Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (95 page)

W
E SET UP CAMP AN HOUR AWAY, JUST INSIDE THE
Cedar Ridge border. Tomorrow, we’d head back into No-Man’s-Land and swing down to Alpine Creek, a sleepy mountain town where people didn’t ask questions and the sheriff was easy to bribe.

If Chase was right, Maddy might have gone back to the place where this nightmare had started for her, a place where she’d felt more pain than most people could ever imagine.

“Tent’s up.” Chase never used ten words when two words would do. I looked up at the sky—cloud covered and seemingly starless—and then back at our makeshift campground.

Jed had, at one point in his life, apparently been something of a survivalist. He’d stated, in his quietly authoritative way, that there was no reason for us to risk being seen checking into a motel, no matter how far from the crime scene we’d traveled. I hadn’t argued. The werewolves among us were just as comfortable—maybe more so—sleeping outside, and I wasn’t holding out much hope that I would be able to sleep at all.

Chase sat down behind me and swept my hair off my neck. He laid his cheek against the skin he’d exposed, then pressed his lips gently to the place where my shoulder met my neck.

“Brought you something,” he said. “To help you sleep.”

I turned back, my face so close to his that I could barely tell where I ended and he began. “What?”

“Maps.” With a crooked smile, he pulled back and began to spread them out between us.

It was easier out here, away from the rest of the pack, to believe that he understood me, my priorities, the things that made me tick. On the edges of the Cedar Ridge territory, I didn’t feel quite so alpha, and Chase wasn’t quite so self-contained.

“You brought me maps,” I repeated. “To help me sleep.”

“You’ll sleep better once you have a long-term plan,” he murmured, placing a hand on mine and dragging them both over the surface of the paper. “Maps. Plan.”

I got up on my knees to get a better look. It was easy enough to see the lines of the maps by lamplight, though if Ali had been there, she almost certainly would have told me that reading in these conditions would ruin my eyes.

Had I thought there was even the slightest chance that I would stay human long enough for that to matter, I might have cared.

Instead, I turned my full attention to Chase’s gift, sorting through the maps and arranging one next to the other until we had the whole of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Utah spread out in front of us.

I drew an invisible circle with the tip of my finger. “We’re here.” I dragged my finger downward. “No-Man’s-Land starts
here
, goes through Alpine Creek, and stretches up to the location of the last murder, here.”

I quickly outlined the borders of No-Man’s-Land.

“This side is Shadow Bluff territory.”

Idaho.

“Cedar Ridge.”

Montana.

“And Stone River starts here. There’s another slice of No-Man’s-Land between Stone River and Luna Mesa here.”

Before Maddy had left, I’d advised her to stick to our territory, or Callum’s. Whether or not she’d listened was another matter. From the moment she’d told me she was leaving, she’d seemed certain that she was fully capable of staying off the beaten path, that wherever she was going, no one else would or could follow.

“When I have to get away, I go for the mountains.” Lake took a seat on the other side of the maps, stretching out her mile-long legs and eyeing our handiwork. “I usually turn around before I get there, but it’s nice to have someplace to run to.”

Mountains? Right now we were smack-dab in the center of the Rockies. Even if Maddy had headed for the mountains, we had no idea of knowing which ones.

“Why mountains?” I asked, hoping Lake’s answer might jog something loose in my mind. I’d always wondered, but never asked about her tendency to Shift and run off into the night.
Like Griffin, Lake’s occasional need for space wasn’t exactly the kind of thing we discussed.

“It’s quiet there.” Until Lake actually said those words, I hadn’t been sure she would answer, but once she started talking, she didn’t seem inclined to stop. “You pick the right mountain, and you could get lost forever: just you and the rocks and the sky. The higher it is and the harder it is to get to, the less chance you have of running into other people. Or werewolves.”

A glint of metal caught my eye, and I changed the subject to one I knew Lake would be more comfortable with.

“That Matilda?” I hadn’t gotten a good look at the shotgun Lake was currently cleaning, but her old standby had the status of a ratty old teddy bear or favorite pet.

“Nope,” Lake said, not missing a beat. “This is Abigail. She’s new.”

The second Lake started naming weapons, Chase pressed another kiss to my temple and then made himself scarce. He seemed to sense that it had been a while since Lake and I had time for girl talk.

“Abigail, huh?” I said.

Lake grinned. “I named yours Greta.”

Of course she did.

“Hey, Lake. Do you and Caroline ever talk weapons?” I don’t know what possessed me to ask that question, except for the fact that as long as I’d known Lake, she’d been one hell of a
shot, and most days, Caroline’s knack seemed to be her single most defining feature.

Lake snorted. “Bryn, you might not have noticed this, but Caroline doesn’t talk. Except to Devon, and that’s only when she’s trying to get him to shut up.”

Actually, I hadn’t noticed Caroline and Devon talking at all. It made me wonder what else I had missed, wrapped up in pack business and blind to anything else.

“It’s not fair.” The sudden fierceness in Lake’s tone caught me off guard. If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought her eyes were wet with unshed tears.

“The fact that Devon never shuts up?” I joked, knowing better than to act like I’d noticed the emotion on her face.

Lake shook her head. I waited.

