“I left to get better,” the girl who’d been one of us said simply. “And everything got worse.”
I ached for the bond missing between us, for the ability to take on her thoughts as my own, to feel them with and for her and protect her from those who would see her harmed.
But every instinct I had was screaming at me that I wasn’t Maddy’s alpha anymore.
I wasn’t even sure we were friends.
“I knew,” she said, her hand rubbing small circles over her bulging stomach and leaving no question what she was referring to. “When I left, I knew, Bryn, and I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell anyone. I thought I could do it—just go away and get better and stop missing Lucas, who I thought he was, what I thought we had. “
She eased toward me. Or maybe I eased toward her. I couldn’t be sure.
“I didn’t know how much it would hurt.”
I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the pregnancy, or leaving the rest of us behind.
“I didn’t know that having someone inside of you could make you a hundred times more lonely on the surface. But I was doing it. I was.” She nodded, as if to convince herself of that fact, even as the tears she’d been holding back spilled over and carved tracks into the grime on her face. “We were doing fine, but then there was a full moon. It wasn’t the first one, but the baby …”
“He Shifted, too,” I said.
Maddy met my eyes. “She,” the pregnant girl corrected softly. “She Shifted, too.”
It wasn’t uncommon for werewolf pups to Shift in the womb—that was part of the reason so few human women survived giving birth to werewolf kids. Combined with Maddy’s own body morphing and breaking, the effect must have been excruciating, so much so that I could almost overlook the other thing she’d just said.
Behind me, Lake could not. “She?”
“It’s a girl,” Maddy said. “Don’t ask me how I know, but I do, and that full moon, when she was Shifting, and I was Shifting, I thought—”
She’d thought she was having a miscarriage. Because female pups only made it to full term if there were twins.
“But nothing bad happened, Bryn. I was fine, and she was fine, but my body—it was like being split in two, cut up from the inside out. It was like dying, and then, suddenly, I wasn’t alone.”
Her eyes landed on Griffin’s, and he smiled, a tragic smile that looked out of place with the freckles on his face.
“You brought Griffin back?” Lake’s voice was very small. Through the bond, I could feel the slight tightening of her throat, the aching knowledge that, for years, she hadn’t been able to do what Maddy had that night. “There was a full moon, and you Shifted, and you just brought him back? That doesn’t even make any sense.”
Maddy looked down at her hands—away from Lake and her question. Griffin picked up where Maddy left off, speaking the words she couldn’t bring herself to say.
“It wasn’t like that, Lake. One second, I was there, watching, invisible, and the next, I could feel Maddy’s Shift, feel the baby Shifting, feel the moon pulling me closer, turning me inside out. Maddy was screaming, Lake, and it hurt me. I started to Shift, too, and then it was like a nuclear reactor went off inside my body.”
His eyes shone just describing it, even now.
“Being dead is like being under anesthetic.” Griffin struggled to put the feeling into words. “Your emotions are there—the important ones, but everything else is numb. Nothing is the way it used to be. Nothing is right, but that night—” His eyes went back to Maddy. “I could feel. I was there.”
For one second, maybe two, Maddy smiled. Then she looked down at her hands, and I knew that whatever she said next wouldn’t be good. “The corpses started showing up a week later.”
There was a full moon. Griffin came back. And a week later, things started to die. Maddy had to realize how that sounded—but it was clear from the way she looked at him that she did not.
“Corpses?” Jed prompted, his voice so gentle, it surprised me.
“They were animals,” Maddy said. “At first.”
I thought back to the blood in the cabin in Alpine Creek. “Something killed them?” I asked, forcing my gaze to stay on Maddy and not dart over to Griffin.
Maddy continued on as if I hadn’t said a word. “I woke up that morning, and Griffin was gone. He just disappeared, and the moment he left, I felt it.” Maddy shivered. I was close enough to her now that I could have reached out and wrapped my arm around her—but I didn’t.
“I didn’t see anything, not at first, but I heard the door open. Then I heard bones snapping and skin stretching, and even though I couldn’t smell anything, I knew someone was Shifting. At first, I thought it was Griffin, so I walked out into the hallway.” Maddy stopped blinking, her eyes far away and glassy, as if she could see it happening, all over again. “The front door was open, and there was a dog standing on the porch. You could tell it was someone’s pet, because it was wearing a little red collar.”
I could see where this was going—well enough that she didn’t need to relive it by putting the experience into words, but when I opened my mouth to tell her that, her voice grew louder, more decisive.
“I didn’t know what the dog was doing there, and I thought that maybe I’d imagined the sound of Shifting. But then I saw the tag on the dog’s collar moving, and I realized he was shaking.” Maddy swallowed, but forced herself to continue. “The dog was a mutt, maybe a year old, and he was shaking so hard that I knew whatever I’d heard, whatever I was feeling, he could feel it, too.”
Now I could see it: Maddy and the mutt and a villain neither one of them could see.
“The puppy saw me. It came right up to me. It nuzzled my hand. And then something cut it in two.”
Blood on the floor and walls of the cabin. I couldn’t see through Maddy’s eyes, but I didn’t need to. I’d smelled the cabin, I’d seen the blood.
“It just kept going and going, claws digging into it, teeth ripping out chunks, and I just stood there.”
“You couldn’t have stopped it,” Griffin murmured. “You couldn’t even see it.”
Maddy continued on, as if she hadn’t heard him. “And then it stopped, and I thought whatever had killed the dog might come for me, but it didn’t. Griffin came back.” Maddy blinked, and I could see her coming back into the present. “We buried the dog—what was left of it—out back.”
It was an odd thing for a werewolf to do, to bury an animal that should have smelled like prey, but the horror of what had been done to the little dog in the red collar had left a mark on Maddy that was visible on her face even now.
This wasn’t just hunting.
This was torture.
And she’d been helpless to stop it. There was nothing a person like us hated more.
The rest of the story made its way out of her mouth in halting, staccato bits. She’d showered, scrubbing her hands raw, using an entire bottle of shampoo, but never feeling clean. Griffin had come back, and whenever he was near, things weren’t so bad, but the second he disappeared …
It happened again. And again. And again. Sometimes it was strays. Sometimes it was someone’s pet, but always, it was brutal. She and Griffin left Alpine Creek, but wherever they went, whatever Maddy did, the monster followed. It always knew where to find her, and Griffin was the only thing that kept it away.
“What happened during that full moon, Maddy?” Jed spoke before I had a chance to, and I wondered if he knew something on the subject of ghosts that the rest of us didn’t. “The night you saw Griffin for the first time—I need you to tell me exactly what you did to bring him back.”
I saw the logic in the question—if we could figure out how Maddy had brought Griffin back, we might be able to figure out the likelihood that she’d brought something else back, too.
Let it be something else, I thought. Not someone she cares about. Not someone Lake cares about, too. Just this once, let it be something else. Let it be easy.
For a long time, Maddy didn’t answer Jed’s question. When she did speak, the words came out in a whisper. “We don’t think it’s anything I did,” she said, each word hard-won. “We don’t think it’s me at all.”