Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  Ali was dumbfounded. Obviously, this wasn’t the response she’d been expecting. Before she could formulate a reply or press me for answers, I bounded off the bed and went in search of clean clothes.

  “Where are you going?” she called after me.

  “First, I’m getting dressed,” I called back. “And then I’m going to see what Lake is up to. I have a project for her.”

  The day before, our best lead to the Rabid had been Chase, but today, I had more. I had a mental image of a girl. I had a name. And I had a deep and abiding suspicion that if my family had been the Rabid’s first set of victims, and Chase was his most recent, they weren’t alone.

  Somewhere along the line, the Big Bad Wolf had attacked someone else, too. Her name was Madison.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  LAKE AND I SET UP SHOP IN THE RESTAURANT. I ordered cheese fries; Lake got a triple-bacon cheeseburger. Breakfast of champions, all the way.

  “I take it you have a plan, Picasso?” Lake asked, after she’d had her way with the burger. I ignored her for a few seconds, putting the finishing touches on the face I was sketching on a napkin. Given the limitations of (a) my skill and (b) my current medium, the likeness wasn’t a bad one.

  “This girl,” I told Lake. “The Rabid was thinking about her last night. I think she’s one of his victims.”

  When the Rabid attacked my family, I’d gotten away unharmed.

  Chase had nearly died.

  Somehow, I didn’t think that the Rabid’s other victims had been so lucky. In the past thousand years, only a handful of humans had survived a major werewolf attack long enough to go Were themselves, and Chase was a lot older than the girl I’d seen in his mind and in the Rabid’s.

  Stronger.

  “Okay,” Lake said cheerfully. “We’ve got a face on a napkin.” I could practically hear an unspoken is it time to shoot someone yet? on the end of that sentence, but I pressed on.

  “We have a picture, and we have a name.”

  MADISON, I wrote in all capital letters on the napkin.

  “And,” I continued as I wrote, “if she’s one of this guy’s victims, her body was either found torn apart by wild animals, or he hid her bones after eating the rest of her.”

  Anyone else probably would have balked at my bluntness, but Lake just twirled her blonde hair around her right index finger and nodded.

  “Google?” she asked.

  “Unless you have a better starting place,” I replied, “then, yes. You guys have wireless in here?”

  Lake leaned back and grinned, slinging her arm over the back of our booth. “What do you think we are, heathens? Course we have wireless.”

  Most of the older Weres were technologically resistant, but I’d grown up with the internet and so had Lake. Together, we probably knew more about technology than the entire old guard of Stone River combined.

  We also had laptops.

  It was early enough in the day that the rest of the restaurant was empty, save for Keely, and if she thought the sight of two teenagers surfing the internet in a werewolf bar was a bit odd, she certainly didn’t say so.

  “I’ll start by searching news stories. You see if you can find some kind of missing-persons database in case our girl’s body was never found.”

  “Anybody ever tell you you’re bossy?” Lake asked.

  “That a rhetorical question?” I returned, while entering the words Madison, wolf attack, dead OR missing, and girl into the search field.

  “Nope,” Lake replied, her own fingers moving lazily across the keys. “Not a rhetorical question.”

  “In that case, yes. I’ve been told on occasion that I’m bossy.”

  “Thought so.”

  The two of us fell into silence as we combed through our search results. Fifteen minutes later, I reached for a cheese fry, only to find the plate empty. I shot arrows at Lake with my eyes, but she just grinned.

  You snooze, you lose. It was practically wolf law.

  “You finding anything?” Lake asked.

  I shook my head. “Nope. You?”

  “I’ve checked two missing-children databases and none of them have a Madison that looks a thing like your girl there.” Lake paused, the perpetual motion of her body stilling. “Lot of missing kids out there,” she added.

  Frustrated that my plan hadn’t yielded even a smidgen of a lead, I switched from surfing news stories to searching images. Since the missing-children databases hadn’t turned up our girl, I tried a new combination of words.

