“Griff.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
GRIFF? AS IN GRIFFIN? AS IN …
“Lake,” he said again. “Lakie.”
I hadn’t heard anyone call her that, not since the first summer she and Mitch came to visit the Stone River Pack alone. We were six years old, and she was wild—wild with grief, with anger, with an emptiness that slowly, over time, Devon and I had seemed to fill.
An emptiness that, looking at Lake now, I knew we never had.
“This isn’t happening,” Lake said. “You aren’t real. You’re never real.”
The depth of anguish in her voice told me how much I’d never known about one of my closest friends. She made a point of being strong and fearless and bulletproof in every way that mattered. She was the one who’d pulled me out of the dark place after Callum had ordered me beaten, and I’d never fully realized—she’d never let me realize—that she had a dark place of her own.
Every time I’d come close to it, she’d pulled back.
But now all of that darkness was bleeding off her, like radio waves of pain—and her brother, her dead brother, was standing there in front of us, with a body that bullets passed straight through and a scent the others couldn’t quite grasp.
A scent present at the Wyoming murder.
“Lake—” I was going to tell her to back away from him, but realized that she wouldn’t hear me if I did. It was like she and this boy—this creature with her dead brother’s face—were the only two people in the world.
She walked toward him, her body shaking with every step, her head thrown back, like if she could just face this head-on, everything would be fine.
She would be fine.
Watching her, I thought of Katie and Alex, the bond between them growing stronger by the day. I felt something building up inside of Lake, fire where she once was frozen, numbness giving way to pain.
“I told you once,” the boy who couldn’t have been Griffin said, “that I was never going to let anything get you, and I never have. Every fight you fought, I fought. Every tree you climbed, I climbed. And when you ran, Lake, I ran with you. Always.”
I could hear Griffin in this thing’s words. I could see the boy I barely remembered in the lines of his face. But this couldn’t be Griffin. Griffin was dead, and we had every reason to believe that this thing in front of us was a killer.
“You weren’t there.” Lake’s voice was uneven and shrill. She sounded like a little kid on the verge of a meltdown. “You weren’t there, and every time I thought I felt you, every shadow I saw out of the corner of my eye—on our birthday—”
“I was there. I was always there.” His voice was an echo of hers, quiet and intense and so full of emotion that I thought he might choke on the words, trying not to cry. “And now I’m here.”
The thing I felt building up inside of Lake—the fire, the pain, the hope—filled her. It overcame her. Something deep in her soul reached out for something deep in his. The bond between them surged, electric and undeniable, and I felt it the way Lake did, like a phantom limb brought suddenly back to life.
I knew then, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that whatever else this thing in front of us was, whatever it had done, Griffin’s face wasn’t just some mask it had chosen to wear. This was Griffin, as surely as Lake was Lake.
“What are you?” Caroline took a step forward, her eyes narrowed into slits, her tone lethal. She may have revised her opinion of werewolves in the past six months, but the Griffin standing before us wasn’t a werewolf.
Not anymore.
“I’m dead,” Griffin said, then he nodded toward Lake. “But she’s not.”
To Caroline, who couldn’t feel the bond between them, those words probably weren’t very illuminating, but to me, they sounded like an explanation, intuitive and complete.
Griffin was dead.
Lake was not.
Female werewolves were always half of a set of twins, the girl’s survival in the womb dependent on the boy’s. Katie and Alex were two halves of the same whole. That was what Griffin was to Lake, what she was to him.
“You’re dead,” Lake said, bitter and trying not to sound broken. “You’re dead, and I’m not, and you’re telling me that you just hung around? And you didn’t say anything, didn’t tell me—”
“I couldn’t,” Griffin said, the words cutting through the air like a whip. “Don’t you think I tried, Lake?” His voice got very soft, and I felt like I was eavesdropping, even though I wasn’t. “Sometimes, late at night, there were moments when you could see me, right before you fell asleep. And on our birthday, every year, when hurt was tearing through your insides and you were smiling on the surface, I tried even harder. That one time, when we turned sixteen …”