Raised by Wolves (24 page)

Tell me where you are, I said silently.

There was no reply. I hadn’t really expected one.

“You girls hungry?” Keely asked, wrapping back by our booth, the way she did every hour or so to check on us.

I nodded. Lake grunted.

“The usual?” Keely asked, her voice dry.

I shook my head. “Pie?” I asked Lake.

She nodded. “Pie.”

Five minutes later, we had our pie, but this time, Keely didn’t disappear after delivering it. “Do I want to know what you two are up to?” she asked.

“No.”

“Probably not.”

Keely put a hand on her hip. “This about that Rabid?”

“Yup.”

“Sure is.”

Lake and I paused, meeting eyes and wondering how exactly it was that Keely had tricked an honest answer out of us. I, for one, hadn’t had any intention of telling her a thing.

Keely held up a hand. “You know what? I don’t want to know. Lake, you have company. Let me know if you need help disabusing him of any notions.”

I was still stuck on wondering how exactly Keely had pried the truth from our lips, when her words sunk in. Company?

What kind of company?

And that’s when it washed over me: wolf. Foreign. Wrong.

I straightened in my seat, hackles raised. Lake didn’t adjust her posture at all, but underneath the table, I saw her hand move, and for the first time, I noticed that she’d brought Matilda with her this morning.

“Now, why do you have to go and reach for the gun?” the peripheral from yesterday asked her. He was tall and broad, and I deeply suspected that in wolf form, he’d be almost as large as Devon. “And here we’ve been getting along so well.”

Lake smiled, slow and sure, a look that meant she was getting ready to either flirt or attack. I braced myself for either or both.

“You’re just sour because I beat the tar out of you at pool.” Lake smiled, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and in a motion too quick for me to track, whipped out her shotgun, aiming it squarely at the foreign wolf’s nose.

“I thought you said it paid to have friends,” I reminded her.

Lake didn’t blink. “It does. If Tom and I weren’t friends, he might be trying to prove that he’s the stronger wolf, and I might be making the reverse argument with the help of my gun.”

He blinked twice and then laughed, but didn’t sound entirely comfortable. There was an edge in Lake’s voice, one that told him to take her threat seriously. He was male, he was bigger, and he was probably stronger—but she was armed.

I really hoped this wasn’t going to degenerate into a dominance squabble, though in retrospect, it was probably too much to hope that I’d left that behind.

As if sensing my thoughts, the foreign wolf turned his attention to me. “You’re Callum’s Bryn,” he said shortly.

I met his gaze. I refused to look away. I managed not to think about Sora. I managed not to think about the fact that if he wanted to, this man could squash me in a second.

“I used to be,” I replied.

“Hey, buddy. Eyes on me.” Lake was the protective type and the jealous type. I wasn’t sure which had her forcing the foreigner’s eyes back to hers. If he challenged anyone, her posture seemed to be saying, it would be her.

Personally, I wouldn’t have laid money on his odds.

“The alphas have been called,” he said after a long moment, never moving, never taking his gaze from hers. “Stands to reason some of them will be passing through on their way to Callum’s.”

Lake didn’t blink. She didn’t move. She also didn’t cock the trigger of her gun, and her “friend” took that as encouragement. “I thought you’d want to know.”

Lake didn’t reply, but after a long moment, she put down the gun, her suntanned face going ashen white.

“Why’s the Senate going to Ark Valley?” I asked, even though I deeply suspected we had the answer spread out on the table in front of us, marked with Xs and stars.

“Callum called ’em,” the Were replied, taking his eyes from Lake to look back at me.

I tossed my ponytail over my shoulder. I knew how to do this. If you needed answers, you had to stand your ground.

I could do this.

“And why did Callum call ’em?” I asked.

The Were shrugged. Keely took that moment to refill my coffee, and as her shoulder brushed the man’s, he shrugged again and started talking. “Who knows? With the old man, chances are as good as they aren’t that it’s for something that hasn’t even happened yet.”

The old man. Even among his own kind, Callum was older than most. Stronger, too. But the last part of that sentence …

“Why would he call a meeting about something that hasn’t happened yet?”

The man shrugged, like it was becoming a compulsion. “Because he knows it will.”

