Taken by Storm: A Raised by Wolves Novel

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Lake never had a choice about what she was, and in the world we lived in, with the numbers the way they were, things would never, ever be fair.

  “Shay’s not getting within a hundred yards of Maddy,” I said, because that was the only thing I could give her, the only promise I might be able to keep. “No one is getting to Maddy, because we’re going to find her first.”

  Even if she’d gone Rabid.

  Even if she was the monster who’d painted those white walls red with blood.

  Even if the person she really wanted to tear limb from limb—the reason she wanted vengeance—was me.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THAT NIGHT, I COULDN’T BREATHE INSIDE THE TENT. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t think. We still didn’t have a plan, and when exhaustion finally beat back everything else competing for space in my mind, I fell into a nightmare, the kind that followed you seamlessly from one dream to the next.

  I was running. Someone was chasing me.

  Something.

  Hands grabbed my shoulders. Nails that might have been claws dug into my arms, but I couldn’t feel the pain. I couldn’t feel anything.

  Suddenly, the forest disappeared, and I was sitting at a wrought-iron table that had been painted white. My hands were folded neatly in my lap. My legs were crossed at the ankles. Stiff, lacy fabric crinkled as I shifted in my seat.

  The girl sitting across from me, dressed in a frilly frock identical to my own, was Maddy. She reached forward, and a tiny china teapot materialized. With dainty hands and an expressionless face, she poured my tea and then her own.

  The light all around us was bright, almost unbearable, but in the corners of the room, there were shadows, and in the shadows, there were eyes.

  Unperturbed, Maddy lifted her teacup upward. With shaking hands, I reached for my own.

  “It’s not what you think,” Maddy said.

  For a second, I thought she was trying to tell me that I’d misconstrued everything that had happened in the past few days, that she wasn’t the monster we were hunting, and relief washed over my body, pleasant and warm.

  A smile cut across Maddy’s features, sharp where they were round. Her teeth gleamed, the exact shade of porcelain as the teacups.

  “It’s not what I think,” I said, in a singsong voice that didn’t feel like my own.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  I brought the teacup to my lips, and that was when I realized—

  We weren’t drinking tea. The cup was filled with blood.

  I woke with a start, no more capable of screaming than I had been when I was caught in the midst of the dream. This was what came of Jed’s little lessons. Once you let yourself be scared, once you opened up the door to the darkest parts of your psyche—

  There it was.

  Not wanting to disturb the others, I glanced around the tent. Chase and Lake were missing—no surprise there. They didn’t need shelter of any kind to feel at home in the woods. Jed was snoring on the far side of the tent, and in between us, Caroline was fast asleep.

  Her eyes were open.

  Somehow, it didn’t surprise me that she was the only person I’d ever met who could bring that particular cliché to life. In sleep, she looked even more doll-like than usual: perfect and petite, with eyes so big and round that her eyelids only covered them halfway.

  Given the dream I’d just had, the last thing I wanted to think about was dolls. Ignoring the chill crawling up my spine, I slipped out of my sleeping bag and tiptoed out into the night.

  The sky had cleared enough that I could see the stars overhead, like fireflies trapped in glass. I wondered if Maddy could see them, wherever she was. I wondered if there was even a small part of her that was still Maddy, if there was anything left of the girl I’d known at all.

  Where are you, Maddy?

  I sent the words off into the night, knowing they’d never reach her. Our minds weren’t connected anymore. The phantom I’d seen in my dream was just that—a phantom, the by-product of opening the floodgates and trying in vain to dam them back up, only succeeding halfway.

  If I hadn’t severed the pack-bond and withdrawn my mind from Maddy’s, we could have actually shared dreams. I could have seen her, talked to her. I could have asked her why. Instead, I was left with my own twisted subconscious and no way into Maddy’s mind at all.

  Lightning struck in the distance, so far away that it was nothing but a dull flash of light on the horizon. I waited for the sound of thunder, but it never came. Instead, a chain reaction went off in my brain, and I remembered the last time nightmares had kept me up at night.

  Those nightmares had been real.

  And the person who’d orchestrated them?

  He’d had a knack for getting under people’s skin and entering their dreams, the way I could sneak peeks at my pack’s.

  I might not be able to connect with Maddy, but that didn’t mean she was off the grid altogether.

  This time, when I went back into the tent, I was able to close my eyes. I was able to sleep. Because the person who’d spent the better part of last fall haunting my nightmares, the one who might have stood a fighting chance at finding Maddy, or at the very least, her dreams—

  He owed me. Big time.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “CHANGE OF PLANS,” I TOLD LAKE, WHO HAD “WEAPoned up” in anticipation of the morning’s adventures. “You, Caroline, and Chase are going to scout out the Rabid’s old house in Alpine Creek.”

  I paused.

  “Wilson’s house,” I corrected myself.

  Samuel Wilson had been the Rabid in my mind for so long: the one, the only. Referring to him by name felt wrong, but with another killer on the loose, it seemed simpler—unless I wanted to give in and start referring to the current Rabid as Maddy.

  She wasn’t the only one there when that boy was killed. I clung to that thought, seesawing back and forth between believing that Maddy had lost it and hoping that, despite appearances, she had not.

