Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(85)

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.