“He Shifted, too,” I said.
Maddy met my eyes. “She,” the pregnant girl corrected softly. “She Shifted, too.”
It wasn’t uncommon for werewolf pups to Shift in the womb—that was part of the reason so few human women survived giving birth to werewolf kids. Combined with Maddy’s own body morphing and breaking, the effect must have been excruciating, so much so that I could almost overlook the other thing she’d just said.
Behind me, Lake could not. “She?”
“It’s a girl,” Maddy said. “Don’t ask me how I know, but I do, and that full moon, when she was Shifting, and I was Shifting, I thought—”
She’d thought she was having a miscarriage. Because female pups only made it to full term if there were twins.
“But nothing bad happened, Bryn. I was fine, and she was fine, but my body—it was like being split in two, cut up from the inside out. It was like dying, and then, suddenly, I wasn’t alone.”
Her eyes landed on Griffin’s, and he smiled, a tragic smile that looked out of place with the freckles on his face.
“You brought Griffin back?” Lake’s voice was very small. Through the bond, I could feel the slight tightening of her throat, the aching knowledge that, for years, she hadn’t been able to do what Maddy had that night. “There was a full moon, and you Shifted, and you just brought him back? That doesn’t even make any sense.”
Maddy looked down at her hands—away from Lake and her question. Griffin picked up where Maddy left off, speaking the words she couldn’t bring herself to say.
“It wasn’t like that, Lake. One second, I was there, watching, invisible, and the next, I could feel Maddy’s Shift, feel the baby Shifting, feel the moon pulling me closer, turning me inside out. Maddy was screaming, Lake, and it hurt me. I started to Shift, too, and then it was like a nuclear reactor went off inside my body.”
His eyes shone just describing it, even now.
“Being dead is like being under anesthetic.” Griffin struggled to put the feeling into words. “Your emotions are there—the important ones, but everything else is numb. Nothing is the way it used to be. Nothing is right, but that night—” His eyes went back to Maddy. “I could feel. I was there.”
For one second, maybe two, Maddy smiled. Then she looked down at her hands, and I knew that whatever she said next wouldn’t be good. “The corpses started showing up a week later.”
There was a full moon. Griffin came back. And a week later, things started to die. Maddy had to realize how that sounded—but it was clear from the way she looked at him that she did not.
“Corpses?” Jed prompted, his voice so gentle, it surprised me.
“They were animals,” Maddy said. “At first.”
I thought back to the blood in the cabin in Alpine Creek. “Something killed them?” I asked, forcing my gaze to stay on Maddy and not dart over to Griffin.
Maddy continued on as if I hadn’t said a word. “I woke up that morning, and Griffin was gone. He just disappeared, and the moment he left, I felt it.” Maddy shivered. I was close enough to her now that I could have reached out and wrapped my arm around her—but I didn’t.
“I didn’t see anything, not at first, but I heard the door open. Then I heard bones snapping and skin stretching, and even though I couldn’t smell anything, I knew someone was Shifting. At first, I thought it was Griffin, so I walked out into the hallway.” Maddy stopped blinking, her eyes far away and glassy, as if she could see it happening, all over again. “The front door was open, and there was a dog standing on the porch. You could tell it was someone’s pet, because it was wearing a little red collar.”
I could see where this was going—well enough that she didn’t need to relive it by putting the experience into words, but when I opened my mouth to tell her that, her voice grew louder, more decisive.
“I didn’t know what the dog was doing there, and I thought that maybe I’d imagined the sound of Shifting. But then I saw the tag on the dog’s collar moving, and I realized he was shaking.” Maddy swallowed, but forced herself to continue. “The dog was a mutt, maybe a year old, and he was shaking so hard that I knew whatever I’d heard, whatever I was feeling, he could feel it, too.”
Now I could see it: Maddy and the mutt and a villain neither one of them could see.
“The puppy saw me. It came right up to me. It nuzzled my hand. And then something cut it in two.”
Blood on the floor and walls of the cabin. I couldn’t see through Maddy’s eyes, but I didn’t need to. I’d smelled the cabin, I’d seen the blood.