He trailed off, and I realized that maybe Lake had seen him—in her dreams, on her birthday. Maybe she’d seen him, or thought she’d seen him, or imagined seeing him and hadn’t told me. I wanted to believe that, to believe that this was some kind of miracle and not a nightmare, but Griffin’s scent—as faint and hard to define as it was—had been all over the Wyoming murder site.
We’d found him here, where another victim had just been killed.
No. Lake’s voice was firm in my mind. She must have known by the look on my face what I was thinking, but she didn’t want me to go there. Just no, Bryn.
“Why now?” she asked Griffin, but I knew she wasn’t asking for my benefit or because she had any lingering suspicions herself. She was asking because she had spent years broken and incomplete, missing him, and she needed to know.
“I couldn’t make you see me before.” The quieter Griffin’s voice got, the harder it was to hear anything in it but truth. “But now I can. Everything’s changed, Lake. Everything.”
Lake nodded, her lips pulled into a thin and colorless line. Through the pack-bond, I could feel a nauseating ball of fear unfurling in the pit of her stomach—not because she was afraid of her brother, but because she was scared to believe that things had really changed. Scared to close her eyes, for fear that she might open them and discover that all of this had been a dream.
“You’re dead, but you’re here.” Caroline sounded calm, but her eyes were locked on to Griffin’s, like a snake’s as it swayed gently in front of a mouse. “What exactly does that make you?”
“I’m a dead werewolf with a twin who’s still alive,” Griffin replied, giving the hunter a look I remembered well from my youth—one that said she was really very slow. “If you want to get technical, I’m pretty sure the word you’re looking for is ghost.”
Werewolves. Psychics. And now ghosts. It made a sick kind of sense—especially given the things we’d seen—and not seen—smelled—and not smelled—at the murder scene in Wyoming. What kind of predator smelled like a memory, a dream? What kind of werewolf could drag a body to Main Street without being seen? The same kind that could dance in blood without ever leaving footprints.
A dead werewolf, brought back as a ghost.
“You killed that girl.” Chase said the words that I couldn’t force myself to speak. Griffin didn’t bat an eye, didn’t seem surprised at the accusation.
Lake reared back like Chase had punched her. “Griffin didn’t do this,” she said, her lips peeling back into a snarl. “He gets sick just looking at human blood. Dad always said he had no stomach.” Her voice wavered, and for a moment, she looked less like she was about to shoot someone and more like she might cry. “If one of us so much as skinned a knee …”
Lake believed what she was saying. She did. But Griffin wasn’t a kid anymore. He wasn’t even a werewolf. He was a ghost, and we didn’t know what that meant, what dying and lingering and existing in some kind of limbo without contact, without touch for years could do to a person.
Everything’s changed. Griffin’s words echoed in my mind, and I couldn’t help thinking that if everything had changed, we had no idea what Lake’s brother was capable of—what he had done to get back here, what he might do to stay.
“Back away from him, Lake.” I didn’t realize I’d said the words as an order until her feet started moving backward, against her will.
“Bryn,” she bit out, “you go alpha on me now, and there’s no going back.”
I came to stand beside her, reaching out to touch her arm. “Sorry.” I reined in the power building up inside of me and broke off the command. That wasn’t the way to get through to her, not about this.
“We don’t know for sure, Lake—what he’s doing here, what he is.”
She didn’t want to listen to me, but she couldn’t entirely shut out my words, either.
The target of our discussion cleared his throat. “You could always ask, Bryn,” he said quietly.
That was the first time Griffin had said my name, and I couldn’t steel myself against the sound of his voice, couldn’t help remembering that for a while—a short little while—he’d been my friend, too.
“You were there,” Chase said, stepping in between Griffin and me. “First in Wyoming, and then here.”
That wasn’t a question, but Griffin responded as if it was. “I was there, but I was too late.”
“Too late for what?” Caroline asked. I didn’t need any kind of special access to her mind to see that she didn’t trust anyone—or anything—she couldn’t shoot.