Lightning struck in the distance, so far away that it was nothing but a dull flash of light on the horizon. I waited for the sound of thunder, but it never came. Instead, a chain reaction went off in my brain, and I remembered the last time nightmares had kept me up at night.
Those nightmares had been real.
And the person who’d orchestrated them?
He’d had a knack for getting under people’s skin and entering their dreams, the way I could sneak peeks at my pack’s.
I might not be able to connect with Maddy, but that didn’t mean she was off the grid altogether.
This time, when I went back into the tent, I was able to close my eyes. I was able to sleep. Because the person who’d spent the better part of last fall haunting my nightmares, the one who might have stood a fighting chance at finding Maddy, or at the very least, her dreams—
He owed me. Big time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“CHANGE OF PLANS,” I TOLD LAKE, WHO HAD “WEAPoned up” in anticipation of the morning’s adventures. “You, Caroline, and Chase are going to scout out the Rabid’s old house in Alpine Creek.”
I paused.
“Wilson’s house,” I corrected myself.
Samuel Wilson had been the Rabid in my mind for so long: the one, the only. Referring to him by name felt wrong, but with another killer on the loose, it seemed simpler—unless I wanted to give in and start referring to the current Rabid as Maddy.
She wasn’t the only one there when that boy was killed. I clung to that thought, seesawing back and forth between believing that Maddy had lost it and hoping that, despite appearances, she had not.
Chase had smelled something else at that house. A partner? An intruder? A demon plaguing her mind?
There’s no such thing as demons, I thought, but I could still see the Maddy of my dreams, sipping blood from a teacup. Six months ago, I would have sworn she wasn’t capable of murder. Two years ago, I would have told you with a straight face that there was no such thing as someone who could see the future or a woman who could control other people’s thoughts.
At this point, we really couldn’t rule anything out.
“See what you can find at the old house,” I told Lake, sticking to the task at hand and banishing the trip down memory lane until later. “Check the woods, too, but lie low.”
The last thing we needed was anyone from Alpine Creek recognizing that two of my three scouts had been there before.
“If Maddy’s there, call me. If you see anything, if you smell anything, if you even think you might remember something that could lead us to her, call me.”
“Sir, yes, sir.” Lake gave a lazy little salute, but the set of her jaw told me that she was glad to be doing something—and that she would have followed me straight to the ends of the earth if I’d asked her to.
“Where are you going?” Caroline announced her presence with a question. Unlike Lake, our human companion didn’t trust me to hand out orders.
“Me?” I asked, figuring that it served her right for eavesdropping.
“No, not you. The other insomniac mutt-lover in the vicinity.” The term mutt-lover should have made me angry, and it should have brought up bad memories, but instead, it
sounded almost like a nickname. Caroline sounded almost human.
“Well, half-pint,” I said, matching her nickname/slur for nickname/slur, “I’m hoping Jed will take me to see an old friend.”
“And what old friend might that be?” Jed sounded only mildly put out that I’d already started breaking up the crew, when he’d been sent along specifically for adult supervision.
I took that as a good sign and turned around. “Do you keep in touch with the rest of the coven?” I asked him.
Jed mulled over the question, his stare telling me that there was only a fifty-fifty chance I’d get an answer. “Some, yes,” he said finally. “Some, no.”
Before Caroline’s psychotic mother had come along, married the coven’s leader, and had him killed, the group of psychics had lived together as a family. But under her influence, they’d done horrible things, and besides Caroline and Jed, who had stayed at the Wayfarer, the rest had scattered to the wind the moment Valerie’s psychic influence had worn off.
“Who exactly are you wanting me to take you to see?”
I gave Jed a stare of my own, one that I hoped told him that if he didn’t help me, I’d find some other way to do it on my own. And then I smiled in a way I hoped he would find at least a little bit endearing.
“Remember Archer?”
I didn’t know Archer’s last name. I wasn’t sure how old he was, or what he’d been doing in the months since I’d seen him last.
Right now I didn’t care.
He slid into the booth across from me. Jed had chosen our rendezvous point. The others had dropped us off, and calling this particular diner a dive would have been generous. Over in the corner, the old man dropped two quarters into an old-fashioned jukebox, leaving Archer and me some semblance of privacy.
I didn’t beat around the bush. We’d spent enough time coming here to meet him—with the clock ticking, there was no time to waste.
“You stalked me.” I opted for bluntness over charm. “You tormented me, you tried to burn me in my sleep, and unless my memory is mistaken, at one point when we were awake, you actually set me on fire.”
The Archer I’d known—the one who’d dogged my dreams and played mind games with me, literally—was caustic. He was half seduction, half sadist, and he hadn’t seen me as a person, because Valerie hadn’t wanted him to.
Caroline’s mother—Ali’s mother—had possessed a knack for manipulating other people’s emotions. She’d tempered Archer’s toward me with equal parts hatred, curiosity, and disgust.
But now he was just a guy—older than me, but younger than Ali—and I was the one playing with his emotions.
Specifically, his guilt.
“You didn’t come all of this way just to yell at me,” Archer said, though his tone suggested that he wouldn’t have had a problem with it if I had. “And if you’re trying to get me to say that I owe you, then you’re right.”
That was easier than I’d thought it would be.
“I need you to find someone for me,” I said.
“I don’t find people.” Archer fiddled with a sugar packet, flicking it back and forth over his index finger and his thumb.
“But you can find their dreams.” I didn’t wait for a reply. “You can talk to them. You can manipulate what they see. You can, if memory serves correctly, set them on fire—”
“You’re really not going to let that go, are you?” he asked. From the look on his face, I thought he might have been joking, but I wasn’t sure.
“I need you to find a specific person’s dreams,” I said.
“And then what do you need me to do?” Archer leaned back against the booth, his eyes dull, and I realized that he thought I was going to ask for something else, that I was going to use him the way Valerie had.
As a weapon.
“That’s it,” I said. “I just need you to find her dreams and tell me what you see. Talk to her, see if she’s okay, try to get her to tell you where she is.”
“Consider it done.” Archer looked like I’d challenged him to a game of chess. “Whose dreams am I finding?”
I told him and debated whether or not to mention the fact that we had no guarantee Maddy was the same person she’d been when she’d left the pack, and had every reason in the world to think that she wasn’t.
“If you can’t give me a general idea of where her body is, I’m going to need something that belongs to her. Clothing is best, or maybe a piece of her hair?”
Did he seriously think that I carried around an inventory of hair for every person in my pack?
I was saved from asking that question out loud by the telltale buzz of my phone against my hip. Withdrawing it from the pocket of my jeans, I noticed that I had a text from an unknown number.
SHE WAS HERE.
For a split second, I thought the universe—or possibly Shay—was taunting me with vague declarations about Maddy’s location, but then I realized that of the group I’d sent to Alpine Creek, Caroline was the only one not in danger of destroying a cell phone the moment she Shifted.