Taken by storm(63)

“You got bit,” Callum repeated, using a tone that I recognized well as the calm before the storm.

“I’m fine,” I said, cutting his temper off at the pass. He rarely lost it, but right now none of us had the time to deal with the fallout if he did. “Jed stitched me back together. Pain sucks, but it’s manageable.” I let out a half laugh, short and harsh. “Just call it practice.”

The change in the room around me was immediate, and I realized I’d said that last bit out loud.

Practice? Lake said. Practice for what?

Chase didn’t ask, and I realized that he knew the answer—maybe he had always known the answer.

“Why didn’t you tell me that Samuel Wilson had a twin?” I turned my focus back to Callum, hoping that it would provide sufficient distraction for Lake. “That it was Sora?”

I wanted him to tell me that I was mistaken, that Sora wasn’t this monster’s twin, that I had it all wrong. I willed him to say that. I prayed.

“When?” Callum asked. “When would you have had me tell you? When we rescued you? When you latched on to Devon and he on to you? When Samuel resurfaced, and we realized he’d never stopped killing? When the kids in your pack killed him?”

Would I have wanted to know? I couldn’t help asking myself the question. If it hadn’t been for whatever happened that full moon, with Maddy and the baby, if the Shadows hadn’t come back—would I have wanted to know that the Big Bad Wolf was Devon’s uncle? That my second family in Callum’s pack had been his family, too?

“Once you realized we were dealing with a Shadow,” I said, neatly cutting those questions out of the equation. “Two hours ago, when we were on the phone, and you knew that a Shadow was stalking Maddy, why didn’t you tell me then?”

“Had we not gotten cut off, I would have.”

I believed him—not because he wouldn’t hide key information from me, but because we were dealing with an enemy whose actions he couldn’t foresee. If he’d had a line on the future, Callum would have had no qualms about withholding information, but I didn’t think he’d play fast and loose with my life, not when he had no way of knowing how that might turn out.

This particular Rabid had died obsessed with the idea of Changing me.

“He and Griffin can’t be at the same place at the same time.” I leaned back against the wall, wincing as my shoulder protested the movement. “If Griffin hadn’t broken back through when he did, I’d be dead. And if Wilson isn’t tied to Maddy, if he’s playing with her because he can and not because he has to, there’s no limit on where or who he might have killed.”

I could see the victims in my mind, their corpses lined up like paper dolls. The boy in the cabin. The girl in Winchester. The unidentifiable mass of skin and blood and bones in Missouri.

How many victims had we’d missed? How many more would there be if we didn’t find a way to stop this thing? In life, Samuel Wilson had been the worst kind of monster. He hadn’t just attacked teenagers. He’d killed children.

And now he was bullet proof.

“This is just the beginning.” I tried to stay calm. I tried to be rational. “Sooner or later, he’ll find a way to push Griffin out. He’ll come to finish the job, and then—”

The corpses in my mind multiplied, stacks upon stacks of bodies. Little bodies. The Shadow would kill me, and then he’d move on—to Caroline and Jed, Chase and Lake. To humans who never stood a chance. To children.

There was nothing we could do to fight back. Nothing.

To kill a Shadow …

I couldn’t afford to follow that thought to completion. In my mind, I saw Devon’s face. I saw his smile, the way he could look utterly ridiculous one minute and like a lethal fighter the next. I saw Sora, who had his eyes, but none of his humor.

No.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that Sora was this monster’s twin. It wasn’t fair that stopping him should fall to us. But most of all, it wasn’t fair that being alpha had turned me into the kind of person who could think the unthinkable.

I didn’t want to be that person.

“We don’t know how to kill him, Callum.” I swallowed, hard. “All we have is a theory.”

What we had wasn’t a theory. It was unspeakable. And there I was, saying the words.

“Now that he’s tasted my blood, he’ll be hungry for more. He’ll kill me, but it won’t stop there.” I paused, wishing that my life was the only one on the line, that this was my sacrifice to make. “It won’t ever stop.”

“No.” Callum wasn’t telling me I was wrong about this monster. He was saying what the voice in my head kept saying, over and over again.