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, Mo
ther?” 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 hea
rt—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.”
Wild Sign Page 27