Taken by Storm: A Raised by Wolves Novel (7 page)

“The Ash Mountain alpha votes in favor of this proposal.”

“The Delta Hills alpha votes in favor of this proposal.”

Callum and I voted against it, as did the Shadow Bluff alpha, who must have thought he stood a better chance at getting to the female through his land than he would if he—and every other alpha on the Senate—had leave to pass through ours. But as the rest of the votes came in, my stomach sank.

“The Snake Bend alpha votes in favor of this proposal.” Shay was the last to vote. He smiled, a cat-eating-canary expression on his otherwise wolfish face. “Correct me if I’m wrong, gentlemen, but the proposal appears to have passed.”

Even if I hadn’t been concerned with what Shay and the other alphas might do if they caught the girl in question—
not Maddy, not Maddy, it couldn’t be Maddy
—I couldn’t run the risk of what might happen if they were given carte blanche to cut through my territory. Even if the other alphas stuck to the edges of my land and gave the Wayfarer a wide berth, I didn’t trust the men in this room with the people closest to me.

With the kids in my pack. With the girls.

I locked eyes with Callum. If he’d seen this coming and hadn’t told me, we were going to be having words. But either way, the two of us were aligned on one point: we needed to find this female before she became a real exposure risk.

Before the other alphas could invoke the vote that had just passed.

Before this Rabid—
not Maddy, not Maddy, please, God, don’t let it be Maddy
—killed. Again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“W
E HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING IT’S
M
ADDY.”

Devon had been waiting to say those words since the
moment I’d clued him in to Shay’s big revelation, but he’d held off on even thinking them in my direction until we’d left the W
ELCOME TO
N
ORTH
D
AKOTA!
sign in our dust.

According to Senate Law, the rest of us could have remained in Shay’s territory for another day, but I wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to get out of there, fast. The Shadow Bluff alpha had left the second the meeting had ended. Several others followed on his heels—probably to make arrangements for my worst-case scenario and their best. Callum had lingered long enough to exchange words with the Luna Mesa alpha, but I hadn’t been able to make out what they were saying or why it was important enough to delay what the two of us needed to be doing now.

Finding Maddy. Or Not-Maddy. Or whoever this female was.

It’s not Maddy,
Devon had told me, over and over again,
once we’d crossed state lines.
You know her, Bryn, and I
know her.

No matter how many times Devon said the words to me silently, I needed to hear him say it out loud. So when Callum stopped for gas, the two of us made our excuses and slipped out of earshot.

“We have no way of knowing it’s Maddy.” I repeated Devon’s words, willing myself to believe them and unable to keep from saying the words that came out my mouth next. “But we have no way of knowing it’s not.”

The first time I’d ever seen Maddy, she was wearing a little-girl dress and speaking in a monotone. Her name was Madison, and she’d been the monster’s favorite: his favorite punching bag, his favorite creation, his favorite little girl.

She was my age, and she’d already been through hell.

Of all the kids that Samuel Wilson had Changed, Maddy was the first one to throw off the mental bonds he’d used to control them. She was the first one to believe me when I told her that being Resilient meant that you could make your own choices about who to follow and who not to.

She was the one who’d chosen me. And after I’d killed Lucas, she’d chosen to leave.

If you force me to stay,
she said, from somewhere in my memory,
I’ll hate you.

I tried not to think of the pain she’d been in, tried not to think about the way she’d looked at Lucas and seen herself. Werewolves had a tendency to fall quickly, and Maddy had
identified with Lucas, with the things he’d survived as a
member of Shay’s pack.

She’d loved him.

“Maddy’s strong.” Devon’s voice broke into my thoughts. “She’s a survivor, Bryn, and she would kill herself before hurting another human being.”

I believed that, too. I did. But there was a problem with
Devon’s logic—Maddy
wasn’t
a human being. She was a werewolf. A lone werewolf, broken down and beaten and alone.

Sooner or later, most lone wolves go Rabid.
I kept a tight hold on the thought and didn’t let it travel from my mind to Devon’s.

