Taken by storm(3)

I wasn’t altogether surprised to find someone waiting for me at the clearing.

“Halt! Who goes there?”

If ever a werewolf had mastered the art of yelling from the diaphragm, it was Dev. Like a knight guarding a princess’s tower, he put his hands on his hips and threw his head back haughtily.

I could so feel a Monty Python impression coming on.

“ ’Tis I,” I yelled back, playing along. “Queen Bryn.”

With any luck, I could distract my best friend—and second-in-command—enough that he wouldn’t pay much attention to the fact that I looked like I’d been mud wresting—and lost.

“Queen?” Devon repeated, looking down his nose at me. Since he was six foot five, he had a long way to look. “Thou dost not look like a queen.”

I rolled my eyes, but amended my previous statement. “ ’Tis I. Peasant Bryn.”

Dev’s lips twitched, but he didn’t crack a smile, which was not a good sign. That Peasant Bryn line was comedy gold.

“You okay?” he asked, dropping the accent and searching my face for the answer.

“I’m fine,” I told him. “I just went for a run.”

To a werewolf’s nose, those words would have smelled true. I was fine—as fine as I could be, given everything that had happened in the past two years.

“You want to tell me why you’re not wearing any shoes?” Devon asked, quirking one eyebrow to ridiculous heights.

“Not really,” I replied. “Peasant Bryn is a girl of few words.”

Maybe I should have given him a real answer, but this was Devon. He couldn’t stand to see me in pain. I doubted he’d understand why I’d sought it out.

A twig snapped somewhere behind us—fair warning we were about to have company. If I’d been in a more charitable mood, I might have acknowledged the fact that “company” had probably stepped on the twig on purpose. I knew better than anyone if Caroline didn’t want to be heard, she wasn’t heard. She came out of nowhere and disappeared the same way. She was the ultimate hunter, a psychic with supernaturally good aim.

We weren’t really what one would call best buds.

“Heya, Caro,” Devon called, perfectly amiable. I didn’t understand how he could call her by a nickname. She’d been a part of the coven that had waged war against our pack. She’d made our people bleed—Devon included.

“Did Jed find you?” Caroline met my eyes and ignored Devon. Dev wasn’t the type to be ignored, but for some reason, he let Caroline get away with it.

If you asked me, Caroline got away with a lot.

“Jed found me,” I told her. I didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t seem to expect me to.

“In that case,” she said, turning back the way she came, “I guess there’s not really anything else for me to say.”

As she turned, I caught a glimmer of something in her eyes, and I couldn’t help but think of the way Ali looked, gritting her teeth and breathing through the worst life had to offer, the memories that cut her to the bone.

“Wait.”

Caroline paused. She waited. I didn’t know what else to say to her, didn’t want to be talking to her at all, but the resemblance to my foster mother, however fleeting, had reminded me that no matter what this girl had done, she was family. Ali’s family.

Her biological family.

“You should come by to see Ali more,” I said finally.

That was as close to an olive branch as I could come. Caroline lived with Jed: on our land, but not in the house I shared with Ali; privy to what the rest of us really were, but not a part of the pack. If I’d had my way, the girl who’d shot Devon and—whether she’d meant to or not, whether she’d had a choice in the matter or not—helped kill one of our own would have been living in another hemisphere. But Ali cared about her. She wanted a relationship with her, and I couldn’t be the one to screw that up.

Family mattered to Ali the way Pack did to me.

Family. Pack. That combination of words made me think of another person who should have been standing here, but wasn’t. A person whose absence I couldn’t blame on Caroline in any way, shape, or form.

Maddy.

Maddy, who’d been one of us. Maddy, who’d loved an angry, broken boy.

Maddy, who’d left, because I’d killed the boy she loved.

For a moment, Caroline actually met my eyes, and I wondered if she played Eric’s death over and over again in her head, the way I obsessed over Lucas’s. I wondered if she felt even an ounce of my guilt, if she sat up nights, staring at the ceiling.

Caroline broke eye contact first. She turned on her heels and left without snapping a single twig.