Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (26 page)

Bryn
. It wasn’t Callum in my head. It wasn’t the pack. It was Chase, and the moment I realized that, the world shifted on its axis, and I was back in the clearing, crouched down, smelling the dirt.

“Chase.” I said his name out loud, and in wolf form, he nuzzled me, pushing his head under my hand.

Chase
.

He butted my chest with his nose, and I fell over back onto my butt. “Jerk,” I said.

He laughed, as much as any wolf could. Then, without any warning, he was human, and he was holding me. Rubbing his cheek against mine. Smelling my hair.

This time, I pushed him away, and he fell back. “Jerk,” he said.

I smiled. “It really is you,” I replied. “Isn’t it? It’s not just a dream.”

Chase snorted. “I wasn’t even asleep.” For a moment, he sounded human, but then his eyes began to yellow, and the diameter of his pupil doubled within a single beat of my heart. “You needed me,” he said, a deep vibrating hum in his voice. “I felt you.
Protect
.”

The last word didn’t sound human. It didn’t sound human at all. Chase had claimed me every bit as much as I’d turned my pack-bond to him, and what was an itch in the back of my mind when I was awake was all-encompassing now.

Chase wanted to protect me.

He had to protect me.

His wolf wanted out, wanted to smell me again. Make me okay.

“It was just a nightmare,” I said, my voice low and calming. “No interference. No Rabid in my brain. No Callum. Just me.”

I didn’t mention that my brain wasn’t the safest place to be these days. Without a word, Chase brought his hands up, ran them lightly over the bruises on my face, one by one.

“Scared,” he said.

It was easier to admit it here. I nodded.

“Angry,” he said, the wolf sneaking into his tone.

I nodded again.

“Sad.”

These were things that the wolf inside Chase understood. Simple things that a human wouldn’t have been able to diagnose with one-word sentences. Emotions were complicated
for humans. They were complicated for me. But for Chase, liquid and feral and always a moment away from changing, they were simple.

I was scared and I was angry and I was sad, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about any of it.

Chase cocked his head to the side, and for a moment, I thought he would Change again, but instead, his body went abruptly still in a jerky, violent motion, like someone or something was holding him back. He dropped to his knees, then to his stomach, and as I reached for him, a foreign smell filled the air.

Burnt hair and men’s cologne
.

The Rabid. I pulled Chase up, forced him into a kneeling position, and put my hands on his shoulders the way that Lance had when the Rabid had flooded Chase’s waking mind.

“Look at me, Chase. Look only at me.”

For a moment, it wasn’t Chase looking back from those eyes. His lips curled into an ugly smile, serpentine and sharp.

Come out, come out, wherever you are
.…

No.

“Look at me, Chase.
Look at me!
” I forced myself into his mind, brought his eyes to mine with my strength of will. I let my mind flood every corner of his. And I saw the Rabid.

He couldn’t get to me.

Couldn’t get to Chase when he was awake.

Callum had put up walls. And it was even harder now. Now that the boy had changed.

Looking at Chase, I got a sense of the Rabid. I could almost see the floss-thin line that connected the two of them. Nothing like the wall of light shining out of my body, connecting every part of Chase to every part of me.

Chase was
mine
. And the Rabid didn’t even know it. Didn’t know that anyone who hurt Chase was
dead
.

Warmth. Safety. Home
.

The smell of burnt hair receded as Chase buried his hands in my hair and mine found their way to his. I stared into his eyes as they faded back to blue, and in them, I saw a reflection of an image Chase had seen when the Rabid had taken over.

“Girl.” Chase said the word out loud.

A girl. My mental image of her was complete, the bond between Chase and me pulsing full force. Like we weren’t hundreds of miles apart. Like he was standing right there beside me. Like this was real.

“Girl,” I repeated. “Four years old, maybe five. Light hair. Gray eyes. Blood.”

Only this time, the girl wasn’t me, and she wasn’t covered in someone else’s blood. It was hers.

Girl
.

There was a name on the tip of Chase’s tongue, on the tip of mine, but before I could say it, I felt a sharp pinch in my ear. And another in my toe. And then—

“Ow!” I sat up in bed. My heart was pounding. My throat was dry. Chase was nowhere to be seen.

“Pleasant dreams?” Ali asked.

Not exactly, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. I brought my hand up to my ear. It wasn’t bleeding. Neither was my toe. But Alex, who was in his wolf form for the first time in I wasn’t sure how long, looked quite pleased with himself, and Katie licked the side of my face.

“What time is it?” I asked Ali.

“Morning.” For a moment, that was all she said, and then she looked back at me from the foot of the bed, where she was unpacking the twins’ onesies. “You slept through the night. We all did, even Nibbler One and Nibbler Two over there.”

Ali had slept. The twins had slept. What I’d done—at least the latter half of the night—wasn’t sleeping.

It wasn’t human, either.

“How are you feeling?” I could tell by Ali’s tone—forced casualness—that she expected me to jump down her throat for asking the question.

Scared. Angry. Sad
, I thought. But all I said out loud was, “A little better, maybe.”

Ali wrinkled her forehead and cocked her head to the side. Clearly, she hadn’t prepared herself for me to be pleasant. After a moment, her eyes narrowed. “What exactly did you and Lake do yesterday?” she asked, like we might have held up a
gas station and gone on a crime spree across the country, all in the span of just a few hours.

“We went to Mexico, had some tequila, eloped with a pair of drug smugglers, and took part-time jobs as exotic dancers. You know, same old, same old.”

Ali snorted.

“I’m torn on stripper names. It’s either going to be Lady Love or Wolfsbane Lane. Thoughts?”

Ali threw a onesie at me. “Brat.”

Considering I’d cost her a husband and her home, that was probably putting things lightly.

