Callum. Pack. Stone River. Permissions.
I thought the words and thought them hard, pushing through it like the pain was nothing.
Callum.
Pack.
Stone River.
Callum.
Under the waistband of my jeans, the Mark was still there. I placed my hand over it, lining my fingers up with the grooves that Callum had carved into my skin.
“The Rabid is still alive. He’s been alive all this time, and now, he’s messing with my—” The possessive seemed more important than the noun that followed it. I wasn’t sure what to call Chase—my friend? My wolf? My other self?
“So it’s true,” Lake said, saving me the trouble of finishing my sentence.
“What’s true?”
“You and this boy. You Marked him.”
When she put it like that, the impossibility of the situation became a magnitude more difficult to ignore. I wasn’t a werewolf, and I certainly wasn’t the Stone River Pack alpha. Callum hadn’t been present when I’d thrown my pack-bond at Chase. The alpha hadn’t forged a new connection between us, I hadn’t bitten Chase, he hadn’t bitten me, and what we shared was nothing like the bond between a werewolf and his mate.
It also bore no resemblance to the bond between Callum and me.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was—” How could I possibly describe what had happened, even to Lake? “We’d just figured out that his Rabid was the same as mine, and they were going to separate us.”
We’d panicked. Both of us. “I had to calm him down. I couldn’t let them take him away. I had to—”
Had to what? I wasn’t explaining this right. Lake was sitting very still, an odd light in her eyes that I couldn’t quite diagnose.
“I had to protect him. And me. So I took everything I felt for the pack. I saw the bond, and instead of closing myself off to it, I pulled. I pulled at it and I thrust it toward Chase.”
I expected Lake to tell me again that what I’d done was impossible, but instead, she looked down at her knees, and in the softest voice I’d ever heard her use, she asked me the last question I ever expected to hear from her lips. “Could you do it again?”
For a second, I thought she was asking if, given the chance, I would go back in time and do the exact same thing again, knowing the consequences, but there was something between us—a light shifting of air, a pulsing in her bond with the pack and the muted power of the Mark on my side—that told me that wasn’t so.
She was asking if I could rewire someone else’s pack-bond. She was asking if I could rewire hers. Lake and her dad were peripherals. Callum didn’t require their attendance at the Crescent, but they were still a part of Callum’s pack. He was still her alpha.
“I don’t know, Lake.”
Could you try? I didn’t hear the words, the way I would have if my bond with Chase didn’t stand between Callum’s pack and my mind, but I could see the question on the tip of her tongue. After a moment, she bit her lip, and whatever I’d imagined I’d seen disappeared, replaced by a look I associated with Lake’s reaction to being dared to do something.
An alarm sounded in the back of my head, because that look was trouble. Lake Mitchell didn’t turn down dares.
“I suspect you’re wanting to know why Callum didn’t kill the Rabid,” Lake said.
Cautiously, I nodded.
“And I suspect you’re wanting to know if he has plans to kill the Rabid now that he’s back?”
This was why I had dealt Lake in. She had no inhibition, no sense of propriety, and she was fearless. Pack or not, she wouldn’t shy away from pressing Callum’s buttons. Growing up removed from Ark Valley had given her the luxury of following her own will more than the alpha’s, and right now, Callum’s privacy and hallowed judgment didn’t command her respect nearly as well as my need to make sure that this Rabid was put down.
“If Callum’s not going to kill the Rabid, I will.” I said those words out loud for the first time and knew that it wasn’t a bluff. It wasn’t me blustering or running off at the mouth without thinking. It wasn’t foolishness, and it didn’t matter that I was human and the Rabid was not.
He’d messed with what was mine. He’d killed my family. He’d hurt Chase. And the only way to get him out of Chase’s head forever was to see him dead.
I told Lake as much, and she didn’t even blink. She didn’t ask me how exactly one human girl was going to take down a Rabid that had been evading our entire pack for over a decade. She just took me at my word and moved on to the next order of business.
