Taken by Storm: A Raised by Wolves Novel (24 page)

Dev, who wasn’t a member of the Snake Bend Pack.

Dev, who was a member of mine.

I looked at the Weres—a mixture of men and wolves—on the ground. I saw them gazing up at Devon, and I knew.
Leaving them to fight it out for dominance would be asking for trouble.

They needed someone to take Shay’s place—and Devon
was the one who’d delivered the killing blow.

Shay’s dead. They’re fair game. You could claim them,
Devon
told me silently, but the wolf inside of him said something
very different. It longed for something else: something animal and powerful and right.

I nodded—not in response to Devon’s request, but in
response to the knowledge that this was what Callum had
foreseen, this was what was meant to be.

I walked forward on stiff human limbs. I stood next to
Devon, so close that I could feel the heat of his body, smell
Shay’s blood. I lifted my hand to his cheek. I smiled—and
then before he could tell me not to, I swiped my fingernails across the surface of his neck.

I let him go.

I pulled myself out of his head, snapped his bond to our pack like it was dried spaghetti.

I heard it break.

I felt it, felt his absence, like a hole in my own body.

“Bronwyn,” he said, but I shook my head, didn’t let him
finish.

“Go,” I said. “They’re waiting. For you.”

All around us, the Snake Bend Pack watched in silence, their eyes on him.

“All I ever wanted,” Devon said softly, “was to stay with
you.”

I didn’t reply, because Devon, of all people, understood—what we wanted didn’t matter. My first allegiance was to my
pack—and from this point forward, his would be to Snake Bend.

“You stubborn, impossible, backhanded little wench.”

From Dev, that was the equivalent of
good-bye
.

He turned. He walked toward the Snake Bend wolves. And then he claimed them. I could see the power, shining in his eyes, could see the moment they accepted him, the instant their world realigned itself with Devon at their center.

Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

I couldn’t hear his thoughts or theirs, but I could see the call spreading from wolf to wolf. I could see them waiting for their alpha’s signal.

With one last glance over his shoulder at me, Devon gave
into the call of the wild. He Shifted—and as a pack, one
incredible, immovable, unfathomable force, they ran.

EPILOGUE

“B
UT WHY?”

I tried to summon the part of my brain responsible for political dealings. It was all about patience—and control.

“Because,” I replied calmly, “Rose is too little to play Fuzzy Wuzzy Death Ball. She’s just a baby.”

Lily did not seem overly impressed with my reasoning. Katie and Alex had been following her around since they were barely a year old themselves. Lily wasn’t disposed to wait for Maddy’s baby to outgrow infant status.

Despite the similarity in their names, the four-year-old hurricane and Maddy’s little daughter were about as different as two pups could get. Rose was quiet, even when she cried—and she rarely cried. She was wide-eyed, observant, peaceful—and sometimes, I would have sworn she was looking at things no one else could see.

We still didn’t know—what her knack was, why the
Shadows were drawn to her, how she’d brought them back.
But you could tell, just by looking at her, just by holding
her, warm and solid in your arms, that she was different.

Impossible.

A miracle.

A female born alone.

None of which made her capable of playing the rough-and-tumble game Lily had fashioned for herself and the twins.

“Get some of the older kids to play,” I told Lily.

She made a face. “They
cheat
.”

Since I was highly skeptical that Fuzzy Wuzzy Death Ball actually had rules, that seemed doubtful. More likely, Lily just didn’t like playing with anyone she couldn’t boss around.

“Go,” I told her, cutting off another “why” with a gentle nudge to her side. “Go on.”

After a long, considered moment, Lily went, leaving me in the woods alone.

No Devon.

No Chase.

Just me.

That wasn’t technically true, of course. Lake was still
around, ready to kick my butt out of moping anytime she suspected the dark place might be beckoning me on. Griffin assisted her in that effort, though I suspected he ran interference on my behalf just as often.

Then there were the newest members of our pack. Maddy—and baby Rose—and a handful of adult males, handpicked by Devon for their fighting prowess and their loyalty. Before I accepted them as part of Cedar Ridge, I’d run their names by Mitch. Having interacted with them more than once over the years, he’d given the transfers his stamp of approval, and Callum had sent me e-mails, encouraging me to accept Devon’s offer of extra muscle.

