It was supposed to be me.

They heard the words, and they absorbed them. They let me break, and then they put me back together again, all in a matter of seconds.

I straightened and cleared my throat, but when I spoke, my voice still came out husky with tears. “We’ll be needing a new plan. As it turns out, the numbers are in his favor, not ours. And also, we can’t kill them.” I paused, because the irony of the words I was about to say didn’t escape me in the least. “They’re just kids.”

“One of us should go back to the cabin,” Devon said softly, his voice cutting across mine, quiet and insistent. “Just close enough to try to scent their numbers.”

“Does it matter?” I asked, meeting his eyes and wondering how exactly the two of us had gone from algebra and the safety of Stone River to here, all in a matter of months. “If Wilson has twelve Changed werewolves, or if he has forty, does it really matter?”

Either way we were outclassed, outnumbered, overwhelmed, and screwed. In that order. Since I’d both been there and done that, I made an executive decision, one I begged the others with my mind and with my eyes to follow.

Retreat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

BACK AT OUR TEENY-TINY MOTEL ROOM, I TRIED TO catch the boys up on everything Lake and I had discovered with our internet sleuthing. “It’s hard to get a real count of how many attacks this guy has been involved in. There are at least four or five confirmed deaths—with bodies and everything—that might fit his profile.”

Those would be the Rabid’s failures. The people he’d tried, but failed, to change. Or maybe he’d never tried to change them. Maybe he’d just been thirsting for blood.

“We found several other attacks, too, where the victim was either missing or presumed dead. I’m not sure how many. Less than a dozen, more than six, but that doesn’t really tell us how many wolves Wilson has in that cabin. Who knows how many of his attacks we missed? This is Google we’re talking about here, not science. Lake and I aren’t professional profilers. The only thing our research really told us is that there was a very good chance he’d attacked a lot of people in a lot of different territories. The numbers are fuzzier.”

I thought of the missing-children database Lake had found online, put up by parents hopeful to get their kids back. How many of those “missing” kids were dead? How many of them were here in Alpine Creek, older and less human than they’d been when they disappeared?

“I saw fifteen or sixteen at the cabin,” I said, thinking back. “There might have been a few more inside. The youngest was maybe four or five, the oldest probably about seventeen.”

“Were they all female?” Chase asked, an odd expression on his face, like the word female had taken on a whole new meaning the moment he’d become a Were.

I shook my head. “About half and half.”

Lake laughed, but it was a sad, grating noise. “Half of sixteen is eight. Looks like Katie and I aren’t quite so special anymore.”

Lake was right. The only way a female werewolf could be born was as half of a set of twins, but apparently, if you knew the secret to making new werewolves, females were just as easy to make as males. I thought about what that could mean for a pack. Fewer human wives, fewer babies lost in childbirth. More purebreds. Stronger wolves.

A stronger alpha.

“I guess we know why the Senate was willing to deal,” I said, my voice like sandpaper on my throat.

Werewolves were so long-lived that it didn’t make much of a difference for the species if there were years when not a single live birth took place. The birthrate, however low, was still usually higher than the death rate, because Weres were nearly impossible to kill.

But expanding a pack’s numbers? Trying to stay head to head with a pack as old and large as Callum’s?

That was a real concern.

“The other alphas want stronger numbers.” I looked down at my fingertips, like they’d tell me my sickening logic was false. “The Rabid can give them numbers.”

Suddenly, I understood why the alphas had really wanted to see Chase. They’d wanted to see how a changed werewolf compared to someone who was born that way, and they’d wanted to know the details of the Rabid’s attack, because they were hoping to figure out what the monster knew that they didn’t.

“The Rabid isn’t going to give up the secret to making new werewolves.” I said the words decisively and wouldn’t have been able to keep from saying them, even if I were the only person in the room. “The moment he tells the alphas how to make new wolves, he’s dead, and we have an even bigger problem.”

One Rabid out hunting humans was bad. A half dozen or more alphas doing it was a problem that no amount of trickery on my part would solve.

“So if he’s not giving up the secret, what do the alphas stand to gain from letting him live?” Chase asked, sounding more human than I’d heard him in a very long time. If he’d let his wolf take over, he would known the answer.

Numbers were power.

“He’s bartering them,” Lake said, flopping down on the bed and pulling her knees to her chest. “Those kids back at the cabin. Those are his bargaining chips.” I reached out to Lake’s mind and saw how close this hit to home, how many times she’d wondered if someday, her own alpha might decide to barter her.

Never, I told Lake silently, putting all of my force behind that single word. Callum was an alpha of alphas. His first instinct was always, always to protect.

Except, a tiny voice in my head reminded me, when it wasn’t.

Still, I couldn’t believe, even for a second, that he ever would have treated Lake like a commodity. That he ever would have let anyone harm her, no matter what they offered him in return.

“What if the Rabid isn’t trading the kids he has now?” Devon asked, pacing the room with long, angry strides. “There’re two things every dominant wolf wants: territory and a pack.”

Those were the things that had led Devon’s brother to leave Callum’s pack and transfer into another, just so he could have the opportunity to challenge and kill that pack’s alpha the moment he was accepted as a transfer. The need for territory and for a pack was something that Devon understood, more than he’d ever let on to me before now.

“Dev’s right,” Chase said, recognizing the instinct, his voice taking on a fluid, reflective tone that told me this conversation was bringing him closer and closer to the edge of a Shift. “Why would Prancer give up any of his wolves when he could … just … make … more.”

I felt Chase’s control begin to slip and reached out to him, grabbing his lapels with my fists and his mind with mine.

Stay with me, Chase. Stay human.

I had no idea what he’d do in wolf form in a room this small. The last time he’d been this upset, the need to hunt had been overpowering.

Stay with me, I said, repeating the words in a soothing tone halfway between a lullaby and a command. Stay. Human.

I could feel his wolf snarling beneath the surface, and for a moment, I thought I’d lost him, but as I spread my hands flat against Chase’s chest, willing him to calm, his wolf settled, and Chase nodded.

Bryn.

Chase.

Bryn.

For a split second, I wondered what the two of us would be doing if we were the only ones in this room. Then I forced myself to step back as I realized that Devon and Lake had been seconds away from stepping between Chase and me, willing to protect me at all costs.

The last thing we needed right now was to fight amongst ourselves. The stakes to killing this Rabid had just shot up, because even more so than I’d realized before, if we didn’t kill him, future attacks were a foregone conclusion. Lots of them, probably. New werewolves, made to order.

More kids who lost everything to the Big Bad Wolf.

Why not adults? Was that it? Was that the whole trick to making new wolves? Children could survive, adults couldn’t?

I pushed back the ponderings. It couldn’t be that simple, or the alphas would have already figured it out. And besides, even if we assumed that the Rabid could change adults, from the alphas’ perspective, younger was probably better. Inter-pack dominance, positioning yourself for power amongst the other alphas—the entire process was a long game. To people who lived practically forever, eighteen years wasn’t so long to wait for someone to mature, and the earlier a pack got ahold of someone, the more influence they had.