement.

She stood frozen, curiosity pushing her forward, curiosity and the desire to see what the hell was making that noise. But caution and that small voice in her head held her still.

And then the sound changed, becoming a rhythmical squicking, as if some film director decided to make a parody of sex. It was too loud and too . . . harsh, as if something huge and wet scraped over and over against a rough surface. Someone—Zander?—cried out in a mix of passion and pain.

It sounded, she thought, with a sort of revolted horror (and a weird desire to laugh), like the tentacle sex in the old anime movie that had been passed around the high school girls’ locker room. Yes, she had watched it.

She and her best friend had consumed two buckets of popcorn and laughed themselves sick. Her dad had caught them. Being her dad, he’d grabbed a handful of popcorn and stayed to observe a tentacle enter a place a tentacle had no business being. He’d winced theatrically and then rolled his eyes before wandering out.

She wished her dad were here now.

A very distinctive odor hit her nose. The sounds did not lie. Sex was taking place.

She also caught a whiff of something else, musk and mint like the flannel shirt she wore as armor, but lighter somehow and vaguely familiar. There was a gentle scuffing sound just outside the cavern—and a naked, very dirty woman padded in on soft feet.

For a moment, she reminded Anna of Zander.

Then she came closer, dispelling the illusion—a thing of shadows and the shape of her eyes.

“Anna?” the woman said in a whisper so quiet Anna was surprised that she could hear. “Are you okay?”

The woman, even naked and dirty, carried with her an air of command that had Anna responding to her as if she were here to help. Anna looked at the bed, then pointed in the general direction of the sloppy wet noises—and shook her head definitively.

The woman nodded and then gestured for Anna to follow her back the way she’d come—the direction that Zander had not taken. This section of the tunnel was still lit, and Anna couldn’t help but look the way Zander had gone, but it dropped down and turned. All she could see was that the light from that direction had a distinct orange tinge and looked too bright to have been provided solely by ordinary bulbs.

The woman stopped and Anna stopped with her. There was something odd about Anna’s own reaction to this woman—who was a stranger, a naked stranger, even. And she felt like a trusted comrade, if not a friend. But unlike the happy, safe feeling that Zander’s music inspired, this felt true.

She turned to Anna as if to say something.

Anna spoke first. “Who are you?” she asked. “Have we met?”

The other woman’s eyes flashed to icy blue, as if she wore some kind of contacts designed to make her look like a superhero or an alien.

Wolf eyes. And that thought felt true as well.

The woman didn’t answer Anna’s question, her voice still quiet—though she would have had to be singing full-throated opera to have pierced the noises coming from behind them. “You need music to clear your head. The wrong kind of music will make you vulnerable to him—anything soft or emotional. Music in general is dangerous. The Singer’s powers are music and memory. But they can also be used to defend against him. You need something defiant. A war song. Maybe something like—” She hummed a little and Anna recognized the tune.

“Queen,” Anna said. “I can channel Freddie Mercury.”

“Wait until we get somewhere safer—or if the enemy appears. Think defiance while you sing, or it will backfire. I hope it won’t be necessary, because we are going to try to make it out before they are finished back there. I warn you, though, this next cavern is bad. Stay beside me.”

“What if he cuts the lights?” Anna asked.

“I have a flashlight,” the woman said. “I picked it up at the cave entrance.” For the first time, Anna noticed that she was carrying a small black flashlight in one hand. In the dim light, it blended with the dirt on the woman’s hands.

“Something killed the electric lanterns back there.”

“Well, then, Anna,” said the woman in a biting tone—so familiar. Who was this woman? “I guess we’ll have to fight in the dark, or”—she nodded her head toward the disturbing sounds behind them—“you can go back and wait until he gets done in there.”

Anna followed her into the next cavern without another word.

This cavern was huge. Though it was lit by dim bulbs on a string down the middle of it, Anna had to judge the size of the cave by sound as much as sight, because the edges were hidden by stalagmites rising from the ground like giant malformed trees. Some of them had broken over the years—or perhaps those were stalactites—and lay like broken marble columns in an ancient Grecian temple.

