“When did she go up to Wild Sign?” Anna asked Charles urgently, her mouth dry. “This summer, right?”

“Yes,” Charles said. “July.”

“Does she strike you as the type of person who would give herself willingly to the thing that probably killed her father?” Anna asked.

“No.” Tag grunted, and then swore as if the grunt hadn’t been enough to express his feelings. “I can’t even get pregnant and that is revolting. Shades of Rosemary’s Baby.” Something about the lack of response made him pull himself forward to get a good look at their faces. “You two don’t know Rosemary’s Baby? Mia Farrow? Roman Polanski?”

With a huff of disgust, he dropped back into his seat with enough force that Anna could feel the SUV lurch. “You people. I get that it predates Anna’s arrival on this planet, but it is a classic horror movie. Gave me nightmares for weeks after I saw it—and I’m a werewolf.”

“What does it have to do with the present situation?” asked Anna to please him—though the title was a fair hint.

“Good Catholic girl is sold by her jobless actor husband to the Satanist neighbors, who need a vessel to carry Satan’s baby,” he said promptly. “Husband gets a part in a play. She gets drugged, raped, and then gaslighted,” Tag said. “Do we need to tell Dr. Connors?”

Anna was never going to watch that movie. She’d had enough of being helpless and told that black was white for a lifetime. Maybe Dr. Connors and her wife had been trying for a child. Anna herself had been looking into reproductive alternatives.

It didn’t feel like that.

“So the Singer is impregnating every woman who comes near it?” Tag said. “Do we need to start looking for its walkers?”

“That’s why they kept everyone away,” Anna said suddenly. “All those wards. It wasn’t about keeping the black witches out—the Singer did that for them, didn’t it? I had the impression that Dr. Connors the Younger thought it was out of the ordinary that she’d never gone up to visit her father while he was at Wild Sign. They were trying to keep possible victims away.”

“The Singer isn’t a new thing, though,” objected Tag. “Maybe we are hip-deep in the Singer’s walkers right now and just don’t know it?”

“Maybe not,” said Charles. “I don’t think that it would be making bargains unless it needed to.”

“She didn’t act like someone who had been assaulted,” said Anna.

“Rosemary didn’t remember it, either,” said Tag. “Not at first.”

“You think it affected her memory,” said Anna, keeping her eyes on the road so that Charles wouldn’t read her face. She hadn’t lost anything all day today. At least nothing that had left her with one of those odd teleport-feeling jumps. Nothing that she remembered, anyway.

Charles put his hand on her thigh, just above her knee. He’d felt her fear. She needed to tell him about that memory lapse yesterday. But before she could say anything, Charles spoke.

“We need to talk to Dr. Connors,” he said.

He was right.

“Let me do it?” Anna suggested, though there were very few things that she wanted to do less. “If the situation is what we think, we shouldn’t overwhelm her with men, right?”

She was aware of Charles’s keen glance, but he didn’t argue with her.

“I think I’ll put a call in to Mercy,” Charles said unexpectedly. “If I had my pick of who to consult about our current situation, it would be Coyote. Maybe she can tell me how we could make that happen.”

* * *

*

ANNA HAD DEBATED about calling ahead, which would have been the polite thing to do. But she didn’t think she could manage the proper tone. She dropped Tag and Charles off at the storage facility and headed back to the RV campground where Dr. Connors was staying.

She pulled into the spot she’d used before. The Volvo wagon, hatchback open, was backed up to the little cottage Dr. Connors and her wife were staying in. There was luggage piled inside the car. She was pretty sure that they had not intended to leave today.

She heard them before she got to the porch. They kept their voices quiet; someone with mere human senses would not have heard them at all. Even she could not hear the words, just the tone: hurt and anger with a fair bit of fear on both of their parts.

She thought, Two months, maybe three, is about the time you’d have to quit denying what your body was telling you, isn’t it? She pictured Sissy’s hollowed-out face and wondered if some of the grim control she’d shown was because she was fighting nausea.

Anna knocked briskly at the door. All of the talking stopped. Quick footsteps came to the door and it opened just a crack.

