“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.