“Talking about it might help,” Ali said, seeing a tell on my face to the guilt sloshing around in my stomach. “You’re going to have to talk to someone eventually, Bryn.”

I thought back to the dream. Back to Chase. Back to the screaming girl and the name buried in my mind.

“I am talking to someone,” I said, making the executive decision that Ali didn’t need to know that the person I was talking to was a teenage werewolf haunted by the psychopath who’d murdered my birth parents. “And you’re right, it helps.”

Ali was dumbfounded. Obviously, this wasn’t the response she’d been expecting. Before she could formulate a reply or press me for answers, I bounded off the bed and went in search of clean clothes.

“Where are you going?” she called after me.

“First, I’m getting dressed,” I called back. “And then I’m going to see what Lake is up to. I have a project for her.”

The day before, our best lead to the Rabid had been Chase, but today, I had more. I had a mental image of a girl. I had a name. And I had a deep and abiding suspicion that if my family had been the Rabid’s first set of victims, and Chase was his most recent, they weren’t alone.

Somewhere along the line, the Big Bad Wolf had attacked someone else, too. Her name was Madison.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

L
AKE AND
I
SET UP SHOP IN THE RESTAURANT
. I ordered cheese fries; Lake got a triple-bacon cheeseburger. Breakfast of champions, all the way.

“I take it you have a plan, Picasso?” Lake asked, after she’d had her way with the burger. I ignored her for a few seconds, putting the finishing touches on the face I was sketching on a napkin. Given the limitations of (a) my skill and (b) my current medium, the likeness wasn’t a bad one.

“This girl,” I told Lake. “The Rabid was thinking about her last night. I think she’s one of his victims.”

When the Rabid attacked my family, I’d gotten away unharmed.

Chase had nearly died.

Somehow, I didn’t think that the Rabid’s other victims had been so lucky. In the past thousand years, only a handful of humans had survived a major werewolf attack long enough to go Were themselves, and Chase was a lot older than the girl I’d seen in his mind and in the Rabid’s.

Stronger.

“Okay,” Lake said cheerfully. “We’ve got a face on a napkin.” I could practically hear an unspoken
is it time to shoot someone yet?
on the end of that sentence, but I pressed on.

“We have a picture, and we have a name.”

MADISON
, I wrote in all capital letters on the napkin.

“And,” I continued as I wrote, “if she’s one of this guy’s victims, her body was either found torn apart by wild animals, or he hid her bones after eating the rest of her.”

Anyone else probably would have balked at my bluntness, but Lake just twirled her blonde hair around her right index finger and nodded.

“Google?” she asked.

“Unless you have a better starting place,” I replied, “then, yes. You guys have wireless in here?”

Lake leaned back and grinned, slinging her arm over the back of our booth. “What do you think we are, heathens? Course we have wireless.”

Most of the older Weres were technologically resistant, but I’d grown up with the internet and so had Lake. Together, we probably knew more about technology than the entire old guard of Stone River combined.

We also had laptops.

It was early enough in the day that the rest of the restaurant was empty, save for Keely, and if she thought the sight of two teenagers surfing the internet in a werewolf bar was a bit odd, she certainly didn’t say so.

“I’ll start by searching news stories. You see if you can find some kind of missing-persons database in case our girl’s body was never found.”

“Anybody ever tell you you’re bossy?” Lake asked.

“That a rhetorical question?” I returned, while entering the words
Madison, wolf attack, dead OR missing
, and
girl
into the search field.

“Nope,” Lake replied, her own fingers moving lazily across the keys. “Not a rhetorical question.”

“In that case, yes. I’ve been told on occasion that I’m bossy.”

“Thought so.”

The two of us fell into silence as we combed through our search results. Fifteen minutes later, I reached for a cheese fry, only to find the plate empty. I shot arrows at Lake with my eyes, but she just grinned.

You snooze, you lose
. It was practically wolf law.

“You finding anything?” Lake asked.

I shook my head. “Nope. You?”

“I’ve checked two missing-children databases and none of them have a Madison that looks a thing like your girl there.” Lake paused, the perpetual motion of her body stilling. “Lot of missing kids out there,” she added.

Frustrated that my plan hadn’t yielded even a smidgen of a lead, I switched from surfing news stories to searching images. Since the missing-children databases hadn’t turned up our girl, I tried a new combination of words.

Madison, in loving memory

A couple of clicks had the search engine displaying a hundred images per page, and fourteen pages and half an hour in, I saw her. Hands shaking, I clicked on the picture and followed the link.

Madison Covey, age six

She had light blonde hair, tied into pigtails for the picture. Her eyes were bluer and less gray than they’d been in my dream, but the resemblance was unmistakable. Someone had erected an online shrine for our Madison.

Ten years ago.

“Find something?” Lake asked.

I didn’t answer, not right away. I just did the mental math. If she’d lived, Madison would have been a year older than me.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Lake swung over to my side of the booth, and she leaned her head over so that the side of her forehead touched mine. Together, we scrolled down the page. It wasn’t the kind of information I’d hoped to find. No police reports. No detailed descriptions of her body after the attack. Just a picture of the girl and information about her favorites: favorite colors (orange and blue), favorite foods (macaroni and cheese), favorite thing to do with bubble wrap (pop it).

We miss you, Maddy
.

I closed my eyes, seeing Chase and seeing this girl through the Rabid’s eyes.

“He killed her.” I tried to pull myself away from the little girl’s face, tried not to wonder if she’d been hiding under a sink when he found her, or if he’d dragged her body into the forest to celebrate his kill.

“She lived in Nevada,” I said. “Not Callum’s territory.”

“Odell’s,” Lake supplied. “The Desert Night Pack. They smell like sandstone and fish.”