“If you know who to attack,” I said, finishing his thought, feeling for a moment like we were the only two people in the room, “then making new werewolves really isn’t that hard.”
I wondered how the Rabid was finding them, the people like us. I didn’t have to wonder what alphas like Shay would do if they found out how to track our kind, too.
That couldn’t happen.
The Rabid had to die, and the secret had to die with him. Then, and only then, would things go back to normal. Weres would stop attacking humans, because the humans they attacked wouldn’t survive, and the risk of exposure wasn’t worth it for one new werewolf every couple of hundred years.
The Rabid had to die. It was a variation of the same single-minded thought that had driven me for months.
“We need a plan.” For someone who’d once made a practice of rushing into things blind, I was beginning to feel like a broken record with those four little words. Unfortunately, this time, I didn’t have a plan, so I was forced to take the situation apart, piece by piece.
Goal: kill the Rabid.
Problem: a sneak attack at the cabin was out, because our target had at least a dozen not-so-human shields. If we fought Wilson at the cabin, we’d have to fight his little homemade pack, too.
Problem: we couldn’t fight the kids. Not Madison. Not the others. Not when they were victims in all of this, too.
“We’ll either have to catch the Rabid when he leaves the cabin, or we’ll have to lure the kids away from him.” Those were the only two options I could see, and I wasn’t fond of either of them.
“Problem,” Lake said out loud. “If we lure the kids away to attack the Rabid, we’ll have to split up.”
Needless to say, after the last time, none of them were fond of that idea.
“Problem.” Chase ran one hand up his arm as he spoke. I doubted he even noticed he was doing it. “We can’t just wait for Prancer to leave his house. We don’t have time.”
I looked down at my watch, as if there was even the slightest chance that it would tell me how long we had before Ali and Mitch figured out where Lake and I had gone, or how long it would take Callum to respond to the psychic beacon that had gone up the second I’d rewired Devon’s and Lake’s bonds. For that matter …
“Problem,” I said. “If the Senate is making the Rabid a deal, they’ll probably come here to do it in person.” That was the way it was with werewolf bargains. Like my permissions, the alphas’ deal with the devil would require a certain amount of ceremony.
“Okay, so we can’t just wait it out and hope the Rabid leaves his cabin sometime soon, and we can’t risk splitting up to lead his harem on a merry little chase.…”
The fact that Lake had referred to the wolves as a “harem” did not escape my attention, but I wasn’t about to touch that issue—or the vibes I was getting from the bond between us—with a twenty-foot pole.
“We’ll have to lure him out,” I said instead. Chase leaned toward me, the way a plant turns toward the sun. “If we can’t go to him, we’ll have to bring him to us.”
Now.
“Hmmmmm,” Devon said. “If I was a psychotic werewolf who had a fetish for turning small, defenseless children into my own personal lapdogs, what would it take to get me to leave my happy little family to come into town?”
In the back of my mind, an answer began to surface, but before I could verbalize my half-formed plan, Lake and Devon both started to glare at me.
I turned to Chase, looking for backup. His face was set, his expression stony. I laced my fingers through his and looked him straight in the eye, folding myself into his mind, absorbing his objections and showing him my need to do this.
“We’re not using you as bait,” Lake said, pulling me reluctantly back into my own body. “And don’t you argue with me, Bryn, because if this guy didn’t already have his own little party going on in the woods, you would never agree to let me lure him into town by letting him know there was a female Were there.”
She was right, but we also didn’t have any other choices. The Rabid didn’t need females. He didn’t want them. But he was in the business of making werewolves and apparently had a way of identifying the kind of people who could survive the Change. People like me. Resilients.
Naming the knack and those who had it satisfied me, but it did nothing to distract me from the fact that if our Rabid was a psycho, the fact that the Resilient in question was the one who’d gotten away might be more enticing than any of us knew.
“He has a girl out there,” I said. “About our age. Her name is Madison, and she died when she was six years old. Not really, but that’s what her family thinks, and that’s when her life ended. She was six; I was four. As far as we know, mine was the only attack that was ever interrupted by other wolves. Some of the Rabid’s other victims might have ended up dead, and Callum’s pack found Chase after the fact, but I’m the only one who got away absolutely unscathed. He never even got the chance to attack me, and he really, really wanted to.”