Or possibly a warning.
“I don’t see how this is a Senate matter.” The alpha from Luna Mesa had an almost musical voice and a calm about him that made me wonder exactly how old he was. “Two attacks is not a pandemic. Let the local alphas investigate and deal with the situation. I’d venture to guess that neither you nor Callum needs our interference, Shay.”
The words reminded me of something I’d known, but forgotten: the Senate wasn’t called every time there was a Rabid. The reason Callum had called it the last time was because the man had been hunting across the country, in and out of different territories, for years. Plus he’d done something the others had thought next to impossible: created new Weres.
But one murder in Wyoming and one in Missouri? As graphic as they were, as horrific, the Luna Mesa alpha was right. That shouldn’t have been a Senate affair. For a few moments, I thought that perhaps Shay was just trying to undermine Callum—and me. It even occurred to me that he might have sent someone to play Rabid in between our lands, but that didn’t explain why he was claiming that a similar attack had happened near his territory, or what he was hoping to gain by going public with this information now.
Nothing could have prepared me for what Shay said next.
“Believe me, Arturo. This is a Senate affair.” Shay took a seat, like the fight had drained out of him, but I knew better. The look in his eyes told me he was about to deliver a lethal blow—though to who or what, I wasn’t sure.
Beside me, Callum looked straight ahead, staring at a fixed point in the distance. His facial expression never changed, but my stomach plummeted, and my heartbeat became audible once more.
Shay looked at me, only at me. “I have reason to believe that this Rabid is going to strike again. And I have reason to believe that she’s female.”
CHAPTER TEN
THE SILENCE FOLLOWING SHAY’S PROCLAMATION WAS deafening. The undercurrent of power in the room surged, unmistakable and violent. Muscles tensed. Pupils pulsed. The air, thick with unspoken emotion, was hot in my lungs. I felt like I might suffocate on the unbearable intensity of it all, and even though I’d known objectively that I was in a room full of people who weren’t human and didn’t live by human laws, the beasts inside them were much closer to the surface now.
Close enough that if even one of them Shifted, I could easily find myself in a room full of wolves.
“A female Rabid?” The alpha from Shadow Bluff—a man I knew only by reputation, one that said he had a habit of going through human wives like Kleenex—recovered first. “There’s no such thing.”
Just like there wasn’t such a thing as a female alpha. Just like there was no such thing as a werewolf who was born human, but Changed.
“You can’t honestly expect us to believe that a female is responsible for this.” That was from the Ash Mountain alpha—William. I didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered that he didn’t think my sex was even remotely capable of committing this kind of violence.
“I think females are capable of many things.” Shay let his eyes linger on my face, my body for a second too long. “Does anyone in this room doubt that my mother could kill? That she has killed?”
There wasn’t an individual in the Senate who hadn’t taken a life—myself included. Sora had been around for centuries—at least—and she was one of the most dominant wolves in the Stone River Pack.
There probably wasn’t much she wasn’t capable of.
“You’re not suggesting that your mother is responsible for this.” The Luna Mesa alpha—the one who’d challenged Shay to prove that this Rabid was Senate business at all—was incredulous. Of all of them, he seemed the least taken in by Shay’s performance, the most skeptical.
“My mother,” Shay said, glancing meaningfully at Callum, “is otherwise occupied. But this Rabid is female, and I think you’ll all agree that complicates things.”
That was putting it mildly. The standard operating procedure with Rabids—with the exception of the one who’d managed to bargain with the Senate—was immediate execution, brutal and absolute. But there wasn’t a man in this room who would willingly kill a female werewolf. There were too few of them. Even with the addition of the six females in my pack who had been born human, there were fewer than two dozen female Weres in the country.
I wasn’t sure Shay’s pack had even one.
“What evidence do you have that our killer is female?” Callum asked. If he’d seen this turn of events coming, he gave no visible indication of it, but there was no surprise in his features, either.