Fine, Chase, I said silently, giving in because if he had been the one under attack, I probably would have done something a lot rasher than standing guard at the edge of the woods. Just stay hidden.
This time, I caught a hint of Chase’s human side in his reply, something that told me that he was good at blending in to the background, that he’d spent most of his human life trying not to be noticed.
“Hey, sleeping beauty.” Lake tried for nonchalance in her tone but couldn’t quite sell it, and her voice quivered as she pressed on. “Want to tell us what’s going on, and why exactly you look like you’ve seen the wrong side of a barbeque?” She plopped down next to me and stretched out her legs.
You guys remember that thing we weren’t going to tell Devon? I asked Lake and Maddy silently. They both shifted slightly in response. Devon narrowed his eyes, and Lake batted her eyelashes in a show of innocence that was just this side of terrifying.
I think we’re going to have to tell him, I continued. Any volunteers?
“Not it,” Lake said out loud.
“Not it,” Maddy chimed in quickly.
I sighed. “Hey, Dev, funny story …”
Shockingly, Devon didn’t find the story of the previous night’s events very funny, and none of them—not Lake, not Devon, not Maddy, not Chase in wolf form, lurking in the distance—was overly amused by the morning’s development.
“You had a dream that someone was trying to set you on fire, and when you woke up, your skin was burned,” Lake repeated humorlessly.
I leaned back on my wrists and blew out a breath, watching it take shape in the winter air. “That about covers it.”
“Except, of course, for the part where my brother sent you veiled threats about someone else coming after Lucas, and the part where our gentleman visitor looked you straight in the eye and told you the threat was human.”
When Devon got irked, he had a tendency to over-enunciate, and by the end of that sentence, his pronunciation was sharp enough to draw blood.
“Lucas wasn’t lying.” Maddy was the only one willing to speak up and voluntarily step into Devon’s line of fire. “I was there. Lake was there. We would have smelled it.”
“There’s lying and there’s not-lying,” Lake replied, mulling over each word. “If you ask me, Lucas was not-lying. His words weren’t exactly false, but for someone who wants our help, the boy isn’t really what you would call forthcoming.”
Lucas hadn’t ever explicitly said that the people after him weren’t a threat. He’d never said that they weren’t dangerous. He’d said that they were human, and I’d filled in the blanks on my own. The irony of the situation—that I of all people had assumed that by virtue of being human, a person couldn’t possibly be a threat—did not escape me.
Devon leaned over and pressed two fingers deliberately against my cheek, watching the skin go pale and then pink again. After a moment, he repeated the action.
“Are you done yet?” I asked, shoving him, to absolutely no avail.
“Depends. Is my bestie done lying to me and pretending things are okay when they aren’t? Hmmmmm?”
Devon poked me again. I was on the verge of giving in and promising him that whatever happened next, I would tell him, whether I thought hearing it would be good for him or not, but before I could say the words, our conversation was interrupted.
At first, the interrupter didn’t say anything. She just walked up to us—right up to us—so close that the tips of her black leather boots almost touched my jean-clad legs. She didn’t kneel to our level to speak. She didn’t even look down. Instead, she stared off into the distance.
Into the forest.
At Chase.
“Hello there,” Devon said, shifting position to move a fraction of an inch closer to the intruder. “Is there something I can help you with? Directions to the gymnasium? Personal tutoring on Hamlet? Predictions on this year’s Oscar favorites?”
Personally, I thought he was laying the drama geek vibe on a little thick, but the girl—the same one I’d seen in the cafeteria the week before—didn’t so much as bat an eye. In fact, I would have gone as far as to say that she paid less attention to Dev than any female had in a very long time.
When she did shift her gaze from the forest, the girl had eyes only for me.
“I’m Caroline,” she said, “and you’re the wolf girl.”
I’d certainly been called worse, but my breath caught in my throat the moment she said the word wolf.
I stood up and looked down at her. Humans didn’t know about the existence of werewolves, and they especially didn’t know about the existence of my pack here, in my territory, at my high school.
“Who are you?” I took a step forward. If we’d been anywhere near the same height, my face would have been right in hers, but she was so small that the top of her head didn’t even reach my chin.
“I’m Caroline,” she repeated. “Keep up.”
Caroline. Looked like a porcelain doll, felt like a threat.
My brain absorbed the information and fed it automatically to the rest of the pack, a transfer as simple and reflexive as taking a breath and then breathing out.
“I believe you have something that belongs to us.”
Us?
I glanced over Caroline’s shoulder, half expecting to see an army of pint-sized leather-clad divas, but as best I could tell, she was alone.
“Define something,” I said, pushing down the urge to place a hand on each of her shoulders and force her, belly up, to the ground.
Not here, I told myself. Not now.
“I believe its name is Lucas.” Caroline scuffed the heel of her boot into the ground, and it took me a minute to realize that she was etching a symbol into the snow. “On the off chance that you’ve had multiple Lucases show up at the home front in the past couple of days, ours should have been fairly clearly marked.”
For a split second, it was like I was staring right at the back of Lucas’s neck again, and the scar I’d seen there, ugly and puckered, was an exact reflection of the shape in the snow: a four-pointed star laid over a half circle.
