Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (103 page)

Stop it
, I told myself. Like Chase had implied, there was a fine line between planning for all eventualities and borrowing trouble. I’d told Lake I believed her. I’d decided to trust Griffin—for now. And that meant assuming that everything he’d told us was true: the killer only came around to torture Maddy when Griffin was gone, and if Lake could keep him grounded in the here and now, at least until we figured out a plan, Maddy could go back to civilization.

Or at least to a crappy motel.

“You don’t know that it will work,” Maddy said, turning her stubbornness on Griff.

“Mads, if you think I’m going to let Ugly here go
anywhere
”—Lake’s lips pulled back into a terrifying smile—“you’ve got another think coming.”

Ugly
wasn’t a word I would have used to describe Griffin, but I knew better than to argue with Lake in sister mode.

“It’s settled, then.” Caroline—who hadn’t said a word since Griffin had told us the only time he felt pain was when Lake did—was all business. “We all go. Bryn calls Callum. And if this thing does show up …”

Her baby blues glowed with predatory hunger.

“Somehow, some way, we damn well make it wish it hadn’t.”

Those were big words from such a little girl, but eminently effective, because within moments, we were headed down the mountain, Maddy, baby, and all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“G
RIFFIN?
” C
ALLUM SAID THE NAME THE SAME WAY
I would have said Lucas’s, like Lake’s twin was the one he thought about—his regret—staring up at his ceiling at night. “Mitch’s son.”

“Yes.” I didn’t say much more than that. I waited for Callum to answer my unasked questions, to tell me that I was right to trust Griffin or vaguely hint that the choices I was making were wrong. But for once, Callum sounded like he hadn’t seen this coming. It was a novel enough experience that I figured he might need a moment.

After a few seconds of heavy silence, I decided he’d had enough time to adjust. “We don’t know how or why we can see him now, but whatever happened went down on a full moon three months ago. Maddy was Shifting at the time.”

Another silence fell. This time, it was Callum who broke it. “You think her baby had something to do with it.”

I hadn’t actually told Callum Maddy was pregnant, but I wasn’t surprised he knew. In fact, the only thing surprising about this was that he’d thought Maddy might be the Rabid in the first place.

He hadn’t seen this turn of events coming at all.

“We don’t know for sure that it’s the baby,” I told him. “But Maddy’s never had a problem with ghosts before.”

That was an understatement—like the rest of us, she’d had no idea that ghosts even existed. The question was, had Callum?

“Griffin says that he never left, that he was always here, and we just couldn’t see him.” I waited to see if Callum would take the bait.

He did.

“He stayed for Lake.” This time, there was no question in Callum’s voice.

“He stayed for Lake,” I repeated, and then, because I couldn’t help myself, I asked the question never far from my mind where Callum was concerned. “Did you know?”

Did he know that Griffin’s spirit hadn’t ever really left Lake? Did he know what kind of person Lake’s brother was now?

“There are stories, Bryn. Old stories, about what happens when a female werewolf outlives her twin—but if you’re asking if I knew that there was a way, any way, to bring a Shadow back, the answer is no.”

“Old stories,” I parroted. With Callum, there was no telling how “old” the stories in question might be. “About Shadows.”

The word felt funny on the tip of my tongue, but given that Griffin claimed to have been watching Lake for years, going where she went, aging as she did, it seemed somehow appropriate.

He’d been her Shadow, in more ways than one.

“I didn’t know it was more than a story, Bryn.” On the other end of the phone line, the man I’d come to see as omniscient expelled a breath. “This explains some things.”

I waited for him to elaborate. Given proper motivation, I could use patience like a weapon. He’d taught me that.

“I’ve never seen a future that included Griffin,” Callum said finally. “And when I foresaw the murders, I only saw Maddy.”

There’d been a kind of cold comfort in knowing, these past couple of years, that Callum could see the future. No matter how awful the situation I got into was, the fact that he’d probably seen it coming had helped me believe that there might be a way out of it.

Experience had taught me that Callum might willingly step back and let me go through hell. He would let me, maybe even
make
me fight my own battles. But I didn’t believe he’d let me die.

“You can’t see ghosts.” I said the words out loud.

“Shadows,” Callum corrected. “
Ghost
is a human word, and Shadows aren’t human. They never were.”

“Fine,” I amended. “You can’t see Shadows.”

“No.” That admission seemed to cost him something. “I can’t.”

“And you’re just
now
figuring this out?” Maybe I shouldn’t have sounded so shocked, but Callum had been alive long enough to see entire empires rise and fall. There wasn’t much he didn’t know.

“Werewolf twins are relatively rare, Bryn. One twin dying a violent death while the other lives on is even rarer—and besides, this is the first instance I’ve heard of where anyone except the living twin has been able to see, feel, or interact with a Shadow in any way.”

Violent death?
I couldn’t help looking toward Lake—and Griffin.
I thought he drowned
.

Since those weren’t words I could say out loud—or even
think
to anyone else in the room—I turned my attention to a topic that Callum might actually be able to shed some light on.

“Think this will stop them from coming after Maddy?” I didn’t specify who
they
were. I didn’t have to.

“Do you recall what, precisely, the proposition was that the Senate passed?”

