“Not by blood.”
That shouldn’t have surprised me. I knew better than anyone that blood wasn’t what made people family.
“Valerie was with us three years when Wes died. By that time, it seemed natural to most folks that she’d be the one to take over.”
“Most folks,” I repeated. “But not you.”
He shrugged. “Never wanted to lead much myself. Filling Wes’s shoes would have been tough on anyone, but Valerie took to it.” He paused. “I always thought she took to it a little too well.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him why he’d stayed. It couldn’t have been easy, watching Valerie work her way into everyone else’s emotions, making them feel what she wanted them to feel—about her, about their former leader’s death, about Caroline. But before I could even ask the question, I had my answer, because in the brief exchange I’d seen between Jed and Valerie’s daughter, there’d been shades of Callum and me.
Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you.
Now was not the time to get caught up in memories—not with company in my head and a slew of questions Jed might be willing and able to answer.
“Valerie had Caroline give me an ultimatum—either I hand over a Were under my protection, or your coven is going to attack my pack.” I measured Jed’s response. Nothing I said surprised him, but his jaw tightened when I mentioned Caroline, scars jumping to life on his face as the muscles underneath them tensed. I pushed harder, further, testing my intuition that Jed’s weakness, the whole reason he’d stayed with the coven, was the girl. “How do you think Caroline is going to feel if her mother uses her to murder a bunch of little kids?”
Jed reached out, lightning quick, and grabbed my arm, his fingernails digging into my flesh and sending my pack-mates into a defensive roar in my head.
“I know what’s at stake here,” Jed said, his voice surprisingly quiet given his viselike grip on my arm. “Know it better than you, so if you’ve got questions, ask them, but don’t play with me, Bryn.”
He had one of those tones—one that said that I was a kid and he wasn’t and he’d been waging wars since before I was ever born.
“Fine,” I said. “Question: why does the coven care so much about getting Lucas back? What’s he to Valerie?”
Jed let go of my arm. “I’m no expert on the workings of that woman’s mind, but if I were a betting man, I’d say that odds are that one teenage werewolf is not what she’s after. She’s just using him to get the others all riled up, same as she’ll use you.”
It had occurred to me that Valerie might not want Lucas—that she might want me—but I’d never thought, even for a second, that maybe neither one of us was the point. That if I met Valerie’s ultimatum, she might find something else to demand, some other reason to set her coven against my pack.
“If I gave Lucas back, she’d just find another excuse to fight us.”
“That a question?” Jed asked, looking amused.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Should it be?”
He grunted.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
The realization was strangely liberating. I’d spent all this time thinking that I had to choose between my own pack’s safety and sending an innocent to be tortured by people who blindly hated his guts, when in reality, there’d never been a choice.
On the downside, that meant we had no safety net, no backup plan, no options.
Ask him if he knows anything about the deal, Chase suggested quietly. He, Lake, and Dev had been so quiet that I’d almost forgotten they were there.
“Lucas said that Valerie made some kind of deal with his alpha,” I said, searching Jed’s features for some kind of reaction. “Shay gave Lucas to Valerie. Any idea what he asked for in return?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Jed replied facetiously. “This Shay guy got any reason to want anyone in your pack dead?”
I could practically feel the blood drain out of my face. Shay had reason to want anyone who stood between him and the Changed females dead—including, but not limited to, me.
“Thought so.” Jed ran a scarred hand roughly over his neck. “Going after your pack is a risk, and Valerie’s not in the habit of risking something for nothing. The question you should be asking isn’t what Shay wanted Valerie to do—it’s why she’s doing it.”
My mind was reeling. Shay sent Lucas to the coven. They tortured him. Lucas escaped and came running straight to me. Shay had to have known that Lucas would go for help—maybe he’d even asked the coven to let him escape conveniently close to my territory so that I would be the obvious choice. Then, when Valerie came after our pack, she could use Lucas as an excuse—a focal point for her coven, an excuse to keep me from figuring everything out.