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 …
“I think I’m going to go to the restaurant and harass Lake,” I told Ali. “She’s waiting tables this afternoon, and I’d kind of like to see her in action.”
I didn’t mention that the action I most wanted to see Lake enact was the way she’d respond when I asked her if she had any weapons other than a shotgun. If she didn’t, she’d know where to find them and she’d take disturbing joy in doing so. I’d be Santa Claus, just for asking.
And while Lake requisitioned supplies, I’d track our Rabid. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew I’d do it, the same way I knew that Ali wouldn’t object to me going to talk to Lake.
“She doing okay?” Ali asked, transferring her maternal instincts from me to Lake.
“She’ll be fine until the alphas come back through, and then she’ll be fine again after that.”
If I could figure out where our prey was hiding, Lake wouldn’t have to stay inside when the alphas came back through Montana. We’d be well on our way to No-Man’s-Land by then.
The Wayfarer was nearly empty when I slid into a corner booth. Lake, notepad in hand, slid in across from me.
“Aren’t you supposed to be taking my order?” I asked.
“Bite me. And then you can tell me what’s wrong.” She paused. “Aren’t you supposed to be with …?”
She gestured elaborately, and I filled in the blank. Lake had known my plan for this morning. I’d promised to report back, and here I was.
“Been there. Done that. Didn’t go so well.”
Lake threw her notepad to the side, summarily ignoring the three other occupied tables in the restaurant. “Didn’t go so well as in you didn’t see anything, or didn’t go so well as in you didn’t like what you saw?”