“You recognize it,” Caroline said. “Very good. You get a sticker. Sadly, you won’t be able to really enjoy that sticker if we’re forced to put you down like a rabid dog.”
The second the threat left her mouth, Devon, Lake, and Maddy were on their feet, and I could feel the hackles rising on Chase’s back in the distance.
For the first time, Caroline flicked her eyes around the rest of our little group, and she held one gloved hand out to Devon. “Down, boy,” she said, not even bothering to reply to Maddy or Lake. “That wasn’t a threat. It was a conditional statement. If we get back what’s ours, everyone lives to howl at the moon another day. If we don’t …”
Caroline shrugged delicately. A low growl ripped its way out of Maddy’s throat. I glanced at her, and she swallowed the inhuman noise, but not without taking a step closer to the little blonde girl with the great big mouth.
“Who’s we?” My voice gave no hint of the deafening barrage of thoughts in my mind. I was cool, calm, collected.
So was she.
“My family.” Caroline dragged her eyes up and down my body, and they settled on my sunburned cheeks. “I see you’ve already met Archer. He has an uncanny way of getting under your skin, wouldn’t you say?”
She gave me time to reply, then smiled when I didn’t say a word. “You’ll have to excuse his manners, though. Archer’s all about the hunt.”
Hello, mutt-lover. The voice echoed through my memory, and my temples throbbed just thinking about it.
“My mother told him to wait, but Archer was anxious to meet you in person. If she tells him to pull back, though, he’ll listen. My mother can be a very persuasive woman, and she has no desire for bloodshed, especially not yours, Bryn.”
They knew my name.
“I think you’ll find us reasonable. We won’t attack. We won’t rush you. My family can be very patient—so
me of us, anyway.” Caroline folded her hands in front of her and brought blue eyes to meet mine once more. “You have one week.”
“One week,” Lake repeated. “One week or what?”
Lake, I said sharply. On instinct, I held her back, my mind willing her feet not to move, not to carry her into a confrontation with an enemy whose true nature was still, for the most part, unknown.
“One week or what?” Devon repeated. He didn’t make a move on Caroline, and it was taking everything I had to keep Lake from ripping out her throat, so I let him press the question in his own way: with a gentle elevation of one eyebrow and an endless, pointed stare.
Caroline took a step back, but I knew by the expression on her face that it wasn’t a retreat. She ran the tip of one gloved finger over the inside edge of her jacket, and I saw a flash of silver.
She didn’t draw her weapon, but I knew the others had seen it, too.
“I never miss.” Caroline said the words simply, the same way I would have said that my eyes were brown.
“Guess that makes two of us.” Lake hooked her fingertips through the belt loops on her jeans, a casual gesture completely at odds with the tension in her neck.
“No,” Caroline said softly. “You do miss. If the target’s too far away, or if the wind isn’t right. If you throw knives or take a shot with an arrow, if you line someone up in your sight—sometimes, you miss.”
I narrowed my eyes. “And you don’t?”
Caroline inclined her chin slightly. “No.” A faint breeze caught her hair, and it fanned out like a halo around her head. Beside me, Devon stiffened and took a step forward.
“Can’t smell me, can you?” Caroline said, a soft, deadly smile working its way onto her lips. “Call it a gift. Once I leave here, you won’t be able to track me. If I’m a hundred yards out, you won’t hear me coming.”
Her tone was enough to send a chill up my spine, but that was nothing compared to what I was feeling from the others. She was standing right in front of them, and they couldn’t smell her. She was armed, and unless they wanted the whole school to see it, they couldn’t attack.
“What are you?” I couldn’t help asking the question. She looked human, but there wasn’t a human on the planet who could sneak up on a Were. There wasn’t a hint of fear on her face.
There was no doubt.
She knew what we were, and she wasn’t afraid—and that was terrifying.
“I’m a hunter.” Caroline’s smile grew predatory. “It’s what I was made for. It’s all that I do.”
Threat.
The sensation was so overwhelming, so intense that I could feel it as bile in the back of my throat, an incredible pressure at my temples, a knife through my stomach. I let go of my mental hold on Lake, because I needed every ounce of control I had to keep myself from springing forward and tackling this thing in front of me to the ground.
She shouldn’t have been able to make me feel this way. I shouldn’t have taken her words at face value, but it was all too easy to believe that when she took aim, she really didn’t miss—that she couldn’t, that the rest of her so-called family was just as unnatural, just as deadly.
Threat. Threat. Threat.
Predatory grin still in place, Caroline took another step backward, her hands held out to the sides, like she was dancing.
Like she was seconds away from going for her knife.
“You have one week,” she said, and then, with every confidence that not one of us would go for her back, she turned and walked toward the school.
You can’t smell me, she’d promised. You won’t hear me coming.
It’s what I was made for. It’s all that I do.
I never miss.
“Show of hands,” Devon said, breaking the silence. “Who thinks we’re screwed?”
