“You brought me maps,” I repeated. “To help me sleep.”
“You’ll sleep better once you have a long-term plan,” he murmured, placing a hand on mine and dragging them both over the surface of the paper. “Maps. Plan.”
I got up on my knees to get a better look. It was easy enough to see the lines of the maps by lamplight, though if Ali had been there, she almost certainly would have told me that reading in these conditions would ruin my eyes.
Had I thought there was even the slightest chance that I would stay human long enough for that to matter, I might have cared.
Instead, I turned my full attention to Chase’s gift, sorting through the maps and arranging one next to the other until we had the whole of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Utah spread out in front of us.
I drew an invisible circle with the tip of my finger. “We’re here.” I dragged my finger downward. “No-Man’s-Land starts here, goes through Alpine Creek, and stretches up to the location of the last murder, here.”
I quickly outlined the borders of No-Man’s-Land.
“This side is Shadow Bluff territory.”
Idaho.
“Cedar Ridge.”
Montana.
“And Stone River starts here. There’s another slice of No-Man’s-Land between Stone River and Luna Mesa here.”
Before Maddy had left, I’d advised her to stick to our territory, or Callum’s. Whether or not she’d listened was another matter. From the moment she’d told me she was leaving, she’d seemed certain that she was fully capable of staying off the beaten path, that wherever she was going, no one else would or could follow.
“When I have to get away, I go for the mountains.” Lake took a seat on the other side of the maps, stretching out her mile-long legs and eyeing our handiwork. “I usually turn around before I get there, but it’s nice to have someplace to run to.”
Mountains? Right now we were smack-dab in the center of the Rockies. Even if Maddy had headed for the mountains, we had no idea of knowing which ones.
“Why mountains?” I asked, hoping Lake’s answer might jog something loose in my mind. I’d always wondered, but never asked about her tendency to Shift and run off into the night. Like Griffin, Lake’s occasional need for space wasn’t exactly the kind of thing we discussed.
“It’s quiet there.” Until Lake actually said those words, I hadn’t been sure she would answer, but once she started talking, she didn’t seem inclined to stop. “You pick the right mountain, and you could get lost forever: just you and the rocks and the sky. The higher it is and the harder it is to get to, the less chance you have of running into other people. Or werewolves.”
A glint of metal caught my eye, and I changed the subject to one I knew Lake would be more comfortable with.
“That Matilda?” I hadn’t gotten a good look at the shotgun Lake was currently cleaning, but her old standby had the status of a ratty old teddy bear or favorite pet.
“Nope,” Lake said, not missing a beat. “This is Abigail. She’s new.”
The second Lake started naming weapons, Chase pressed another kiss to my temple and then made himself scarce. He seemed to sense that it had been a while since Lake and I had time for girl talk.
“Abigail, huh?” I said.
Lake grinned. “I named yours Greta.”
Of course she did.
“Hey, Lake. Do you and Caroline ever talk weapons?” I don’t know what possessed me to ask that question, except for the fact that as long as I’d known Lake, she’d been one hell of a shot, and most days, Caroline’s knack seemed to be her single most defining feature.
Lake snorted. “Bryn, you might not have noticed this, but Caroline doesn’t talk. Except to Devon, and that’s only when she’s trying to get him to shut up.”
Actually, I hadn’t noticed Caroline and Devon talking at all. It made me wonder what else I had missed, wrapped up in pack business and blind to anything else.
“It’s not fair.” The sudden fierceness in Lake’s tone caught me off guard. If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought her eyes were wet with unshed tears.
“The fact that Devon never shuts up?” I joked, knowing better than to act like I’d noticed the emotion on her face.
Lake shook her head. I waited.
“If Maddy was a guy, the worst they could do is kill her.” Lake shoved her gun to the side. “Now, there’s nowhere she can run that they won’t find her, if we don’t find her first. It’s not right, and it’s not fair, and goddamn it, we shouldn’t have to do this.”
Lake rubbed the heel of her hand roughly over her face, dashing away her tears. “She’s our friend, and if it wasn’t for Shay wanting her, wanting me—if it wasn’t for that, he never would have pulled that crap with Lucas in the first place. He wouldn’t have tried to kill you, and you wouldn’t have had to kill Lucas, and Maddy wouldn’t have lost her freaking mind. She wouldn’t have lost control, and we wouldn’t have to sit here, polishing our weapons and looking at this stupid map.”
Lake slammed her elbow back into a tree trunk, hard enough to break her skin. I forgot sometimes that I wasn’t the only one with things on her mind, that Maddy wasn’t just my responsibility or my friend.
In fact, I had a sinking suspicion that parts of this outburst had been building up inside Lake for a very long time, and this was the first time she’d had someone to listen.
“It’s not just me. Or Maddy. It’s Phoebe, and it’s Sage, and someday it’s going to be Katie and Lily and Sloane—”
She stopped short of rattling off all of their names, one by one, but my mind completed the task, and I realized that if Lake had known I was planning on voluntarily becoming a Were—a female Were—she would have slapped me silly and shot me in the kneecap, just for good measure.
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.