Dr. Tanya Bonsu bore very little resemblance to the cheerful woman Anna had met the day before. Her face was tight and her magnificent black eyes were reddened. “Ms. . . . Anna,” she said, evidently having forgotten Anna’s last name. “I am afraid that this is a very bad time. If you could come back in an hour, I’ll be out of the way and Sissy would, no doubt, be happy to speak with you.”

“Have you,” Anna said, her hold on the door keeping Tanya from pulling it shut, “ever seen the movie Rosemary’s Baby?” She didn’t know why she went with Tag’s movie, but it did seem to cover all the bases and save Anna a long explanation with a hostile audience—assuming the movie was as well-known as Tag seemed to think.

Tanya quit struggling with the door. “That is not funny,” she said coldly.

“It isn’t a funny situation,” Anna said. “Carrie Green, one of the witches in Wild Sign, had a grandfather. We spent this morning visiting him at a rest home. We know something more about what might have happened in Wild Sign.”

“I don’t care what the fuck happened in Wild Sign,” said Tanya in a low, vicious voice. “Let go of the door and come back later. When I am gone.”

“You care,” Anna said, and she pushed out with the soothing Omega power. It seemed to her that things might go better with a little less anger. She wasn’t as effective on humans as she was with the werewolves, but it could help.

She softened her voice. “Unless you and Dr. Connors have been making use of modern science, I think the creature who kept the white witches of Wild Sign safe got your wife pregnant. It wants children, and it can screw with people’s memories.”

Shock loosened Tanya’s hold on the door, and Anna shoved it open with her shoulder, tempering her strength so she only moved the other woman back a few steps.

The cottage living room held a couch, a TV, and a two-person dining table. The kitchen was separated from the rest of the house by a door, which was open. Next to the kitchen was a narrow, enclosed stairway.

“Dr. Connors,” Anna said, keeping an eye on Tanya, who had backed all the way across the living room. Evidently the shove had been hard enough to make Tanya reevaluate what she knew about werewolves, because she smelled frightened now.

Though Tanya had smelled of fear before, there was a difference between fear of losing the person you love and fear of a monster. The word was the same in the English language, but it didn’t smell the same at all. A lot of emotions were like that. After years of Charles’s teaching, Anna’s nose was well calibrated enough to tell the difference. Anna just didn’t know if the change in Tanya’s fears was useful.

“Ms. Cornick.” Dr. Connors’s voice originated from upstairs. “This is a very bad time. Please go away.”

“Do you remember getting pregnant when you hiked up to Wild Sign?” Anna called. “Or did it steal your memories from you first?”

Anna knew the answer to that, of course.

Sissy Connors rushed down the stairway. She was wearing Minnie Mouse pajama bottoms and a USMC oversized T-shirt that was the right size to have belonged to Tanya. She was barefoot and braless, and her face was a lovely shade between I-just-threw-up and watch-out-I’m-going-to-throw-up-again. Anyone who’d ever been to a college party would recognize it.

“What the hell did you just say?” she asked.

“Sit down,” Anna said, and she glanced at Tanya. “You, too.”

Tanya looked at Anna a moment and said, “Rosemary’s Baby?”

Anna nodded.

Sissy must have watched old movies, too, because comprehension lit her face. She clutched her stomach and the scent of her revulsion might have made Anna’s nose wrinkle if she hadn’t been prepared for it.

It wasn’t Anna’s story that Tanya believed; it was the expression of shock and comprehension on her wife’s face.

Tanya walked over to Sissy and wrapped her in her arms. They rocked a moment, cheek to cheek. Then Tanya whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“How sure are you?” Sissy asked.

“That the creature that destroyed Wild Sign got you pregnant?” Anna shook her head. “Occam’s razor sure. More certain after seeing your reaction than I was driving over here. I can tell you for certain that whatever that thing your father and the other white witches at Wild Sign made a bargain with, it can take your memories away.”

Sissy looked up at Anna and raised her eyebrows. You?

Anna gave her a sharp, single nod.

“I should have believed you,” Tanya said.