Raised by Wolves

“It was a really bad dream,” I told Ali, forcing the tremors out of my voice. “But on the bright side, I don’t think I have a fever anymore.”

“You never had a fever,” Ali replied. The tone in her voice reminded me that Ali wasn’t stupid, and that oatmeal or no oatmeal, there was a good chance my “illness” hadn’t fooled her as well as I’d thought. “You needed to be alone. I get that.”

I felt like maybe she did understand, even though her actual words reinforced the fact that she had no idea that this had nothing to do with me struggling to deal with the events of the last few days and everything to do with the events of the last few minutes. It wasn’t Ali’s fault that I’d neglected to mention that Chase and I could hop in and out of each other’s heads at will. There would be time to feel guilty about that little omission later. Right now, I had other things to hide.

Like the fact that the dull roar in my gut—telling me to hunt, to kill, to protect—had gone nuclear.

On the other side of our bond, I felt Chase’s approval, felt him tear into an animal’s throat with a ferocity that should have scared me, but didn’t.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Ali asked, doing a 180 from the moment before and laying a hand on my cheek. “You actually do feel a little warm, and you look … strange.”

“Thanks a lot,” I replied. It wasn’t like I could say, Well, the werewolf who shares my brain just killed a deer, and the two of us are planning on hunting down the Big Bad Wolf like the woodsman of yore.

Hmmmm …, I thought, the mind bunnies multiplying. Woodsman. Ax. Silver ax.

If I was going to hunt a Rabid, I needed weapons, and I needed to figure out where exactly the Rabid was. I’d counted on eavesdropping to tell me the latter, but things hadn’t worked out that way. I’d have to figure it out myself. As for weapons …

“I think I’m going to go to the restaurant and harass Lake,” I told Ali. “She’s waiting tables this afternoon, and I’d kind of like to see her in action.”

I didn’t mention that the action I most wanted to see Lake enact was the way she’d respond when I asked her if she had any weapons other than a shotgun. If she didn’t, she’d know where to find them and she’d take disturbing joy in doing so. I’d be Santa Claus, just for asking.

And while Lake requisitioned supplies, I’d track our Rabid. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew I’d do it, the same way I knew that Ali wouldn’t object to me going to talk to Lake.

“She doing okay?” Ali asked, transferring her maternal instincts from me to Lake.

“She’ll be fine until the alphas come back through, and then she’ll be fine again after that.”

If I could figure out where our prey was hiding, Lake wouldn’t have to stay inside when the alphas came back through Montana. We’d be well on our way to No-Man’s-Land by then.

The Wayfarer was nearly empty when I slid into a corner booth. Lake, notepad in hand, slid in across from me.

“Aren’t you supposed to be taking my order?” I asked.

“Bite me. And then you can tell me what’s wrong.” She paused. “Aren’t you supposed to be with …?”

She gestured elaborately, and I filled in the blank. Lake had known my plan for this morning. I’d promised to report back, and here I was.

“Been there. Done that. Didn’t go so well.”

Lake threw her notepad to the side, summarily ignoring the three other occupied tables in the restaurant. “Didn’t go so well as in you didn’t see anything, or didn’t go so well as in you didn’t like what you saw?”

“More like heard,” I corrected her. “But the second one.”

“The Rabid escaped again?” Lake guessed. “They have no idea where he is?”

“Oh, no,” I replied, my voice forcefully cheerful, because it was the only way I could keep from yelling. “Nothing like that. Apparently, he has something the alphas want, so they’re not going to hunt him. They voted.”

“Voted?” Lake asked incredulously. Clearly, she couldn’t imagine Callum voting on anything, not when his word was, in her experience, pretty much law.

“Callum was in the minority. They outvoted him. Nothing he could do.”

Lies, lies, lies. He could have done something. If he’d wanted to.

“Sucks,” Lake opined. “So when are we leaving?”

She didn’t even have to ask what I intended to do now. She knew, and she was with me, the same way Chase was. Two teenage werewolves and one human girl against an enemy the pack had chosen not to cross.

This Rabid was going down if it killed me. I tried not to think about the fact that it probably would.

“We leave as soon as I figure out where we’re going,” I said, concentrating on what needed to be done, right here, right now. “In the meantime, can you rustle up some …?” I didn’t want to say the word weapons out loud, but Lake took my meaning.

“Supplies?” she asked, her eyes sparkling, but hard. “I might know where we could get some. Just let me tell Keely I’m out of here.”

I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of Lake “telling” Keely anything—not when I knew that it was disturbingly easy to tell Keely way too much—but Lake couldn’t exactly take off without explanation. Not if we wanted to keep Ali and Mitch in the dark.

“Be right back,” Lake told me, heading for the bar.

“Excuse me,” a man—human—at a nearby table called. “Could I get a refill on my—?”

“Nope.” Lake didn’t even look for him as she zeroed in on Keely. I hung back, figuring that the less I spoke to the World’s Best Listener, the better.

For her part, Keely took one look at Lake and frowned. “Whatever it is, the answer is no.”

“But you don’t even know what the question is,” Lake said.

“I don’t have to. I know that look. That look is trouble.”

Lake wheedled. “I just need to cut out early today. Bryn needs my help.”

Keely blew a wisp of hair out of her face. “Fine, but you breathe a word to your daddy about me letting you out of here without a cross-examination, and you and I are going to have words. Clear?”

Lake smiled in response, and I added Keely to the list of people, including Ali and Mitch, who’d be ready to kill us the moment they figured out where we’d gone.

Five minutes later, Lake and I were outside and on our own.

“Cabin twelve,” Lake said.

“What?”

“Cabin twelve. That’s where my dad keeps the weapons. The lock on the door is kid’s play to jimmy open.”

I didn’t ask how Lake knew this, and I didn’t question the fact that Mr. Mitchell had an entire cabin full of weapons. Under normal circumstances, I would have, because—Lake’s fondness for shotguns aside—werewolves didn’t need weapons. They were weapons. But thinking back to the look on Mitch’s face when he’d told me, all calmlike, that male werewolves could get funny around females, I wasn’t surprised.

Against humans, werewolves didn’t need weapons. Against other werewolves, being armed to the hilt might come in handy, at least in human form.

“Okay,” I said. “So you’ll take care of the weapons situation. Now we need to know where we’re going and we need a way to get there.”

I kept coming up with small problems, like transportation, because no matter how many times I turned it over in my mind, I couldn’t come up with a solution to the bigger one: we didn’t know where the Rabid was. We’d have only a few hours’ head start once we left here, before Ali and Mitch figured out that we’d gone. We couldn’t afford to wander around aimlessly. We couldn’t act on some unformed hunch.

We had to be sure.

“Transportation is easy,” Lake said when I brought up the issue. “My dad got a new car, but he hasn’t gotten rid of his truck yet. We’ll take that.”

“Can you drive?” I asked. I wasn’t sixteen yet, and though I’d managed fine with all stolen motorcycles I’d come in contact with, I wasn’t sure I could handle a stick shift.