Raised by Wolves (Raised by Wolves #1)(50)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

She had light blonde hair, tied into pigtails for the picture. Her eyes were bluer and less gray than they’d been in my dream, but the resemblance was unmistakable. Someone had erected an online shrine for our Madison.

Ten years ago.

“Find something?” Lake asked.

I didn’t answer, not right away. I just did the mental math. If she’d lived, Madison would have been a year older than me.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Lake swung over to my side of the booth, and she leaned her head over so that the side of her forehead touched mine. Together, we scrolled down the page. It wasn’t the kind of information I’d hoped to find. No police reports. No detailed descriptions of her body after the attack. Just a picture of the girl and information about her favorites: favorite colors (orange and blue), favorite foods (macaroni and cheese), favorite thing to do with bubble wrap (pop it).

We miss you, Maddy.

I closed my eyes, seeing Chase and seeing this girl through the Rabid’s eyes.

“He killed her.” I tried to pull myself away from the little girl’s face, tried not to wonder if she’d been hiding under a sink when he found her, or if he’d dragged her body into the forest to celebrate his kill.

“She lived in Nevada,” I said. “Not Callum’s territory.”

“Odell’s,” Lake supplied. “The Desert Night Pack. They smell like sandstone and fish.”

Not a pleasant combination, or one that made any amount of sense, but that’s the way it was with foreign packs. None of them smelled good. They weren’t supposed to. They were foreign. They were threats. Wolves from our pack probably didn’t smell any better to them.

“Looks like this Rabid is an equal-opportunity hunter,” I said. “I was attacked in Colorado. Chase is from—”

Where was Chase from?

Kansas.

The answer was enough to make me close my eyes, letting a blink last longer than it otherwise would have.

Somewhere in Ark Valley, Chase was awake.

“Chase is from Kansas,” I said. “Rim of Callum’s territory.”

“You and Madison were both little girls. Your parents were obviously adults. Chase is a teenage boy. What’s the pattern?”

There were few things in life more frightening than a werewolf who watched Law and Order.

“Multiple states, multiple territories. There is no pattern, unless …”

I didn’t finish my sentence, and I didn’t have to. Lake was already there.

“Unless there are more.”

Not just Chase and Madison and me. What if there had been others? If this Rabid hunted across territories and never stayed in one place for long, he could have been doing this for years. But how was that even possible? Weres just didn’t think like that. Wolves had territories. Even lone ones.

Even Rabids.

They didn’t just drift from state to state, hunting humans unnoticed.

My fingers made their way back to the keys, and I opened a new window. Now that I had a last name and a town, maybe I could track down a news story, a police report, anything.

Lunch came and went. I had another order of cheese fries. Lake had another triple-bacon cheeseburger. Keely didn’t say a word. Slowly, the restaurant began to fill up. Humans, mostly. The peripheral Were from the Snake Bend Pack. Another Were that I recognized as one of Callum’s.

By late afternoon, Lake and I had an MO. Hundreds of people had been killed by wolves in the past decade. A small subset of them—all children—had been attacked in cities or towns where there were no native wolf populations. Many of the victims had died on the spot. Others, like Madison Covey, had been dragged off into the woods, bleeding all the way, no more than scraps of flesh recovered to identify their bodies.

And then there were the thousands of missing children about whom nothing was known. There one day, gone the next. For all we knew, some of them had fallen to our Rabid, too.

One thing was certain: Chase and I were outliers. He was the oldest. At four, I would have been the youngest, and my parents were the only adults.

At one point, Lake rustled up a map and a pen. We spread it out over our table, marking each of the attacks that fit our Rabid’s pattern.

Maybe we didn’t know what we were doing. Maybe two kids with an internet connection and a lot of time on their hands couldn’t track a serial killer, even if they knew what to look for better than any police department would.

But maybe we were right.

I had no idea what to do about it. For minutes at a time, maybe hours, I stared at the map. We’d marked kills in every territory, but the most were in Callum’s and the two adjacent territories: those belonging to Odell and Shay. The attacks zigzagged out from some invisible central point, and I cursed the fact that I’d taken algebra instead of geometry this year in school.

Tell me where you are, I said silently.

There was no reply. I hadn’t really expected one.

“You girls hungry?” Keely asked, wrapping back by our booth, the way she did every hour or so to check on us.

I nodded. Lake grunted.

“The usual?” Keely asked, her voice dry.

I shook my head. “Pie?” I asked Lake.

She nodded. “Pie.”

Five minutes later, we had our pie, but this time, Keely didn’t disappear after delivering it. “Do I want to know what you two are up to?” she asked.

“No.”

“Probably not.”

Keely put a hand on her hip. “This about that Rabid?”

“Yup.”

“Sure is.”

Lake and I paused, meeting eyes and wondering how exactly it was that Keely had tricked an honest answer out of us. I, for one, hadn’t had any intention of telling her a thing.

Keely held up a hand. “You know what? I don’t want to know. Lake, you have company. Let me know if you need help disabusing him of any notions.”

I was still stuck on wondering how exactly Keely had pried the truth from our lips, when her words sunk in. Company? What kind of company?

And that’s when it washed over me: wolf. Foreign. Wrong.

I straightened in my seat, hackles raised. Lake didn’t adjust her posture at all, but underneath the table, I saw her hand move, and for the first time, I noticed that she’d brought Matilda with her this morning.

“Now, why do you have to go and reach for the gun?” the peripheral from yesterday asked her. He was tall and broad, and I deeply suspected that in wolf form, he’d be almost as large as Devon. “And here we’ve been getting along so well.”