Is it Maddy?
Callum met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “The answer is yes.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
CALLUM PARKED THE CAR IN FRONT OF THE WAYFARER 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 suddenly 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 running, 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.