  Madison, in loving memory

  A couple of clicks had the search engine displaying a hundred images per page, and fourteen pages and half an hour in, I saw her. Hands shaking, I clicked on the picture and followed the link.

  Madison Covey, age six

  She had light blonde hair, tied into pigtails for the picture. Her eyes were bluer and less gray than they’d been in my dream, but the resemblance was unmistakable. Someone had erected an online shrine for our Madison.

  Ten years ago.

  “Find something?” Lake asked.

  I didn’t answer, not right away. I just did the mental math. If she’d lived, Madison would have been a year older than me.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” Lake swung over to my side of the booth, and she leaned her head over so that the side of her forehead touched mine. Together, we scrolled down the page. It wasn’t the kind of information I’d hoped to find. No police reports. No detailed descriptions of her body after the attack. Just a picture of the girl and information about her favorites: favorite colors (orange and blue), favorite foods (macaroni and cheese), favorite thing to do with bubble wrap (pop it).

  We miss you, Maddy.

  I closed my eyes, seeing Chase and seeing this girl through the Rabid’s eyes.

  “He killed her.” I tried to pull myself away from the little girl’s face, tried not to wonder if she’d been hiding under a sink when he found her, or if he’d dragged her body into the forest to celebrate his kill.

  “She lived in Nevada,” I said. “Not Callum’s territory.”

  “Odell’s,” Lake supplied. “The Desert Night Pack. They smell like sandstone and fish.”

  Not a pleasant combination, or one that made any amount of sense, but that’s the way it was with foreign packs. None of them smelled good. They weren’t supposed to. They were foreign. They were threats. Wolves from our pack probably didn’t smell any better to them.

  “Looks like this Rabid is an equal-opportunity hunter,” I said. “I was attacked in Colorado. Chase is from—”

  Where was Chase from?

  Kansas.

  The answer was enough to make me close my eyes, letting a blink last longer than it otherwise would have.

  Somewhere in Ark Valley, Chase was awake.

  “Chase is from Kansas,” I said. “Rim of Callum’s territory.”

  “You and Madison were both little girls. Your parents were obviously adults. Chase is a teenage boy. What’s the pattern?”

  There were few things in life more frightening than a werewolf who watched Law and Order.

  “Multiple states, multiple territories. There is no pattern, unless …”

  I didn’t finish my sentence, and I didn’t have to. Lake was already there.

  “Unless there are more.”

  Not just Chase and Madison and me. What if there had been others? If this Rabid hunted across territories and never stayed in one place for long, he could have been doing this for years. But how was that even possible? Weres just didn’t think like that. Wolves had territories. Even lone ones.

  Even Rabids.

  They didn’t just drift from state to state, hunting humans unnoticed.

  My fingers made their way back to the keys, and I opened a new window. Now that I had a last name and a town, maybe I could track down a news story, a police report, anything.

  Lunch came and went. I had another order of cheese fries. Lake had another triple-bacon cheeseburger. Keely didn’t say a
word. Slowly, the restaurant began to fill up. Humans, mostly. The peripheral Were from the Snake Bend Pack. Another Were that I recognized as one of Callum’s.

  By late afternoon, Lake and I had an MO. Hundreds of people had been killed by wolves in the past decade. A small subset of them—all children—had been attacked in cities or towns where there were no native wolf populations. Many of the victims had died on the spot. Others, like Madison Covey, had been dragged off into the woods, bleeding all the way, no more than scraps of flesh recovered to identify their bodies.

  And then there were the thousands of missing children about whom nothing was known. There one day, gone the next. For all we knew, some of them had fallen to our Rabid, too.

  One thing was certain: Chase and I were outliers. He was the oldest. At four, I would have been the youngest, and my parents were the only adults.

  At one point, Lake rustled up a map and a pen. We spread it out over our table, marking each of the attacks that fit our Rabid’s pattern.

  Maybe we didn’t know what we were doing. Maybe two kids with an internet connection and a lot of time on their hands couldn’t track a serial killer, even if they knew what to look for better than any police department would.

