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.
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br /> “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.
She could feel him aroused against her—and that focused her attention. She didn’t want this—whatever this was. She needed to get out of here.
She was very much afraid that meant she needed to figure out what was beyond this room. What it was that smelled like death, and what smelled of magic and old power.
Wait.
If she had listened to that inner voice in the first place, if she’d run when they got out of the Suburban, she might be back in that hotel by the river. She thought of the miles they had driven and amended herself. She would at least be on the way to the river by now—though an odd part of her remained convinced she could have made it to the river.
He stepped back and shook his head, then walked over to a dark corner of the room and pulled out an instrument case. If he hadn’t been standing between her and the tunnel, she’d have taken her chances. But without a head start, she wasn’t going to be able to get far enough into the tunnel fast enough that he couldn’t simply grab her ankles and drag her out.
She wondered why he’d brought her here. The kisses—and that bed—were making her very uncomfortable.
Wait.
He pulled out a mandolin that was a lot older than the case it was stored in. As he began tuning, he said, “You are not going to be hurt, Anna.”
She’d had a dentist who used to say that right before he stuck the needle in. It was a lie then—and it was a lie now. Even if he thought he was telling the truth.
And then he began to play. She loved music—it spoke to her, and always had. It gave her joy when she was sad and comforted her when she was afraid. And she had been so afraid.
After a while he put the mandolin back in its case.
“Hello, Anna,” he said.
“Hey, Zander.” She gave him a shy smile.
“How old are you?”
She laughed. “Jailbait for you. Seventeen.”
“Good,” he said. “Would you go sit on the bed and wait for me? I won’t be a long time. Maybe a half hour.”
She didn’t mind waiting. She liked to use downtime to work through the solo that she was going to play for auditions for Northwestern. There were a couple of spots that weren’t as smooth as they could be. And she still wasn’t sure that slowing down that movement in the middle a little more wouldn’t make the music better, even if it might mean that the adjudicators thought she was doing it to make the piece easier.
He gave her a soft kiss she didn’t pay much attention to and then gently propelled her to the bed. She couldn’t help wrinkling her nose. The sleeping bags had been here long enough to absorb the smell of death and whatever that other weird scent was. It wasn’t a pleasant smell. Her instincts told her not to react. There was something wrong here, and she needed him to go away.
“All right?” he asked.
She wished he’d shut up; she wanted to work on her music. If she’d been a mathematician, she would have solved equations or counted in prime numbers or something. Music would clear her head.
She gave him a perfunctory smile. “Yes, fine.”
He watched her for a second, then he nodded and walked out.
As soon as he was out of sight, something rose out of the hollow place inside her, something vibrating with life and strength and rage. Her hands curled and every muscle in her body tensed. She needed to get out of here. Her head was foggy as all hell, but she knew that much.
She was on her way out, halfway up the squeeze-chute tunnel, when she heard a soft click and all the lights in front of her went out. She paused. Could she find her way out in the dark? The darkness of the cave was not the darkness of night. There was no light. She’d be able to make it out of the narrow passage, where there was only one direction to go, but after that? When her memory of how they had made the trip in was foggy?
She slid back out into the bedroom cavern. Improbably, given that it was presumably attached to all of the other lights, the single bulb was still lit, but the lanterns on either side of the bed were out. She picked one of them up and pressed the red button to turn it on. Nothing happened.
It had just been lit. It was a simple, battery-operated device. She tried the other one with the same result.
She was trapped.
And that was when she became aware of the sounds. Muffled scuffling noises with an odd wet edge to them. Groaning. A shushing sound almost like a croon that ended in a sound like grain spun in a basket. Then a wet squishy smacking sound, like someone had thrown a giant sponge out of an airplane so it could land on pavement.
She stood frozen, curiosity pushing her forward, curiosity and the desire to see what the hell was making that noise. But caution and that small voice in her head held her still.