When Maddy had left, I’d worried that another alpha might find her and try to claim her, but I hadn’t thought about what it would be like for her, without the pack. I’d only thought of how horrible it was for us without her. She was a phantom limb, a missing piece, a yearning….

And she would have felt that—all of that tenfold.

“You two coming?” Sora called out, and I met Devon’s eyes. If we could hear his mother, she could hear us. Good thing we’d been standing there for minutes in silence.

“Explain to me again why you granted that woman permission to step foot on Cedar Ridge land.” Dev didn’t raise his voice, but he didn’t bother to lower it, either, and with werewolf hearing, there was no question that Sora would have heard it.

“Because Callum is our ride, and he asked.”

Devon rolled his eyes. “Oh, really?” he said. “Callum
asked
?”

Actually, Callum had said it “might be a good idea” if Sora came with us. Personally, I’d thought it “might be a horrific idea,” but then I’d noticed the way the other alphas and their seconds were looking at her and the way she was looking at them, and for the first time, I thought of what it must have been like to be Sora: the only woman among all these men, for years.

Then I said yes.

“Not only did Callum ask,” I told Devon, “he said, ‘pretty please.’ ”

Devon—and his nose—were unimpressed with that statement. “Liar.”

“He said, ‘pretty please with a cherry on top,’ ” I continued. “And now that I said yes, we’re BFFs. He’s going to make me a friendship bracelet and everything.”

Devon tweaked the end of my ponytail. “You are a horrible liar.”

Maybe—but I was very good at distracting people, including Devon, who didn’t need to be ruminating on his relationship with Sora when we were all going to be stuck in the car together for another hour. Unfortunately, I wasn’t nearly as good at distracting myself as I was at distracting other people. As Devon and I made our way back to the car, my mind went again to the dark place, to the thoughts I couldn’t bear. If Jed had been there, he would have told me to let them in, so I did.

Human bodies, torn limb from limb.

Blood smeared against white walls.

Maddy.

Minutes went by, miles of travel, while I sat there, lost to images and possibilities and guilt.

“Did you know?” I said finally. My voice was quiet, but I was certain werewolf hearing would pick up on the words just fine, and confident that Callum would understand that the question was for him. “You said there was a Rabid. You never said she was female.”

“I’m not omniscient, Bryn.” Callum’s voice was world-worn and weary, like he’d known the question was coming. “I can’t see everything, and even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to sort through it all.”

“Did you know?” I repeated the question, because he
hadn’t answered it, not really.

In the front seat, there was silence, and then: “I knew there was a female involved. It honestly never occurred to me that she might be the Rabid.”

For all the respect he afforded Sora—and me—Callum still thought like a Were. Females might not be sugar and spice, but they certainly weren’t serial killers.

“Is she?” I forced the question out of my mouth. “The
female you saw, is she rabid?”

Callum didn’t give me an answer—though whether he was holding back or genuinely didn’t know, I wasn’t sure.

“Your other question,” he said finally. “The one you haven’t asked yet.”

It was just like Callum to agree to answer a question I hadn’t asked instead of the one I had, but at least this way, I didn’t have to actually say the words.

Is it Maddy?

Callum met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “The answer is yes.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

C
ALLUM PARKED THE CAR IN FRONT OF THE
W
AYFARER
restaurant. I’d expected him to drop me off at the house, but given that Sora was with us, keeping our distance from Ali was probably a good idea.

I knew for a fact that my foster mother was an excellent shot.

“We have days, Bryn.” Callum’s voice was strained—just barely, but for him, that was the equivalent to cussing and screaming. “We have a week, if we’re lucky. Every future I can find is coated in blood. I’ll hold the other alphas off as long as I can, but you need to find her. Fast.”

Her
, as in
Maddy
.

Our Maddy. The Rabid.

“You’re not going to look for her?” I asked, forcing myself to be calm, to not think about the pictures or the bodies or the way Maddy had looked—broken, but regal—last December, when she’d walked away. “You’re just going to sit back and leave finding her to me?”

If the future was as dire as Callum was predicting, I
couldn’t fathom why he wasn’t going after Maddy himself.