  But maybe we were right.

  I had no idea what to do about it. For minutes at a time, maybe hours, I stared at the map. We’d marked kills in every territory, but the most were in Callum’s and the two adjacent territories: those belonging to Odell and Shay. The attacks zigzagged out from some invisible central point, and I cursed the fact that I’d taken algebra instead of geometry this year in school.

  Tell me where you are, I said silently.

  There was no reply. I hadn’t really expected one.

  “You girls hungry?” Keely asked, wrapping back by our booth, the way she did every hour or so to check on us.

  I nodded. Lake grunted.

  “The usual?” Keely asked, her voice dry.

  I shook my head. “Pie?” I asked Lake.

  She nodded. “Pie.”

  Five minutes later, we had our pie, but this time, Keely didn’t disappear after delivering it. “Do I want to know what you two are up to?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Probably not.”

  Keely put a hand on her hip. “This about that Rabid?”

  “Yup.”

  “Sure is.”

  Lake and I paused, meeting eyes and wondering how exactly it was that Keely had tricked an honest answer out of us. I, for one, hadn’t had any intention of telling her a thing.

  Keely held up a hand. “You know what? I don’t want to know. Lake, you have company. Let me know if you need help disabusing him of any notions.”

  I was still stuck on wondering how exactly Keely had pried the truth from our lips, when her words sunk in. Company? What kind of company?

  And that’s when it washed over me: wolf. Foreign. Wrong.

  I straightened in my seat, hackles raised. Lake didn’t adjust her posture at all, but underneath the table, I saw her hand move, and for the first time, I noticed that she’d brought Matilda with her this morning.

  “Now, why do you have to go and reach for the gun?” the peripheral from yesterday asked her. He was tall and broad, and I deeply suspected that in wolf form, he’d be almost as large as Devon. “And here we’ve been getting along so well.”

  Lake smiled, slow and sure, a look that meant she was getting ready to either flirt or attack. I braced myself for either or both.

  “You’re just sour because I beat the tar out of you at pool.” Lake smiled, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and in a motion too quick for me to track, whipped out her shotgun, aiming it squarely at the foreign wolf’s nose.

  “I thought you said it paid to have friends,” I reminded her.

  Lake didn’t blink. “It does. If Tom and I weren’t friends, he might be trying to prove that he’s the stronger wolf, and I might be making the reverse argument with the help of my gun.”

  He blinked twice and then laughed, but didn’t sound entirely comfortable. There was an edge in Lake’s voice, one that told him to take her threat seriously. He was male, he was bigger, and he was probably stronger—but she was armed.

  I really hoped this wasn’t going to degenerate into a dominance squabble, though in retrospect, it was probably too much to hope that I’d left that behind.

  As if sensing my thoughts, the foreign wolf turned his attention to me. “You’re Callum’s Bryn,” he said shortly.

  I met his gaze. I refused to look away. I managed not to think about Sora. I managed not to think about the fact that if he wanted to, this man could squash me in a second.

  “I used to be,” I replied.

  “Hey, buddy. Eyes on me.” Lake was the protective type and the jealous type. I wasn’t sure which had her forcing the foreigner’s eyes back to hers. If he challenged anyone, her posture seemed to be saying, it would be her.

  Personally, I wouldn’t have laid money on his odds.

  “The alphas have been called,” he said after a long moment, never moving, never taking his gaze from hers. “Stands to reason some of them will be passing through on their way to Callum’s.”

  Lake didn’t blink. She didn’t move. She also didn’t cock the trigger of her gun, and her “friend” took that as encouragement. “I thought you’d want to know.”

  Lake didn’t reply, but after a long moment, she put down the gun, her suntanned face going ashen white.

  “Why’s the Senate going to Ark Valley?” I asked, even though I deeply suspected we had the answer spread out on the table in front of us, marked with Xs and stars.

  “Callum called ’em,” the Were replied, taking his eyes from Lake to look back at me.