“If Maddy was a guy, the worst they could do is kill her.” Lake shoved her gun to the side. “Now, there’s nowhere she can run that they won’t find her, if we don’t find her first. It’s not right, and it’s not fair, and
goddamn it
, we shouldn’t have to do this.”

Lake rubbed the heel of her hand roughly over her face, dashing away her tears. “She’s our friend, and if it wasn’t for Shay wanting her, wanting me—if it wasn’t for that, he never would have pulled that crap with Lucas in the first place. He wouldn’t have tried to kill you, and you wouldn’t have had to kill Lucas, and Maddy wouldn’t have lost her freaking mind. She wouldn’t have lost control, and we wouldn’t have to sit here, polishing our weapons and looking at this stupid map.”

Lake slammed her elbow back into a tree trunk, hard enough to break her skin. I forgot sometimes that I wasn’t the only one with things on her mind, that Maddy wasn’t just
my
responsibility or
my
friend.

In fact, I had a sinking suspicion that parts of this outburst had been building up inside Lake for a very long time, and this was the first time she’d had someone to listen.

“It’s not just me. Or Maddy. It’s Phoebe, and it’s Sage, and someday it’s going to be Katie and Lily and Sloane—”

She stopped short of rattling off all of their names, one by one, but my mind completed the task, and I realized that if Lake had known I was planning on voluntarily becoming a Were—a female Were—she would have slapped me silly and shot me in the kneecap, just for good measure.

Lake never had a choice about what she was, and in the world we lived in, with the numbers the way they were, things would never, ever be fair.

“Shay’s not getting within a hundred yards of Maddy,” I said, because that was the only thing I could give her, the only promise I might be able to keep. “No one is getting to Maddy, because we’re going to find her first.”

Even if she’d gone Rabid.

Even if she was the monster who’d painted those white walls red with blood.

Even if the person she really wanted to tear limb from limb—the reason she wanted vengeance—was me.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
HAT NIGHT
, I
COULDN
’
T BREATHE INSIDE THE TENT
. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t think. We still didn’t have a plan, and when exhaustion finally beat back everything else competing for space in my mind, I fell into a nightmare, the kind that followed you seamlessly from one dream to the next.

I was running. Someone was chasing me.

Some
thing
.

Hands grabbed my shoulders. Nails that might have been claws dug into my arms, but I couldn’t feel the pain. I couldn’t feel anything.

Suddenly, the forest disappeared, and I was sitting at a wrought-iron table that had been painted white. My hands were folded neatly in my lap. My legs were crossed at the ankles. Stiff, lacy fabric crinkled as I shifted in my seat.

The girl sitting across from me, dressed in a frilly frock identical to my own, was Maddy. She reached forward, and a tiny china teapot materialized. With dainty hands and an expressionless face, she poured my tea and then her own.

The light all around us was bright, almost unbearable, but in the corners of the room, there were shadows, and in the shadows, there were eyes.

Unperturbed, Maddy lifted her teacup upward. With shaking hands, I reached for my own.

“It’s not what you think,” Maddy said.

For a second, I thought she was trying to tell me that I’d misconstrued everything that had happened in the past few days, that she wasn’t the monster we were hunting, and relief washed over my body, pleasant and warm.

A smile cut across Maddy’s features, sharp where they were round. Her teeth gleamed, the exact shade of porcelain as the teacups.

“It’s not what I think,” I said, in a singsong voice that didn’t feel like my own.

“It’s not what you think.”

I brought the teacup to my lips, and that was when I realized—

We weren’t drinking tea. The cup was filled with blood.

I woke with a start, no more capable of screaming than I had been when I was caught in the midst of the dream. This was what came of Jed’s little lessons. Once you let yourself be scared, once you opened up the door to the darkest parts of your psyche—

There it was.

Not wanting to disturb the others, I glanced around the tent. Chase and Lake were missing—no surprise there. They didn’t need shelter of any kind to feel at home in the woods. Jed was snoring on the far side of the tent, and in between us, Caroline was fast asleep.

Her eyes were open.

Somehow, it didn’t surprise me that she was the only person I’d ever met who could bring that particular cliché to life. In sleep, she looked even more doll-like than usual: perfect and petite, with eyes so big and round that her eyelids only covered them halfway.

Given the dream I’d just had, the last thing I wanted to think about was dolls. Ignoring the chill crawling up my spine, I slipped out of my sleeping bag and tiptoed out into the night.

The sky had cleared enough that I could see the stars overhead, like fireflies trapped in glass. I wondered if Maddy could see them, wherever she was. I wondered if there was even a small part of her that was still Maddy, if there was anything left of the girl I’d known at all.

Where are you, Maddy?

I sent the words off into the night, knowing they’d never reach her. Our minds weren’t connected anymore. The phantom I’d seen in my dream was just that—a phantom, the by-product of opening the floodgates and trying in vain to dam them back up, only succeeding halfway.

If I hadn’t severed the pack-bond and withdrawn my mind
from Maddy’s, we could have actually shared dreams. I could have seen her, talked to her. I could have asked her why. Instead, I was left with my own twisted subconscious and no way into Maddy’s mind at all.

Lightning struck in the distance, so far away that it was nothing but a dull flash of light on the horizon. I waited for the sound of thunder, but it never came. Instead, a chain reaction went off in my brain, and I remembered the last time nightmares had kept me up at night.

Those nightmares had been real.