“And …?” I knew by the look on Ali’s face that there was more.
“And,” Ali continued, “he said that it was absolutely crucial for me to tell you that if you go anywhere near this coven, he’d be very displeased. I believe his exact words were that you shouldn’t be poking your nose around their affairs and that he forbids it.”
Forbids it?
Forbids it?
I sputtered, “Who does he think he is? I’m not his responsibility, and he’s not my alpha. He can’t forbid anything.”
Even when I had been living under Callum’s rule, even when he’d been the closest thing to family that Ali and I had, I’d never have let him get away with being that high-handed. Forbidding me to do something was as good as telling me to do it.
Irritation mounted until I felt like snarling. Slowly, however, common sense intruded on my ire, and a little bell began going off in the back of my head.
Callum knew that telling me specifically not to do something was a surefire recipe for making me want to do it.
He knew that.
I glanced at Ali to see if she was thinking the same thing. The edges of her lips turned upward. “Callum’s many things, Bryn, but he isn’t an idiot. The only reason he’d ever ask me to tell you that something was strictly, absolutely off-limits was if he wanted to ensure that you’d do the exact opposite of what you were told.”
When it came to maneuvering around the rules, I’d learned from the master. If the Senate asked, Callum could honestly say that other than telling Ali to keep me at home and under guard, he’d done nothing. He hadn’t offered us any advice in his position as alpha, and he most certainly hadn’t suggested that if I wanted to find my way out of this situation, I’d need to investigate the coven firsthand.
“Think if I go into town alone, someone will show up to play more mind games?” I asked.
“Most psychics don’t have aggressive powers.” Ali glanced out the window. “For every person who’s good in a fight, there are twelve who are better at messing with your mind. Even if this coven is one of the more powerful ones, if you show up in town without a werewolf escort, someone will show.”
I was shocked that Ali was willing to consider the idea of me playing bait—until I realized that she hadn’t specified my going into town alone. She’d said that someone was sure to show if I went in without werewolf backup. Given that she and I were the only humans in the pack, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that she was planning on coming with me.
Knowing Ali the way I did, though, I was starting to suspect that it was more than that. Ali wasn’t just planning on coming with me—she seemed dead set on it, like she wanted to flush out the psychics as much as or more than I did. I could see the drive to do this hidden beneath the almost-neutral set of her features.
Ali didn’t just want to come with me. She needed to come with me. The only thing that wasn’t 100 percent clear to me was why.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ALI AND I STOPPED BY THE RESTAURANT ON OUR way to town. Living with werewolves meant that everyone would know the second we left the Wayfarer grounds anyway, so there was no point in sneaking around. Besides, Ali needed to drop the twins off with Mitch and check in with the older Resilients to make sure the younger ones were doing okay. There weren’t too many kids in our pack young enough to need constant supervision, but the older Resilients—some of whom were just a few years younger than me—had been taking care of the littler kids for years.
In the clutches of the Rabid, they’d been the ones to bear the brunt of the abuse.
If there was one thing that seeing Lucas had taught me, it was how lucky they all were to have come out of it with their minds and spirits intact.
“Where’d you say you’re going again?” Mitch asked. His voice was mild, but he was a Were and Ali was female, so the things he didn’t say hung in the air between them, heavy and clear.
“We’re going to town,” Ali repeated, unfazed by the question and the manner in which it was delivered. “Just for an hour or so. Think you can hold things down here?”
“I suspect I can.” Mitch paused for a split second and then he turned to me and said, “Bryn, I ever tell you that you and Ali here are an awful lot alike?”
Ali couldn’t seem to decide whether to smile or throw her hands up in the air at that, so I saved her the trouble of responding.
“I’m going to assume that’s a compliment,” I told Mitch. “For both of us.”
Mitch shook his head in consternation, and Ali reached up and patted his shoulder, in a motion that I was fairly certain she didn’t mean to look nearly as intimate as it did. “We’ll be fine, Mitch. If it’ll make you feel better, have Lake rustle up a couple of tranquilizer guns. Just make sure they’re loaded for humans, not Weres.”
Lake wasn’t the kind of person you had to ask twice for weapons, so she didn’t even wait for her dad to give her a nod before she took off out the front door of the restaurant. I gave it ten-to-one odds that she’d be back with tranq guns in less than three minutes.
Unfortunately, three minutes was all it took for Devon and Chase to show up at the restaurant and innocuously volunteer to shadow Ali and me on our trip to town. Given that the whole reason we were going into town was to flush out people who tortured werewolves for fun, I wasn’t inclined to indulge the boys’ protective instincts over my own.
“I need you here,” I told Devon quietly. “Lucas showed up in my room last night.”
I’d expected those words to distract Dev, but he just glanced at Chase and then turned back to me. “I know,” he said, and the similarity between my best friend’s facial expression and Chase’s was eerie.
You told him? I asked Chase silently, torn between annoyance and shock. Chase and Devon weren’t exactly friends, and Chase wasn’t really what one would call chatty.
“Of course he told me,” Devon retorted, even though I knew for a fact he hadn’t heard me ask the question. “You can just imagine how thrilled I was to hear it.”
I wasn’t sure which was worse for Dev: that Lucas had gotten close enough to me that, if he’d wanted to, he could have ripped out my throat, or that Chase had been the one to stop him—and spend the night.
“Dev, I need you and Lake to keep an eye on Lucas. Wherever he goes, you go, and if you can keep him away from the younger kids—”