CHAPTER NINE
WE CUT OUT ON THE REST OF THE SCHOOL DAY, AND as Chase leapt in wolf form into the back of Lake’s Jeep and I buried my fingers in his stiff, damp fur, I had a sinking feeling that none of us would be back.
Not until this threat was taken care of.
Maybe not ever.
For as long as I could remember, I’d attended public school, human school, pretending that I could be one of them. That I could be normal. That I had some kind of future outside the boundaries of a werewolf pack. But maybe that was all it would ever be.
Pretense.
One way or the other, I had no business going through the motions of a normal school day while a foreign wolf lay on a bed in Cabin 13. Maybe this was a sign that as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t give Maddy homeroom or prom or any typical teen experience to make up for all the things she’d missed growing up.
The five of us were Pack, and we belonged with the others. We belonged at home, not out in the open where a threat could waltz up to us at lunchtime and calmly issue ultimatums we weren’t at liberty to respond to.
It was a miracle that none of the Weres had lost their grip and Shifted.
That wasn’t a chance I was going to be taking again anytime soon. If Caroline and her “family” wanted a confrontation, they would have to come to us. I had to believe that on our turf, werewolf strength and instinct and the thirst for our enemies’ blood would be worth something, no matter what—besides Caroline—the other side had in their arsenal.
Worse comes to worst, you don’t have to fight them, the pragmatic part of my brain whispered. Give them what they want, and they’ll go away.
I didn’t want to be the kind of person who could consider that option, but what I wanted wasn’t what mattered. Keeping my pack safe mattered. Making sure that no one laid a finger on Katie or Alex or Lily mattered.
But didn’t Lucas, with his haunted eyes and heartbreaking wariness, matter, too?
“He really did lie.” Maddy’s thoughts weren’t far from my own, but I knew that this was harder for her, that she’d wanted to believe in Lucas, because she’d seen so much of herself in the things that had been done to him. “Lucas lied.”
“No,” Lake corrected tersely, taking a turn with all the zeal of an Indy 500 driver. “He didn’t lie. He just left out a few key details, such as the fact that the humans who are after him aren’t exactly what you’d call run of the mill.”
I’m a hunter, the little blonde girl had said. It’s what I was made for. It’s all that I do.
“Caroline might have been exaggerating her abilities.” I had to say the words, even though I didn’t believe them. There was a tone to Caroline’s voice, a look in her eyes that I recognized all too well. “If you can’t smell her, you wouldn’t be able to tell if she was telling the truth.”
Devon glanced at me for a second, maybe less. “You believe her,” he said—a statement, not a question.
“Believe what?” I asked. “That she’s the perfect hunter?”
The kind you didn’t see coming. The kind who never missed.
I shook my head, trying to clear it of unwanted thoughts.
“I believe,” I said slowly, “that she’s a threat, and I know she’s not working alone.”
The burn on my skin was fading, but the questions it had inspired weren’t going away. We didn’t know how big Caroline’s family was. We didn’t know what they were, other than human. We didn’t know why they wanted Lucas, and we certainly didn’t know the limits of what they could do.
“You think they’re like Keely?” Lake asked, gunning the engine the moment she said the bartender’s name. “With her … you know …?”
Before Ali had yanked me out of Callum’s pack and brought me to the Wayfarer, I hadn’t known there was anything unusual in the world, other than werewolves. I hadn’t known that Callum saw possible futures laid out in a complicated web, or that I had an unnatural ability to survive things that would kill a normal girl. I hadn’t had a clue that there were people out there like Keely, who could make you spill your secrets just by looking at you a certain way.
In all the time since I’d discovered those things, I hadn’t
once stopped to wonder what else—or, more to the point, who else—was out there.
“So, what?” I said. “Some people are really scrappy, and some people are easy to talk to, and some people are made to hunt?”
My words were met with silence.
“And what about the other guy?” I continued. “The one I keep seeing in my dreams? That’s not just a knack. You can’t just be born with a knack for burning people in their sleep. That’s …”
Impossible?
Insane?
“That’s not a knack,” I said mutinously. “That’s magic.”
The word felt ridiculous coming out my mouth. I’d grown up around things that would have made normal girls take off screaming, but I’d never once believed in magic. Werewolves were just another species. Pack-bonds were connections, as natural as a mother feeding her infant in the womb. Even Callum’s seeing the future was something I could write off as …
Quirky.
But this? The symbol carved into Lucas’s skin. The foreign presence in my dreams. My pink and sunburned skin.
This was a whole new world of weird.
“I’m going to throttle Lucas,” I said, my voice deceptively cheerful. “I mean, seriously? He couldn’t have warned us?”
“Maybe he knew that if he told us the truth, we would send him away.” Maddy’s voice was soft, and in an uncharacteristically affectionate gesture, she laid her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. “Maybe he doesn’t believe that anyone else could ever want to fight for him.”
I leaned my head over so that my temple was touching the top of Maddy’s head. Behind us, Chase stood up on his hind legs and put one paw on my shoulder and one on hers, huffing into our faces before nudging each of us with a wet, cold nose. The affection he showed Maddy surprised me, and my surprise made me realize that in human form, Chase never touched anyone but me.