Apparently, I’d been wrong.
Wilson hadn’t been killing the children he’d attacked. He’d been turning them. Creating his own little werewolf army. It was sick.
Sick and impossible. According to what Mitch had told Keely, there had been a grand total of three, maybe four cases of a human being changed into a Were in the past thousand years. One case every two hundred and fifty years, even though the prevalence of attacks was much, much higher.
Yet somehow, this Rabid had managed to change dozens.
The girl I’d almost shot—the one who’d come outside when she’d sensed me near, the one who was my age and my height and my build almost exactly—Madison—she could have been me.
If Callum had arrived at my house a few minutes later, she would have been.
Come out, come out, wherever you are. I won’t hurt you. The Big Bad Wolf always wins in the end.
Had I been the first? A trial run? Away for him to test whatever method he’d found for changing humans? Were my parents just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Had they died because of me? Why hadn’t they changed? If this Rabid knew the secret to making new werewolves, why had he only used it on children? Did it work on adults? How could a six-year-old even survive the kind of ravaging it took to trigger the change?
My pack—my friends—descended on me the second I came within their range. Their questions pushed mine out of my head, and their touches—soft on my face, my arms, and my stomach—calmed me enough that I was able to make a sound. And unable to keep from crying.
It was supposed to be me.
They heard the words, and they absorbed them. They let me break, and then they put me back together again, all in a matter of seconds.
I straightened and cleared my throat, but when I spoke, my voice still came out husky with tears. “We’ll be needing a new plan. As it turns out, the numbers are in his favor, not ours. And also, we can’t kill them.” I paused, because the irony of the words I was about to say didn’t escape me in the least. “They’re just kids.”
“One of us should go back to the cabin,” Devon said softly, his voice cutting across mine, quiet and insistent. “Just close enough to try to scent their numbers.”
“Does it matter?” I asked, meeting his eyes and wondering how exactly the two of us had gone from algebra and the safety of Stone River to here, all in a matter of months. “If Wilson has twelve Changed werewolves, or if he has forty, does it really matter?”
Either way we were outclassed, outnumbered, overwhelmed, and screwed. In that order. Since I’d both been there and done that, I made an executive decision, one I begged the others with my mind and with my eyes to follow.
Retreat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BACK AT OUR TEENY-TINY MOTEL ROOM, I TRIED TO catch the boys up on everything Lake and I had discovered with our internet sleuthing. “It’s hard to get a real count of how many attacks this guy has been involved in. There are at least four or five confirmed deaths—with bodies and everything—that might fit his profile.”
Those would be the Rabid’s failures. The people he’d tried, but failed, to change. Or maybe he’d never tried to change them. Maybe he’d just been thirsting for blood.
“We found several other attacks, too, where the victim was either missing or presumed dead. I’m not sure how many. Less than a dozen, more than six, but that doesn’t really tell us how many wolves Wilson has in that cabin. Who knows how many of his attacks we missed? This is Google we’re talking about here, not science. Lake and I aren’t professional profilers. The only thing our research really told us is that there was a very good chance he’d attacked a lot of people in a lot of different territories. The numbers are fuzzier.”
I thought of the missing-children database Lake had found online, put up by parents hopeful to get their kids back. How many of those “missing” kids were dead? How many of them were here in Alpine Creek, older and less human than they’d been when they disappeared?
“I saw fifteen or sixteen at the cabin,” I said, thinking back. “There might have been a few more inside. The youngest was maybe four or five, the oldest probably about seventeen.”
“Were they all female?” Chase asked, an odd expression on his face, like the word female had taken on a whole new meaning the moment he’d become a Were.
I shook my head. “About half and half.”
Lake laughed, but it was a sad, grating noise. “Half of sixteen is eight. Looks like Katie and I aren’t quite so special anymore.”
Lake was right. The only way a female werewolf could be born was as half of a set of twins, but apparently, if you knew the secret to making new werewolves, females were just as easy to make as males. I thought about what that could mean for a pack. Fewer human wives, fewer babies lost in childbirth. More purebreds. Stronger wolves.