Which, she noticed, a part of her was still ready to do.

She had a sickening half memory of running through the woods in the dawn light—the path she had taken lay right over Charles’s shoulder. Her awareness, as she had sprinted through the unfamiliar territory, had bounced back and forth between the present moment and that horrible night when she’d become the prey of the pack. That explained why it had come so easily to mind just now—though not why it had done so this morning.

She reached out her hand. Charles stepped forward and took it at once, his warm hand closing around her cold one. The physical touch helped hold off her imminent panic, though she didn’t quite know why she was panicking. When his arms closed around her, her headache faded as well.

“It had to shut you out to get its fingers into me,” she told him. And then wondered how she’d known that—or if it was true.

“What is it?” he asked, only it was Brother Wolf who asked, not Charles, his voice smooth and dark.

“The Singer in the Woods.” She still wasn’t thinking right—and there was something wrong with Charles. Why was it Brother Wolf who was talking to her?

She shivered and pressed closer to him, feeling as if she would never get warm again. “It’s damaged. Hungry. Lonesome. It needs.”

Something sharp dug into her mind, trying to lock the connection between her and Charles closed again. Anna screamed—she could hear the duet roar of angry wolves, her own and Brother Wolf—and the claws retreated, driven back by the sound.

She didn’t lose consciousness, but it was a close thing. By the time her world righted again, Charles had dragged her into his lap, sheltering her with his body.

“Music,” she said through the fog that was trying to feed on her. That mind-dulling miasma in her head was another kind of attack, she thought.

“What?” asked Tag, his voice very quiet. She looked for him and found him by the SUV nearly twenty feet away. He was crouched down, balanced on the balls of his feet and the fingers of his hands. His eyes were wolf-bright. There wasn’t a lot of human left in him. And she remembered that she was an Omega and he was a dominant wolf—and there was nothing physical he could protect her from to relieve his fury.

She would have apologized, but talking was too much effort—and she had to get through to Charles.

“Sing.” She fought to get the word out. When he didn’t immediately respond, she worried she hadn’t gotten it out in an understandable form. She tried giving him explicit directions. “Sing for me, Charles.”

“Charles isn’t with us,” said Tag in a rough voice as unlike his usual melodious tenor as she’d ever heard him speak. “He hasn’t been here all day.”

For a moment she didn’t understand what he was saying. Charles was wrapped around her—they appeared to be sitting on the ground, though she didn’t remember how they’d ended up there. Her cheek vibrated with his near-silent growls.

Oh. She was usually better at telling which one she was dealing with, but she wasn’t exactly at the top of her game.

“Brother Wolf,” she said. “I need you to sing.”

That had driven it off before, the Singer in the Woods. She remembered that, hearing Charles’s voice, feeling it charge the atmosphere with his love, his power. But Brother Wolf did not respond.

Think, she told herself sternly, but it was getting harder to keep track of what she needed to do. She had not broken under the weight of what had happened to her in the Chicago pack. She was stronger than this. What weapons did she have?

Oh. Of course.

I am a werewolf, damn it, she told herself, and called on the change to take her.

For the first time, the transformation didn’t hurt. Or more precisely, her head hurt so much that the familiar agony of her body reshaping itself barely registered. As the shape of the wolf took over her body, its spirit clothed hers. The wolf flowed over and through her, sliding through her mind and healing the damage done. Midway through the change, her mate’s music, Charles’s music, became part of her magic, lending her energy and purpose.

His voice melted into her bones, a staccato warrior’s song that thrummed in her chest with its battle cry. There were words, powerful words that lent themselves to combat. She didn’t understand them but understood their import all the same. Those words formed both shield and sword for her battle. Which did not come.

The thing that had its fingers sifting through her memories fled in the wolf’s wake, in the face of her mate’s song. She was left panting, sane, and, as far as she could tell, free of the Singer, whatever the hell the Singer was.

The raspy martial lyrics of a folk metal band in her ears, she closed her eyes and rested her still-aching head against her mate’s shoulder as he sang the Hu’s “Wolf Totem” in a land thousands of miles and eight centuries from the steppes of Genghis Khan.

As with the last Hu song he’d performed for her, Anna was pretty sure he would tell her he wasn’t getting the pronunciation right with this one, either—but if he’d been at the head of a Mongol horde, they would have known exactly what he meant when he sang.

* * *

*

WHAT WITH ONE thing and another it was late afternoon before everyone was back to their human selves. Boneless in her chair, Anna licked her fingers clean of the last of Tag’s spicy barbecue sauce. It wasn’t sanitary, probably, but she wasn’t letting any of it go to waste.

Besides, it made Charles’s eyes heat up as he went over the last day with his da on the phone. And Anna would do almost anything to wipe the ragged expression off her mate’s face. Her success at that lasted until her hand went to her neck to make sure Justin’s bite mark was really gone.

One of the things that being plunged into the single worst memory of her life had done was to make very clear how hard Charles worked to empower her. Not only because Charles would always back her, but because he had taught her how to defend herself.

She could fight now, in whatever shape she wore. And she knew how to weaponize the natural abilities being an Omega gave her. If she ever found herself the prey of a crazed band of damaged werewolves again, they could not hurt her. She was almost sure she knew how to quiet their beasts. How to make them hers.

The woman I am now would never have had to suffer at the hands of Justin. She told herself that, but she couldn’t believe it. The memory of his teeth in her neck, his smell, his hands on her skin, was too near. Maybe tomorrow she would believe in her ability to fend off Justin.

Charles was watching her, his jaw tense and his eyes yellow.

Today, she decided, she wasn’t going to be afraid of a dead man. She was going to flirt with Charles instead.

She put her index finger in her mouth and met her mate’s eyes as the spicy brilliance of Tag’s sauce filled her mouth. Charles flashed her a sudden grin and turned his back so she couldn’t distract him anymore.

She got up and threw away her paper plate. Tag had done both the cooking and the cleaning for the meal and had returned to his Yeats. He was wearing earbuds with the volume low enough she couldn’t hear it. His head was nodding as he read.

“Anna?” Charles said, turning back to her. “Da wants to hear your side of this.”

“Do you have all your memories back, Anna?” Bran asked. She’d been politely ignoring their conversation until then. She couldn’t help overhearing everything, a condition of being a werewolf, but she felt it was polite to pretend she wasn’t.

“No,” she said. Then paused. “I don’t know, really. I remember most of what happened at Wild Sign, I think. I’m a little foggy from the moment I picked up the recorder until I woke up this afternoon. But the only part I don’t remember at all is this morning. After we got back from Wild Sign, I went to sleep as a wolf. Around six in the morning I apparently shifted from wolf to human, panicked when Charles touched me, and made like a track star through the forest. They caught me, kicking and screaming—we are the only people at this campground, which is probably a good thing.”

She’d been thinking about the noise. But she supposed it might also be good in another way. If there had been another group camping here, they could have been fresh victims for the Singer in the Woods. They had, she’d noticed, all adopted the name that she’d produced in the middle of its attack. She didn’t know how she’d gotten it—one of the things she couldn’t quite remember.

“Do you think the Singer poses a danger for others?” Bran asked. “People near you? Or people near Wild Sign?”

She held off her immediate “How should I know?”