I hadn’t replied.

There were twenty-five of us now—enough to cover a wider territory than we’d held before. With a civility unobserved in any alphas before us, Devon and I had split the former Snake Bend territory the way we’d split candy bars when we were little. North Dakota was mine; the lower states his.

Together, we had more people, more land, and more females than most other packs could ever even dream of. I didn’t kid myself that the other alphas were unaware that the Cedar Ridge and Snake Bend packs, though separate, would fight any enemies as one.

I also didn’t ignore the obvious, that this was the future Callum had been aiming for all along. This was the reason he hadn’t warned me that Shay might come after Maddy. This was why he hadn’t prevented Chase’s death, why I woke up each day alone, feeling like half my body was missing and a chunk of my soul had gone dead inside.

Callum had his reasons. I understood—I did. I saw his
thought process with crystalline clarity; I recognized that the outcome—Shay dead, Devon the alpha of his own pack, the other alphas sufficiently warned about what might happen if
someone came after me—was the best any of us might have
hoped for.

But Chase was still dead, and that, I couldn’t forgive. Not now. Not ever.

You can’t trade a human’s life for a wolf’s.

If Callum had Changed me when I asked him to, Shay
would have had to go through me to get to Chase. I would have had the option of offering my life up for the wolf Caroline had killed. With my life on the table, Shay wouldn’t have been able to go after anyone else.

You need to be human for this,
Callum had said, and I was. I’d waited. I’d been patient. But Chase was the last person who would die because of what I was—and what I wasn’t. He was the only one who might have been able to talk me out of it.

He was my why.

I went back to the house and dressed in simple clothes: a light sweatshirt, cotton shorts. I told Ali I was going out.

“Won’t you get cold?” she asked. Summer had given way to early fall; already, there was a chill.

I shrugged. “You know me,” I said. “I’ll survive.”

There was a pregnant pause as she looked at my face, really looked at it. There was nothing to see there, no hint of things to come.

She let me go.

I drove to the border and waited. I didn’t call Callum, didn’t give him an ultimatum, but if he didn’t show, I’d order one of the new Weres to attack me. Loyal or not, protective or not, they wouldn’t be able to disobey.

“Five minutes,” I whispered. “You have five minutes.”

I didn’t, wouldn’t say his name.

I sat down on the ground. I offered my face up to the sky. It was dark and overcast, but I basked in it, the same way I would have if there were sun. These were my last human breaths.

My last human sky.

A hundred years from now, would I look back and remember the way the colors looked? Would I recall what it was like for goose bumps to dot my flesh, to hear nothing, smell nothing, to know that there was no one and nothing in my body but me?

I didn’t care.

What good was being human, if it meant watching the people I loved die? What good was it pretending that I
was
human, when life just kept peeling my humanity off in strips?

Crunching gravel alerted me to Callum’s approach. I looked at him, expecting to feel a stab of betrayal, anger, hurt, but for the first time in memory, I met Callum’s eyes and felt nothing.

Whatever we’d had, whatever bond we had forged, whatever memories we’d shared, however much of the person I’d become that I could trace back to him—he’d killed it, as dead as Jed and Chase.

“Bryn.” That was all he said, just my name. Everything else went unspoken, evident only in his tone. From the day he’d found me until now—every interaction, every time he’d dried my tears, the times he’d been the one to make me cry. I’d loved him, and I’d hated him, and it had all been leading up to a single moment in time.

Now.

“You made me a promise once,” I said, my tone as flat as his was brimming with everything that had passed between us in the past thirteen years. “I’ve come to collect.”

He didn’t push me. He didn’t reach out to touch me. His eyes locked onto mine, a perfect match for the tone in his voice.

“You’re certain?”

I stood, faced him, held my arms out to my side.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Kill me.”

Kill whatever humanity I had left.

He turned his back on me and began Shifting. I heard each snap of bone, as flesh rendered itself into something new. I thought of my parents, the scars on Caroline’s arm, Lucas trying to rip out my throat.

I thought of the chunk the Shadow had taken out of my flesh. I thought of a thousand cuts on my body, needles digging into flesh, the smell and taste and feel of blood.

Callum turned back around. On four legs, he padded
toward me. His eyes met mine. I nodded.

He leapt.