The fallen cave giants weren’t the only things strewn broken over the floor. Anna found the source of the musty smell of death.

The mummified bodies of maybe a dozen people lay scattered around. It took her horrified eyes a moment to register that they were all dressed in modern clothing. They lay in small groups—two men face-to-face, holding hands. Four women who looked as though they’d been sitting cross-legged and also holding hands when whatever had done this to them had hit. It looked as though they had all sat down and awaited their doom without a fight.

Just when she thought she’d reached her limit of horror for the night, she realized that some of the bodies were children.

She turned in a slow circle, though she still followed the other woman, who was picking her way across the cavern, walking backward as her eyes found new bodies in the shadows. There weren’t just a dozen; there were at least twice that many.

There was a soft airy noise—and it took Anna a second to realize that the noise was coming from the bodies. They were breathing . . . or at least they had all exhaled, pushing the musty scent of death into the cavern.

“This is how he punished the rebels,” the woman said grimly. “We need to get out of here.”

“Are they alive?” Anna asked numbly, forgetting to be quiet.

She didn’t realize she’d stopped moving altogether until her comrade grabbed her wrist and pulled. “I don’t know,” the woman answered. “Worry about them later.”

“Anna?”

Zander’s voice came from the direction of the bedroom cavern.

“Sing, now,” said the woman. “Run.”

One of Anna’s voice teachers, a woman who had been in Cats for five years on Broadway before retiring, liked to make her students sing while they were running. She said it taught them abdominal control.

Singing “We Will Rock You” at the top of her lungs certainly challenged Anna’s diaphragm control. But she still did better than the other woman, whose volume changed with her footfalls.

“Think defiance,” the woman said at a break in the song—and as she spoke, the lights went out.

Anna heard the flashlight hit the ground, so apparently that hadn’t worked any more than the electric lanterns back in the bedroom cave. But a hand wrapped around hers in the darkness and tugged. They had to quit running, but the other woman led the way with apparent confidence. Anna assumed that she knew this cave system, had bat radar, or was guiding them by something other than sight.

There was a soft noise and the other woman staggered. “Low ceiling,” she growled in a rough voice.

She was a head taller than Anna, but Anna put her free hand up so that if something were hanging down, she’d have some warning. She couldn’t tell if anyone (Zander) was following them, because she was singing.

She sang the second verse of the song as they stumbled in inky darkness, thinking that it would be a hell of a beacon for anyone or anything trying to figure out where they were.

As she sang a generation’s hymn to defiance, the go-to score of almost every high school pep band since 1977, the huge hollowness that Anna had been contending with all night dissolved, the fog on her memory cleared, and the challenge in her voice quit being any kind of acting.

Anna staggered, stumbling to her knees on the damp stone as she tried to reconcile the memories of a lifetime with the past few hours. Her song broke off, but her memories remained.

“What the freaking hell, Leah?” she growled angrily, though none of this was Leah’s fault. She wasn’t angry with Leah.

“Sing now, talk later,” Leah told her, yanking her to her feet. “And be careful. This is a weapon that can bite back. Music is meant to be a gift to listeners—but it can’t be that here. It has to fall on him like an axe. Make your music a declaration of war.”

Leah started with the first verse again, moving at a quick walk. Keeping Anna behind her so that if someone were going to stumble or run into something, it would be her. Leah protected her people.

Back in her own skin, her wolf so close to the surface Anna was a little surprised she wasn’t already starting to change, she could catch the faint whiffs of fresh air—which had to be what Leah was following.

They ran out of verses for “We Will Rock You,” and Anna went for another classic with Pink Floyd’s ode to juvenile delinquency, “Another Brick in the Wall.”

Without electric guitars, though, that one took only about a minute. Anna tried Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” but it was quickly obvious that Leah didn’t know it. So Anna sang only the first two lines. In desperation she went back to Queen. They could just sing the damned verses over and over again, she thought; that’s what they had done when she was in high school.