And then the sound changed, becoming a rhythmical squicking, as if some film director decided to make a parody of sex. It was too loud and too … harsh, as if something huge and wet scraped over and over against a rough surface. Someone—Zander?—cried out in a mix of passion and pain.
It sounded, she thought, with a sort of revolted horror (and a weird desire to laugh), like the tentacle sex in the old anime movie that had been passed around the high school girls’ locker room. Yes, she had watched it.
She and her best friend had consumed two buckets of popcorn and laughed themselves sick. Her dad had caught them. Being her dad, he’d grabbed a handful of popcorn and stayed to observe a tentacle enter a place a tentacle had no business being. He’d winced theatrically and then rolled his eyes before wandering out.
She wished her dad were here now.
A very distinctive odor hit her nose. The sounds did not lie. Sex was taking place.
She also caught a whiff of something else, musk and mint like the flannel shirt she wore as armor, but lighter somehow and vaguely familiar. There was a gentle scuffing sound just outside the cavern—and a naked, very dirty woman padded in on soft feet.
For a moment, she reminded Anna of Zander.
Then she came closer, dispelling the illusion—a thing of shadows and the shape of her eyes.
“Anna?” the woman said in a whisper so quiet Anna was surprised that she could hear. “Are you okay?”
The woman, even naked and dirty, carried with her an air of command that had Anna responding to her as if she were here to help. Anna looked at the bed, then pointed in the general direction of the sloppy wet noises—and shook her head definitively.
The woman nodded and then gestured for Anna to follow her back the way she’d come—the direction that Zander had not taken. This section of the tunnel was still lit, and Anna couldn’t help but look the way Zander had gone, but it dropped down and turned. All she could see was that the light from that direction had a distinct orange tinge and looked too bright to have been provided solely by ordinary bulbs.
The woman stopped and Anna stopped with her. There was something odd about Anna’s own reaction to this woman—who was a stranger, a naked stranger, even. And she felt like a trusted comrade, if not a friend. But unlike the happy, safe feeling that Zander’s music inspired, this felt true.
She turned to Anna as if to say something.
Anna spoke first. “Who are you?” she asked. “Have we met?”
The other woman’s eyes flashed to icy blue, as if she wore some kind of contacts designed to make her look like a superhero or an alien.
Wolf eyes. And that thought felt true as well.
The woman didn’t answer Anna’s question, her voice still quiet—though she would have had to be singing full-throated opera to have pierced the noises coming from behind them. “You need music to clear your head. The wrong kind of music will make you vulnerable to him—anything soft or emotional. Music in general is dangerous. The Singer’s powers are music and memory. But they can also be used to defend against him. You need something defiant. A war song. Maybe something like—” She hummed a little and Anna recognized the tune.
“Queen,” Anna said. “I can channel Freddie Mercury.”
“Wait until we get somewhere safer—or if the enemy appears. Think defiance while you sing, or it will backfire. I hope it won’t be necessary, because we are going to try to make it out before they are finished back there. I warn you, though, this next cavern is bad. Stay beside me.”
“What if he cuts the lights?” Anna asked.
“I have a flashlight,” the woman said. “I picked it up at the cave entrance.” For the first time, Anna noticed that she was carrying a small black flashlight in one hand. In the dim light, it blended with the dirt on the woman’s hands.
“Something killed the electric lanterns back there.”
“Well, then, Anna,” said the woman in a biting tone—so familiar. Who was this woman? “I guess we’ll have to fight in the dark, or”—she nodded her head toward the disturbing sounds behind them—“you can go back and wait until he gets done in there.”
Anna followed her into the next cavern without another word.
This cavern was huge. Though it was lit by dim bulbs on a string down the middle of it, Anna had to judge the size of the cave by sound as much as sight, because the edges were hidden by stalagmites rising from the ground like giant malformed trees. Some of them had broken over the years—or perhaps those were stalactites—and lay like broken marble columns in an ancient Grecian temple.
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