“My staying out of it will give me more leverage with the
others, and someone has to do damage control with the human
authorities. Wherever the girl was before, she’s gone now, and she won’t want me to be the one to find her.”

I was going to say that Maddy wouldn’t want me to find her, either, that the whole point of her leaving was to get away from me, but Sora didn’t give me a chance to speak.

“To catch a Rabid,” she said, with a strange and quiet
intensity in her voice, “you have to think like a Rabid. There’s a dark logic to their thoughts. A hunger. If you can figure out what they’re hungry for, you can find them.”

Them
, as in plural? Sora spoke like someone who’d spent a decent amount of time tracking down rabid werewolves. That shouldn’t have surprised me, given that she had been there the day Callum had rescued me. Callum had been the one to pull me out from underneath the kitchen sink, but Sora was the one who’d fought Wilson.

Flashes of fur. White, gleaming fangs. Red eyes. Blood.

A warm hand on my shoulder brought me back to the present. Dev.

“Get inside her head, figure out what she’s hungry for.” Devon repeated his mother’s words, pretending he didn’t know what I’d been thinking, that the memories hadn’t been written clearly on my face. “We can do that.”

Sora glanced at Callum, then back at Devon. “She can do that,” Sora corrected, nodding her head at me. “Or I can. But, Devon, you’ll be staying here.”

I didn’t remember taking a step forward, let alone four, but sud
denly I was standing nose to nose with Sora, staring her down.

“That wasn’t an order, Bryn-girl,” Callum told me. “She’s not telling your Devon what to do.”

My Devon,
my inner alpha echoed.
Mine.

“The Senate meeting is over, and without the protections that provides, an alpha can’t afford to leave his or her pack untended for long.”

Callum’s even words managed to penetrate the thud of possessiveness, protectiveness, rage in my brain.

I was the Cedar Ridge alpha. Dev was the most physically formidable person in our pack. If anything ever happened to me, he’d take over as alpha.

As much as I hated to admit it, Sora was right. Devon and I couldn’t both go looking for Maddy—especially not when the other alphas might find reason to pass through our territory in a matter of days.

“I’ll take Chase,” I said, before Devon could object. “And Lake. You know they won’t let anything happen to me, Dev, and if the other alphas end up passing through, Lake wouldn’t want to be here anyway.”

I wasn’t going to say more than that—not to Dev, who
knew Lake well enough to know that all the Senate Laws in the world didn’t make her feel as safe as a loaded weapon did.

The last thing we needed was her shooting a foreign alpha.

“I should be there,” Dev said, matching his mother’s quiet intensity word for word. “With you. With Maddy. I should be there.”

Hearing the way he said her name made me want to take him with me so badly that I could have screamed. Before Lucas, Maddy had been one of us. Not just one of the pack, but one of us. We’d been her family, her friends—

“The Cedar Ridge alpha would like to know if the Stone River alpha remembers that she applied no sanctions when he trespassed on her territory?” I felt like another person as those words slipped out of my mouth, like political Bryn was Dr. Jekyll—or possibly Mr. Hyde.

“I remember, Bryn.”

Callum was resisting dealing with me on official terms, and I wasn’t sure why. “If the Cedar Ridge alpha were to request sanctuary …”

Callum put two fingers under my chin. He looked into my eyes, and I looked into his, unable to finish the sentence.

“I would give you sanctuary,” he said. “I would take care of them as if they were my own. You know that.”

I did. And if I could send the kids in my pack with Callum, back to Stone River, just for a little while, then Devon could come with me.

“But that cannot happen, Bryn-girl. Not with the other alphas coming through.”

I took a step back, away from Callum’s touch against my face.

“There’s a reason you send Chase to run the perimeter of your territory, Bryn.”

To check on the peripherals? Or because he would never be
fully comfortable here? I wondered what Callum was getting at.

“Territory is only territory when it’s occupied. Senate Law prevents trespassing, but if your pack abandons Cedar Ridge land, it won’t be Cedar Ridge land anymore.”

I thought of Chase running the border of our territory, of the peripherals spread out across the state, and then I thought
of the way the pack gathered at the full moon, Shifting and run
ning, overflowing with energy, at one with the woods and with each other.

