Taken by Storm

That much, I should be able to handle.

That much, I could do.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“SIT DOWN.”

Checking on Jed wasn’t exactly going as planned. He was already up when I got there, already packed, and waiting for me when I showed up at the cabin he and Caroline shared. The Deadliest Little Psychic was nowhere to be seen, and Jed seemed to be under the impression that now was as good a time as any for lesson two.

“Jed, I don’t think—”

He didn’t let me finish that sentence. “Once upon a time, that might have been true, but I’d say that these days you’re doing plenty of thinking. Not thinking doesn’t keep a person up at night.”

Jed’s observation was mild, but it made me wonder just how tired I looked.

“Are you actually accusing me of thinking too much?” I raised one eyebrow in an imitation of an expression I’d seen on Devon’s face one too many times. “Have you met me?”

I’d been guilty of a lot of things in my life, but an overabundance of caution or logic had never been one of them. You didn’t end up accidentally founding your own werewolf pack by thinking things through or making pro and con lists.

“I’m not going to pretend to know what it’s like in your shoes, Bryn. You’ve got a lot on your mind, probably always will.” Jed eased himself down on the ground next to me. “But if you want to control what you are and what you can do, you’re going to have to learn when to think and when to give in and feel.”

I couldn’t help thinking that this would have been infinitely easier a year ago, or two, or three, back when I’d been nothing but feelings. Look Before You Leap Bryn could have mastered her Resilience in a heartbeat.

But I wasn’t that girl anymore.

“Close your eyes. Breathe. And remember.”

This time, Jed didn’t have to tell me what to remember. I knew what he wanted me to do. Ultimately, the thing that prodded me into doing it wasn’t that Callum had implied he wouldn’t Change me until I’d learned. It was the realization that Maddy had survival instincts every bit as honed as I did.

She was Resilient, too.

If the worst turned out to be true and we couldn’t get through to her, if she was caught up in a red haze of her own, too shattered on the inside to do anything but hurt, I’d need every advantage I could get just to keep the two of us alive.

So I forced myself to think of the look on Maddy’s face—

broken, but regal and holding it together by a string—the day she’d left.

I’m going to go away, and I’m going to get better, because if I don’t, the next time someone challenges you, it’s going to be me.

Those were words Maddy had actually said to me. For once, I didn’t fight the memories. I didn’t fight back the darkness, the horror, the fear that she’d been closer to the edge than I’d realized.

You did this to me. You.

Now my mind was putting words in her mouth, things she’d never said.

You killed him. You left me to deal with it alone.

I heard the words in Maddy’s voice. I allowed my imagination to conjure up the nightmares I hadn’t let myself dream the night before. I saw Maddy, covered in blood. I saw her Shifting to wolf form.

I saw Lucas—hopeless, hungry, and full of fury—leaping for my throat.

Blood, blood, everywhere there was blood.

Just like that, I was back under the sink at my parents’ house, hiding from the Big Bad Wolf. Except this time, when I peeked out and saw the Rabid tearing through my father’s skin and shredding it like a manic child opening a present, the Rabid wasn’t the one from my memories, the one who’d haunted my dreams.

It was Maddy.

You did this to me.

The fear was overwhelming and absolute. I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want to be feeling it. I didn’t want the world to be closing in around me as I watched blood splatter up against off-white walls.

All of a sudden, I was standing, yards away from where I’d been before. My back was to the wall of Jed’s cabin, and I could feel my pulse throbbing in my stomach.

“Feel it?” Jed asked, over the sound of my breathing, the deafening beating of my heart.

I could feel the surge of energy, that whisper deep inside of me, the kind of power that let a panicked mother lift a car.

“Hold on to it.”

My body was quickly realizing that there was no present danger. I could feel the power beginning to leak out of my limbs, but I pulled it back.

The smell of wet cardboard and rotting flesh. The heavy sound of breathing in the silence.

I lived and breathed the fear, and my senses heightened. I felt something—an odd kind of silence, not quite a noise—behind me. Hopped up on power, I whirled, and a second later, I slammed Caroline back against the exterior wall of the cabin, my hand around her neck.

I hadn’t heard her coming, but I’d known she was there. After a moment, I let go of my Resilience, allowed it to slip away. I pried my hand away from Caroline’s throat.

Unfathomably, she smiled. “I take it the lesson went well?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

TWO PSYCHICS, TWO WEREWOLVES, AND A PSYCHIC human alpha walk up to a crime scene….

It was like the beginning of a very bad joke, and I found myself wishing that Devon were there to share it with. Instead, our merry little band—Lake, Chase, Jed, Caroline, and me—stood in absolute silence, the wind cutting through the trees with a high-pitched whistle and carrying new scents to the Weres’ noses.

“There’s no one around for miles,” Lake told us. “That it?”

She jerked her head toward a house in the distance, and I nodded, even though there was nothing about the way the house looked—from the outside, in the dark—that would have tipped off the average observer to the fact that days earlier, someone had been murdered there.

Unconsciously, I began running through everything we knew about the circumstances in which the death had been discovered.

The front door was closed when the police responded to a 911 call placed from the vicinity. They found the body—what was left of it—inside. The walls were dripping blood.

I forced myself to focus on the sights and sounds of the here and now. We were close enough to the mountains that even in the dead of summer, it smelled like snow, and the moon overhead was a shade fuller than it had been the night before.

To my eyes, the world was shadowy and dark, quiet, still. I could barely make out the outlines of the people standing right next to me, but to the Weres, the scant moonlight would have been as good as a spotlight, illuminating the leaves on the trees, each blade of grass, and the house in the distance.

Beside me, Chase breathed in deeply through his nose. Through the bond, I could feel him sorting his way through layers and textures, scent upon scent upon scent.

“Anything?” I asked him, my voice quiet, but echoing through the silence nonetheless.

He closed his eyes and breathed in again. Even though I couldn’t quite make out his features, I could picture the expression on his face almost exactly: long eyelashes lying still against pale skin, nostrils flared, and concentration playing around the edges of his lips.

“There was definitely a werewolf here,” he said finally. “Female. Young.”

He glanced at Lake, and she nodded, kneeling to the ground and bringing a handful of dirt up to her nose.

Was it Maddy? I asked her, not wanting to give life to the question by saying it out loud.

For the longest time, Lake didn’t reply, but even through the darkness, I could see her lowering her head toward the ground. Her blonde ponytail picked up the light of the moon, making her look like an angel caught midprayer, knees in the dirt, head bowed.

Chase joined her on the ground, crouching down with liquid grace, the whites of his eyes catching the moonlight the way Lake’s hair had.

I translated their actions—and the things they weren’t saying—for our human companions.

“Maddy was here.” I paused, suddenly aware of how very much I’d hoped that Callum was wrong, just this once. “Was she in human form, or wolf?”

“In this exact spot?” Lake asked, sniffing again. “She was human, but there’s no shortage of woods around here. If she’d decided to Shift, smart money says she would’ve gone farther in.”