I still wasn’t following. Fortunately, someone was.

“Are you saying Callum’s psychic?” Keely asked quietly, sounding a measure less incredulous than I felt when I heard the question. Alphas were connected to their packs. They saw through eyes that weren’t their own. They were strong.

But they weren’t psychic.

“I’m not saying a thing,” the Were said as if he couldn’t figure out how exactly he’d managed to say as much as he already had. “But, yeah. You don’t get to be Callum’s age or have a pack that big without an edge.”

Keely set my coffee cup back down and then moved on to the next table, and the Were stopped talking. His forehead wrinkled as he took in the full sight of our table. “What are you two doing anyway?” he asked.

I expected Lake to reply, but she didn’t. She’d gone ashen at the announcement about the alphas and hadn’t yet recovered.

“We’re plotting world domination,” I said, covering for her, wondering what was wrong, even as my own mind was muddled with possibilities I’d never considered. About Callum. About Ali’s assertion that Callum had known what my permissions would lead to, long before he’d ever granted them. “It takes more planning than one might think.”

Werewolves could smell lies, but most of them were significantly dicier on the subject of sarcasm.

“I should go.” Lake rushed the words into each other, and then, in a blur, she was gone, shotgun and all. The moment she left, I became aware of how close this foreign wolf was to me, how awful he smelled, how jarring his presence was to my pack-sense.

I didn’t show it. I just sat there, and after four seconds, or five, and one hard look from Keely, he backed slowly away. I reached for my coffee cup and didn’t notice until I picked it up that my hand was trembling. I reached out my other hand, steadying the cup, and then I brought it slowly to my lips, digesting what I’d just heard.

The alphas were coming. The Senate had been called.

Callum may or may not have been psychic.

And Lake was nowhere to be seen.

GOING AFTER LAKE WAS EASIER SAID THAN DONE. I dropped our stuff back at Cabin 4, where my family and I were staying, and then I tried to figure out which of the other houses dotting the horizon was hers. Based on the number of them on the property, Mitch was either an impressive businessman or really bad about picking up strays. At some point, the Wayfarer appeared to have evolved from a restaurant/bar to some kind of inn.

Or possibly a halfway house.

None of which told me where Lake was, or why she’d run off in the first place. Either I’d missed something in her interaction with the wolf named Tom—and I didn’t think I had—or she was upset about the Senate meeting. Or what Tom had said about Callum.

Or both.

Until I knew what had upset her and why, I couldn’t judge whether it would be better to give her space or hunt her down, keep her out of trouble or get into some with her. Looking for her gave me an excuse not to think about the bombshells Tom had dropped.

Tracking had never been my strong suit, but I knew enough to start where I’d lost track of my prey to begin with. The dirt path up to the restaurant was well trod, and I wouldn’t have been able to pick out Lake’s tracks were it not for the fact that most of the other patrons of this fine establishment followed the trinity of instructions on the front door: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service.

That had to have been Keely’s doing. Werewolves weren’t particular on the topic of dress, or lack thereof.

Lake’s imprint was light in the dirt, which told me she’d been running full speed, her feet barely touching the ground as she bolted. When the drive gave way to fields of grass, I followed the trajectory she’d been taking before until I hit a more densely wooded area. I found her clothes in shreds, scattered with the force of her forward momentum, her shotgun abandoned beside them.

Knowing what the torn tank top meant, I knelt to the ground and looked for confirmation. I didn’t have to look far.

Paw prints.

“She Shifted.”

The mild voice took me by surprise. I’d been so caught up in tracking Lake that I hadn’t noticed someone else tracking me.

Mitch had the grace not to mention just how easy that task had been. “Lake just needs to run it out for a bit. She’ll head for the mountains, always does. ’Bout halfway there, she’ll turn back.”

It was already getting dark outside.

“Don’t you worry about her, Bryn. I’ve never seen a girl for running like that one. For that matter, haven’t seen many wolves even half as fast. She’ll be back by sunrise. Always is.”

“Why’s she running?” I asked, slipping into the gentle cadence of Mitch’s ambling tone.

“Senate’s coming through,” Mitch commented, sounding for all the world like he was commenting on the weather.

