Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (105 page)

That same monster had killed my parents, Changed Chase. The kids in my pack had once been his, until they’d turned on him and literally torn him to pieces.

Female twin. Violent death
. Those were the ingredients Callum had said went into making a Shadow. I hoped I was wrong, but we knew for a fact that Samuel Wilson fit at least one of those requirements.

As soon as Devon got back to me, we’d know if he fit the other one, too.

“I’m sorry.”

It took me a second or two to figure out who was apologizing and another stretch of time to work my mind around why.

“I thought having Lake here would keep me grounded—and
it did, to an extent. I think our killer got tired of waiting. When he realized I wasn’t going anywhere …” Griffin trailed off.

I thought back to what he had said earlier, about sometimes losing his grip on this reality. I hadn’t understood until I’d seen it myself, but now I had to wonder—what if the other Shadow didn’t
choose
to wait until Griffin was gone until it attacked? What if they
couldn’t
be in the same place at the same time?

Without even realizing I was doing it, I let that thought bleed over onto Lake’s and Chase’s minds. With absolutely no ceremony whatsoever, Lake turned immediately to Griffin and proceeded to show him the exact same amount of sympathy she’d shown me.

“Stop your caterwauling,” she said, though I could hear the undercurrent of sadness, worry, and fear in her voice. “That thing came here, and you left. We could all do with a few less sorrys and a little more figuring of the hows and the whys.”

“Caterwauling?” Griffin repeated dryly. “You think I’m
caterwauling
?”

Lake nodded and then made an imperious shooing motion, which Griff must have interpreted as encouragement to stay on task and start talking. With an aggravated look at his sister, he did.

“The second before I blinked out, I could feel a presence trying to get in. There was this pressure, inside my head, outside it.” He paused. “Then it was here. For a split second, we both were. And then …”

He stopped talking, and the moment he did, memories passed from Lake’s mind to mine. I didn’t know how she’d picked them up from Griffin, or how he’d known that she would be able to pick up where he left off. If the bond between them was that strong, why hadn’t I picked up on Griffin’s innocence sooner? Why hadn’t I believed what Lake was telling me? Why hadn’t I seen?

Because you didn’t want to
. I answered my own question.
Because you couldn’t let yourself let him in—not after Lucas. Not again
.

I shook myself free of the thought like a dog shaking off the rain. Through my bond with Lake, I let myself feel what Griffin had in the second before the other Shadow began the attack—the incredible pressure, the chill, and finally, the pull of a vacuum.

Pulling Griffin apart.

Pulling him to pieces.

“Two Shadows can’t be in the same place at the same time,” I said, mulling it over and wondering if there was any way we could use that little tidbit to our advantage. Besides an attack against the Shadow’s twin, that was the only thing we’d found that even approximated weakness.

Facing off against Wilson had been bad enough when he was a corporeal Rabid. Taking him down in this form would be much, much harder.

Maybe even impossible.

“What are you thinking?” Chase was the one who asked the question, but I could see reflections of it on the others’ faces—all except for Maddy, whose pale face was carefully, curiously blank.

“I asked Devon to look into something.” That wasn’t exactly an answer, but it was true. “When he gets back to me, I’ll let you guys know.”

I wasn’t going to dig up the past we’d tried so hard to bury, not until I was sure. At this point, all I had were a string of coincidences and a gut feeling, like lead in my stomach.

I wasn’t going to rip open Chase’s wounds—or Maddy’s—for that.

“I’ll go.” Maddy whispered the words, but there was a certain strength to them nonetheless. A finality.

“Go?” Lake and I repeated, our voices combining to make the question sound more like an exclamation.

“This is my fault,” Maddy said, enunciating each word with almost maniacal precision. “This thing is following me. The animals and the girl and that boy in Wyoming—it’s all me.”

“Maddy.” There was something in the way Griffin said her name that reminded me of the way Chase said mine. “None of this is your—”

“
All
of this is my fault.” Maddy wasn’t whispering anymore. Her vocal cords tensed with the weight of the words. “I did this.
Me
.”

She had her hand on her stomach again, and I wondered what exactly she was blaming herself for.

“You could have died, Bryn.” Maddy swung her gaze toward mine, but made no move to come closer to the bed. I struggled to stand, moved closer to her.

Maddy didn’t bat an eye. It was like she was trapped in her own little world, her own nightmare. “This monster went after
you
. It hurt
you
, and the last thing I wanted to do—”

She stopped talking and bit her lip. I could see her trying not to cry, trying not to remember.

“It was my fault,” she said again, but this time, it felt like the two of us were the only people in this room. “Last time, it was my fault.”

She wasn’t talking about the Shadow. Not anymore.

“You got hurt. You could have died, and I should have seen it.”

“Maddy—”

“No!” She didn’t let me finish, didn’t even let me start. “You took him in for
me
. You made him Pack for
me
. I loved him, and he would have killed you! He was always planning on killing you, and I didn’t see it. What kind of monster does that make me?”

All this time, I hadn’t realized that Maddy had been carrying the weight of guilt around, too—that she blamed herself for Lucas, more than she blamed me.

“I loved him, Bryn. I would have died for him, and he—” She took in a sharp breath, her grip on her stomach tightening. “I still loved him.” Those words held the weight of a confession. “Even afterward. Even after he—”

She couldn’t say the words.

I knew then with haunting prescience that the moment when Lucas had challenged me and I’d faced down the challenge would always be between the two of us. We would never get past it. I would always think of it when I looked at Maddy, and she would always think of it when she looked at me.