  I tossed my ponytail over my shoulder. I knew how to do this. If you needed answers, you had to stand your ground.

  I could do this.

  “And why did Callum call ’em?” I asked.

  The Were shrugged. Keely took that moment to refill my coffee, and as her shoulder brushed the man’s, he shrugged again and started talking. “Who knows? With the old man, chances are as good as they aren’t that it’s for something that hasn’t even happened yet.”

  The old man. Even among his own kind, Callum was older than most. Stronger, too. But the last part of that sentence …

  “Why would he call a meeting about something that hasn’t happened yet?”

  The man shrugged, like it was becoming a compulsion. “Because he knows it will.”

  I still wasn’t following. Fortunately, someone was.

  “Are you saying Callum’s psychic?” Keely asked quietly, sounding a measure less incredulous than I felt when I heard the question. Alphas were connected to their packs. They saw through eyes that weren’t their own. They were strong.

  But they weren’t psychic.

  “I’m not saying a thing,” the Were said as if he couldn’t figure out how exactly he’d managed to say as much as he already had. “But, yeah. You don’t get to be Callum’s age or have a pack that big without an edge.”

  Keely set my coffee cup back down and then moved on to the next table, and the Were stopped talking. His forehead wrinkled as he took in the full sight of our table. “What are you two doing anyway?” he asked.

  I expected Lake to reply, but she didn’t. She’d gone ashen at the announcement about the alphas and hadn’t yet recovered.

  “We’re plotting world domination,” I said, covering for her, wondering what was wrong, even as my own mind was muddled with possibilities I’d never considered. About Callum. About Ali’s assertion that Callum had known what my permissions would lead to, long before he’d ever granted them. “It takes more planning than one might think.”

  Werewolves could smell lies, but most of them were significantly dicier on the subject of sarcasm.

  “I should go.” Lake rushed the words into each other, and then, in a blur, she was gone, shotgun and all. The moment she left, I became aware of how cl
ose this foreign wolf was to me, how awful he smelled, how jarring his presence was to my pack-sense.

  I didn’t show it. I just sat there, and after four seconds, or five, and one hard look from Keely, he backed slowly away. I reached for my coffee cup and didn’t notice until I picked it up that my hand was trembling. I reached out my other hand, steadying the cup, and then I brought it slowly to my lips, digesting what I’d just heard.

  The alphas were coming. The Senate had been called.

  Callum may or may not have been psychic.

  And Lake was nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  GOING AFTER LAKE WAS EASIER SAID THAN DONE. I dropped our stuff back at Cabin 4, where my family and I were staying, and then I tried to figure out which of the other houses dotting the horizon was hers. Based on the number of them on the property, Mitch was either an impressive businessman or really bad about picking up strays. At some point, the Wayfarer appeared to have evolved from a restaurant/bar to some kind of inn.

  Or possibly a halfway house.

  None of which told me where Lake was, or why she’d run off in the first place. Either I’d missed something in her interaction with the wolf named Tom—and I didn’t think I had—or she was upset about the Senate meeting. Or what Tom had said about Callum.

  Or both.

  Until I knew what had upset her and why, I couldn’t judge whether it would be better to give her space or hunt her down, keep her out of trouble or get into some with her. Looking for her gave me an excuse not to think about the bombshells Tom had dropped.

  Tracking had never been my strong suit, but I knew enough to start where I’d lost track of my prey to begin with. The dirt path up to the restaurant was well trod, and I wouldn’t have been able to pick out Lake’s tracks were it not for the fact that most of the other patrons of this fine establishment followed the trinity of instructions on the front door: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service.

  That had to have been Keely’s doing. Werewolves weren’t particular on the topic of dress, or lack thereof.

  Lake’s imprint was light in the dirt, which told me she’d been running full speed, her feet barely touching the ground as she bolted. When the drive gave way to fields of grass, I followed the trajectory she’d been taking before until I hit a more densely wooded area. I found her clothes in shreds, scattered with the force of her forward momentum, her shotgun abandoned beside them.