Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (89 page)

“These images have already made their way to the internet.”

Shay clicked through a series of crime scene photos, each more ghastly than the last.

“Luckily, both local authorities and the person responsible
for leaking these pictures seem to believe this is an isolated incident.”

Shay paused, and in the space between his words, I could hear the beating of my own heart. The sound of it—and the picture on the screen, blood spread across white walls, like someone had been finger painting with it—made me dizzy, almost nauseous.

“Local authorities are wrong.”

This time, when Shay clicked over to the next slide, the images weren’t crime scene photos, but they were just as bloody. Just as gruesome.

“These were taken last week, just outside of the southernmost portion of Snake Bend territory and just north of the Arkansas state line.”

Years of geography lessons—the kind regular girls never had to take—came pouring back into my mind. The Snake Bend territory reached from North Dakota over to Minnesota, and then down through Iowa and most of Missouri. The Delta Hills Pack had most of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama—but there was an area between the southern tip of Snake Bend and the northern border of Delta Hills that didn’t officially belong to either pack.

No-Man’s-Land.

There were strips of land throughout the continent that fell to the same classification, places where geographical barriers and state lines didn’t line up, or where history might
have divided up territories in a way at odds with the present.

No-Man’s-Land was the only option for wolves who didn’t want to be associated with any pack—and sooner or later, most lone werewolves broke under the pressure of life alone and went Rabid.

“We’re lucky that as of yet, Missouri and Wyoming officials are not talking to each other.”

Was it my imagination, or did Shay’s gaze rest on me a second too long when he said Wyoming? That was where Cedar Ridge territory met up with Stone River. And in between the two, there was another slice of No-Man’s-Land.

One I knew all too well.

“You’re sure this is the work of a rabid Were?” the Ash Mountain alpha asked. “The Wyoming attack could have been a human, albeit a disturbed one. And Missouri—looking at the body, there’s no way to know that wasn’t an animal.”

I couldn’t help staring at the photos, looking for differences. The victims were both decimated past all recognition. They had no faces, no extremities, no visible sign of having ever been a person with a name and a family and a future.

These people were dissected and torn to pieces and devoured, and while an animal might have managed it in the backwoods of southern Missouri, the Wyoming crime scene was indoors. Someone had opened the door to the house, and—it appeared—closed it after they left, but there were clear teeth marks in some of the wounds.

The jugular had been ripped out. The walls had been sprayed with blood, and then hands—human hands—had played in it.

This wasn’t just a werewolf who had lost control. This was a monster who enjoyed the control he had over his victim, and whether or not the same person was responsible for the Missouri attack, there was a very good chance that whoever had killed the Wyoming victim was a Were.

Anger bubbled up inside of me, overriding my earlier nausea. Wyoming was near the edge of my territory. This was a threat to my peripherals, my pack, and that someone had chosen to do this so close to the place where the last Rabid had set up camp with his own victims—the kids who now looked to me for protection as members of the Cedar Ridge Pack—felt like a slap in the face.

Or possibly a warning.

“I don’t see how this is a Senate matter.” The alpha from Luna Mesa had an almost musical voice and a calm about him that made me wonder exactly how old he was. “Two attacks is not a pandemic. Let the local alphas investigate and deal with the situation. I’d venture to guess that neither you nor Callum needs our interference, Shay.”

The words reminded me of something I’d known, but forgotten: the Senate wasn’t called every time there was a Rabid. The reason Callum had called it the last time was because the man had been hunting across the country, in and out of
different territories, for years. Plus he’d done something the others had thought next to impossible: created new Weres.

But one murder in Wyoming and one in Missouri? As graphic as they were, as horrific, the Luna Mesa alpha was right. That shouldn’t have been a Senate affair. For a few moments, I thought that perhaps Shay was just trying to undermine Callum—and me. It even occurred to me that he might have sent someone to play Rabid in between our lands, but that didn’t explain why he was claiming that a similar attack had happened near his territory, or what he was hoping to gain by going public with this information now.

Nothing could have prepared me for what Shay said next.

“Believe me, Arturo. This
is
a Senate affair.” Shay took a seat, like the fight had drained out of him, but I knew better. The look in his eyes told me he was about to deliver a lethal blow—though to who or what, I wasn’t sure.

Beside me, Callum looked straight ahead, staring at a fixed point in the distance. His facial expression never changed, but my stomach plummeted, and my heartbeat became audible once more.

Shay looked at me, only at me. “I have reason to believe that this Rabid is going to strike again. And I have reason to believe that she’s female.”

CHAPTER TEN

T
HE SILENCE FOLLOWING
S
HAY
’
S PROCLAMATION WAS
deafening. The undercurrent of power in the room surged, unmistakable and violent. Muscles tensed. Pupils pulsed. The air, thick with unspoken emotion, was hot in my lungs. I felt like I might suffocate on the unbearable intensity of it all, and even though I’d known objectively that I was in a room full of people who weren’t human and didn’t live by human laws, the beasts inside them were much closer to the surface now.

Close enough that if even one of them Shifted, I could easily find myself in a room full of wolves.

“A female Rabid?” The alpha from Shadow Bluff—a man I knew only by reputation, one that said he had a habit of going through human wives like Kleenex—recovered first. “There’s no such thing.”

Just like there wasn’t such a thing as a female alpha. Just like there was no such thing as a werewolf who was born human, but Changed.