I got the distinct impression that Callum wasn’t asking because
he
didn’t remember.

I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a test. “They voted to intervene if the Rabid became an exposure risk,” I said.

“No,” Callum corrected, “they voted to intervene if
the girl
became an exposure risk.”

I’d spent my formative years skirting Callum’s orders and
looking for loopholes. I knew how to speak the truth without really telling it better than anyone I knew.

“The girl,” I said slowly, “isn’t a risk.”

“No,” Callum agreed. “She’s not.”

“So the Senate can’t use the Winchester attack to justify coming here,” I continued. “And since neither you nor I will give them access to our lands …”

Maddy was safe—at least from them, which meant one less thing to worry about for me. I just wished Callum had known something more about Shadows—how much of their original personalities they retained, how likely it was that Maddy had raised two, how exactly one might go about fighting a Shadow, besides trying to get at it through its living twin.

For a moment, I let myself consider the implications. If Griffin wasn’t telling the truth, if Lake was wrong about him …

“How many female Weres are there besides Lake who have a dead twin?” I needed to know. There were so few natural-born females that if the number was bigger than zero, it wouldn’t be bigger by much.

Callum didn’t get the chance to answer my question. The line went suddenly dead. I tried to redial, but three things stopped me dead in my tracks.

The lights started flickering.

The door to the cheap motel room we’d rented slammed shut.

And Griffin disappeared.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I
N AN INSTANT
, C
HASE WAS BY MY SIDE AND
L
AKE WAS
at Maddy’s. Caroline slipped effortlessly into the shadows, her back pressed up against the corner of the room, her eagle eyes sharp.

Something dark and primal crept over Jed’s eyes.

For a second, there was silence, and then I heard laughter—a deep, throaty chuckle that sounded absolutely nothing like Griffin.

Not Griffin
.

Caroline went to draw a weapon, but I met her eyes, and she read the order in mine. Blades and bullets might pass straight through this predator, but the rest of us in this room weren’t immune. The last thing we needed was someone going down to friendly fire.

Lake, try to find Griffin
. I kept my words short and to the point.
Wherever he went, whatever just happened, get him back
.

I stepped sideways, appraising the room, feeling the air on my skin and trying to pinpoint the origin of the laughter.

Nowhere. Everywhere.

To my left, cracks spread along the surface of the mirror, giving it the gossamer appearance of a spiderweb.

Then it shattered.

Jed lunged to his left. A blade of glass flew into the wall behind him, grazing his back.

There were too many of us in this room. Too many targets, too much glass.

Run
, my instincts whispered, from the most ancient part of my brain.
Run, and it will chase you
.

The thought came out of nowhere. I’d spent enough time worrying—and trying not to worry—about Griffin that I hadn’t thought much about the alternative, yet now I knew beyond knowing that if I ran, this thing would follow.

A hand clamped over my arm. Chase. He didn’t want me going anywhere. Our eyes locked, and we stood there, staring at each other, neither one of us willing to give.

On the far side of the room, cracks began spreading along the surface of the window. They spiraled outward, and then there was a
whoosh
of air, and glass exploded inward. The shards rained down, embedding themselves in skin—mine, the others’—tiny, razor-sharp, incessant.

If we stayed here, this thing might pick us off one by one. We couldn’t see it, couldn’t touch it, couldn’t fight back. Short of decapitation, Lake and Chase would survive, but Caroline and Jed were a different story.

Maddy’s baby was a different story.

Griff’s close, Bryn, but he can’t break through
. Lake’s words were punctuated by the rumbling sound of the dresser, vibrating against the floor.
Whoever or whatever this is, it’s shutting him out
.

Griffin had been telling the truth—about everything. I’d doubted him, doubted Lake—

The top drawer of the dresser flew outward, crashing against the opposite wall with enough force that it splintered into pieces.

Another drawer. Then another. Shards of glass from the mirror. The nightstand.

In the middle of the room, Jed straightened suddenly, and his eyes narrowed, his pupils pulsing. There was something almost reptilian about his stare, but as the Shadow tore the room to pieces, debris biting into my skin, Maddy’s,
Caroline’s
—Jed’s posture changed from defensive to offensive.

Our assailant might not have been solid, but his makeshift weapons were. Bleeding adrenaline and power, Jed lashed out with a roundhouse kick, shattering one of the dresser drawers. A piece of debris became a staff in his hands, and then he was nothing but a blur of motion, deflecting projectiles with agility and speed that were beyond that, even, of a Were.

Run. Run, and it will chase me
. I couldn’t shake the idea. What was happening in this room wasn’t our killer’s MO. It hadn’t Shifted yet. It hadn’t laid a ghostly hand on any of us directly.

Maybe it wasn’t used to facing off against groups.

That thought unlocked another one in my mind, a memory: the victim in Winchester was a girl. A teenage girl. Human. Before she had been reduced to blood and bones, she might have looked a little something like me: brown hair, tan skin.…

The Wyoming victim had been a boy. A teenager. A human.

Most killers had a type. If this ghost—
Shadow
, whatever—was thirsting for prey, of all the people in this room, Caroline and I were the only two who might suffice.