Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(89)

He’d gotten in front of them, presumably traveling by a different path. Maybe that way had had lights so he’d been able to run.

Hiding her movement with Leah’s body, Anna pulled her own gun, releasing the safety as she did so. The Sig was matte black and small; Anna kept it against her leg and kept that leg behind Leah.

Ten shots, she told herself as she belted out Brian May’s lyrics. Keep count and use them wisely.

The lights were brighter than she remembered. Either the stint in the darkness had made her more sensitive or there was magic at work, but she could see Zander as if he had a spotlight on him.

He was barefoot and shirtless. His only clothing was his jeans, and they were unbuttoned and unzipped. His skin was damp and a little shiny, as if someone had covered him in oil. On his collarbone and navel, the shiny substance thickened to clear blobs that clung to him as if it were something sticky.

There was a roundish red mark on his hip, visible because his jeans were riding low. Another of those marks was halfway up his throat. He was breathing hard and he smelled like sex.

His face had been flushed with triumph, but even as Anna watched, his expression went blank. He stared at Leah like a rabbit in the face of a hungry wolf.

“Mother?” he said, voice raw.

Leah didn’t say anything. Anna couldn’t read anything from her body language. Leah had a pretty good game face; she probably wasn’t showing what she thought there, either.

Anna, on the other hand, promptly forgot where she was in the song, so she started the chorus up again. On the whole, it had been a good thing she hadn’t found a song with words she’d have to think about.

Mother.

She remembered that when she’d seen Leah enter the bedroom cave, for an instant she had thought the woman looked like Zander.

“I thought you were dead,” Zander said. Anna noticed his pistol was a Glock, though she wasn’t familiar with the model. It was something a lot bigger than her own. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t have bothered with silver bullets—he hadn’t known Anna was a werewolf— but a head shot would probably still be fatal.

“I knew you were not,” Leah said, speaking for the first time. “Though I had hoped so. He needed you too much.”

“You betrayed him.” Zander’s voice cracked out and he gestured with the gun, as if with so much emotion he could not contain his body. “You helped the Beast come into our home and kill all of Father’s children. All of them except for me.”

“I intended for it to be you, too,” she said. To someone who did not know her, her voice would have sounded flat.

But Anna had heard Leah’s flat voice before, and this time she heard the roughness in Leah’s consonants. Leah was feeling something powerful—the echoes of it washed up through the pack bonds and made Anna’s wolf spirit tense in readiness. But Anna suspected that not even Leah would be able to put a single name to those roiling emotions.

“What did you get out of it, Mother?” Zander snarled. “My father told me that you let the Beast transform you, that you became like one of them. Did he bribe you with immortality? I have that, and I don’t turn into a monster with the full moon.”

“No,” said Anna grimly. “You just go out and rape women. Someone is a monster here, and it isn’t Leah.”

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.