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. “I don’t.”
“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.”