The Wayfarer was
ours
. The land between Snake Bend and Stone River was
ours
. It smelled like us. It felt like home. But if the majority of the pack left, even for a little while, that could change.

Someone else could move in and take what was supposed to be ours, and we had less land than any other pack as it was.

So much for sending my pack with Callum and taking Devon with me.

Click.

The sound of bullets being chambered alerted me to the fact that we had an incoming visitor.

“You need to go.” Caroline’s eyes were locked on Sora’s. How she’d gotten her body between Devon’s mother’s and mine without anyone hearing her approach, I did not know, but she had a gun in one hand and a crossbow in the other.

The gun was trained on Sora’s temple, the crossbow on
Callum’s thigh.

“Caroline,” I said, my voice dangerously pleasant. “Do you mind?”

“No,” Caroline said, releasing the safety. “I don’t.”

“Caro, darling, as much of a Kodak moment as this absolutely is, pointing weapons at werewolves isn’t something one does at close range.” Devon was trying to be flippant, but neither one of us knew for sure how Callum or Sora would respond to the threat.

Neither one of us knew whether or not Caroline would pull the trigger.

“I take it you’re Ali’s sister?” Callum’s look was measuring—
but just cautious enough that I got the distinct impression even he couldn’t be sure that Caroline wouldn’t shoot.

“I don’t know what you did to Ali,” Caroline said, her voice
barely more than a whisper, “but you’re not going to do it again.”

It took me a moment to realize that she was talking to Sora, not Callum. Sora and Ali had been friends once, before Sora had hurt me. Seeing her again would have affected Ali the same way it had affected me.

And Ali was the only family Caroline had left.

“Sora, get in the car.”

That was the first time in a very long time that I’d heard Callum give someone a direct order. A glimmer of surprise
passed over Sora’s face, but a second later, it was gone, and she turned to follow Callum’s instruction.

Caroline tracked Sora’s motion and took her eyes off Callum for half a second, but that was half a second too long. In a flash, both weapons were on the ground, and he was holding her very still, from behind.

“Devon’s right,” he said, a hint of an accent creeping into his words. “Shooting werewolves is a thing best done from a distance.”

He leaned forward then, and whispered something into the back of Caroline’s hair, something I couldn’t hear that actually cracked the veneer of ice in the hunter’s eyes. For a second, Caroline looked well and truly shaken. Vulnerable. Pissed.

Then Callum let her go. He turned and pressed a kiss to my forehead before beginning the walk back to his car. Halfway there, he paused and glanced out at the forest, at a large black wolf, keeping its distance, standing guard.

Chase.

I knew the moment I saw him standing there that the past day had been difficult for him. Shifted, his thoughts came to me as a mishmash of images and emotions, but I picked up on the fact that he’d stayed in wolf form the entire time I was gone. He hadn’t said a word to any of the others, hadn’t even seen them.

But now I was back, and so was he.

Callum glanced from Chase to me, taking in the way my body had oriented itself naturally toward the wolf in the distance, the way that even as Callum assessed us, Chase walked slowly toward me, pulled in like a planet orbiting the sun.

“I’m sorry,” Callum said.

I couldn’t tell which one of us he was talking to.

“Sorry for what?” I asked.

Callum gave me a look so tender, so familiar that I could feel tears burning in my eyes. “For something that might happen and might not.”

I opened my mouth to ask another question, but the look on his face changed, his eyes narrowing and his eyebrows lifting in warning.

I knew Callum’s This Subject Is Closed look better than anyone. I’d been raised on that look.

I’d never liked it.

“Find Maddy, Bryn.” Callum turned back to his car, walking to join Sora in the front seat, continuing to talk as he did. “Before this is over, it’s going to get bloody, and the longer she’s out there alone, the worse it’s going to be.”

A few seconds later, he was gone, and Devon, Caroline, and I were standing in front of the restaurant in silence, Chase in wolf form at my side.

“Who
was
that?” Caroline said finally.

Devon glanced at the weapons on the ground and groaned. “Trust me, Caro. You don’t want to know.”