Closer. Closer. Closer.
The door was almost open. I could almost see … there, a body—
No.
The instinct surged up from my stomach, like vomit in the back of my throat. This wasn’t right. Something didn’t feel right. It didn’t smell right. It smelled …
Female. I eased my finger off the trigger, just a hair, as my intended target cleared the door.
It wasn’t the Rabid.
The realization shook me, but I didn’t lower the gun.
A girl. My age, maybe, or a little older. She had light brown hair and pale gray eyes, and there was something horribly, gut-wrenchingly familiar about the lines of her face.
Madison.
My gun lowered itself. My mind reeled. This was impossible. Madison was dead. She’d been declared dead when she was six years old. The Rabid had torn her so far apart that there was nothing but scraps left to bury.
Nothing but scraps.
No body.
Not dead.
I tried to adjust to that information, to reconcile the waiflike teen in front of me to the little girl, but before I could do that, I was body-slammed with another realization.
She wasn’t alone.
They poured out the front door, one after another, and it finally sank in that the Rabid wasn’t the only person who lived in this mammoth house in the woods.
He had people with them. Children. And every single one of them was a Were.
Retreat wasn’t in my DNA any more than it was in the average werewolf’s, but I couldn’t stay there, not when I’d almost shot a dead girl who couldn’t have been more than a year older than me.
Where had Wilson gotten all of these werewolves?
The answer was obvious. I’d always assumed that the Rabid was killing the targets we’d so painstakingly marked on our map. Hunting them. Feeding his bloodlust with prey more satisfying than a rabbit or deer. I’d assumed that Chase was a mistake, an aberration who’d gotten away and survived.
Apparently, I’d been wrong.
Wilson hadn’t been killing the children he’d attacked. He’d been turning them. Creating his own little werewolf army. It was sick.
Sick and impossible. According to what Mitch had told Keely, there had been a grand total of three, maybe four cases of a human being changed into a Were in the past thousand years. One case every two hundred and fifty years, even though the prevalence of attacks was much, much higher.
Yet somehow, this Rabid had managed to change dozens.
The girl I’d almost shot—the one who’d come outside when she’d sensed me near, the one who was my age and my height and my build almost exactly—Madison—she could have been me.
If Callum had arrived at my house a few minutes later, she would have been.
Come out, come out, wherever you are. I won’t hurt you. The Big Bad Wolf always wins in the end.
Had I been the first? A trial run? A way for him to test whatever method he’d found for changing humans? Were my parents just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Had they died because of me? Why hadn’t they changed? If this Rabid knew the secret to making new werewolves, why had he only used it on children? Did it work on adults? How could a six-year-old even survive the kind of ravaging it took to trigger the change?
My pack—my friends—descended on me the second I came within their range. Their questions pushed mine out of my head, and their touches—soft on my face, my arms, and my stomach—calmed me enough that I was able to make a sound. And unable to keep from crying.
It was supposed to be me.
They heard the words, and they absorbed them. They let me break, and then they put me back together again, all in a matter of seconds.
I straightened and cleared my throat, but when I spoke, my voice still came out husky with tears. “We’ll be needing a new plan. As it turns out, the numbers are in his favor, not ours. And also, we can’t kill them.” I paused, because the irony of the words I was about to say didn’t escape me in the least. “They’re just kids.”
“One of us should go back to the cabin,” Devon said softly, his voice cutting across mine, quiet and insistent. “Just close enough to try to scent their numbers.”
“Does it matter?” I asked, meeting his eyes and wondering how exactly the two of us had gone from algebra and the safety of Stone River to here, all in a matter of months. “If Wilson has twelve Changed werewolves, or if he has forty, does it really matter?”
Either way we were outclassed, outnumbered, overwhelmed, and screwed. In that order. Since I’d both been there and done that, I made an executive decision, one I begged the others with my mind and with my eyes to follow.
Retreat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BACK AT OUR TEENY-TINY MOTEL ROOM, I TRIED TO catch the boys up on everything Lake and I had discovered with our internet sleuthing. “It’s hard to get a real count of how many attacks this guy has been involved in. There are at least four or five confirmed deaths—with bodies and everything—that might fit his profile.”
Those would be the Rabid’s failures. The people he’d tried, but failed, to change. Or maybe he’d never tried to change them. Maybe he’d just been thirsting for blood.
“We found several other attacks, too, where the victim was either missing or presumed dead. I’m not sure how many. Less than a dozen, more than six, but that doesn’t really tell us how many wolves Wilson has in that cabin. Who knows how many of his attacks we missed? This is Google we’re talking about here, not science. Lake and I aren’t professional profilers. The only thing our research really told us is that there was a very good chance he’d attacked a lot of people in a lot of different territories. The numbers are fuzzier.”
I thought of the missing-children database Lake had found online, put up by parents hopeful to get their kids back. How many of those “missing” kids were dead? How many of them were here in Alpine Creek, older and less human than they’d been when they disappeared?