The lights came back on, ironically blinding her so she tripped and fell down hard. She popped up, throwing her weight back so she could come to her feet balanced and ready. Leah was stock-still in front of her. And twenty feet beyond that, Zander stood with a black handgun aimed at them.

He’d gotten in front of them, presumably traveling by a different path. Maybe that way had had lights so he’d been able to run.

Hiding her movement with Leah’s body, Anna pulled her own gun, releasing the safety as she did so. The Sig was matte black and small; Anna kept it against her leg and kept that leg behind Leah.

Ten shots, she told herself as she belted out Brian May’s lyrics. Keep count and use them wisely.

The lights were brighter than she remembered. Either the stint in the darkness had made her more sensitive or there was magic at work, but she could see Zander as if he had a spotlight on him.

He was barefoot and shirtless. His only clothing was his jeans, and they were unbuttoned and unzipped. His skin was damp and a little shiny, as if someone had covered him in oil. On his collarbone and navel, the shiny substance thickened to clear blobs that clung to him as if it were something sticky.

There was a roundish red mark on his hip, visible because his jeans were riding low. Another of those marks was halfway up his throat. He was breathing hard and he smelled like sex.

His face had been flushed with triumph, but even as Anna watched, his expression went blank. He stared at Leah like a rabbit in the face of a hungry wolf.

“Mother?” he said, voice raw.

Leah didn’t say anything. Anna couldn’t read anything from her body language. Leah had a pretty good game face; she probably wasn’t showing what she thought there, either.

Anna, on the other hand, promptly forgot where she was in the song, so she started the chorus up again. On the whole, it had been a good thing she hadn’t found a song with words she’d have to think about.

Mother.

She remembered that when she’d seen Leah enter the bedroom cave, for an instant she had thought the woman looked like Zander.

“I thought you were dead,” Zander said. Anna noticed his pistol was a Glock, though she wasn’t familiar with the model. It was something a lot bigger than her own. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t have bothered with silver bullets—he hadn’t known Anna was a werewolf— but a head shot would probably still be fatal.

“I knew you were not,” Leah said, speaking for the first time. “Though I had hoped so. He needed you too much.”

“You betrayed him.” Zander’s voice cracked out and he gestured with the gun, as if with so much emotion he could not contain his body. “You helped the Beast come into our home and kill all of Father’s children. All of them except for me.”

“I intended for it to be you, too,” she said. To someone who did not know her, her voice would have sounded flat.

But Anna had heard Leah’s flat voice before, and this time she heard the roughness in Leah’s consonants. Leah was feeling something powerful—the echoes of it washed up through the pack bonds and made Anna’s wolf spirit tense in readiness. But Anna suspected that not even Leah would be able to put a single name to those roiling emotions.

“What did you get out of it, Mother?” Zander snarled. “My father told me that you let the Beast transform you, that you became like one of them. Did he bribe you with immortality? I have that, and I don’t turn into a monster with the full moon.”

“No,” said Anna grimly. “You just go out and rape women. Someone is a monster here, and it isn’t Leah.”

She went back to singing before the fog could take her again.

“Bitch,” he said to Anna. “You would have been the mother of—” Here he said a name that Anna, classically trained to sing in languages she didn’t speak, could not have begun to put together. “Mother of the Singer’s children, his walkers who go about his business in the world. There is no greater honor.”

“I’m a werewolf,” Anna told him. “I can’t bear a child.”

“He could fix that,” Zander told her. “Your children would have been pleasing to him. They would—”

“Grow up to be rapists?” Anna said dryly.

He sneered at her, but he wasn’t really interested in Anna. He returned his attention to Leah. “You don’t understand what you did. He was on the verge of Becoming when you betrayed him. Our lord and master nearly died under the teeth of the Great Beast—and I was left alone to wander.”

The Great Beast must have been Sherwood, Anna thought.

“I was a child, Mother,” Zander said. “And you abandoned me. If I am not what you wanted me to be, the fault is not mine or my father’s.”

Leah flinched a little before she caught herself.

“As to the charges of rape—” He held Leah’s eyes and said emphatically, “I have never taken an unwilling woman. Such would be an abomination to the Singer.”

