With a huff of disgust, he dropped back into his seat with enough force that Anna could feel the SUV lurch. “You people. I get that it predates Anna’s arrival on this planet, but it is a classic horror movie. Gave me nightmares for weeks after I saw it—and I’m a werewolf.”

“What does it have to do with the present situation?” asked Anna to please him—though the title was a fair hint.

“Good Catholic girl is sold by her jobless actor husband to the Satanist neighbors, who need a vessel to carry Satan’s baby,” he said promptly. “Husband gets a part in a play. She gets drugged, raped, and then gaslighted,” Tag said. “Do we need to tell Dr. Connors?”

Anna was never going to watch that movie. She’d had enough of being helpless and told that black was white for a lifetime. Maybe Dr. Connors and her wife had been trying for a child. Anna herself had been looking into reproductive alternatives.

It didn’t feel like that.

“So the Singer is impregnating every woman who comes near it?” Tag said. “Do we need to start looking for its walkers?”

“That’s why they kept everyone away,” Anna said suddenly. “All those wards. It wasn’t about keeping the black witches out—the Singer did that for them, didn’t it? I had the impression that Dr. Connors the Younger thought it was out of the ordinary that she’d never gone up to visit her father while he was at Wild Sign. They were trying to keep possible victims away.”

“The Singer isn’t a new thing, though,” objected Tag. “Maybe we are hip-deep in the Singer’s walkers right now and just don’t know it?”

“Maybe not,” said Charles. “I don’t think that it would be making bargains unless it needed to.”

“She didn’t act like someone who had been assaulted,” said Anna.

“Rosemary didn’t remember it, either,” said Tag. “Not at first.”

“You think it affected her memory,” said Anna, keeping her eyes on the road so that Charles wouldn’t read her face. She hadn’t lost anything all day today. At least nothing that had left her with one of those odd teleport-feeling jumps. Nothing that she remembered, anyway.

Charles put his hand on her thigh, just above her knee. He’d felt her fear. She needed to tell him about that memory lapse yesterday. But before she could say anything, Charles spoke.

“We need to talk to Dr. Connors,” he said.

He was right.

“Let me do it?” Anna suggested, though there were very few things that she wanted to do less. “If the situation is what we think, we shouldn’t overwhelm her with men, right?”

She was aware of Charles’s keen glance, but he didn’t argue with her.