“What do you need me to do?”
I looked out at the water, working my way through the situation, taking into account everything I knew about Lake, the Wayfarer, and her brand of persuasion. I thought of the human bartender, with her talk-to-me face and eyes that didn’t look like they missed much, and I thought about the kind of clientele that a place run by a peripheral male would naturally attract.
Wolves weren’t solitary creatures. Where there was one werewolf, sooner or later, there were more, and Mitch and Lake weren’t our pack’s only peripherals.
“I think I need you to talk to the bartender,” I said, turning the idea slowly over in my mind. If any of Callum’s other wolves had been here, the bartender would know, and if she’d gotten them drunk enough, they might have talked. Lake didn’t ask for the rationale behind my request. She just stood up and made her way back to the restaurant, because she knew as well as I did that any good plan started with recon.
It wasn’t until Lake and I were sitting on stools in front of the bar that I thought to wonder how exactly a human female had ended up working for Lake’s dad. Looking for answers, I closed my eyes and let my senses take over. The woman in question smelled like Walmart soap and evergreen trees. She bore no Marks and had no connection to the pack. Not to Stone River, and not to any of the others. She wasn’t on edge and there wasn’t the slightest whiff of fear in the air around her. From somewhere behind us, I heard a rustle, and my fingers curled reflexively into fists.
Wolf.
And not one of ours, either.
“Easy, girl,” Lake said, even though I got the feeling that the intruder’s presence sent her hackles up, same way it did mine. “This here’s neutral territory. We welcome all types.”
Technically speaking, this wasn’t neutral territory, and it wasn’t Lake’s. Montana was Stone River territory. It belonged to Callum, and the wolf behind us did not.
“He’s a peripheral,” Lake told me. “One of Shay’s.”
I hadn’t had much practice identifying other packs by smell, but I recognized the name. Shay was the youngest alpha in North America. He’d challenged the former leader of the Snake Bend Pack around the turn of the century and won. Like Devon, Shay was a purebred Were, and Sora was his mother, too. Technically, that made him Devon’s half-brother, but since neither of us particularly cared for him, we didn’t think of him that way. Shay had broken all ties with his family—and Callum—long before either Devon or I were born.
“Your dad lets Shay’s wolves eat here?” I asked. It was unfathomable.
“Only the peripherals, and only the ones that can mind their manners,” Lake said. “It doesn’t hurt to have friends.”
I tried to see the sense in that, however much my instincts were telling me it was wrong-wrong-wrong. I’d thought that the Wayfarer was a resting point for Stone River peripherals, but given the host of smells in the air, its clientele was far more eclectic than I’d given it credit for.
All the more reason to talk to the bartender and find out what she knew.
“I’m Bryn.” I opened my eyes again and met hers, and if she noticed that I’d been smelling her, she didn’t comment on it.
“Keely.” For a long moment that was all she said, and then she turned and narrowed her eyes at Lake. “You up to something?”
Lake’s lips worked their way into an easy grin. “Always. You heard anything about a Rabid?”
/> I’d expected her to finesse the question more, but who was I kidding? This was Lake. Keely paused for a moment and then snorted. “If I lied, you’d smell it, so I’ll stick with that’s no concern of yours and suggest you leave it at that.”
Lake opened her mouth to argue, but I pinched her leg in the age-old sign for shut up and let me do the talking.
“You know about werewolves,” I said, meeting Keely’s gaze.
“I expect I might,” Keely allowed.
“And you’re not dead.”
Keely snorted. “This one sure knows how to sweet-talk a girl, doesn’t she, Lake?”
I wondered if Callum knew that there were humans in Montana who knew who and what we were, but if he didn’t, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. “The fact that you’re alive means you know how to keep your mouth shut. I can respect that.”
Lake pinched my leg. I ignored her.
“So I won’t ask you about any Rabids or any secrets.”
Another pinch. Harder this time. I swatted Lake’s hand away.
“But I am going to ask what you’ve heard about what it takes for a human to become a Were.”
