He gave me a look.
“Okay,” I said, “maybe it is that bad. But I’m at least sixty percent sure that I’m unconscious and that we’re sharing a dream. I really don’t think I’m dead.”
Dev buried his head in his hands and then ran them through his artfully mussed hair. “Start at the beginning?”
A rush of emotion—his, not mine—hit me all at once.
I nodded. My teeth worried at my bottom lip. Then I told him everything.
About Griffin.
About Maddy.
About Shadows and the one that had just done its best to kill me.
Devon was silent right up until the point when I finished talking, and then he let loose. “Lake’s brother is alive and up until a few minutes ago, you thought he might be evil; Maddy’s pregnant; Callum’s knack is on hiatus; and the Rabid you’re supposed to be hunting is capable of tearing a person to pieces without ever assuming physical form?”
Well, when you put it that way, it did sound really bad.
Rather than acknowledge that fact, I concentrated on the last bit. “Shadows are hard to describe,” I said. “It was like, one second, he was almost solid, and the next, he was everywhere. When he was on top of me, I could touch him, I could feel him, but I couldn’t hurt him.”
The word hurt was a reminder of all of the pain that awaited me on the other side of this dream.
“How bad is it?” Devon asked.
I tried to avoid the question, with little success.
“How bad, Bronwyn?”
I could have lied. In a dream, he might not have smelled it—but I couldn’t do that, not when we had no guarantee that this was an expedition I’d make it back from alive.
“Two inches to the right, and this thing would have had my throat.”
If I’d been any slower, any weaker, if my senses had been any less sharp, if even a bit of exhaustion had managed to beat its way through my altered state, I wouldn’t be here.
Not in this dream.
Not on this planet.
I’d be splatter—like the boy in Wyoming, the girl in Winchester.
Like my parents.
My parents. I don’t know if it was the dream, or the fact that Dev was there, the way he had been the day Callum had brought me home, but the universe realigned itself, suddenly and without warning.
I’d known that if I ran, the Shadow would chase me.
To catch a Rabid, you have to think like a Rabid, Sora had said. There’s a dark logic … a hunger …
This thing was following Maddy. Torturing Maddy. And when I had run, it had come after me.
“Devon,” I said, feeling like the earth itself had been jerked out from under my feet. “I need you to talk to Mitch and find out something for me.”
I’d asked Callum how many female Weres had a dead twin—but that wasn’t the right question. Not now, after feeling that thing’s breath on me.
Now that it had tasted my blood.
“What do you need?” Devon didn’t hesitate, wouldn’t, no matter what I asked of him.
I thought of the cabin in Alpine Creek. The dead animals. The Shadow’s human victims, teenagers all.
“I need you,” I said slowly, “to find out if Samuel Wilson had a twin.”
I came to on a bed in a different motel. Apparently, we’d become persona non grata at the old one.
Go figure.
Chase was lying beside me, his body curled around my smaller frame. On my other side, Jed was calmly and efficiently digging a needle into my flesh: quick, clean strokes.
Stitches.
If the Shadow bite had been numb before, my shoulder was on fire now. Lovely.
“How long was I out?” I ground out. Jed eyed Caroline, and she tossed me a rolled up pillowcase.
“Little over an hour,” she said. “Bite down on that.”
I wanted to refuse, just on principle, but as the needle dug deep into my skin, I stuffed the pillowcase into my mouth and bit down as hard as I could, muffling the scream that wanted to make its way out of my mouth.
I could do this. I could handle this. I hadn’t faced off against a ghostly opponent to be undone by a few measly stitches.
“Is poor wittle Bryn going to cry?” I could see worry playing at the edges of Lake’s mouth, but her tone was an exact match for the time I’d broken my arm, when we were nine. “Don’t be such a bawling little crybaby. You’ll be fine.”
Chase gave her a disgruntled look, but I found myself appreciating the distraction. It was easier to deal with Jed sewing me back together like a patchwork quilt when I had something else to concentrate on.
To that end, I turned my attention to Lake and said something that does not bear repeating into the pillowcase bunched up in my mouth.
She grinned, but the expression didn’t go all the way up to her eyes. I may have only been out for an hour, but that was an hour too long. She’d worried.
They all had.
“Almost done here, Bryn.” Jed made good on his words, and thirty-five excruciating seconds later, he tied off the last stitch. He smoothed something that looked like mud and smelled like booze over the wound and then bandaged it.
I spat out the pillowcase.
“Guess I can scratch ‘get eaten by an immaterial being’ off my to-do list,” I groused, trying—and failing—to find some humor in the situation. Beside me, Chase swallowed a noise halfway between a snort and a cry and ran his hand up and down my good arm.
I could almost feel the pain flowing from my body to his. If he could have borne this for me, he would have, in a heartbeat.
“I wouldn’t recommend trying to move that arm,” Jed told me—no muss, no fuss, no pity. “Unless you’re looking to repeat this particular experience.”
More stitches? No, thank you. The throb of pain was
constant—burning, aching, incessant assaults against each and every nerve ending in my shoulder.
“I’ll take it easy,” I said.
The rest of the room scoffed audibly. In unison.
I took the high road and ignored their obvious skepticism. Instead, I focused on the real issue here. “The Shadow’s gone, but he could come back.”
Griffin caught my gaze and lifted his eyebrows slightly. I thought I’d done a good job hiding my doubts about him, but the look on his face was enough to tell me that he’d known. He may as well have written do you believe me now? across the sky in large block letters.
I nodded—as close to an apology as I could come when there was something much, much bigger at stake. The very possibility that the Shadow might be Wilson had changed everything, even though I had no way of knowing if my instincts were on point. Maybe the specter that had been following Maddy wasn’t the same monster who’d turned her into a werewolf when she was six years old—but maybe it was.
That same monster had killed my parents, Changed Chase. The kids in my pack had once been his, until they’d turned on him and literally torn him to pieces.
Female twin. Violent death. Those were the ingredients Callum had said went into making a Shadow. I hoped I was wrong, but we knew for a fact that Samuel Wilson fit at least one of those requirements.
As soon as Devon got back to me, we’d know if he fit the other one, too.
“I’m sorry.”
It took me a second or two to figure out who was apologizing and another stretch of time to work my mind around why.
“I thought having Lake here would keep me grounded—and it did, to an extent. I think our killer got tired of waiting. When he realized I wasn’t going anywhere …” Griffin trailed off.
I thought back to what he had said earlier, about sometimes losing his grip on this reality. I hadn’t understood until I’d seen it myself, but now I had to wonder—what if the other Shadow didn’t choose to wait until Griffin was gone until it attacked? What if they couldn’t be in the same place at the same time?
Without even realizing I was doing it, I let that thought bleed over onto Lake’s and Chase’s minds. With absolutely no ceremony whatsoever, Lake turned immediately to Griffin and proceeded to show him the exact same amount of sympathy she’d shown me.
“Stop your caterwauling,” she said, though I could hear the undercurrent of sadness, worry, and fear in her voice. “That thing came here, and you left. We could all do with a few less sorrys and a little more figuring of the hows and the whys.”