He made a finger gesture that Anna didn’t quite catch. “My father was trapped in the waters beneath the ground for nearly two centuries healing the damage the Beast had done. And through it all he kept me alive at great cost to himself. If he had not loved me, I would be dead and he would have healed himself much faster.

“As it is, he cannot sing, Mother, because the Beast took his tongue. He cannot leave this place until his Becoming, and he had only me to find worshippers for him. We offered them a fair bargain and they accepted. It was not rape.” He raised his chin.

“What about Dr. Connors?” said Anna.

“She was not unwilling,” he said. And he lied.

“I see.” Anna kept her voice soft with an effort. “He has the witches—the ones who told him what Wild Sign had done—they are bearing his children. Why did you need Dr. Connors? And me?”

“Do you think that those children will be his as I am his?” Zander’s voice was bitter with something that sounded very much to Anna’s ear like jealousy. “Those creatures are selfish. They will keep their bargain—because they know the Singer does not trust them. But they are black witches. Evil. Their children are taught vileness with their mothers’ milk.”

He paused. “He trusted the people of Wild Sign. They gave him form and they worshipped him with music. My father loved them and they betrayed him. I told him not to trust them, that he could only trust me. That I am the only one who loves him. Now he believes me.”

His gun had been gradually lowering as he spoke, but he jerked it up, aiming it at Leah’s head. “I told him that he would need children better than those the black witches will carry. Children who will love him. My children. He told me to find women to bear them. So I have.”

Anna wondered if there were other unsuspecting women carrying the Singer’s children.

“Nonconsensual sex is rape,” Leah said. “Twisting someone’s memories around makes them incapable of consent. You are a rapist. We are done here.”

He said, “Yes, we are.” He pulled the trigger a hair slower than Anna did, even though she had to step around Leah first.

Anna’s initial bullet hit his hand, making his shot go wild. She’d considered the dangers of that before she’d fired and chanced it anyway. Better being hit by a chunk of rock than a bullet; the rock would do less damage. Her second and third shots went through his left eye. She hit him in the heart, too, as he was falling.

Six left, she thought. She shoved Leah, who had not moved.

“Out, out,” she sang instead of “rock you.” She had no intention of letting her memories get stolen again.

They had to step over Zander to escape.

Leah had quit even trying to sing. But she was running with Anna in the right direction, so Anna figured that Leah was in charge of her own mind.

Rain was still pelting down sideways as they scrambled out of the cave—a different opening than Anna and Zander had used to enter earlier. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed too close together. Anna quit singing.

Leah said, “If we head directly to the highway, we can make it faster than if we take your SUV.”

Anna shook her head. “The SUV is dead anyway. Pretty sure he took out the oil pan on a rock. But we don’t have to make it to the highway before we get help.” She pointed. “Charles is over there. Maybe a quarter of a mile away.”

Leah half lidded her eyes—Zander’s eyes. Once Anna had noticed the resemblance, she didn’t know how she could have missed it. Then Leah nodded. “Okay, I feel them, too.”

Anna gave her the damp flannel shirt with about the same amount of reluctance with which Leah accepted it. They jogged along the side of the mountain, skirting heavy undergrowth where they found it.

“I don’t really remember him,” Leah said suddenly, her voice tight. “I remember I had a child named Alexander. I remember we weren’t able to get him out, and that he wasn’t there when the rest of the children were killed. I don’t remember any more.”

And that was only partly a lie. Anna wasn’t going to call her on it. “What made you come here?” she asked, hoping it was an easier thing for Leah to talk about.

Leah said, “I dreamed. The night before I left Bran to come here. Buffalo Singer, Charles’s uncle, told me that the time had come to finish my battle. I didn’t know what he meant, not until . . . I heard the Singer’s call again. And I decided that I would go to the Singer after all. I expected a battle, I think. I did not expect Alexander.”

She sounded . . . broken. Voice hoarse, she continued as if the words were being forced out of her mouth. “I didn’t tell Zander that I don’t remember why we left him, did I? I told him, told my son, what I thought would make him angry enough to raise that gun so that I could make myself kill him before the Singer came after us in his stead.” She paused. “I wonder why he did not come?”

