Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“I’m not omniscient, Bryn.” Callum’s voice was world-worn and weary, like he’d known the question was coming. “I can’t see everything, and even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to sort through it all.”
“Did you know?” I repeated the question, because he hadn’t answered it, not really.
In the front seat, there was silence, and then: “I knew there was a female involved. It honestly never occurred to me that she might be the Rabid.”
For all the respect he afforded Sora—and me—Callum still thought like a Were. Females might not be sugar and spice, but they certainly weren’t serial killers.
“Is she?” I forced the question out of my mouth. “The female you saw, is she rabid?”
Callum didn’t give me an answer—though whether he was holding back or genuinely didn’t know, I wasn’t sure.
“Your other question,” he said finally. “The one you haven’t asked yet.”
It was just like Callum to agree to answer a question I hadn’t asked instead of the one I had, but at least this way, I didn’t have to actually say the words.
Is it Maddy?
Callum met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “The answer is yes.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
CALLUM PARKED THE CAR IN FRONT OF THE WAYFARER restaurant. I’d expected him to drop me off at the house, but given that Sora was with us, keeping our distance from Ali was probably a good idea.
I knew for a fact that my foster mother was an excellent shot.
“We have days, Bryn.” Callum’s voice was strained—just barely, but for him, that was the equivalent to cussing and screaming. “We have a week, if we’re lucky. Every future I can find is coated in blood. I’ll hold the other alphas off as long as I can, but you need to find her. Fast.”
Her, as in Maddy.
Our Maddy. The Rabid.
“You’re not going to look for her?” I asked, forcing myself to be calm, to not think about the pictures or the bodies or the way Maddy had looked—broken, but regal—last December, when she’d walked away. “You’re just going to sit back and leave finding her to me?”
If the future was as dire as Callum was predicting, I couldn’t fathom why he wasn’t going after Maddy himself.
“My staying out of it will give me more leverage with the others, and someone has to do damage control with the human authorities. Wherever the girl was before, she’s gone now, and she won’t want me to be the one to find her.”
I was going to say that Maddy wouldn’t want me to find her, either, that the whole point of her leaving was to get away from me, but Sora didn’t give me a chance to speak.
“To catch a Rabid,” she said, with a strange and quiet intensity in her voice, “you have to think like a Rabid. There’s a dark logic to their thoughts. A hunger. If you can figure out what they’re hungry for, you can find them.”
Them, as in plural? Sora spoke like someone who’d spent a decent amount of time tracking down rabid werewolves. That shouldn’t have surprised me, given that she had been there the day Callum had rescued me. Callum had been the one to pull me out from underneath the kitchen sink, but Sora was the one who’d fought Wilson.
Flashes of fur. White, gleaming fangs. Red eyes. Blood.
A warm hand on my shoulder brought me back to the present. Dev.
“Get inside her head, figure out what she’s hungry for.” Devon repeated his mother’s words, pretending he didn’t know what I’d been thinking, that the memories hadn’t been written clearly on my face. “We can do that.”
Sora glanced at Callum, then back at Devon. “She can do that,” Sora corrected, nodding her head at me. “Or I can. But, Devon, you’ll be staying here.”
I didn’t remember taking a step forward, let alone four, but suddenly I was standing nose to nose with Sora, staring her down.
“That wasn’t an order, Bryn-girl,” Callum told me. “She’s not telling your Devon what to do.”
My Devon, my inner alpha echoed. Mine.
“The Senate meeting is over, and without the protections that provides, an alpha can’t afford to leave his or her pack untended for long.”
Callum’s even words managed to penetrate the thud of possessiveness, protectiveness, rage in my brain.
I was the Cedar Ridge alpha. Dev was the most physically formidable person in our pack. If anything ever happened to me, he’d take over as alpha.
As much as I hated to admit it, Sora was right. Devon and I couldn’t both go looking for Maddy—especially not when the other alphas might find reason to pass through our territory in a matter of days.
“I’ll take Chase,” I said, before Devon could object. “And Lake. You know they won’t let anything happen to me, Dev, and if the other alphas end up passing through, Lake wouldn’t want to be here anyway.”
I wasn’t going to say more than that—not to Dev, who knew Lake well enough to know that all the Senate Laws in the world didn’t make her feel as safe as a loaded weapon did.
The last thing we needed was her shooting a foreign alpha.
“I should be there,” Dev said, matching his mother’s quiet intensity word for word. “With you. With Maddy. I should be there.”
Hearing the way he said her name made me want to take him with me so badly that I could have screamed. Before Lucas, Maddy had been one of us. Not just one of the pack, but one of us. We’d been her family, her friends—
“The Cedar Ridge alpha would like to know if the Stone River alpha remembers that she applied no sanctions when he trespassed on her territory?” I felt like another person as those words slipped out of my mouth, like political Bryn was Dr. Jekyll—or possibly Mr. Hyde.
“I remember, Bryn.”
Callum was resisting dealing with me on official terms, and I wasn’t sure why. “If the Cedar Ridge alpha were to request sanctuary …”
Callum put two fingers under my chin. He looked into my eyes, and I looked into his, unable to finish the sentence.
