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.