“Lucas,” I repeated out loud. I stepped into the room and was greeted with a face so blank that I had to wonder if he’d heard me say his name or registered my presence here at all.
The boy in question was olive-skinned, but pallor had settled over his cheeks, and he didn’t twitch or move at all as I approached. The stillness was unnatural on a Were, and watching him felt as odd as seeing a lion lying faint on the floor. He looked like someone had drained the blood from his body and then leeched his will to live straight from his soul.
I crossed the room to stand at the foot of his bed, keeping myself just out of his reach. “I’m Bryn,” I said, for lack of a better opening, “and you’re on Cedar Ridge land.”
“I know.” His voice wasn’t quiet or raspy or anything else I’d expected of it. Instead, it had an almost musical quality to it, like he would have been more at home singing along to an acoustic guitar than forcing his mouth to speak regularly. “I came here for you.”
Devon was beside me in an instant. To his credit, he didn’t stand straight, and his lip didn’t curl back to reveal canines, but his size and presence spoke for themselves. “Did your alpha send you?” Devon asked, refusing to refer to Shay by name.
The boy on the bed shuddered and then his body fell almost immediately back into stillness, like even shivering was too much for his fractured mind to bear.
“When you say you came here for Bryn,” Lake added, her eyes glittering and utterly lethal, “what exactly would you be meaning by that?”
So much for my doing the talking.
“I can’t … I can’t live like that. Not anymore. It’s—” The boy blinked and even that seemed to take gargantuan effort. “I just can’t do it.” Ignoring Lake and Devon, Lucas looked at me—not at my eyes, but close enough that I felt the weight of each word out of his mouth. “They say you help people. That you save them. Callum’s Bryn. That’s you, right?”
“You didn’t come here to kill Bryn.” Devon’s voice matched the tone in Lucas’s almost exactly, and I wondered if Dev even realized he was doing it. “And your alpha didn’t send you?”
Lucas moved, and I braced myself. At first, I thought he was leaping to his feet, but when he stopped moving, he was still on the bed, kneeling and no longer covered by the threadbare sheet.
Angry white scars crisscrossed his torso and arms like tiny Xs and Os. He’d been cut, long and deep, over and over again. “You want to know if Shay sent me?” he asked Devon. “If your brother sent me?” Lucas breathed in raggedly and lowered his voice. “You look just like him.”
Devon didn’t even blink, but inside, I winced for him, knowing that Lucas’s words would undoubtedly have left a mark.
“I suppose whether or not Shay sent me depends on your definition of the word sent. He beat me. He hounded me. And when it got to the point that I couldn’t think of fighting back, couldn’t even muster up the strength to keep wishing he was dead, when I thought that things couldn’t get any worse for me in Snake Bend”—Lucas settled back, his eyes blank, his voice soft—“they did.”
“Why?” The word burst out of Lake’s mouth a second before I could give voice to the question myself. “Why would your own alpha do something like that?”
Now Lucas didn’t look at Lake, or at me. He looked at Devon, and I wondered if he was really seeing Dev or if he was still caught up in memory, seeing Shay in the features the brothers shared.
“Why?” Lucas repeated. “My alpha is the type who needs a punching bag when things are going badly.” He shifted his gaze from Devon to me. “And lately, things haven’t exactly been going well.”
Lucas’s words hit me hard, the image of his bloodied body interwoven in my mind with that of the scars that still marred his flesh. Shay had done that to Lucas. He’d done it because he was a bully and because he couldn’t touch the person he most wanted to hurt, the reason things had not been going according to his master plan.
Me.
Six months earlier, Shay had gone to Alpine Creek, Wyoming, expecting to return with fresh blood and females for the Snake Bend Pack, and because of me, he’d gone home empty-handed and watched as a human girl walked away with everything he’d wanted for himself.
I’d seen the bloodlust in Shay’s eyes. I knew how badly he’d wanted to slam me into a wall, to rip out my insides and watch my body crumble to the ground. But thanks to the power Callum held over the rest of the werewolf Senate, thanks to the Senate’s own laws, Shay couldn’t touch me.
In the wild, when an animal is forced to pull back from attacking an adversary and turned its wrath on an easier target instead, they called it redirected aggression.
There was a chance—a good one—that what Shay had done to Lucas he’d done because of me.
“What do you want from us?” I asked Lucas, unable to keep myself from taking a step closer to the dead eyes that looked up at me from the bed. “Why did you come here?”
I didn’t bother telling myself that the only one to blame for Shay’s actions was Shay. It didn’t even matter if I believed it. I wasn’t the kind of person who could look at someone like Lucas and walk away with something as pat as an “it’s not my fault.”
In response to my question, Lucas tilted his head to the side, a gesture more animal than not. “I want you to claim me,” he said, like it was the simplest, most obvious thing in the world. “I don’t want to be Snake Bend anymore. I want to be Cedar Ridge.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“HE WANTS TO TRANSFER PACKS?”
No matter how many times I said those words, I still couldn’t quite believe that was why Lucas had come all the way to the Wayfarer, a place that must have felt like enemy territory to his wolf, the same way he felt foreign to me. Bleeding and bloody, beaten within an inch of his life and unable to Shift, he’d limped and stumbled his way over mountains and through the forest and around God knew how many towns where he might have been spotted and shot—and he’d done all of that in the single-minded pursuit of one thing.
Me.
They say you help people. Callum’s Bryn.
I struggled to keep my head up under the memory of Lucas’s words and the hope I’d seen in his otherwise dead eyes. I didn’t want to be anyone’s last hope any more than I wanted to be some kind of werewolf legend: the Little Human That Could.