Anna did not regret Zander’s death. But she was very glad it had been her who had killed him and not Leah. The other woman would have done it, but Anna thought that Leah was going to leave this place with enough battle scars. She didn’t need to add killing her son to the list.

Anna groped for something she could say.

Don’t feel bad; he was a rapist asshole who stood by while the Singer did whatever he had done to the people of Wild Sign that turned them into what we found in that cavern didn’t strike quite the right tone somehow.

He took great photographs and fought for the environment didn’t seem . . . on point, either.

Leah was not someone Anna could give a hug to, even had it been appropriate to the situation. Sage was the only one who might have been able to do such a thing—and Sage had been a lie. And a hug was only useful if there was time to cry—and the person who gave you a hug was someone you didn’t mind crying in front of.

“I am not sorry” was all that Anna managed.

Leah didn’t reply to that.

Anna felt Charles’s nearness and increased her pace without considering that the much more fatigued Leah—who had apparently run here from Montana—could not keep up. The trees thinned out a little and she caught sight of Charles and Tag.

Charles saw her, too, and broke from the jog he’d been moving at to a full-on run. She could have flown down the hill. She didn’t slow as she neared, just threw herself at him, wrapping around him, arms and legs and heart—knowing he would catch her. He would always catch her.

And for a moment, with his hard arms around her with bruising force, she wasn’t a badass who had just killed the minion of a would-be god. She was a shivering fearful woman who had narrowly missed being Rosemary. A woman who had seen a cavern of living mummies—and that was a memory she might not fight too hard to keep if someone wanted to steal it from her.

Hugs were dangerous in that way. He held her tight—and she could feel in the too-rapid beat of his heart and the slight shiver of his arms that he had been frightened, too.

“We need to go,” said Leah. She sounded pretty tough, but she had it worse than Anna, and she didn’t have anyone to hug her.

Anna dropped back to the ground.

“Leah,” said Charles. “Da is worried about you. I’m glad to see you safe.”

An odd expression crossed Leah’s face. “Is he? And ‘safe’ is a matter of degree, isn’t it?” She looked over her shoulder. “We should go.”

They set off down the mountain toward safety. Anna and Charles took the lead and Tag the rear, surrounding the usually indomitable Leah with what protection they could.

“Tell me,” said Charles.

And because the pace didn’t preclude talking, Anna did. When she had finished, Charles glanced over his shoulder at Leah so that it would be clear that he was speaking to her.

“My da called Asil back from Billings and left for here in the middle of the night, as soon as Asil returned to care for the pack. His intention was to fly to Bend and then requisition a helicopter and fly to Wild Sign. If he was able to do that, he should be here sometime in the next hour or so.”

Because Anna knew her mate, she felt that there was a lot more he wanted to say. He saw her gaze and shook his head. “Some things my da is going to have to put back together or not,” he told her.

“Should we wait for him in Wild Sign?” Anna asked.

“No,” Leah said, though Anna had been talking to Charles. “We need to get out of here.”

“No need,” Charles answered Anna. “Pack sense will tell him where we are. We should just keep going. We’ll come back and hunt when we have a better idea of what we are dealing with. We can bring some allies along—and a better way to protect ourselves than singing Queen at the tops of our lungs.”

Leah stumbled as they came to the amphitheater. She recovered quickly and took up the pace again, but her running had lost the easy rhythm she’d had before the stumble.

“Leah,” asked Tag, “would you let me carry you?”

“No,” she said. “Twisted my ankle. It will heal in a minute. Keep—”

There was a rumble, louder and longer than any of the thunder they’d been hearing, though it was the same kind of sound.

“Earthquake,” said Tag.

“It’s him,” Leah said, despair and fatigue in her voice. “We were too slow.”

“Look,” Charles said.

The ground that formed the amphitheater lost solidity, dropping down like ground zero of an underground nuclear detonation. Dirt flowed downward like a waterfall, punctuated with the boulders and stumps that had been the pews in the Singer’s open-air house of worship.