“I saw fifteen or sixteen at the cabin,” I said, thinking back. “There might have been a few more inside. The youngest was maybe four or five, the oldest probably about seventeen.”
“Were they all female?” Chase asked, an odd expression on his face, like the word female had taken on a whole new meaning the moment he’d become a Were.
I shook my head. “About half and half.”
Lake laughed, but it was a sad, grating noise. “Half of sixteen is eight. Looks like Katie and I aren’t quite so special anymore.”
Lake was right. The only way a female werewolf could be born was as half of a set of twins, but apparently, if you knew the secret to making new werewolves, females were just as easy to make as males. I thought about what that could mean for a pack. Fewer human wives, fewer babies lost in childbirth. More purebreds. Stronger wolves.
A stronger alpha.
“I guess we know why the Senate was willing to deal,” I said, my voice like sandpaper on my throat.
Werewolves were so long-lived that it didn’t make much of a difference for the species if there were years when not a single live birth took place. The birthrate, however low, was still usually higher than the death rate, because Weres were nearly impossible to kill.
But expanding a pack’s numbers? Trying to stay head to head with a pack as old and large as Callum’s?
That was a real concern.
“The other alphas want stronger numbers.” I looked down at my fingertips, like they’d tell me my sickening logic was false. “The Rabid can give them numbers.”
Suddenly, I understood why the alphas had really wanted to see Chase. They’d wanted to see how a changed werewolf compared to someone who was born that way, and they’d wanted to know the details of the Rabid’s attack, because they were hoping to figure out what the monster knew that they didn’t.
“The Rabid isn’t going to give up the secret to making new werewolves.” I said the words decisively and wouldn’t have been able to keep from saying them, eve
n if I were the only person in the room. “The moment he tells the alphas how to make new wolves, he’s dead, and we have an even bigger problem.”
One Rabid out hunting humans was bad. A half dozen or more alphas doing it was a problem that no amount of trickery on my part would solve.
“So if he’s not giving up the secret, what do the alphas stand to gain from letting him live?” Chase asked, sounding more human than I’d heard him in a very long time. If he’d let his wolf take over, he would known the answer.
Numbers were power.
“He’s bartering them,” Lake said, flopping down on the bed and pulling her knees to her chest. “Those kids back at the cabin. Those are his bargaining chips.” I reached out to Lake’s mind and saw how close this hit to home, how many times she’d wondered if someday, her own alpha might decide to barter her.
Never, I told Lake silently, putting all of my force behind that single word. Callum was an alpha of alphas. His first instinct was always, always to protect.
Except, a tiny voice in my head reminded me, when it wasn’t.
Still, I couldn’t believe, even for a second, that he ever would have treated Lake like a commodity. That he ever would have let anyone harm her, no matter what they offered him in return.
“What if the Rabid isn’t trading the kids he has now?” Devon asked, pacing the room with long, angry strides. “There’re two things every dominant wolf wants: territory and a pack.”
Those were the things that had led Devon’s brother to leave Callum’s pack and transfer into another, just so he could have the opportunity to challenge and kill that pack’s alpha the moment he was accepted as a transfer. The need for territory and for a pack was something that Devon understood, more than he’d ever let on to me before now.
“Dev’s right,” Chase said, recognizing the instinct, his voice taking on a fluid, reflective tone that told me this conversation was bringing him closer and closer to the edge of a Shift. “Why would Prancer give up any of his wolves when he could … just … make … more.”
I felt Chase’s control begin to slip and reached out to him, grabbing his lapels with my fists and his mind with mine.
Stay with me, Chase. Stay human.
I had no idea what he’d do in wolf form in a room this small. The last time he’d been this upset, the need to hunt had been overpowering.
Stay with me, I said, repeating the words in a soothing tone halfway between a lullaby and a command. Stay. Human.
I could feel his wolf snarling beneath the surface, and for a moment, I thought I’d lost him, but as I spread my hands flat against Chase’s chest, willing him to calm, his wolf settled, and Chase nodded.
Bryn.
Chase.
Bryn.
For a split second, I wondered what the two of us would be doing if we were the only ones in this room. Then I forced myself to step back as I realized that Devon and Lake had been seconds away from stepping between Chase and me, willing to protect me at all costs.
The last thing we needed right now was to fight amongst ourselves. The stakes to killing this Rabid had just shot up, because even more so than I’d realized before, if we didn’t kill him, future attacks were a foregone conclusion. Lots of them, probably. New werewolves, made to order.
More kids who lost everything to the Big Bad Wolf.
Why not adults? Was that it? Was that the whole trick to making new wolves? Children could survive, adults couldn’t?
I pushed back the ponderings. It couldn’t be that simple, or the alphas would have already figured it out. And besides, even if we assumed that the Rabid could change adults, from the alphas’ perspective, younger was probably better. Inter-pack dominance, positioning yourself for power amongst the other alphas—the entire process was a long game. To people who lived practically forever, eighteen years wasn’t so long to wait for someone to mature, and the earlier a pack got ahold of someone, the more influence they had.
Look at me.
