Raised by Wolves

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  The rest of the pack, however, was another story.

  “Most of the oldest wolves know,” Ali said. “None of the wives do. Devon doesn’t.”

  She knew me well enough to know that Dev was the one who mattered the most.

  “I take it Lake knows now?” Ali continued.

  “Maybe.”

  Had Lake even heard that part of Tom’s confession? The moment he’d mentioned that foreign alphas would be passing through the Wayfarer, she’d gone quiet and pale.

  “The Senate is meeting,” I said.

  “Senate,” Ali scoffed, purely out of reflex. “There’s nothing democratic about werewolves. Nothing.”

  She was right. This meeting would be like throwing a bunch of champion gladiators into a ring and telling them to talk out their differences over tea. A democracy sounded good in theory, but every time the Senate met, it threatened to be the last.

  All it would take is one alpha to decide that he was above it. Below it. Whatever. One dominant wolf curious to see if he could force his will on one of the others, absorb that territory into his own. Grow his pack’s numbers and power by taking someone else’s.

  By force.

  “Lake’s gone,” I said, thinking of those same men and the way the thought of them had sent her running—not because she was running away, but for the same reasons I’d forced myself to race her to the dock. To prove I was faster. Stronger. Tougher than anyone thought I was.

  Even me.

  “Gone?” Ali was startled. “Gone where? Does Mitch know?”

  I nodded. “She Shifted and took off for the mountains.” It was easy to picture Lake running. She was a honey-blonde wolf, a color you never would have seen in nature, and she was fierce. If I’d wanted to, I probably could have reached for her through my pack-bond, but I knew when to leave well enough alone.

  When Lake was ready to talk about it, she’d come back.

  “The Senate,” Ali said, and this time, her voice was tighter. Less sarcastic, more pained. “Some of them will have to pass through here to get to Callum. I take it Callum is the one who called them?”

  Callum was more or less the only one who ever called the Senate. The others were content to live as kings in their own territories. He was the one who’d declared them a council. This whole democracy thing was his idea. Given what I knew now about his so-called knack, I had to wonder if there was a reason for that move.

  Callum never did anything without a reason.

  “Lake doesn’t want to see anyone who passes through,” I said, refusing to think about Callum any more than I had to. “Mitch says male werewolves can get weird around females.”

  Ali’s silence wasn’t a surprised one. She’d known, then. I probably should have figured it out when Lake’s visits to Ark Valley had become fewer and further apart, the older we got.

  “Nobody will touch Lake without Callum’s say-so,” Ali said. “Not unless they’ve lost their minds.”

  Considering that Lake and I were currently tracking a Rabid, that was less than comforting. Disturbing, too, was the idea that some of the other alphas might be unstable enough to fall under the same classification, at least where female werewolves were concerned.

  “Callum wouldn’t let anyone hurt her,” I said.

  Ali tried to hide her incredulous look, but I saw it anyway, the way her mouth twisted to the side and her eyes widened, reminding me that he’d done more than let Sora hurt me.

  He’d told her to do it.

  “Callum’s more of a big-picture person, Bryn.” Ali’s voice was soft, and I got that she was trying to be gentle with me, trying to make me understand the situation in a way that would hurt me less, even though she had no desire to understand it herself. “Sometimes, for the future he wants, the details have to give.”

  The details. Like me.

  “I’m going to go,” I said. “To my room. It’s been a long day.”

  Ali nodded. “Love you, kiddo.”

  “I love you, too.”

  By the time I got to my room, I needed something to do—half so I could stop thinking about Callum and his so-called knack, and half so I wouldn’t start thinking about the fact that this wasn’t my room.

  The map provided a convenient distraction. I spread it out over my bed and stood on my knees over it. There had to be some pattern to the killing. If I’d had a ruler, I would have measured the distance between each of the kills. Instead, I played connect the dots, drawing a line from the first attack—the one against my parents—to the next chronologically, and then the next. I stopped when I got to Chase’s, and still, there weren’t any answers.