My logic in asking that question wasn’t so much a rationale as an instinct. Any human who’d been within five feet of a werewolf and known him for what he was had thought about it. What it would be like to Change. What it would take to trigger it.
Ribs popping. Head throbbing. Punch after punch after punch.
I forced the swell of fear down before Lake could smell it, before the peripheral in the back right corner could get a taste of me. Keely and I weren’t talking about a beating. I had no reason to be thinking about that. None. We weren’t talking about Marks or being bitten.
We were talking about slaughter.
“I asked about that,” Keely said. “When Mitch told me what he and Lake were and warned me that things could get rowdy here. He said he wouldn’t let a soul touch me, but even so, I asked what would happen if I got bitten or scratched—if I would change or just keel over. Never hurts to be informed.”
“Humans becoming Weres is supposed to be impossible,” I said, thinking that instead of celebrating birthdays, I should start marking my life by its impossibilities. One for a four-year-old escaping a Rabid. Two for being Marked by a thousand-year-old alpha. Three for closing my mind off to the pack so completely for so long. Four for a boy who should be dead.
Five for the way I’d claimed him above and beyond our allegiance to Callum’s pack. Six for the way Chase had come to me in my dreams.
“It’s not impossible,” Keely said, leaning forward on her elbows. “Just unlikely.”
Now that was interesting. In silent agreement with my assessment, Lake finally stopped pinching my thigh. “That so?” she asked Keely, her voice a low rumble that reminded me of her dad’s.
Keely nodded. “The way I’ve heard it, in the past thousand years, a human being changed has happened three or four times. Mostly, they just die. If anyone could figure out how to bring humans over without killing ’em dead, I suspect there’d be a lot more of you wolf-types than there are.”
There was power in numbers. The larger the pack, the more powerful the alpha.
I digested the information Keely had given me slowly. Chase’s situation wasn’t impossible. It was improbable. I filed that information away for future knowledge.
“You know anything about the other times it has happened?” I asked Keely, not really expecting an answer. She shook her head and then excused herself, as the Were I’d felt earlier came up to the bar.
“I thought you wanted to find out about the Rabid,” Lake said, dropping her voice to a whisper.
“I do,” I whispered back, “but Miss Keely over there wasn’t talking, and right now, our best lead on the Rabid is Chase.”
I had no idea where the Rabid was or what he was doing, but I did know that a part of him was in Chase’s head.
Burnt hair and men’s cologne.
Banishing the memory of the smell, I told Lake about the first time Callum had taken me to see Chase. About the way that, for a few moments, the Rabid’s claim to his prey had outweighed Callum’s. About the way I’d seen Chase in my dreams and followed him into his own enough to know that the Rabid was still playing games.
“Let me get this straight,” Lake said when I was done, leaning back on her bar stool in a position I would never have been able to manage. “You and the Stone River Pack alpha and El Rabido are fighting it out for dominance in lover boy’s head.”
There were so many things wrong with that sentence. The casual way she’d referred to the Rabid. The words—Stone River, Pack, alpha—that brought Callum’s image to my mind and made me wonder how long thinking of him would feel like pressing on a bruise, just to see if it still hurt. And then there was the fact that Lake had referred to Chase as “lover boy,” when really, he was just a boy. My boy.
Mine.
Mistaking my reaction for offense, Lake quickly added a second incomprehensible sentence onto her first. “Between Callum, the Rabid, and the infamous Bronwyn Clare, my money’s on you.”
Yeah. Right. The pain from my ribs, dull and aching, called the wisdom of that bet into question.
“Seriously, Bryn. You may be human, but I know you. You fight dirty.”
The vote of confidence made me smile, but the movement hurt my face, reminding me again that I wasn’t invincible.
I wasn’t even that hard to break.
“I’m going to go,” I said. “See how Ali’s doing. Get settled.”
Lake narrowed her eyes at me, trying to see past the surface of my words. I stared back at her, holding her gaze until she looked away. Realizing what I’d done—and what it would have meant in her wolf’s eyes—I offered up an olive branch.
