“No deal,” I told Lake. I’d learned not to bet with her—about anything—by the time we were eight.
Except for that one time the summer when we were twelve, but again—completely beside the point.
“Besides,” I said, “Matilda’s over by the fence.” I’d never actually met Lake’s favorite shotgun, but I’d heard enough stories to make an educated guess.
“She’s fickle, is Matilda,” Lake admitted. “But boy, can the old girl get the job done.”
“What’d this guy do anyway?”
As a general rule, Lake didn’t shoot people without a reason—or some assurance that they would heal almost as soon as she shot them.
“Jerk cheated on his girlfriend,” Lake replied. “And stiffed me on my tip the last time through.”
Lake had been waiting tables at the Wayfarer since she was about twelve. Anyone who’d been to the restaurant more than once knew that you didn’t play pool with Mitch’s daughter expecting to win and you didn’t skimp on her tip. I’d never been here before, and even I knew that. I also knew that if you had a secret, you didn’t come to the Wayfarer in the first place. There were no secrets with Lake Mitchell. None.
“So you asked for permissions, broke the conditions, and Callum had you beaten, huh?”
My first instinct was to pull back, but before my upper lip had worked itself even halfway into a good snarl, I let it go, the tension melting off my face. Lake was Lake. She couldn’t help asking. It probably would have sucked more if she hadn’t, but that didn’t change the fact that if and when I said a word about any of this to anyone, it would be on my terms, not theirs.
The next time Callum’s name crossed my lips, it would be because I wanted to say it, not because someone had asked.
Measuring my response, Lake plucked a strand of grass from the ground and chewed on it, deceptively insightful. “Don’t want to talk about it?” she guessed, nonchalant.
Did I want to talk about the fact that I’d disobeyed the pack? That Callum had betrayed me, over and over again; that every day, he’d let me go on believing one thing when reality was another? Did I want to talk about the fact that together, Callum and I had destroyed Ali’s marriage, torn my family apart, and brought life to a screeching halt?
“Not particularly.”
“You want to race me to the dock?” Lake asked in the same casual tone.
I thought about running with the pack—how connected I’d felt. How invincible.
“Ten-second head start?” It helped to barter with Lake.
“Five.”
I took off the moment the word was out of her mouth, ignoring the pain in my side and the way the bruises on my face and shoulders throbbed as my movements pulled skin tight across muscle.
I was fine.
Lake tore past me in a blur, never one to hold back on superspeed just because her opponent didn’t have it. Jaw set, teeth clenched, I pushed myself to keep up, keep her in sight, and in the edges of my mind, I felt him.
Chase.
He and his wolf wanted to be here. They wanted to run with me, and as I pushed myself harder and harder, I pretended that Chase was there beside me, his hand looped through mine. In my dream, I’d kept watch over him. Protected him. I’d been the strong one.
I hadn’t been the one crumpled on the ground.
With the Wayfarer behind me, I ran, trying to leave everything but that memory in my dust. My feet beat into the ground again and again, punishing it and punishing my body for its human weakness.
If what I’d seen the night before was real—and every instinct I had said it was—then a Rabid was still stalking Chase’s dreams. The same Rabid that had hunted him down as human prey. The Rabid.
It didn’t matter if my ribs hurt. It didn’t matter if every time I blinked, I saw Sora’s fist coming toward my face. I needed a plan. I needed to be strong. So I just kept running, because come hell or high water, a girl couldn’t afford to be weak or human at a time like this.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BY THE TIME I GOT TO THE DOCK, LAKE WAS ALREADY lounging, her head thrown back and her feet dangling just above the surface of her namesake. The way I saw it, I had two choices: deal her in, or lie to her face. Experience—and my acquaintance with her trigger finger—told me that she made a better ally than an enemy, and if there were some things that were mine and mine alone, to play and replay in my head as I stared at my ceiling each night, there were others that I needed a second opinion on. And if that second opinion happened to come from a waitress with no compunctions whatsoever about eavesdropping on any and all Weres who passed through her territory, all the better.
“You heard anything about the new wolf?” I asked, plopping down next to her on the dock. Even with my ribs protesting so much that I wondered if they’d poked a hole in my lungs, the question made its way easily off my tongue. Things were always easy with Lake and me, even though Mr. Mitchell always swore that “doing things the hard way” was her middle name, the same way “pack business” could have been mine.
“I heard my dad talking to Ali on the phone,” Lake said, staring out at the water. “Mama Bear was spitting nails—something about you and this new boy.”
“Chase.” Supplying his name didn’t make me lose track of reality, but when I blinked, I kept my eyes closed for a fraction of a second longer than I would have otherwise, waiting for Chase or his wolf to appear, emblazoned on the inside of my eyelids. Now that I wasn’t running anymore, it was harder to picture him, harder to feel him on the other side of the bond I’d forged.
“Ali didn’t say the boy’s name,” Lake continued, closing her own eyes and tilting her head back, offering her face up to the sun. “She just said that he was bad news—for you. That Callum was hiding something. That you’d end up hurt.”
At first, I’d assumed that the conversation Lake had overheard was the one that had directly prefaced Ali dragging me and the twins off to the Wayfarer, but her words made me ask for a clarification on that point, and it became apparent that Ali had been in contact with Mitch long before I’d broken the conditions of my permissions.
Ali’s lack of confidence in my ability to stay out of trouble was astounding. Or it would have been, if I’d proven her even the tiniest bit wrong.
“Did Ali or your dad know that the Rabid who attacked Chase was the one who killed my family?” I was fairly certain I knew the answer to that question, but I had to ask. A week ago, I would have sworn that Callum couldn’t have kept something like that from me, either.
To my relief, the second the word Rabid left my mouth, Lake’s eyes flew open, and she almost fell off the end of the dock, supernatural grace and balance the only things that saved her from taking a nosedive I wouldn’t have been able to avoid.
“The Rabid who killed your … I thought Callum killed that scum-licking, dirt-sucking, mother—”
Sensing that Lake could provide an infinite number of adjectives to describe the man Chase called Prancer, I cut her off. “I thought so, too, but no. The Rabid got away. Nobody thought it crucial to tell me. Flash-forward eleven years, and what do you know, Chase gets bit.”
Lake digested that for a moment. “And I’m guessing the alpha didn’t particularly want you to figure that one out.”
I was grateful that she hadn’t said Callum’s name this time. “He let me see Chase, knowing I’d figure it out, and then he had me beaten for doing it.”
Ali’s logic had crept into my thoughts enough that my mouth was verbalizing it to Lake. If I could run with broken ribs, I could force myself to part with one or two ugly truths and to silently say the words that cut me most.
Callum. Pack. Stone River. Permissions.
I thought the words and thought them hard, pushing through it like the pain was nothing.
Callum.
Pack.
Stone River.
Callum.
Under the waistband of my jeans, the Mark was still there. I placed my hand over it, lining my fingers up with the grooves that Callum had carved into my skin.
“The Rabid is still alive. He’s been alive all this time, and now, he’s messing with my—” The possessive seemed more important than the noun that followed it. I wasn’t sure what to call Chase—my friend? My wolf? My other self?