Something sharp dug into her mind, trying to lock the connection between her and Charles closed again. Anna screamed—she could hear the duet roar of angry wolves, her own and Brother Wolf—and the claws retreated, driven back by the sound.

She didn’t lose consciousness, but it was a close thing. By the time her world righted again, Charles had dragged her into his lap, sheltering her with his body.

“Music,” she said through the fog that was trying to feed on her. That mind-dulling miasma in her head was another kind of attack, she thought.

“What?” asked Tag, his voice very quiet. She looked for him and found him by the SUV nearly twenty feet away. He was crouched down, balanced on the balls of his feet and the fingers of his hands. His eyes were wolf-bright. There wasn’t a lot of human left in him. And she remembered that she was an Omega and he was a dominant wolf—and there was nothing physical he could protect her from to relieve his fury.

She would have apologized, but talking was too much effort—and she had to get through to Charles.

“Sing.” She fought to get the word out. When he didn’t immediately respond, she worried she hadn’t gotten it out in an understandable form. She tried giving him explicit directions. “Sing for me, Charles.”

“Charles isn’t with us,” said Tag in a rough voice as unlike his usual melodious tenor as she’d ever heard him speak. “He hasn’t been here all day.”

For a moment she didn’t understand what he was saying. Charles was wrapped around her—they appeared to be sitting on the ground, though she didn’t remember how they’d ended up there. Her cheek vibrated with his near-silent growls.

Oh. She was usually better at telling which one she was dealing with, but she wasn’t exactly at the top of her game.

“Brother Wolf,” she said. “I need you to sing.”

That had driven it off before, the Singer in the Woods. She remembered that, hearing Charles’s voice, feeling it charge the atmosphere with his love, his power. But Brother Wolf did not respond.

Think, she told herself sternly, but it was getting harder to keep track of what she needed to do. She had not broken under the weight of what had happened to her in the Chicago pack. She was stronger than this. What weapons did she have?

Oh. Of course.

I am a werewolf, damn it, she told herself, and called on the change to take her.