“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.

“She was not unwilling,” he said. And he lied.

“I see.” Anna kept her voice soft with an effort. “He has the witches—the ones who told him what Wild Sign had done—they are bearing his children. Why did you need Dr. Connors? And me?”