She reached for Charles through their bond—and only then realized that it was closed up tight. Maybe that was the reason her thoughts were so muddled. She would feel better if she could feel him; he might drown out the pain that was making it hard to think. She wasn’t good at manipulating their bond, though she’d gotten better.

Visualizations were sometimes useful, so she tried to imagine herself reaching out and unlocking the door that stood between them. She pulled on it and the bond blazed open with a suddenness that she hadn’t expected. As if she’d pulled hard on a swinging door at the same time that Charles was pushing it.

For a disorienting moment, she was seeing herself from his point of view. Her hair was tangled and there were traces of tears down her cheeks. She had a bloody nose again. Her shoulders were hunched in pain. (Well, she wasn’t used to having a hangover any longer. It had been years.) Her pupils were dilated like a drug addict’s, making her brown eyes look black. She looked small and fragile—something she’d never seen when she looked into a mirror.

Charles did something—it certainly hadn’t been her—and their bond settled down to its usual gentle awareness. The weird feeling of perceiving herself from his viewpoint receded. Charles took a deep breath. She realized that he’d even been careful of his breathing, so he didn’t startle her into running.

Which, she noticed, a part of her was still ready to do.

She had a sickening half memory of running through the woods in the dawn light—the path she had taken lay right over Charles’s shoulder. Her awareness, as she had sprinted through the unfamiliar territory, had bounced back and forth between the present moment and that horrible night when she’d become the prey of the pack. That explained why it had come so easily to mind just now—though not why it had done so this morning.

She reached out her hand. Charles stepped forward and took it at once, his warm hand closing around her cold one. The physical touch helped hold off her imminent panic, though she didn’t quite know why she was panicking. When his arms closed around her, her headache faded as well.

“It had to shut you out to get its fingers into me,” she told him. And then wondered how she’d known that—or if it was true.

“What is it?” he asked, only it was Brother Wolf who asked, not Charles, his voice smooth and dark.

“The Singer in the Woods.” She still wasn’t thinking right—and there was something wrong with Charles. Why was it Brother Wolf who was talking to her?

She shivered and pressed closer to him, feeling as if she would never get warm again. “It’s damaged. Hungry. Lonesome. It needs.”