Wrong. Wrong-wrong-wrong. Wolves weren’t meant for democracy. Werewolves weren’t meant to vote. Callum was safe. Callum was strong. Callum should have done something.
He didn’t.
“All in favor?”
In favor of what? I couldn’t hear the vote go down, didn’t hear anyone’s answer but Callum’s, but I knew based on the tone of his voice that it must have been in the minority, that the others were voting to do the unthinkable.
I tried to wrap my mind around it but couldn’t. The Senate wasn’t going to hunt the Rabid. They were going to make him a deal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“NO!” I SAT UP IN BED, THE SCREAM TEARING ITS WAY out of my throat. On the other side of our bond, Chase was going wild, his wolf giving in to bloodlust, hunting. Rabbits. Deer.
Chase needed to kill something.
I could relate. My own fingernails dug into my pillow, and I came dangerously close to tearing it apart. As I extracted myself from Chase’s mind, I was hit with two pangs of withdrawal. One was his. The other was mine, and they mirrored each other so perfectly that at any other time, I would have turned the feelings over and over in my head, remembering the feeling of his skin and being inside it and hurting in sync with his loss.
With the way that we’d both just been betrayed. Again.
Callum could have fought the other alphas. He could have fought them, and he could have won, but we just weren’t worth it to him. Chase and my parents and Madison Covey and who knows how many other children who’d been torn to shreds—they weren’t worth it.
I wasn’t worth it.
“Bryn!” Ali came rushing into the room, a knife in her hand. The image seemed wrong. Ali wasn’t a fighter, and I could take care of myself.
I was the one Callum had trained to fight, not her.
“Are you okay?” Ali’s eyes were wild, and for the first time, I felt her pack-bond brushing against what was left of mine.
Ali was Pack, and I’d scared her to death.
“I’m fine,” I said, thankful that she didn’t have a Were’s ability to smell the truth. “Bad dream.”
Except it wasn’t a dream. It was real. The Rabid was alive, and if the Senate had their way, he wouldn’t be experiencing a shift in condition anytime soon. And Callum had just stood there and let it happen in the name of democracy.
Screw democracy. And screw Callum, too.
Ali sat beside me on the bed. “It must have been some dream,” she said, stroking my hair back from my eyes.
I reminded myself that Ali was family. Ali would never have betrayed me like this. But Ali wasn’t a fighter, and she wouldn’t understand that I had to fight. That if the Senate wasn’t going to kill the Rabid, I was.
She’d worry, and she’d yell, and she’d lock me in my room until I turned thirty. And while I sat around doing nothing, other people would die.
“It was a really bad dream,” I told Ali, forcing the tremors out of my voice. “But on the bright side, I don’t think I have a fever anymore.”
“You never had a fever,” Ali replied. The tone in her voice reminded me that Ali wasn’t stupid, and that oatmeal or no oatmeal, there was a good chance my “illness” hadn’t fooled her as well as I’d thought. “You needed to be alone. I get that.”
I felt like maybe she did understand, even though her actual words reinforced the fact that she had no idea that this had nothing to do with me struggling to deal with the events of the last few days and everything to do with the events of the last few minutes. It wasn’t Ali’s fault that I’d neglected to mention that Chase and I could hop in and out of each other’s heads at will. There would be time to feel guilty about that little omission later. Right now, I had other things to hide.
Like the fact that the dull roar in my gut—telling me to hunt, to kill, to protect—had gone nuclear.
On the other side of our bond, I felt Chase’s approval, felt him tear into an animal’s throat with a ferocity that should have scared me, but didn’t.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Ali asked, doing a 180 from the moment before and laying a hand on my cheek. “You actually do feel a little warm, and you look … strange.”
“Thanks a lot,” I replied. It wasn’t like I could say, Well, the werewolf who shares my brain just killed a deer, and the two of us are planning on hunting down the Big Bad Wolf like the woodsman of yore.
Hmmmm …, I thought, the mind bunnies multiplying. Woodsman. Ax. Silver ax.
If I was going to hunt a Rabid, I needed weapons, and I needed to figure out where exactly the Rabid was. I’d counted on eavesdropping to tell me the latter, but things hadn’t worked out that way. I’d have to figure it out myself. As for weapons …