It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t betrayal, it wasn’t even hurt—but that unnameable emotion, that burden might lighten in time, but it would never really go away. Not because we couldn’t forgive each other—we had.

Things would never be simple with Maddy and me because neither one of us would ever fully forgive ourselves.

“This isn’t your fault.” I brought the conversation back to the present, back to a place where I might be able to make a difference and chip away at her guilt. “This Shadow is playing with you. It’s torturing you.”

“I let it do this,” Maddy said. “Somehow, being near me—”

“No.” I wracked my mind for something I could say, something that would smell true to her nose. “There was another murder, in Missouri, just north of the Arkansas state line. The Senate thought it was the work of the same Rabid.”

Or at least, some of them had.

“You’re not making this thing kill, Maddy. It’s following you because it can.” I could feel myself coming close to something I didn’t want to say out loud. “It wants you to feel like this is your fault. It wants your pain.”

Maddy’s eyes flickered with uncertainty, then horror, then the barest hint of recognition. She knew firsthand what it was like to live with someone who got pleasure out of other people’s pain.

“Don’t give this thing what it wants.” There was an alien depth to the emotion in those words—one I heard, even as I was saying them. Maddy heard it, too, and she heard the wealth of things I wasn’t saying.

Understanding shone in her eyes, then hardened into something else.

She knew.

Beside me, I could feel Chase’s mulling over the fact that something had passed between Maddy and me—something unspeakable. Across the room, Lake looked severely tempted to beat the answer out of me with the butt of her gun.

My cell phone rang, breaking the tension in the room. I knew before I answered it that it was Devon. The ring tone—the theme song from
Moulin Rouge!
—was a big tip-off.

“Remind me never to leave you alone with my cell phone again,” I said, answering on the second ring.

“Hello to you, too.”

“What have you got?” I asked. It would have been better if we’d been able to have this conversation silently, but the farther away the two of us got from each other, the fainter the connection. We’d been able to connect in our dreams, but it would be more difficult now that we were both awake, and
this was one of those times when I needed to hear every single word—even if that meant that Lake, Chase, and Maddy would hear them, too.

“As soon as I woke up—and assured Ali that you would be fine, for which you owe me a day at the spa, at the very least—I went to find Mitch.”

I wasn’t sure how old Mitch was, but he was by far the oldest person in our pack—and the only one likely to have the answers I’d asked Devon to find.

“I caught him near Keely.”

“Devious,” I commented. Keely was the bartender at the Wayfarer. Like me, she had a psychic knack, but hers was for making people spill their secrets. If Mitch knew the answer to Devon’s questions, Devon would have gotten it out of him, just by virtue of Keely being in the room.

“You were right. Mitch says Samuel Wilson did have a twin.”

Chase didn’t respond in any visible way to Devon’s bombshell. Maddy looked down. Lake reared back. Of the three Weres in this room, she was the only one who seemed truly surprised.

The rest of us knew too much about the monster, firsthand. Even in death, he’d never let us go.

Later
, I told myself. Later, I could process this. Later, I could think about what it meant, but right now I needed one more piece of information.

“I need to know what pack Wilson was born in.”

While male Weres sometimes transferred packs, females usually stayed in their natal pack until they died. If we knew which pack Wilson was born in, there was a good chance we’d be able to find his living twin. If Griffin was right, if his only real weakness was Lake, finding this monster’s twin was the first step toward identifying his Achilles heel.

“I suspected you might need that information.” Devon’s voice was too light, too calm. He was playing a part, and I had no idea why. “I asked Mitch that very question.”

“And?”

Devon cleared his throat. “Samuel Wilson,” he said, in that same, unnatural tone, “was born a member of the Stone River Pack.”

I had to remind myself to keep breathing. I fought the urge to gasp.

The Rabid who’d killed my parents had been born as one of Callum’s wolves. That revelation alone would have been a bombshell, but the implications were far, far worse.

At one point in time, Callum’s pack had counted among its numbers three female Weres, but now that Katie and Lake were in my pack, Stone River only had one.

“Devon.” I said my friend’s name and then swallowed hard.

No wonder he sounded so off.

The only female in Callum’s pack old enough to be Wilson’s twin was Sora.

Devon’s mother.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I
HUNG UP THE PHONE WITH
D
EVON AND SUNK BACK
onto the stiff motel bed. Callum had to have known, back when we were hunting Wilson, that he was Sora’s twin.

Sora had to have known.

To catch a Rabid, you have to think like a Rabid
.

Had she been talking about her brother?

Unwittingly, my mind flashed back to the day Callum had found me hiding under the kitchen sink in an old house I barely remembered—the day I’d seen a rabid werewolf kill my parents like they were nothing more than meat. Sora had been part of the cavalry that had come with Callum to rescue me. She’d been the one who Shifted, the one who leapt for the monster’s throat.

The two had grappled.

Flashes of fur. White, gleaming fangs
.

My memory was piecemeal, at best, but the images were there, and they were hard to shake. The Rabid had gone out the window, and Sora had followed. The monster should have
died that night. We’d attributed the fact that he hadn’t to his knack—a perfect match for my own. But maybe Wilson’s survival hadn’t just been a combination of Resilience and luck.

Maybe Sora had let him go.

Not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t stick around to watch him die, knowing that she’d been the cause.

Now, he was back, and the only thing we knew of that might hurt a Shadow was attacking its twin. I hadn’t wanted to think about the implication of that when I’d believed Griffin might be the killer, and I certainly didn’t want to think about it now. For better or worse, after everything we’d been through, Sora was still Devon’s mother.