  Chase had smelled something else at that house. A partner? An intruder? A demon plaguing her mind?

  There’s no such thing as demons, I thought, but I could still see the Maddy of my dreams, sipping blood from a teacup. Six months ago, I would have sworn she wasn’t capable of murder. Two years ago, I would have told you with a straight face that there was no such thing as someone who could see the future or a woman who could control other people’s thoughts.

  At this point, we really couldn’t rule anything out.

  “See what you can find at the old house,” I told Lake, sticking to the task at hand and banishing the trip down memory lane until later. “Check the woods, too, but lie low.”

  The last thing we needed was anyone from Alpine Creek recognizing that two of my three scouts had been there before.

  “If Maddy’s there, call me. If you see anything, if you smell anything, if you even think you might remember something that could lead us to her, call me.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.” Lake gave a lazy little salute, but the set of her jaw told me that she was glad to be doing something—and that she would have followed me straight to the ends of the earth if I’d asked her to.

  “Where are you going?” Caroline announced her presence with a question. Unlike Lake, our human companion didn’t trust me to hand out orders.

  “Me?” I asked, figuring that it served her right for eavesdropping.

  “No, not you. The other insomniac mutt-lover in the vicinity.” The term mutt-lover should have made me angry, and it should have brought up bad memories, but instead, it

  sounded almost like a nickname. Caroline sounded almost human.

  “Well, half-pint,” I said, matching her nickname/slur for nickname/slur, “I’m hoping Jed will take me to see an old friend.”

  “And what old friend might that be?” Jed sounded only mildly put out that I’d already started breaking up the crew, when he’d been sent along specifically for adult supervision.

  I took that as a
good sign and turned around. “Do you keep in touch with the rest of the coven?” I asked him.

  Jed mulled over the question, his stare telling me that there was only a fifty-fifty chance I’d get an answer. “Some, yes,” he said finally. “Some, no.”

  Before Caroline’s psychotic mother had come along, married the coven’s leader, and had him killed, the group of psychics had lived together as a family. But under her influence, they’d done horrible things, and besides Caroline and Jed, who had stayed at the Wayfarer, the rest had scattered to the wind the moment Valerie’s psychic influence had worn off.

  “Who exactly are you wanting me to take you to see?”

  I gave Jed a stare of my own, one that I hoped told him that if he didn’t help me, I’d find some other way to do it on my own. And then I smiled in a way I hoped he would find at least a little bit endearing.

  “Remember Archer?”

  I didn’t know Archer’s last name. I wasn’t sure how old he was, or what he’d been doing in the months since I’d seen him last.

  Right now I didn’t care.

  He slid into the booth across from me. Jed had chosen our rendezvous point. The others had dropped us off, and calling this particular diner a dive would have been generous. Over in the corner, the old man dropped two quarters into an old-fashioned jukebox, leaving Archer and me some semblance of privacy.

  I didn’t beat around the bush. We’d spent enough time coming here to meet him—with the clock ticking, there was no time to waste.

  “You stalked me.” I opted for bluntness over charm. “You tormented me, you tried to burn me in my sleep, and unless my memory is mistaken, at one point when we were awake, you actually set me on fire.”

  The Archer I’d known—the one who’d dogged my dreams and played mind games with me, literally—was caustic. He was half seduction, half sadist, and he hadn’t seen me as a person, because Valerie hadn’t wanted him to.

  Caroline’s mother—Ali’s mother—had possessed a knack for manipulating other people’s emotions. She’d tempered Archer’s toward me with equal parts hatred, curiosity, and disgust.

  But now he was just a guy—older than me, but younger than Ali—and I was the one playing with his emotions.

  Specifically, his guilt.

  “You didn’t come all of this way just to yell at me,” Archer said, though his tone suggested that he wouldn’t have had a problem with it if I had. “And if you’re trying to get me to say that I owe you, then you’re right.”

  That was easier than I’d thought it would be.

  “I need you to find someone for me,” I said.

  “I don’t find people.” Archer fiddled with a sugar packet, flicking it back and forth over his index finger and his thumb.

  “But you can find their dreams.” I didn’t wait for a reply. “You can talk to them. You can manipulate what they see. You can, if memory serves correctly, set them on fire—”

  “You’re really not going to let that go, are you?” he asked. From the look on his face, I thought he might have been joking, but I wasn’t sure.

  “I need you to find a specific person’s dreams,” I said.

  “And then what do you need me to do?” Archer leaned back against the booth, his eyes dull, and I realized that he thought I was going to ask for something else, that I was going to use him the way Valerie had.

  As a weapon.

  “That’s it,” I said. “I just need you to find her dreams and tell me what you see. Talk to her, see if she’s okay, try to get her to tell you where she is.”

  “Consider it done.” Archer looked like I’d challenged him to a game of chess. “Whose dreams am I finding?”

  I told him and debated whether or not to mention the fact that we had no guarantee Maddy was the same person she’d been when she’d left the pack, and had every reason in the world to think that she wasn’t.

  “If you can’t give me a general idea of where her body is, I’m going to need something that belongs to her. Clothing is best, or maybe a piece of her hair?”

