Something isn’t right.
I didn’t know what it was, so I kept running—through forest after forest, with changing scenery, changing leaves. Abruptly, Maddy stopped running. I stopped running, too. I walked toward her, weightless and light on my toes. Her brown hair was straight and neat, not a strand out of place. Her clothes were dirty and torn, but there was grace to Maddy’s stance, the tilt of her head.
I reached out to touch her shoulder, and my hand passed right through.
“It’s my fault,” Maddy said, without turning around. “Everywhere I go, it never stops.” She turned her head to the side, until I could see her profile in the shadows. “You shouldn’t touch me.”
I couldn’t touch her. Whether that was the work of her subconscious or mine, I wasn’t sure.
“Everything I touch dies,” Maddy said, the words quiet, but distinct.
Suddenly, the two of us weren’t in the forest anymore. We were in a cabin. Samuel Wilson’s cabin, in Alpine Creek.
There was blood everywhere—fresh blood.
“I didn’t do it,” Maddy said. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Maddy.” I tried to touch her arm again and failed. “Where are you?”
She didn’t answer, but a jolt of images crossed from her mind to mine: sharp stone, dark walls, a little river.
A tiny slat of light.
“Maddy, look at me.”
She looked at me, and I was struck by the fact that she didn’t look different. She looked like Maddy, our Maddy, not the specter from my dream that night before.
She didn’t look like a killer.
“The Senate knows about Wyoming.”
She weathered those words like a blow.
“Callum’s stalling them, but if I can’t find you, if something happens again—”
I couldn’t put what had been done in that house in Wyoming into words. I couldn’t even think the word
monster.
“The other alphas will come for you. First come, first serve. I need to find you, Maddy. You need to let me help you.”
“Help me?” Maddy said, and this time, she didn’t sound like herself, not at all. “You can’t help me, Bryn. The only person who can help me is dead.”
Lucas.
She was talking about Lucas.
“You don’t know,” Maddy said. “You just don’t know.”
She didn’t cry, but the intensity in her voice made me want to. A physical change came over her body—the way she stood, the arch to her back, the lines of her threadbare clothes.
“You just don’t know,” she said again.
I touched her arm, really touched it this time, and she turned all the way around to face me. I watched as she brought her right hand to rest on her stomach.
Her very pregnant stomach.
And then I woke up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I HAD NO IDEA IF ARCHER HAD SEEN WHAT I’D SEEN, but as soon as he opened his eyes, I was right there in his face.
“Tell me that was just a dream,” I said.
You don’t know. Maddy’s voice echoed in my head. You just don’t know.
The only person who can help me is dead.
“The life-size mouse was a dream,” Archer said, his tone almost comically serious. “The forest, the cabin, the way she looked when you first saw her—that was all a dream.”
But her stomach …
“It wasn’t a dream, Bryn.” Archer’s voice was very soft, very gentle. “I knew there was something when I went into her dreams on my own. I couldn’t tell what it was, exactly, but—”
“Maddy’s pregnant.” My voice was even softer than Archer’s. He didn’t reply, and I didn’t wait for him to. I just walked away—away from Archer, away from our camp, away from everyone and everything.
Maddy had left the Wayfarer in December, two weeks after Lucas had died. She’d been holding it together by a string, and she’d said she was leaving because she couldn’t get better with me in her head.
She’d said that she needed to be somewhere that I wasn’t.
Now, seven months later, she was pregnant—and judging by the size of her stomach, pretty far along.
The only person who can help me is dead.
I’d known objectively that Maddy had loved Lucas. I’d known that the time I’d spent fighting Valerie’s coven, she’d spent with him. But I hadn’t realized—
I’d never even thought—
She was pregnant when she left. I couldn’t hide from that realization, couldn’t deny it. And that means Lucas is the father.
Just like that, I was right there again, in the woods outside the Wayfarer, kneeling next to him, running my hand over the fur on his neck, telling him to go to sleep.
To die.
And now Maddy was out there broken and alone and pregnant. A wave of nausea crashed into my body, and I bent over at the waist, afraid that I might actually throw up.
The Senate didn’t know. Shay didn’t know. Because if they had, if they’d known that not only was there a female up for grabs, but also a baby, not even Callum could have kept them away.
There was nothing more important to Weres than children. Nothing. The idea that I’d let a pregnant teenager carrying a werewolf pup go off into the big, bad world alone would have seemed more monstrous to the other alphas than the Wyoming murder.
Was that why Maddy went Rabid? I wondered. Werewolves were wired for pack living. Lone wolves were under enough strain going it alone in normal circumstances, but werewolf pregnancies were notoriously difficult, notoriously painful. Most human women didn’t survive, but even for female Weres, it was far from a walk in the park.
It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone should have to go through alone.
With sudden clarity, I saw Maddy’s life stretched out before me, from the day she’d been Changed until now.
Viciously attacked by a Rabid, her human life torn away.
Forced to live under the thumb of the monster who’d done that to her—a sadist just as psychopathic in human form as he was as a wolf.
Then, finally, she’d gotten a break. Finally, things had gotten better. She’d had friends, a family. She’d been safe. She’d met a boy and fallen in love.
She’d gotten pregnant.
And then the one person she’d trusted—more than anyone—that person had killed the boy she loved, the father of her baby.