“What if the Rabid isn’t trading the kids he has now?” Devon asked, pacing the room with long, angry strides. “There’re two things every dominant wolf wants: territory and a pack.”
Those were the things that had led Devon’s brother to leave Callum’s pack and transfer into another, just so he could have the opportunity to challenge and kill that pack’s alpha the moment he was accepted as a transfer. The need for territory and for a pack was something that Devon understood, more than he’d ever let on to me before now.
“Dev’s right,” Chase said, recognizing the instinct, his voice taking on a fluid, reflective tone that told me this conversation was bringing him closer and closer to the edge of a Shift. “Why would Prancer give up any of his wolves when he could … just … make … more.”
I felt Chase’s control begin to slip and reached out to him, grabbing his lapels with my fists and his mind with mine.
Stay with me, Chase. Stay human.
I had no idea what he’d do in wolf form in a room this small. The last time he’d been this upset, the need to hunt had been overpowering.
Stay with me, I said, repeating the words in a soothing tone halfway between a lullaby and a command. Stay. Human.
I could feel his wolf snarling beneath the surface, and for a moment, I thought I’d lost him, but as I spread my hands flat against Chase’s chest, willing him to calm, his wolf settled, and Chase nodded.
Bryn.
Chase.
Bryn.
For a split second, I wondered what the two of us would be doing if we were the only ones in this room. Then I forced myself to step back as I realized that Devon and Lake had been seconds away from stepping between Chase and me, willing to protect me at all costs.
The last thing we needed right now was to fight amongst ourselves. The stakes to killing this Rabid had just shot up, because even more so than I’d realized before, if we didn’t kill him, future attacks were a foregone conclusion. Lots of them, probably. New werewolves, made to order.
More kids who lost everything to the Big Bad Wolf.
Why not adults? Was that it? Was that the whole trick to making new wolves? Children could survive, adults couldn’t?
I pushed back the ponderings. It couldn’t be that simple, or the alphas would have already figured it out. And besides, even if we assumed that the Rabid could change adults, from the alphas’ perspective, younger was probably better.
Inter-pack dominance, positioning yourself for power amongst the other alphas—the entire process was a long game. To people who lived practically forever, eighteen years wasn’t so long to wait for someone to mature, and the earlier a pack got ahold of someone, the more influence they had.
Look at me.
And that brought me back to the fact that I had every reason to believe that what the Rabid had done to Chase was what he’d had planned for me, when I was a kid. On some level, I’d always known it wasn’t a random attack and that the monster had come looking for me. That my parents had just been the ones standing in his way.
Come out, come out, wherever you are...
But why me? Why any of us?
I brought my eyes to Chase’s and in them, I saw myself. Saw that from the moment I’d first heard his tortured howl, my gut had been telling me that we were the same. I looked at him, and I saw the red haze of his dreams and of mine.
Remembered the fight-or-flight instinct, a wild, feral, merciless, uncompromising need to survive that I’d felt in his mind and in my own.
The alphas had asked Chase how he was attacked. They’d wanted to know, because they’d wondered if it would tell them something more than any previous investigations had. The Rabid had been hunting for more than a decade. During that time, at least some of the alphas must have known.
They must have watched him and wondered how he made the impossible flicker to life.
I wasn’t aware of the moment that my thoughts went from silent to verbal, but the others had no problem picking up on the things that had gone unspoken, their minds and their thoughts interwoven with mine. “Maybe the Rabid does something a little different each time,” I said, a hot feeling, like steam, seeping over my body in a way that wasn’t pleasant in the least. “Lake and I were looking for patterns earlier, but what if there is no pattern, other than the fact that every one of Wilson’s wolves should have died? What if the secret isn’t about the attack at all?”
No magic sequence. No recipe for how to ravage a body just right.
“What if it’s about the victim?”
Chase and I were the same.
We did whatever it took to get out of a situation alive and intact. If you blocked us into a corner, we lost it. If you beat us down, eventually, we popped back up. We fought, and we held on, and at the end of the day, we lived.