  There were more attacks in the West and Midwest than in the East. More in the North than in the South. But that still left a quarter of the country.

  A quarter that was divided among alphas, none of whom would have tolerated a lone wolf, let alone a Rabid, on their land.

  Maybe if he was at the edges of the territory? I thought. Things were certainly different at the Wayfarer than they were in Ark Valley. Using the same pen, I drew an outline over each of the territories. Callum had Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. California, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah were part of Desert Night territory. Snake Bend zigzagged from Arkansas up to to Wisconsin, looping back down for Illinois.

  As I finished tracing Shay’s territory, I paused, looking closer at the map. It was the kind that had geographical information on it as well as official boundaries: rivers, mountains, that kind of thing. I thought briefly of Lake, running for something she wouldn’t reach, but then I forced myself to concentrate.

  Callum had been in America longer than Colorado had been a state. I grappled with my memory, grasping at straws. Somewhere in my “surviving pack life” lessons, there’d been pack history.

  Rivers. Mountains. Lakes.

  That was it. Once upon a time, territories hadn’t been drawn along state lines. They’d been drawn along natural ones, and I remembered—almost remembered, couldn’t remember—something.

  Something Callum had told me about the borders of our territory. Of all territories.

  I forced myself to close my eyes. I pictured Callum and ignored the stinging in my throat. The phrase, if I could just remember the phrase …

  No-Man’s-Land.

  Triumph was sweet, the aftertaste bitter. I couldn’t have been older than six or seven when Callum had told me about it. There were places where the natural cutoffs didn’t line up well with state lines. A tiny slice of one state might be cut off from the rest of a territory by a river or by mountains. Hardly worth fighting over, but fighting was what Weres did about territory disputes, so in certain cases …

  The alphas had a gentlemen’s agreement to leave the land alone.

  The answer was so obvious that if I’d been any older during Callum’s little tutorial, I would have berated myself for not thinking of it sooner. With a smile, I took my pen and circled the tiny slices of the map that fell between boundaries, grateful that I’d managed to remember and that Callum had told me in the first place.

  In retrospect, though, it seemed like a weird thing to teach a kid who just wanted to learn how to tell a few lies and not get eaten.

  Sitting back, I examined my work. It wasn’t an answer. There were five relevant pockets of land that fell in the center of the Rabid’s attacks, each one so small that they weren’t labeled with any city names on the map. Now, I just needed to figure out which one the Rabid was using as his base of operations.

  A funny feeling wormed its way through my insides. It wasn’t entirely dissimilar to what I’d felt the night I’d run with the pack, or the starburst of determination in my brain when I’d realized that I needed to touch Chase, even if it meant breaking every rule.

  I was a predator, tracking her prey. I was hunting, the same way Weres took down smaller game.

  “I don’t need to hunt this Rabid.” I said the words out loud, trying to convince myself that they were true. Even i
f I knew where he was, killing him wasn’t my job. I wasn’t as well equipped to do it as Callum and the other alphas were, and this was what they were meeting about.

  The last time I’d rushed into something, things hadn’t ended well. I thought of Ali in the other room, thought of everything she’d given up for me. If I got myself killed, she’d be the furthest thing from okay, and the twins needed their mother.

  I had to wait. I had to let the Senate take care of this. If they knew what I knew, that this Rabid had been hunting on all of their lands, they’d want to take care of him as badly as I did. Any werewolf with even a lick of sense knew that challenging an alpha on his own turf was a good way to get yourself dead.

  I looked back at the map, and thought back to the words I’d sworn to Lake. If Callum’s not going to kill the Rabid, I will.

  Until and unless that happened, I needed to get rid of this feeling. I needed to step back, even if the part of me that had grown up Pack felt like stepping away from a kill was wrong. You didn’t come between a wolf and his prey, but I forced myself to let go of mine. Folding up the map, I wondered if I should share what I’d managed to uncover so far. I had no way of knowing if any of it was valid. No way of knowing how much of it—or how much more—Callum and the other alphas already knew.