“I would give you sanctuary,” he said. “I would take care of them as if they were my own. You know that.”
I did. And if I could send the kids in my pack with Callum, back to Stone River, just for a little while, then Devon could come with me.
“But that cannot happen, Bryn-girl. Not with the other alphas coming through.”
I took a step back, away from Callum’s touch against my face.
“There’s a reason you send Chase to run the perimeter of your territory, Bryn.”
To check on the peripherals? Or because he would never be fully comfortable here? I wondered what Callum was getting at.
“Territory is only territory when it’s occupied. Senate Law prevents trespassing, but if your pack abandons Cedar Ridge land, it won’t be Cedar Ridge land anymore.”
I thought of Chase running the border of our territory, of the peripherals spread out across the state, and then I thought of the way the pack gathered at the full moon, Shifting and running, overflowing with energy, at one with the woods and with each other.
The Wayfarer was ours. The land between Snake Bend and Stone River was ours. It smelled like us. It felt like home. But if the majority of the pack left, even for a little while, that could change.
Someone else could move in and take what was supposed to be ours, and we had less land than any other pack as it was.
So much for sending my pack with Callum and taking Devon with me.
Click.
The sound of bullets being chambered alerted me to the fact that we had an incoming visitor.
“You need to go.” Caroline’s eyes were locked on Sora’s. How she’d gotten her body between Devon’s mother’s and mine without anyone hearing her approach, I did not know, but she had a gun in one hand and a crossbow in the other.
The gun was trained on Sora’s temple, the crossbow on Callum’s thigh.
“Caroline,” I said, my voice dangerously pleasant. “Do you mind?”
“No,” Caroline said, releasing the safety.
“Caro, darling, as much of a Kodak moment as this absolutely is, pointing weapons at werewolves isn’t something one does at close range.” Devon was trying to be flippant, but neither one of us knew for sure how Callum or Sora would respond to the threat.
Neither one of us knew whether or not Caroline would pull the trigger.
“I take it you’re Ali’s sister?” Callum’s look was measuring—but just cautious enough that I got the distinct impression even he couldn’t be sure that Caroline wouldn’t shoot.
“I don’t know what you did to Ali,” Caroline said, her voice barely more than a whisper, “but you’re not going to do it again.”
It took me a moment to realize that she was talking to Sora, not Callum. Sora and Ali had been friends once, before Sora had hurt me. Seeing her again would have affected Ali the same way it had affected me.
And Ali was the only family Caroline had left.
“Sora, get in the car.”
That was the first time in a very long time that I’d heard Callum give someone a direct order. A glimmer of surprise passed over Sora’s face, but a second later, it was gone, and she turned to follow Callum’s instruction.
Caroline tracked Sora’s motion and took her eyes off Callum for half a second, but that was half a second too long. In a flash, both weapons were on the ground, and he was holding her very still, from behind.
“Devon’s right,” he said, a hint of an accent creeping into his words. “Shooting werewolves is a thing best done from a distance.”
He leaned forward then, and whispered something into the back of Caroline’s hair, something I couldn’t hear that actually cracked the veneer of ice in the hunter’s eyes. For a second, Caroline looked well and truly shaken. Vulnerable. Pissed.
Then Callum let her go. He turned and pressed a kiss to my forehead before beginning the walk back to his car. Halfway there, he paused and glanced out at the forest, at a large black wolf, keeping its distance, standing guard.
Chase.
I knew the moment I saw him standing there that the past day had been difficult for him. Shifted, his thoughts came to me as a mishmash of images and emotions, but I picked up on the fact that he’d stayed in wolf form the entire time I was gone. He hadn’t said a word to any of the others, hadn’t even seen them.
But now I was back, and so was he.
Callum glanced from Chase to me, taking in the way my body had oriented itself naturally toward the wolf in the distance, the way that even as Callum assessed us, Chase walked slowly toward me, pulled in like a planet orbiting the sun.
“I’m sorry,” Callum said.
I couldn’t tell which one of us he was talking to.
“Sorry for what?” I asked.
Callum gave me a look so tender, so familiar that I could feel tears burning in my eyes. “For something that might happen and might not.”
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but the look on his face changed, his eyes narrowing and his eyebrows lifting in warning.
I knew Callum’s This Subject Is Closed look better than anyone. I’d been raised on that look.
I’d never liked it.
“Find Maddy, Bryn.” Callum turned back to his car, walking to join Sora in the front seat, continuing to talk as he did. “Before this is over, it’s going to get bloody, and the longer she’s out there alone, the worse it’s going to be.”
A few seconds later, he was gone, and Devon, Caroline, and I were standing in front of the restaurant in silence, Chase in wolf form at my side.
“Who was that?” Caroline said finally.
