Charles got his jaws on the tentacle a second later and severed it in a spray of clearish fluid that seemed to be the Singer’s version of blood. But the damage was done. Leah’s leg was all but ripped off.

Charles did not see a mouth in the frothing water of the lake, but something must have surfaced, because the Singer shrieked, an ululating, ear-piercing noise that rose to the point of pain on sensitive ears. The searing agony of the sound dropped on the pack, and for a moment they were still.

Then Brother Wolf took advantage of the temporary motionlessness of the three tentacles currently onshore and opened a four-foot-long wound that was as deep as he could manage given the length of his claws and the toughness of the Singer’s rubbery skin. In apparent response, the Singer jerked all of its parts beneath the water.

Directed by the needs of the hunt, Anna grabbed Leah by the scruff of the neck with her teeth and pulled the wounded wolf well out of reach. Leah did not object to either the pain of Anna’s teeth breaking through hide and into flesh or the bump of her damaged leg on the ground. The hunting song knew that to heal such a wound would weaken the pack too much to continue the battle. So the song withdrew from Leah, leaving only three wolves in the fight.

ALONE AND SHIVERING from pain and exhaustion, Leah tried to start her change. The shift should heal most of the damage to her leg on its own. The sooner she got this done, the sooner she could get back into the fray. Nothing happened. She simply didn’t have the resources to change again without rest or food.

She cast an anxious glance at the ongoing battle. They weren’t going to win. The Singer was simply amusing himself with them. Leah couldn’t bear being the only survivor a second time.

Desperately, she reached out to her distant pack for a boost of energy to help her change. They should have been too far away for her to reach. And they were.

But Bran wasn’t.

Rich energy pulsed through her mate bond, making the change almost easy, certainly quicker than she was used to. As her body burned and stretched, she felt Bran begin to open their bond.

Buried with pain and the confusion of the shift, she reacted with utter and instinctive honesty. She shut it tight, cutting off the feed of energy, which she might not have done if she’d been more cognizant. It didn’t matter; she had enough to finish the change on her own.

When she lay faceup in the mud, the falling rain keeping her eyes closed, she heard the faint sound of an approaching helicopter. Proof that Bran was near—had she needed further confirmation.