Storm’s comin’. It’ll pass.

“But what does the Senate meeting have to do with Lake?” I asked.

Mitch stared at my face, long and hard, taking measure of whatever he saw there before speaking again. “Nothin’ that I know of. I suspect they’ll be talking about this Rabid the two of you have been nosing around at all afternoon.”

And here I’d thought that getting away from Callum meant that I’d have some privacy—and the chance to get the drop on someone, every once in a while.

“Is Callum psychic?” The question slipped off my tongue before I’d even thought about asking it.

“Psychic?” Mitch repeated, biting back a smile that made me feel younger than I was. “Not a word you hear much in our world, Bryn.”

By some definitions, we were all psychic. Pack-bonds connected the Stone River wolves to each other, to their wives, and to me. I could speak to pack members without opening my mouth, and for the past two nights, Chase and I had shared dreams.

We’d pulled the image of a girl from the mind of the Rabid.

“Does Callum know that things are going to happen before they happen?” I asked, rephrasing the question in terms of specifics, as Ali’s question to me in the car floated back into my mind: How many times have you gotten the drop on Callum, Bryn? How many times has anyone?

“Callum’s got good instincts,” Mitch said.

“The kind of instincts that let him see the future?” All of a sudden, I had to know. How it worked. How much Callum knew.

If he’d done this to me on purpose.

“Let’s just say he has a knack for knowing what’s going to happen before it does and leave it at that.”

“A knack?” I snorted. “Like you have a knack for turning into a wolf?”

Mitch ignored my sarcasm. “Something like that.”

“Is it because he’s an alpha?”

“No.”

“Is it because he’s a Were?”

“No.” Mitch put his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “It’s just a knack, Bryn. Some people have ’em. Most don’t.”

He made it sound so simple. So matter-of-fact that I wondered why it had never occurred to me before.

“Some people are fast. Some people are strong.” Mitch grinned. “Some people are just real easy to talk to.”

I recognized that grin and knew it meant something. He was teasing me. Real easy to talk to …

“Keely,” I said, my mind spinning. Lake and I had told her what we were doing without even meaning to. The peripheral male who’d warned us the other alphas were coming hadn’t spilled the beans about Callum’s reputed power until Keely had come over to pour my coffee, brushed her shoulder against his, and then, he couldn’t tell us everything we wanted to know fast enough.

No wonder Mitch had a human bartender, if that bartender had a knack for getting secrets out of anyone who passed through.

Knacks. Some people have them. Most don’t.

I saw the next question coming a mile off. I took my time asking it, because I didn’t want to sound as ridiculous as I had when I’d called Callum psychic. “Do I have one?”

Mitch shrugged. “You’d know that better than I would.”

I thought of fighting Devon. Of hiding under the sink. Of forcing my pack-bond onto Chase.

Of fighting back the Rabid in his head.

Was that something? Or was I just lucky and stubborn and everything that any human Marked by an alpha and raised by werewolves would have been?

For his part, Mitch reached out and patted my shoulder as if he were consoling me for all of the knacks I didn’t have.

“Way I see it, Bryn, you’ve always been mighty scrappy.”

Scrappy? Scrappy?

Some people could see the future. Some people could loosen other people’s lips just by looking at them. And me?

I was scrappy.

Lucky me.

“Will the alphas stop in the restaurant on their way through?” I asked.

Mitch’s smile hardened. “Some will.”

“Will Keely … use her knack?” The phrasing sounded ridiculous, but I wasn’t sure how else to put it.

Mitch took my meaning and shook his head. “Keely’ll take tomorrow off. I’ll man the restaurant myself.”

I got the feeling he didn’t want any of the alphas to know about Keely or what she could do. Especially since the Wayfarer played host to some of their peripherals.

“And Lake?” I asked. I still didn’t understand why she was running or what exactly she was running from.

“Those alphas won’t see hide or hair of Lake, Bryn. She’ll stay far enough away, they won’t even smell her.”

There was something in his tone that made me think that if Lake hadn’t been inclined to stay away on her own, he’d have seen to it that she did. Given my own mixed feelings about the Senate, I understood the impulse, but not the hardness around Mitch’s eyes.