Your coven has lost someone. You must have loved whoever it was very much. The words Ali had used to spur the psychics into showing their hand echoed in my mind.

“He’s the one who got killed by a werewolf?” I said. Doing the math, I hit a snag. “He wasn’t Caroline’s father?”

“Not by blood.”

That shouldn’t have surprised me. I knew better than anyone that blood wasn’t what made people family.

“Valerie was with us three years when Wes died. By that time, it seemed natural to most folks that she’d be the one to take over.”

“Most folks,” I repeated. “But not you.”

He shrugged. “Never wanted to lead much myself. Filling Wes’s shoes would have been tough on anyone, but Valerie took to it.” He paused. “I always thought she took to it a little too well.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him why he’d stayed. It couldn’t have been easy, watching Valerie work her way into everyone else’s emotions, making them feel what she wanted them to feel—about her, about their former leader’s death, about Caroline. But before I could even ask the question, I had my answer, because in the brief exchange I’d seen between Jed and Valerie’s daughter, there’d been shades of Callum and me.

Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you.

Now was not the time to get caught up in memories—not with company in my head and a slew of questions Jed might be willing and able to answer.

“Valerie had Caroline give me an ultimatum—either I hand over a Were under my protection, or your coven is going to attack my pack.” I measured Jed’s response. Nothing I said surprised him, but his jaw tightened when I mentioned Caroline, scars jumping to life on his face as the muscles underneath them tensed. I pushed harder, further, testing my intuition that Jed’s weakness, the whole reason he’d stayed with the coven, was the girl. “How do you think Caroline is going to feel if her mother uses her to murder a bunch of little kids?”

Jed reached out, lightning quick, and grabbed my arm, his fingernails digging into my flesh and sending my pack-mates into a defensive roar in my head.

“I know what’s at stake here,” Jed said, his voice surprisingly quiet given his viselike grip on my arm. “Know it better than you, so if you’ve got questions, ask them, but don’t play with me, Bryn.”

He had one of those tones—one that said that I was a kid and he wasn’t and he’d been waging wars since before I was ever born.

“Fine,” I said. “Question: why does the coven care so much about getting Lucas back? What’s he to Valerie?”

Jed let go of my arm. “I’m no expert on the workings of that woman’s mind, but if I were a betting man, I’d say that odds are that one teenage werewolf is not what she’s after. She’s just using him to get the others all riled up, same as she’ll use you.”

It had occurred to me that Valerie might not want Lucas—that she might want me—but I’d never thought, even for a second, that maybe neither one of us was the point. That if I met Valerie’s ultimatum, she might find something else to demand, some other reason to set her coven against my pack.

“If I gave Lucas back, she’d just find another excuse to fight us.”

“That a question?” Jed asked, looking amused.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Should it be?”

He grunted.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

The realization was strangely liberating. I’d spent all this time thinking that I had to choose between my own pack’s safety and sending an innocent to be tortured by people who blindly hated his guts, when in reality, there’d never been a choice.

On the downside, that meant we had no safety net, no backup plan, no options.

Ask him if he knows anything about the deal, Chase suggested quietly. He, Lake, and Dev had been so quiet that I’d almost forgotten they were there.

“Lucas said that Valerie made some kind of deal with his alpha,” I said, searching Jed’s features for some kind of reaction. “Shay gave Lucas to Valerie. Any idea what he asked for in return?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Jed replied facetiously. “This Shay guy got any reason to want anyone in your pack dead?”

I could practically feel the blood drain out of my face. Shay had reason to want anyone who stood between him and the Changed females dead—including, but not limited to, me.

“Thought so.” Jed ran a scarred hand roughly over his neck. “Going after your pack is a risk, and Valerie’s not in the habit of risking something for nothing. The question you should be asking isn’t what Shay wanted Valerie to do—it’s why she’s doing it.”

My mind was reeling. Shay sent Lucas to the coven. They tortured him. Lucas escaped and came running straight to me. Shay had to have known that Lucas would go for help—maybe he’d even asked the coven to let him escape conveniently close to my territory so that I would be the obvious choice. Then, when Valerie came after our pack, she could use Lucas as an excuse—a focal point for her coven, an excuse to keep me from figuring everything out.

From the outside, it would appear that the coven had their own reasons for fighting us—reasons that weren’t Senate business in the least.

Somewhere, in Snake Bend territory, the Snake Bend alpha was sitting back on his haunches and watching a group of psychics fight the battles that Senate law wouldn’t let him fight. Shay couldn’t challenge me. He couldn’t fight me, and he couldn’t take what was mine, but technically, he wasn’t.

He was letting someone else do the dirty work for him.

Why would Valerie agree to something like that? What could Shay have possibly offered her to justify the risk? And more importantly, now that I knew that giving Lucas back wouldn’t change our situation, what exactly could I do to stop this from turning into an all-out war?

“If we take Valerie out,” I said, disturbed by how easy it was for me to ask the question, “does everyone else go back to normal?”

“You a killer?” There was no condemnation in my companion’s voice, and I got the distinct feeling that if he’d gotten any of his scars fighting, his opponents probably hadn’t lived long enough to scar.

“No,” I said. “I’m not a killer, but I do have a tranq gun, and we could keep her unconscious for a good, long time.”

“Val uses her own daughter to keep the others in line. She’s convinced the entire coven that Caro is a remorseless, soulless killer. Kid even believes it herself. If undoing that were as easy as knocking Val out, I would have done it myself, years ago.” Jed stared me straight in the eye. “Doesn’t matter if she’s unconscious. There’s a part of her mind that doesn’t sleep, and once a suggestion is implanted, it’s in there good. Killing her might work, but it also might not.”

He watched me, waiting for some indication of whether or not I was up to the task. Whether I could kill just because it might break Valerie’s spell.

I had a knife.

I had the training.

We have a problem. Dev’s voice broke into my thoughts, sparing me from answering the question. You need to come home, Bryn. Now.

“I have to go,” I said, and Jed nodded, like that answered that.

“Go on, then,” he said. “But don’t be surprised if Valerie moves up her little game. You came here, to her house. She’s likely to answer in kind.”

I would have liked to ask Jed other things—what sort of knacks the other members of the coven had, how many of them there were, what we could do to defend ourselves—but I didn’t get the chance, because whatever the problem back at the Wayfarer was, it was a big one.

Lake, Devon, and Chase pulled out of my head at once.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I MADE IT TO THE EDGE OF THE PSYCHICS’ PROPERTY, running at a solid and furious pace, my skull pounding with the sudden withdrawal of my guard. I could still sense them—Lake and Devon were at the Wayfarer; Chase was on his way here; and all three of them were on edge, like someone had shot a flare directly into the heart of our pack, but the two-way street that I’d opened for them was closed.