Devon glanced at the weapons on the ground and groaned. “Trust me, Caro. You don’t want to know.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WORD TRAVELS FAST IN WEREWOLF PACKS. WITHIN THE hour, six of us sat around a circular table in the back room of the Wayfarer restaurant. Chase had Shifted back to human form; Devon had changed into a fresh and crisply ironed shirt. Lake was playing with empty bullet casings, rolling them around her fingertips in a motion halfway between juggling and twirling a baton. That just left Ali—who was sitting perfectly still, her hair pulled into a messy ponytail at the base of her neck and her hazel eyes unreadable—and Lake’s dad, who was probably the only person at this table who had any personal experience in either Senate politics or tracking down Rabids.
“Here’s what you need to know.”
I laid the facts out for the others quickly and efficiently. I didn’t stumble over Maddy’s name, didn’t let myself care or feel or hurt in any way.
Fact: there had been a murder near our territory that looked to be the work of a rabid werewolf.
Fact: a young girl fitting Maddy’s description had been seen near the scene.
Fact: Callum had as good as said that she was involved in this up to her eyeballs.
Fact: if there was another attack, Shay and the rest of the alphas would use that as justification to come after Maddy themselves.
“We can’t let that happen,” I said. “I’ll leave in the morning, head over to the site of the last murder. Lake and Chase are coming with me, but Devon’s going to stay here.” I flicked my eyes over to Lake’s dad. “Mitch, I’d appreciate it if you did the same.”
I could have made it an order, but Mitch had known me since I was a kid, and he and Ali were what I’d call close. If I was going to convince my foster mother that this was a good idea, I’d need his support, not just compliance.
“It might not be a bad idea to pull in the peripherals,” Mitch commented, which I took to mean something along the lines of why, yes, Bryn, I would be happy to stay here and help look after the pack in your absence. “They’ll be more at risk on the edges of the territory than they would be here.”
“And,” Devon added, “as feisty as the tween brigade is, it couldn’t hurt to have a few more werewolves in residence who are at least close to full grown.”
The majority of the members of our pack were between the ages of nine and thirteen. Despite the fact that I’d only been fifteen myself the first time I faced down the Senate, I couldn’t help feeling the others were just kids, that they should get to stay that way as long as possible.
“They shouldn’t know,” I said, making eye contact with each person at the table, one after another. “You can tell the peripherals that we’re going after Maddy, but the younger kids don’t need to where I’m going, or why.”
They didn’t need to know that a girl they’d looked up to and loved and missed like crazy might have become a monster.
I didn’t need to know that.
Chase’s hand worked its way into my palm, and he wove his fingers in between mine. I gripped his hand, pushing back the memory of the crime scene photos and the image my brain had conjured of Maddy in wolf form, tearing out the victim’s throat.
“And if you get caught?” That was the first time Ali had actually spoken. “You can’t exactly tell the local sheriff that he doesn’t need to worry about tracking down this killer because you’ve got it under control. Three teenagers milling around a murder scene isn’t exactly what I’d call inconspicuous, Bryn, and no matter what you are in the werewolf world, out there, you’re just a kid.”
I hated that Ali was playing the voice of reason and hated that she was right. Most of all, though, I hated that she acted like I didn’t know the human world, like being part of the pack, heart and soul, had cost me my humanity already.
“We’ll be careful,” I said. I did know the meaning of the word discretion.
Sometimes.
“I’m good at not being seen,” Chase told Ali quietly. “I always have been, and you know that I would never let anything happen to Bryn.”
Lake looked on the verge of chiming in, but Ali didn’t give her a chance.
“So we’re just supposed to let you three go off on your own?” she asked.
I’d known this was coming. Mitch might have understood the rationale for my plan, but Ali didn’t think like a were
I didn’t get more than her name out of my mouth before she cut me off.
“I know, Bryn. Believe me, I know. Your life isn’t normal. No matter how hard I try, it’s never going to be normal, and I can’t protect you from that. I can’t protect you from anything, but you can’t just expect me to be okay with the idea of you taking off for parts unknown to track down some kind of killer.” She shoved her fingers roughly through her hair, a gesture of frustration I recognized all too well. “What if it’s not Maddy?”
I’d spent so much effort trying not to obsess over the likelihood that Maddy had gone Rabid that I hadn’t let myself really mull over the alternative, either.
“Callum said …”
“Callum,” Ali said tersely, “never tells anyone more than half the story. You’ll be lucky if you got a third, tops. He’s not God, Bryn. He’s fallible. He gets things wrong.”
Right now we didn’t have much else to go on.
Ali jabbed a finger at me. “All you know is that there’s a killer who might be a werewolf, and there was a girl near the crime scene who might be Maddy. Even if the girl is Maddy and the killer is a werewolf, that doesn’t mean they’re one and the same, or that there’s anything you can do about it if they are. So you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t like the idea of my daughter tromping through some crime scene like this is CSI: Werewolf Nation.”
I waited a few seconds to make sure Ali was really done talking this time.
“I have to go,” I said, softening the words as much as I could. “Callum said Maddy’s involved, and he wouldn’t lie to me, not about this. That means that either Maddy did this, in which case it’s my responsibility to stop her, or somehow, it’s all a big coincidence, in which case, we have no guarantee the killer won’t turn around and start hunting Maddy next.”
I willed Ali to understand.
“We can’t just leave her out there alone. It’s not right, Ali, and you know it.”