  Exhausted, but knowing I wouldn’t be able to sleep, I leaned back in my bed. My breathing slowed, but my eyes didn’t close. I cleared my mind until Chase’s scent filled my nose.

  If my eyes hadn’t been open, I would have sworn he was there in the room with me, but he wasn’t. Even with five hundred miles between us, we were connected. It wasn’t all-consuming the way it had been in the minutes after I’d formed the connection, but it was there, and as I stared up at the ceiling, I became aware of the fact that somewhere, Chase was staring up at a starlit sky.

  I breathed in.

  He breathed in.

  As long as we were awake, there was no Rabid to haunt his mind, no memories to plague mine. There was just Chase and me and the uncannily comfortable silence of two people who felt as if they’d known each other for much longer than they actually had.

  I saw through his eyes. He saw through mine. And for the first time since we’d come here, I felt like I was home.

  Eventually, I did fall asleep, and in an ironic twist of fate, Chase wasn’t in my dreams and I wasn’t in his. In fact, my sleep was dreamless. Peaceful—until the sound of a heavy weight dropping onto my bedroom floor woke me up.

  Four-legger. Wolf.

  That was all it took for me to jump out of bed. I landed on my feet, and since I’d fallen asleep fully clothed, my knives were still sheathed to my calves. I had a silver blade in each hand before my eyes had even adjusted to the darkness. Moving on instinct, I put my back against the wall, scanning for the threat, and the moment I found it was the exact moment that the wolf in question slumped to the floor and melted into human form.

  Lake. Worn-out and naked. I couldn’t do anything for the former problem, but for both of our sakes, I shielded my eyes and rifled around in my suitcase until I found something that would fit her. The sweatpants were short on her and the tank top was too tight, but she didn’t complain.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Have a nice run?” I asked her. I would have asked her if she was okay if I hadn’t known for a fact that the answer was no. There was no sense in making her say it.

  “I’m tired,” Lake said. “Mind if I crash here tonight?”

  I doubted she was too tired to make it the additional hundred yards to her house, but I wasn’t about to turn her away. Lake needed a friend, and she needed Pack. Right now, I was pretty much the only person in the world who qualified as both.

  “Mi casa es su casa,” I said. “Literally. I’m pretty sure your dad owns it.”

  Lake managed a grin. “That make me your landlord?”

  I snorted. “Not hardly.”

  I sheathed my knives and sat back down on the bed.

  “Scootch over,” Lake told me.

  I obeyed. Part of me wanted to wait for her to say something, but given the fact that she’d come right out and asked me about the Callum situation, I figured I owed her the same courtesy.

  “So. Alphas passing through on their way to Callum’s, and that peripheral thought you should know because they might decide you’re worth fighting for.”

  Lake blew out a breath of air with so much force that her lips actually made a popping sound. “If they tried anything, I’d kill ’em.”

  “Still sucks, though,” I commented.

  Lake snorted.

  “Don’t want to talk about it?” I asked.

  Lake shook her head. “Sorry about crashing here. Was feeling kind of lonesome. When we were little, I used to sneak into Griff’s room all the time. Drove him nuts.”

  The rare mention of Lake’s twin took me by surprise. Anyone with the power of inference could tell just by looking at her that she’d had a brother once, since by definition, female Weres were always half of a set of twins. Sora’s was a male in our pack named Zade. Katie’s was Alex. Lake’s was dead.

  Thinking back, I couldn’t remember the last time Lake had mentioned Griffin, but I knew better than to comment on that fact.

  “I don’t mind the company,” I said instead. “I get it. You run to be alone. And when you’re done …”

  You don’t want to be alone anymore.

  I didn’t say the words out loud, but I pushed them toward her, not knowing if she’d hear them, since I was Chase’s first and Stone River’s second.

  “You figure out anything else about the Rabid?” Lake asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “There are some places that don’t technically belong to any of the alphas. He could be hiding out in one of those.”

  “You think the Senate knows where he is?” Lake asked.

