Chase and I were the same.
Enough with the philosophizing. Lake’s voice. Inside my head—and somehow, it didn’t sound the way it did when she spoke out loud. It was quiet. Unassuming in tone, if not in words. Not timid, but understated and cautious.
Vulnerable.
Focus, Lake told me, and I could feel her taking a step back from my mind, folding herself inward and concentrating—to the extent that she could—on hiding from me the things that I didn’t normally see.
I nodded and took the reins. “Rabid. Here, in Alpine Creek. There’s a cabin in the woods. We’ll only have one shot.”
Chase pulled me close to him, and I wondered if he’d even realized he’d done it. And then I realized that my hand was on the top of his hipbone, but somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to remove it as I continued speaking to my friends. My pack.
“The last time I messed with someone’s pack-bond, it set off a psychic flare that brought the entire pack straight to us.” I paused, letting my words take hold, my grip on Chase tightening. “If what Chase and I just did has the same effect, we’re working under a time limit here, so let’s move. Lake and I are set for an attack. I have a plan. Boys, it’s hunting season. Weapon up.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
NOBODY LIKED MY PLAN.
“You want us to split up?” Chase asked, his brow wrinkling in obvious bewilderment.
Lake echoed the sentiment, her voice flat. “Why would we split up? There’s four of us and one of him.” After a brief moment’s pause, she amended her head count to better reflect our real odds. “Three and a half of us, one of him.”
Three and a half, as in three werewolves, one human. I narrowed my eyes. “For your sake, Lake, I’m going to pretend that Devon is the half.”
Dev, unquestionably the strongest person in this room, just shrugged and let me keep my delusions. “It’s because of my petite stature,” he said. All 6′4″ of him.
My sensibilities halfway appeased, I turned my attention back to the crux of Lake’s point. “Yes, we have stronger numbers, but we have no idea how old this guy is! Do any of you think for a second that the four of us together could take Callum?”
The fact that Callum was still my point of reference and would probably always be the standard to which all others compared was less than comforting.
“We can take him.” Chase said the words quietly, but an echo of them, silent and whispered from his mind to mine, lingered in my thoughts. “Not Callum. Prancer. The four of us together, I think we could take him.”
I paused for a single moment before thrusting that idea into the guillotine and dropping the blade. “And how many of us would make it out of that kind of confrontation alive?”
I felt their collective hackles go up all around me. For better or worse, this was our pack now. We couldn’t afford to lose each other. I’d die if anything happened to a single one of them.
“Our best chance to get out of this unscathed is to split up. One person goes in and plays sniper. The others rush in once the target is hit.”
I could see the logic worming its way into their thick skulls, and I pressed on. “If we all go, the Rabid will know it’s an attack. There’s no other reason three werewolves would show up unannounced in his woods. If one of us goes in and the others fall back, it won’t be considered as much of a threat.”
Lake ran a hand through her blonde hair, twisting her ponytail around her wrist. “He won’t expect us to be armed to the hilt.”
That was a near certainty. Lake was the only Were I’d ever met with a fondness for weapons. Weres rarely fought in human form, and with any luck, the Rabid wouldn’t be expecting a long-range attack. One werewolf killing another with a series of well-placed bullets would have seemed as absurd to most Weres as the idea of natural wolves settling dominance disputes with pistols at dawn.
“I’ll go,” Chase said quietly. “He won’t consider me a threat at all.”
It cost Chase to say those words, to know that they were true. To the Rabid, Chase would never be a real person, let alone one who deserved to be viewed with any kind of wariness or respect.
“He might not perceive you as a threat, but he’ll know you’re coming,” I said, my voice matching Chase’s for lack of volume. “He’ll smell you a mile off, and he’ll know it’s you. He’ll be waiting. He’ll have something planned.”
“He won’t expect me to have a gun.”
At the word gun, Lake leaned back against the dilapidated nightstand, crossing her right foot over her left. “Do you know how to shoot?” she asked Chase.