“I’m not giving up, Lake. I’m just regrouping.”
I needed to think. I needed a plan, and as far as I was concerned, recon had just begun.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“ALI?” I WASN’T ENTIRELY SURE THAT I WAS IN THE right place, so I called out as I opened the front door. The word bounced off the walls, and even though everything about this cabin—three bedrooms scrunched side by side, a combined living and kitchen area twice as big as I was used to—screamed not home, it was the difference in echoes between this house and Ali’s that did me in.
Regrouping was one thing. Recon was good, and the Wayfarer wasn’t a bad place to do it. But this wasn’t home.
Thinking about Ark Valley made my mind go quiet, and my pack-sense surged. Chase came first, and I saw him running, the way Lake and I had earlier. I felt his stride in the muscles stretching down my own thighs and the urge to run, to be with him, almost devoured me whole.
Next, I felt the twins, two rooms over. Devon, Callum, and all of the other members of our pack were too far away for me to feel, except for Lake and her dad.
“Ali?” I called again, keeping my voice down this time, because my connection to the twins hummed with the low buzz of sleep. She didn’t reply, and I found all three of them sleeping on the same king-sized bed on a comforter that wasn’t ours. Alex was on his tummy, his tiny human hands buried in Kaitlin’s fur, and Ali’s entire body was curved around the two of them. The moment I walked into the room, Katie stirred.
She blinked. Once. Twice. Three times. And then she wriggled. Glancing at Ali, dead to the world, I walked quietly to the bed and picked Katie up. She burrowed into my body, like she thought she could carve out a puppy-sized space in my side.
“Hey there, baby girl,” I whispered.
Katie snuffed, and I realized she was smelling my breath. I wondered if I smelled like home, and if she could make out the faint scent of blood from my bruises.
Katie whined and then licked me.
“Shhhhh,” I told her, settling her puppy form in my arms. “Mama and Alex are sleeping.”
Katie stilled, and I brought my eyes back to Ali. She’d driven through the night to get us here. I doubted she
’d slept much the three before that, when I’d been wafting in and out of consciousness.
“Mama’s tired,” I told Katie, my own stomach twisting. “Mama’s had a hard day.”
Week.
Month.
And me being me probably hadn’t made it any easier for her.
Katie, well and truly bored with my revelations, yawned, her puppy-mouth opening so wide that if she were in human form, she probably would have dislocated her jaw.
“Did you wake up just for me, baby?” I asked her. She snuggled into my side again, and I took the cue. Gingerly, I slid onto the edge of the bed. I propped myself up on a pillow and let Katie sprawl out on my stomach. She laid her nose just under my chin, let out of a whoof of puppy-fresh breath, and fell asleep. I curled toward Ali, careful not to squish Alex, willing the three of them to sleep well.
Willing all four of us to be okay.
Sleep came. The clearing. The forest. The smell of early autumn—but no Chase. I knelt down to the ground, and with the motion, I lost my awareness that this was a dream. That maybe Chase’s absence just meant that he wasn’t asleep. Instead, I dug two fingers into the dirt and brought it to my nose.
I couldn’t smell him. I couldn’t smell anything. A sluggish worry wrapped its way slowly around the base of my spine, and like a snake, it slithered up my back, one vertebra at a time. I couldn’t smell anything. It was worse than being blindfolded, worse than small spaces, worse than opening my mouth to scream, knowing the sound would never make it from my throat.
I couldn’t smell.
I hugged my knees to my chest, unable to rise into a crouch, unable to ready my fists or reach for my blade. And then the world around me folded in on itself, like someone was making origami. Like I was a test paper and someone had crumpled me up and thrown me away.
And then the world was being uncrumpled, and the forest unfolded into something new.
Something small.
Something that smelled like wet cardboard and drain cleaner. I would have taken comfort in the fact that I could smell again but for the memories that combination brought with it.