“You can’t honestly expect us to believe that a female
is responsible for this.” That was from the Ash Mountain alpha—William. I didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered that he didn’t think my sex was even remotely capable of committing this kind of violence.

“I think females are capable of many things.” Shay let his eyes linger on my face, my body for a second too long. “Does anyone in this room doubt that my mother could kill? That she has killed?”

There wasn’t an individual in the Senate who hadn’t taken a life—myself included. Sora had been around for centuries—at least—and she was one of the most dominant wolves in the Stone River Pack.

There probably wasn’t much she wasn’t capable of.

“You’re not suggesting that your mother is responsible for this.” The Luna Mesa alpha—the one who’d challenged Shay to prove that this Rabid was Senate business at all—was incredulous. Of all of them, he seemed the least taken in by Shay’s performance, the most skeptical.

“My mother,” Shay said, glancing meaningfully at Callum, “is otherwise occupied. But this Rabid
is
female, and I think you’ll all agree that complicates things.”

That was putting it mildly. The standard operating procedure with Rabids—with the exception of the one who’d managed to bargain with the Senate—was immediate execution, brutal and absolute. But there wasn’t a man in this room who would willingly kill a female werewolf. There were too few of them. Even
with the addition of the six females in my pack who had been born human, there were fewer than two dozen female Weres in the country.

I wasn’t sure Shay’s pack had even one.

“What evidence do you have that our killer is female?” Callum asked. If he’d seen this turn of events coming, he gave no visible indication of it, but there was no surprise in his features, either.

Shay leaned forward and delivered the answer to Callum’s question. “The police in Wyoming have a witness that puts a female between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one at the crime scene. No one knows where she came from or where she went, but there’s an indication that she may have been living in the woods.”

A female werewolf. Living by herself. In the unclaimed land between Callum’s territory and my own.

No
.

I didn’t want to give purchase to the thought. I didn’t want to consider that it might be possible. It
wasn’t
possible.

“I trust that no one here is missing a female?”

At Shay’s question, every single person in the room turned to look at me. More than a third of the female werewolves in the country were members of my pack, and if anyone else had been in possession of a female Were in that age range, they almost certainly would have kept her close to home.

“I’m not missing any wolves,” I said firmly. I wasn’t. My
pack only had twenty members, and each one was accounted for.

But Maddy …

Maddy wasn’t.

“You have two peripheral females.” Shay played those words like a trump card. All eyes were on me, and this time, I didn’t just feel the power—I felt the
animosity
. The violent, animal rage that I had something they wanted. The suspicion that I might not be protecting that most valuable of resources.

The Ash Meadow alpha, the alpha from Flint Creek, Shay—none of them would have let a female live on the edges of their territories. None of them would have given her that kind of freedom. Even Callum had probably only let Lake live in Montana when she was a part of his pack because her father lived there, too.

“The Cedar Ridge Pack has two peripheral females,” I said, my voice steely and utterly unapologetic. “And I know exactly where they are. At all times. Always.”

Not because they were female. Because they were Pack.

“Phoebe and Sage haven’t been anywhere near Wyoming,” I said, allowing the others to smell the truth in my words. What I didn’t say was that Maddy could have been there, and I wouldn’t have known it. She’d broken off from the pack, and I’d willingly withdrawn my mind from hers. I had no idea where she was, or what she was doing, or if she was even okay. She certainly hadn’t been okay when she’d left. She’d been
heartbroken and bowled over by grief and angry—at me, at Lucas, at herself.

And I’d let her go.

I couldn’t let myself think about that, couldn’t risk a tell working its way onto my face. Unless Shay specifically mentioned Maddy, I could answer his questions in a way that would smell true to the other alphas, without giving a hint to the fact that I knew more than I was letting on.

I just had to bank on the likelihood that none of the others, Callum included, would ask if I’d withdrawn my claim to one of the females in my pack. I had to hope that none of the men in this room would consider that possibility, because they never would have entertained the idea themselves.

Most alphas didn’t even like losing males. The larger a pack, the stronger the alpha, and werewolves weren’t naturally inclined to make themselves weak.

“If you deny that one of your wolves is responsible,” Shay told me, lingering on the word
if
, “then we have to consider the possibility that Samuel Wilson may have Changed at least one additional female of whom we had no knowledge up to this point.”

Samuel Wilson
. I’d never even heard his first name before. In my mind, he’d always been “the Rabid,” the monster who had killed my parents and haunted my dreams. But now, we were dealing with another Rabid, and the monster from my nightmares had a name.

“You think Wilson made another female Were?” the Flint Creek alpha asked, his eyes alight with hunger.

“So it would seem,” Shay replied.

I wanted to latch on to the possibility—wanted to ignore the reality that Maddy was missing, and a female had turned up in the middle of a murder investigation in a place she might well have gone. But I knew my pack. I’d been in their heads, and they’d lived with good old
Samuel Wilson
for years. He’d been power hungry, abusive, psychotic. He wouldn’t have let a female wander away from the fold any more than Shay would have.

That meant that if there really was a female Rabid, in all likelihood, it wasn’t some unknown girl, who’d never had a pack. It was—

No
.

I wasn’t going there. Not here. Not now.

“And if there is a new Were out there on her own?” Callum met Shay’s eyes, and though there was nothing aggressive in the motion, I could see Shay actively fighting the urge to turn away.

“If there’s another female,” Shay said, his voice a whisper that cut through the air like a snake through the bushes, “a
lone
female, then there’s a question of what’s to be done about it.”