Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(88)

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.

The fallen cave giants weren’t the only things strewn broken over the floor. Anna found the source of the musty smell of death.

The mummified bodies of maybe a dozen people lay scattered around. It took her horrified eyes a moment to register that they were all dressed in modern clothing. They lay in small groups—two men face-to-face, holding hands. Four women who looked as though they’d been sitting cross-legged and also holding hands when whatever had done this to them had hit. It looked as though they had all sat down and awaited their doom without a fight.

Just when she thought she’d reached her limit of horror for the night, she realized that some of the bodies were children.

She turned in a slow circle, though she still followed the other woman, who was picking her way across the cavern, walking backward as her eyes found new bodies in the shadows. There weren’t just a dozen; there were at least twice that many.

There was a soft airy noise—and it took Anna a second to realize that the noise was coming from the bodies. They were breathing . . . or at least they had all exhaled, pushing the musty scent of death into the cavern.

“This is how he punished the rebels,” the woman said grimly. “We need to get out of here.”

“Are they alive?” Anna asked numbly, forgetting to be quiet.

She didn’t realize she’d stopped moving altogether until her comrade grabbed her wrist and pulled. “I don’t know,” the woman answered. “Worry about them later.”

“Anna?”

Zander’s voice came from the direction of the bedroom cavern.

“Sing, now,” said the woman. “Run.”

One of Anna’s voice teachers, a woman who had been in Cats for five years on Broadway before retiring, liked to make her students sing while they were running. She said it taught them abdominal control.

Singing “We Will Rock You” at the top of her lungs certainly challenged Anna’s diaphragm control. But she still did better than the other woman, whose volume changed with her footfalls.

“Think defiance,” the woman said at a break in the song—and as she spoke, the lights went out.

Anna heard the flashlight hit the ground, so apparently that hadn’t worked any more than the electric lanterns back in the bedroom cave. But a hand wrapped around hers in the darkness and tugged. They had to quit running, but the other woman led the way with apparent confidence. Anna assumed that she knew this cave system, had bat radar, or was guiding them by something other than sight.

There was a soft noise and the other woman staggered. “Low ceiling,” she growled in a rough voice.

She was a head taller than Anna, but Anna put her free hand up so that if something were hanging down, she’d have some warning. She couldn’t tell if anyone (Zander) was following them, because she was singing.

She sang the second verse of the song as they stumbled in inky darkness, thinking that it would be a hell of a beacon for anyone or anything trying to figure out where they were.

As she sang a generation’s hymn to defiance, the go-to score of almost every high school pep band since 1977, the huge hollowness that Anna had been contending with all night dissolved, the fog on her memory cleared, and the challenge in her voice quit being any kind of acting.

Anna staggered, stumbling to her knees on the damp stone as she tried to reconcile the memories of a lifetime with the past few hours. Her song broke off, but her memories remained.

“What the freaking hell, Leah?” she growled angrily, though none of this was Leah’s fault. She wasn’t angry with Leah.

“Sing now, talk later,” Leah told her, yanking her to her feet. “And be careful. This is a weapon that can bite back. Music is meant to be a gift to listeners—but it can’t be that here. It has to fall on him like an axe. Make your music a declaration of war.”

Leah started with the first verse again, moving at a quick walk. Keeping Anna behind her so that if someone were going to stumble or run into something, it would be her. Leah protected her people.

Back in her own skin, her wolf so close to the surface Anna was a little surprised she wasn’t already starting to change, she could catch the faint whiffs of fresh air—which had to be what Leah was following.

They ran out of verses for “We Will Rock You,” and Anna went for another classic with Pink Floyd’s ode to juvenile delinquency, “Another Brick in the Wall.”

Without electric guitars, though, that one took only about a minute. Anna tried Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” but it was quickly obvious that Leah didn’t know it. So Anna sang only the first two lines. In desperation she went back to Queen. They could just sing the damned verses over and over again, she thought; that’s what they had done when she was in high school.

The lights came back on, ironically blinding her so she tripped and fell down hard. She popped up, throwing her weight back so she could come to her feet balanced and ready. Leah was stock-still in front of her. And twenty feet beyond that, Zander stood with a black handgun aimed at them.