  I didn’t answer. If they didn’t now, they would soon. There wasn’t a place in the country someone could hide from a dozen alphas once they had his scent.

  Burnt hair and men’s cologne.

  “We need to know what the Senate knows,” I said. “We need to hear what they say in that meeting.”

  Even in the dark, I could see Lake go sardonically wide-eyed. “Really? I never would have thought of that!”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “Well, if you’re going to be that way, then I’m not going to tell you my plan for eavesdropping.”

  “No more sarcasm. Scout’s honor.”

  I snorted. The idea of Lake in the Girl Scouts was something else. She’d have earned all of their badges and single-handedly destroyed their reputation within a week.

  “Bryn,” she prodded, her voice coming closer to the high-pitched whine of a dog begging to be let inside.

  Being the generous soul that I was, I gave in and provided her with the key to all of this. The thing I’d discovered earlier tonight. “Chase.”

  The two of us didn’t have to be asleep to enter each other’s minds. We just had to be still. If he could get close enough to overhear the alphas talking, I could eavesdrop on them myself.

  Two days. One for the alphas to get to Ark Valley. One for the meeting. Two days, and I’d have answers. Glancing out the side of my eye at Lake and thinking about everything she had and hadn’t said tonight, I decided it wouldn’t kill either one of us to stay inside and hidden until then.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  AFTER TWENTY-FOUR HOURS INDOORS, LAKE WAS SO twitchy I thought she’d implode, or, more likely, explode, leaving a variety of casualties in her wake. Since I had no desire to be blown to Bryn bits, I was as relieved as she was when Mitch declared the coast clear. Unfortunately, unlike Lake, I couldn’t take a romp through the forest in celebration, and I couldn’t follow her to the restaurant and lend a hand waiting tables.

  I had bigger fish to fry.

  If the coast was clear at the Wayfarer, that meant the alphas had arrived in Ark Valley. And that meant it was time to put Operation Eavesdrop in
to play. Like the old pro I was, I faked the stomach flu and talked Ali into letting me stay in bed all day. The secret to success, as it turned out, was oatmeal—even I thought I was throwing up as I hurled three quarters of a bowl of cooked oats into the toilet.

  After a little bit of wheedling and looking pathetic, I managed to convince Ali that she didn’t need to worry and that all I needed was the solitude and quiet to sleep off the flu, so—with a trash can beside my bed and the evidence/oatmeal hidden away from prying eyes—I bought myself a ticket to slumber land. Or, more precisely, to Chase.

  I told myself that it would be simple, that I’d just slip into his mind the way I had on numerous other occasions. I’d done it without even meaning to when I was unconscious; we’d done it in our dreams. But even as I tried to convince myself that this was nothing, a traitorous part of my brain whispered that the second I came within a hundred yards of this meeting, Callum would know—not because of his knack or because he was alpha, but because staying away had been one of the conditions he’d laid down. Long before I’d had any reason to want to attend this meeting, Callum had forbidden me from going. He might as well have dared me to be there.

  He had to have known that.

  As I lay back, my eyes on the ceiling, I wondered if double jeopardy applied in Pack Law. I’d already broken my permissions. What more could they do?

  “Deep breaths,” I muttered, willing my heart to quit bludgeoning my chest from the inside out. “You’re going to be fine.”

  What would they do to Chase if they caught us? What would they do to me?

  For a moment, I considered backing out, but like a neon sign, the image of a pigtailed little girl lit up in my mind. Madison.

  This wasn’t just about me anymore, and it wasn’t just about Chase and the way the Rabid stalked him through the night, refusing to let him forget even for a second who had the power and who’d been left gutted on the pavement.

  This stopped now. The attacks. The aftermath. The victims. It had to stop, and the alphas would take care of it. Once I heard it from their own mouths, maybe the ever-present roar in my gut—kill the Rabid, save them, fight, protect—might dissipate and die, and I could go back to being the girl who loved playing in other people’s trash and didn’t care much for dominance hierarchies and inter-pack relations.