She was right. This meeting would be like throwing a bunch of champion gladiators into a ring and telling them to talk out their differences over tea. A democracy sounded good in theory, but every time the Senate met, it threatened to be the last.
All it would take is one alpha to decide that he was above it. Below it. Whatever. One dominant wolf curious to see if he could force his will on one of the others, absorb that territory into his own. Grow his pack’s numbers and power by taking someone else’s.
By force.
“Lake’s gone,” I said, thinking of those same men and the way the thought of them had sent her running—not because she was running away, but for the same reasons I’d forced myself to race her to the dock. To prove I was faster.
Stronger. Tougher than anyone thought I was.
Even me.
“Gone?” Ali was startled. “Gone where? Does Mitch know?”
I nodded. “She Shifted and took off for the mountains.” It was easy to picture Lake running. She was a honey-blonde wolf, a color you never would have seen in nature, and she was fierce. If I’d wanted to, I probably could have reached for her through my pack-bond, but I knew when to leave well enough alone.
When Lake was ready to talk about it, she’d come back.
“The Senate,” Ali said, and this time, her voice was tighter. Less sarcastic, more pained. “Some of them will have to pass through here to get to Callum. I take it Callum is the one who called them?”
Callum was more or less the only one who ever called the Senate. The others were content to live as kings in their own territories. He was the one who’d declared them a council. This whole democracy thing was his idea. Given what I knew now about his so-called knack, I had to wonder if there was a reason for that move.
Callum never did anything without a reason.
“Lake doesn’t want to see anyone who passes through,” I said, refusing to think about Callum any more than I had to.
“Mitch says male werewolves can get weird around females.”
Ali’s silence wasn’t a surprised one. She’d known, then. I probably should have figured it out when Lake’s visits to Ark Valley had become fewer and further apart, the older we got.
“Nobody will touch Lake without Callum’s say-so,” Ali said. “Not unless they’ve lost their minds.”
Considering that Lake and I were currently tracking a Rabid, that was less than comforting. Disturbing, too, was the idea that some of the other alphas might be unstable enough to fall under the same classification, at least where female werewolves were concerned.
“Callum wouldn’t let anyone hurt her,” I said.
Ali tried to hide her incredulous look, but I saw it anyway, the way her mouth twisted to the side and her eyes widened, reminding me that he’d done more than let Sora hurt me.
He’d told her to do it.
“Callum’s more of a big-picture person, Bryn.” Ali’s voice was soft, and I got that she was trying to be gentle with me, trying to make me understand the situation in a way that would hurt me less, even though she had no desire to understand it herself. “Sometimes, for the future he wants, the details have to give.”
The details. Like me.
“I’m going to go,” I said. “To my room. It’s been a long day.”
Ali nodded. “Love you, kiddo.”
“I love you, too.”
By the time I got to my room, I needed something to do—half so I could stop thinking about Callum and his so-called knack, and half so I wouldn’t start thinking about the fact that this wasn’t my room.
The map provided a convenient distraction. I spread it out over my bed and stood on my knees over it. There had to be some pattern to the killing. If I’d had a ruler, I would have measured the distance between each of the kills. Instead, I played connect the dots, drawing a line from the first attack—the one against my parents—to the next chronologically, and then the next. I stopped when I got to Chase’s, and still, there weren’t any answers.
There were more attacks in the West and Midwest than in the East. More in the North than in the South. But that still left a quarter of the country.
A quarter that was divided among alphas, none of whom would have tolerated a lone wolf, let alone a Rabid, on their land.
Maybe if he was at the edges of the territory? I thought. Things were certainly different at the Wayfarer than they were in Ark Valley. Using the same pen, I drew an outline over each of the territories. Callum had Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. California, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah were part of Desert Night territory.
Snake Bend zigzagged from Arkansas up to to Wisconsin, looping back down for Illinois.