  Did he seriously think that I carried around an inventory of hair for every person in my pack?

  I was saved from asking that question out loud by the telltale buzz of my phone against my hip. Withdrawing it from the pocket of my jeans, I noticed that I had a text from an unknown number.

  SHE WAS HERE.

  For a split second, I thought the universe—or possibly Shay—was taunting me with vague declarations about Maddy’s location, but then I realized that of the group I’d sent to Alpine Creek, Caroline was the only one not in danger of destroying a cell phone the moment she Shifted.

  HOW LONG AGO DID SHE LEAVE? I typed back.

  DON’T KNOW. The reply came almost immediately, and it was followed by an addendum, which set the phone to buzzing once more. LAKE SMELLS BLOOD.

  Caroline and I were going to have to have a serious conversation about her texting habits. Seriously. “She was here”? “Lake smells blood”? These kinds of things merited a phone call.

  Glancing back up at Archer, I noticed that he had a funny smile on his face. “I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen you actually look your age,” he told me.

  Right. Because texting was so very teen.

  Unsure whether he’d find me making a phone call equally amusing, I dialed Caroline’s number.

  She answered on the third ring and cut right to the chase. “Maddy was here, but she’s not anymore. Lake smells blood. I want to go inside, but Chase and Lake seemed to think we should ask you first.”

  Blood? Check.

  Potentially rabid werewolf? Check.

  Of course Caroline wanted to go inside.

  “How far away from the house are you guys?” I asked, uncertain how close Lake would have had to get in order to pick up on the scent.

  “We’re about a hundred yards out.”

  My breath caught in my throat. At that distance, if Lake was smelling blood, it meant one of two things: either there was a lot of blood, or it was fresh.

  “Archer,” I said.

  “Yes?” His amusement seemed to have dwindled, based on the content of my conversation.

  “Three questions,” I said, ticking them off on my fingers as I spoke. “One: do you have a car? Two: do you have plans tonight? And three: how fast can you drive?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE BLOOD WASN’T HUMAN AND IT WASN’T FRESH, but it was everywhere. The entire cabin smelled like copper and rotting meat. The floorboards—wooden and rotting themselves—had soaked up most of the actual liquid, but there was splatter on every wall in the house.

  “You,” Archer said, coming in on my heels and appraising the “decorations,” “live a very strange life.”

  I couldn’t exactly argue the point. Chase and Lake were waiting out in the forest. This much blood—even if it was animal blood, even if it was old—might have been too much for the predators inside them, and that wasn’t a chance any of us could afford to take, so that left Jed, Caroline, and me to appraise the inside of the cabin—with Archer tagging along.

  “What happened here?” I couldn’t keep myself from asking the question. The pattern of gore made it look like something had been eviscerated.

  Maybe multiple somethings.

  “There aren’t any bodies.” Even Caroline sounded disturbed, and that couldn’t possibly have been a good thing. “There’s nothing but blood.”

  As we walked from room to room, I noted the way Archer kept his distance from Caroline, and the way that Jed never took his eyes off Archer.

  Four psychics walk into a rotting cabin….

  I didn’t let myself finish the joke. Instead, I tried to piece together what had happened here. Someone had been living in this cabin—most likely Maddy. How long ago had she left? What had she done while she was here? Was she the one who’d painted these walls red with blood?

  In the corner of the back bedroom, I spotted a bundle of blankets. As I knelt down to investigate,
I saw a small brown tuft of fur. For a split second, I froze, but after ascertaining that the tuft wasn’t moving, I nudged it with the tip of my shoe, revealing the rest.

  A teddy bear.

  It was old, worn, and missing both eyes, and I was fairly certain someone had made a regular habit of gnawing on its ear.

  “Who lives here?” Archer asked.

  I picked up the teddy bear, running my thumb over the edge of its worn fur and wondering if it had belonged to one of my kids.

  “No one lives here,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  I grabbed the blankets, too, and headed back out to the woods. I’d seen enough. Remembered enough.

  This place had been steeped in blood long before someone had taken to slaughtering animals here. Wilson had seen to that, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend any more time than I had to imagining what life would have been like for the kids in my pack, growing up under a psychopath’s thumb.

  The last thing I wanted to think about was Maddy coming here, because she couldn’t come home.

  Wordlessly, Chase took the blankets from me. Lake took the teddy bear. Without my even having to ask, they lifted their respective targets to their faces and inhaled. My mind was flooded with their impressions.

  Running water. Fresh-cut grass. Maddy.

  She didn’t smell like us anymore, but she didn’t smell like a killer, either. If anything, she smelled a little bit like—

  “Shampoo,” Lake declared out loud. “Drugstore shampoo—the cheap kind. Smells like she used the whole bottle.”

  “How long ago was she here?” I asked. “Can you tell?”

  Lake looked at Chase.

  “It’s hard to be sure,” Chase said. “She slept on these blankets every night, so her scent would be strong, regardless.”

  I digested that piece of information. There was no shortage of beds and cots in Wilson’s cabin, but Maddy—who’d come back here for reasons I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around—had slept on the floor.