And that brought me back to the fact that I had every reason to believe that what the Rabid had done to Chase was what he’d had planned for me, when I was a kid. On some level, I’d always known it wasn’t a random attack and that the monster had come looking for me. That my parents had just been the ones standing in his way.
Come out, come out, wherever you are. …
But why me? Why any of us?
I brought my eyes to Chase’s and in them, I saw myself. Saw that from the moment I’d first heard his tortured howl, my gut had been telling me that we were the same. I looked at him, and I saw the red haze of his dreams and of mine. Remembered the fight-or-flight instinct, a wild, feral, merciless, uncompromising need to survive that I’d felt in his mind and in my own.
The alphas had asked Chase how he was attacked. They’d wanted to know, because they’d wondered if it would tell them something more than any previous investigations had. The Rabid had been hunting for more than a decade. During that time, at least some of the alphas must have known.
They must have watched him and wondered how he made the impossible flicker to life.
I wasn’t aware of the moment that my thoughts went from silent to verbal, but the others had no problem picking up on the things that had gone unspoken, their minds and their thoughts interwoven with mine. “Maybe the Rabid does something a little different each time,” I said, a hot feeling, like steam, seeping over my body in a way that wasn’t pleasant in the least. “Lake and I were looking for patterns earlier, but what if there is no pattern, other than the fact that every one of Wilson’s wolves should have died? What if the secret isn’t about the attack at all?”
No magic sequence. No recipe for how to ravage a body just right.
“What if it’s about the victim?”
Chase and I were the same.
We did whatever it took to get out of a situation alive and intact. If you blocked us into a corner, we lost it. If you beat us down, eventually, we popped back up. We fought, and we held on, and at the end of the day, we lived.
I’d grown up in a werewolf pack where everyone was stronger than I was and yet, until that day with Sora, I’d never really gotten hurt. With training, there were times when I could get lucky enough to get a few good blows in on a full-grown Were. When the Big Bad Wolf had come knocking at my parents’ door, I’d known to run and hide. When you broke my ribs, I didn’t stay down for long. When I refused to fight, when I resisted the urge to let everything go red and let my inner fury out, I passed out for three days.
When the stakes were high and you tried to force your dominance on me, I rewired the entire hierarchy of the pack.
It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t human, and when I’d asked Callum about it, he’d told me that my bond with the Stone River Pack hadn’t changed me, that I was exactly what I’d always been.
I was a person who had the potential to survive a full-blown werewolf attack.
I was scrappy as hell.
“Don’t you guys get it?” I said, the words pouring out of my mouth, one after another after another. “Chase and I, we’re the same. We’re not normal. We’re …”
I refused to use the word scrappy out loud and rapidly searched for a suitable replacement.
“We’re resilient. Our brains must just be wired differently than everyone else’s, because we don’t respond to threats the way normal people do. Something happens to us, and we fight. Or flight—fly, whatever. The point is, when the situation is bad, when things are really dicey, Chase and I pull through. And so did the kids in Wilson’s cabin. They got bit, and they survived.”
I couldn’t explain how exactly the answer had come to me, or why I believed it so strongly when there were probably other solutions to be found. But I did believe it, and because I did, the three of them did, too.
“It’s not about how you attack them,” Lake said, lifting the thought from my mind. “It’s about who you attack. It makes sense—if only one in ten thousand people has the ability
to survive, and you attack randomly, then only one in ten thousand major attacks will lead to a Change.”
“And since Were attacks on human aren’t common …”
“It never happens.”
I felt Chase again, felt his wolf stirring under the surface of his skin, but this time, he pushed the instinct down on his own, replacing it with icy fury.
“If you know who to attack,” he said softly, “if you can figure out what allows someone to survive and selectively attack those people …”
Hunt down those people like animals. Like prey. I brought one hand to the side of Chase’s face, needing to touch him, needing him to know that I understood.
“If you know who to attack,” I said, finishing his thought, feeling for a moment like we were the only two people in the room, “then making new werewolves really isn’t that hard.”
I wondered how the Rabid was finding them, the people like us. I didn’t have to wonder what alphas like Shay would do if they found out how to track our kind, too.
That couldn’t happen.
The Rabid had to die, and the secret had to die with him. Then, and only then, would things go back to normal. Weres would stop attacking humans, because the humans they attacked wouldn’t survive, and the risk of exposure wasn’t worth it for one new werewolf every couple of hundred years.
The Rabid had to die. It was a variation of the same single-minded thought that had driven me for months.
“We need a plan.” For someone who’d once made a practice of rushing into things blind, I was beginning to feel like a broken record with those four little words. Unfortunately, this time, I didn’t have a plan, so I was forced to take the situation apart, piece by piece.
Goal: kill the Rabid.
Problem: a sneak attack at the cabin was out, because our target had at least a dozen not-so-human shields. If we fought Wilson at the cabin, we’d have to fight his little homemade pack, too.
Problem: we couldn’t fight the kids. Not Madison. Not the others. Not when they were victims in all of this, too.