She looked down, but not at her hands this time—at her stomach.
It hadn’t just been Maddy Shifting that night. According to what they’d told us, the baby had, too.
The baby Maddy said was a girl.
The baby who—based on everything we knew about werewolf biology—shouldn’t have lived past that night.
“You think She did this somehow?” Lake said the word she like it was capitalized, like it was a name.
Maddy didn’t answer.
“You have a knack, Maddy,” I said, trying to get her to look at me. “You’re Resilient, but maybe the baby is something else. Maybe her knack isn’t just surviving.”
“It’s not her fault.” Maddy’s eyes flashed. “If having her means this monster following us—I won’t let you touch her. I won’t let anyone touch her.”
“Maddy.” I held my hand out, palm up, and then slowly placed it on her stomach. I didn’t say a word, but as Maddy put her hand over mine, I hoped that every assurance I couldn’t put into words would flow between us, with the exchange of body heat.
Even when I’d thought she was the killer, I’d been determined to keep the other alphas away from Maddy. I wasn’t about to let anyone—or anything—hurt her baby now.
Not even if the baby was somehow responsible for raising the dead.
“What happened last week?” Chase turned the conversation back to the event that had brought us here in the first place. If anyone else had asked, Maddy might have winced, but this was Chase, and for whatever reason, she seemed to trust him.
“We stayed away from people.” In Maddy’s mouth, the word we took on new meaning—whatever else she’d thought or done, she was a mother now, would never just be I again. “I swear, we stayed away from people, but we were outside for months, and then there was this house, and it was empty. The people who lived there had moved, but they hadn’t sold it yet, and we thought—I was hungry, and I was tired, and I just wanted to sleep for one night, just one night, Bryn.”
“Hey.” I caught her chin in my hand. “It’s okay.”
She looked at me, incredulous. “It’s not okay,” she said. “There was a boy. A runaway, and I guess he thought the house looked pretty good, too.”
Blood in the foyer.
Blood on the fireplace.
Blood on the walls.
“He came too close to me, and then Griffin disappeared. I tried to get out of the house. I tried to run, but it was too late.”
“And today?” Caroline asked, her voice decidedly less gentle than it had been before.
“Today, I was hungry.” Maddy met Caroline’s gaze head-on, and for a second, I saw a flicker of the inner steel she’d always hidden beneath that quiet surface. “The baby needs meat.”
“So you went hunting,” Lake said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. For a werewolf, it was.
“I went hunting,” Maddy replied.
Not for humans. Not for pets. For a rabbit or deer, a clean kill that wouldn’t have felt any unnecessary pain or fear.
“And you?” Caroline turned her piercing gaze to Griffin. “If you knew she had to go closer to town to hunt, why weren’t you with her? If this invisible killer only shows up when you’re not around, then why in God’s name would you leave her alone? Why disappear?”
The emphasis Caroline put on those words was unmistakable. She didn’t trust Griffin, and to her, all Maddy’s story had confirmed was that he didn’t have an alibi for the murders.
“I don’t have a choice,” Griffin shot back, his voice rising, his jaw clenched. “I’m new at this. I don’t know how it works. Most of the time, I’m here, and I can control it, but sometimes, I lose my grip, and it’s like there’s something else out there, just waiting to push me away. I fight it. I fight to stay, to keep Maddy safe, but if my attention wavers, even for a second—”
He looked at Lake. No matter who asked the questions, he always ended up talking straight to her. “It might be easier to stick around now that you’re here, Lakie.” He tried to smile, but couldn’t coax his lips into doing anything more than baring his teeth. “The baby might have brought me back, but she’s not the reason I lingered in the first place. Having you here makes everything feel more solid. It makes me feel real.”
None of this made sense to me. It wasn’t an alibi for the murders. It wasn’t an explanation. It was vague and wishy-washy and—
I believe him, Bryn. Lake’s voice cut off all other thoughts in my mind. We’re connected. I don’t need to be able to smell him to know if he’s lying. He’s not. If he says there’s another ghost, there’s another ghost. If he says he’s been trying to fight it, he’s been trying to fight. And if he says that having me here will help, then I’m damn well going to do whatever he needs me to do.
She meant it, more than she’d ever meant anything in her life, and she was sure. I could feel that certainty bleeding over into my own mind, so overpowering I thought my head might explode.
She was in his mind, and I was in hers. She was asking me—begging me—to let that be enough.
“Okay,” I said, but even as the word left my mouth, I thought about Lucas, about the way Maddy had loved him and believed in him and asked me to let him in. What if I was making the same mistake again? What if being alpha meant that I could never really trust anyone, not even the people I loved the most?
He could kill you, my instincts whispered, from somewhere deep inside my mind. He could kill you all.
“We need a plan in case this thing shows up again,” I said, pushing down my doubts, keeping them from Lake, who would never understand. “Right now we’re defenseless. Caroline tried to shoot Griffin, and the bullet went straight through. We have to assume that weapons wouldn’t have an effect on the other ghost, either.”
If there was another ghost.
Caroline didn’t seem to appreciate being reminded that she’d tried to shoot Griffin and failed, but after a few seconds, she transferred her glare from me to him. “Powers and weaknesses. Yours. What are they?”
Griff answered the question without hesitation. He swiped his left arm at the wall of the cave, and it passed straight through. “Walls aren’t a problem. Neither are doors.”
A look of concentration fell over his face, and he placed a hand on my shoulder. I jumped.
“Solidifying is hard,” he said. His touch was ice-cold on my shoulder. The place where his skin met mine felt numb. “But staying solid is easier if I’m not trying to stay visible at the same time.”
He disappeared halfway through that sentence, and the weight of his touch intensified. Beside me, I could feel Lake pushing down a stab of unwanted panic.
A second later, when her brother reappeared, Lake bit her lip.
“Don’t do that,” she said, her voice small. “Don’t ever do that, Griff.”
“Hey.” He caught her eyes. “Lakie, I’m here. I always was.”
“As touching as this reunion is,” Caroline bit in, “can we concentrate on the part where weapons go straight through ghosts? I hate to be the one to point this out, but it’s not exactly a handicap for a killer to be more capable of violence when he’s also invisible.”
Lake gave Caroline a disgruntled look, but the latter was clearly immune.
Jed cleared his throat—about as close to diplomatic as the old man could come. “There’s not a thing alive that can’t be killed, Caro. Dead things included.”
If Jed saw the contradiction inherent in those words, he gave no indication of it. “You just have to know where to hit it.”
Caroline’s hunter eyes appraised Griffin. Lake’s lip curled upward, her incisors gleaming in the scant light of the cave.
“No, Lake,” Griffin interceded. “She’s right. This thing isn’t going to stop until someone stops it.”
It was getting easier to believe that he was on our side, that we really could trust him. But what if that was the point?
“There’s only one thing that hurts me.” This time, Griffin directed his words at me, like he knew what I was thinking.