Felt something else—a flash of recognition. A twinge of familiarity.
We were the same.
“No,” I said out loud. “We are nothing alike.”
But it was still there. Something. There was no connection between us, but there was a pull: like to like, the same magnetism that had brought me to Chase in the basement.
“Werewolves and humans aren’t so different,” he said. “We share the vast majority of our DNA. Growing up in a pack, you probably haven’t been exposed to many humans with gifts, but they’re out there, and just like some of our human cousins are gifted, some werewolves are born with a little something extra as well.” He smiled. “Most of them become alphas, like your Callum.”
Callum, who had a knack for seeing the future. Just like Keely had a knack for getting people to open their mouths, and I had a knack for getting out of sticky situations. A knack, like this Rabid’s, for not ending up dead.
“But I don’t want to talk about Callum,” the Rabid said, unwilling to lose my attention in the middle of his grand reveal. “I want to talk about us. Do you have any idea how special you are? How rare?”
Did it matter? Did I care if I was one in ten thousand, or one in a million?
“I’m resilient,” I said. “I survive things that others wouldn’t. I bounce back. I’m hard to kill.”
“Is that all you think this is, Bryn? Do you really think that it’s just you? That you’re just so tough that you come out on top? Come now. Think. Tell me, haven’t you ever felt it, creeping up your spine? Whispering to you. Taking over your limbs, your sight, your fear, your rage …”
Wilson spoke about his survival instinct like it was a separate being. Like it was sacred. Like he wasn’t a madman reveling in violence so much as the avatar for something primal and cruel. “We’re chosen. Tell me you don’t feel it. Tell me you don’t sense it when you look at me, when you look at the boy that I sent you.”
Chase hadn’t escaped the Rabid. The Rabid had attacked him and left him bleeding on the pavement, knowing that he was leaving the carnage in Stone River territory and that Callum would clean up the mess. Knowing that sooner or later, if Chase was a part of Callum’s pack, the two of us would meet.
Chase hadn’t escaped the Rabid. The Rabid had sent him to me.
No. I wouldn’t let him taint what Chase and I had. I’d die first.
“I guess this explains how you find them,” I said, keeping my voice low and dull. “Your victims.”
“I find them the same way you would,” he said. “The same way you will, once you’re mine. Like to like. I’ve been waiting a long time for someone strong enough to help me, someone as special as I am.” He leaned forward and touched my hair. “You’re glorious as a human. So brave. So strong. I should thank Callum for that, I really should. As a Were, you’ll be a princess.” He sighed. “My princess.”
I shuddered and my throat burned, acid working its way from my stomach to my mouth. I fought the nausea as best I could. In my head, the others roared, and the connection between us pulsed, bright like lightning in my mind.
They’d escaped from the sheriff with only a bullet graze to Devon’s side that had already started to heal.
Hold on, hold on, hold on, they told me. We’re coming.
No, I replied. You don’t understand.
I begged them to come completely into me, to take my thoughts and knowledge as their own and to know what they were up against.
Not just a pack of werewolves. A pack of Resilient werewolves—capital R—who’d lose their minds the moment danger closed in. Of my other selves, only Chase had the same advantage. Devon was a purebred and Lake was a fighter, but their instincts to fight, to escape, to win weren’t any stronger than the average werewolf’s.
“They’re coming,” Wilson said out loud. “Your friends. I can feel them. I can smell them. They smell like anger. Like blood.”
“So do you.” I met his eyes, and I smiled. “You may be scrappy,” I said, intentionally using the word to demean everything he’d just told me, “but you’re still allergic to silver, aren’t you? You took a couple of bullets. I took a chunk out of your side. You have to be hurting right now.”
He slammed his arms into me, pushing my chair over backward. My head cracked into the back of the chair, and for a moment, I saw bright lights. Then everything cleared, and I saw him standing over me, his eyes beginning to yellow.
“I’m going to like Changing you,” he said. “And once I do, we’ll be bonded in a way you can’t even imagine. If you think your connection to Callum’s pack is strong, you’ve seen nothing. Normal pack-bonds don’t hold a candle to what we have. Normal obedience is nothing compared to what you owe your Maker.”
He’d had a hold on Chase, even after Callum had claimed Chase as part of the Stone River Pack. I was pretty sure I knew exactly how strong that made the bond between a Changed werewolf and the person who brought them over. Chase had broken his, with my help and with Callum’s; if this psycho brought me over, I’d have to do the same.
Instead of shaking me, Wilson’s words gave me valuable information. They told me that he didn’t know what I’d done to my pack-bond. He didn’t know that I’d re-carved it, connecting myself first and foremost to Chase. He didn’t know that I’d done the same thing with Devon and Lake. This Rabid thought he knew so much about being resilient, but all he knew was how to fight. Maim. Kill. He didn’t know how to see pack-bonds as a threat to his safety, how to attack them, how to escape.
He didn’t know that I’d done it before and that if he brought me over, I’d do it again.
He was the one who didn’t know the depths of what he was. What I was. What all of the kids outside were.
He was the one who didn’t know what he was messing with.
“Your friends are here,” Wilson told me. As if I didn’t already know. As if I hadn’t felt them coming. As if I couldn’t see out of their eyes—all of their eyes at once. Bleeding and bloody, they were armed to the hilt, and right now, they didn’t care about the fact that the rest of Wilson’s wolves were victims.
Anyone who stood between them and me was fair game.
No, I wanted to say, don’t hurt them. But how could I? How could I tie my pack’s hands behind their backs, when the wolves outside were bound to kill them?
Bound to obey.
“You see now,” Wilson said, straightening my chair. “You understand. We’re all powerful, but the power? It’s mine.”
Mine.
Mine.
Mine.
The words echoed in my mind, and in that second I knew exactly what to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I’D THOUGHT IT MYSELF: WILSON DIDN’T KNOW what it really meant to be resilient. He didn’t know how to use it for anything but blood.
I did.
I closed my eyes and thought of Chase. I thought of Wilson. I thought of Madison, the grinning six-year-old, and Madison, the ghost of a girl who’d greeted me when I woke up. I thought of what it meant to be a survivor myself, and I cast my mind outward, looking for that in them. The power was twisted in Wilson. Ugly. Dark. And that darkness bled onto the others, tainted them.
Madison leapt, and Chase met her midair, their teeth snapping at each other’s throats. To their left, Lake took aim and fired at one of the other wolves—small but vicious. My friends and my kind clashed, and their directives pulsed in my head and my veins, until they were all I could hear.
Protect.
Protect.
Obey.
Obey.
Save Bryn.
Kill them all.
I don’t know where the burst of strength came from, and I didn’t question it. I just shoved my arms outward, straining against the ropes, and they snapped, with the fury of a mother throwing a car off her baby boy. Like a wild thing—a whirl of energy and rage and pulse after pulse of something that I couldn’t name—I jumped out of the chair. But instead of going for Wilson’s throat, instead of killing him, I ran for the door.
My first order of business wasn’t payback. It was salvation, and right now there was so much at stake.