Taken by Storm (Raised by Wolves #3)(24)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

With more questions than answers, the four of us left the way we came—softly, silently, disappearing back into the night.

“I lost Maddy’s scent at the river.” Lake, half-naked and utterly unapologetic about it, picked her discarded shirt up off the ground, skin glistening with sweat and hair streaming free down her back. “When she left, she left fast.”

As Lake finished getting dressed, I took stock of what we knew. Maddy had lived in these woods as a human. She’d left quickly. The killer had somehow managed to avoid stepping in the rivulets of blood. The victim—whoever he was—had died bloody.

“Pain,” Chase said. He brought the side of his face to rest on the top of my head. “Sora said that to track a Rabid, we needed to figure out what he was hungry for.”

What she was hungry for, I corrected silently, unable to shake the image of Maddy in that house, Maddy’s mouth covered in blood.

“Whoever killed that boy is hungry for pain.” Chase closed his eyes for a moment, his forehead creased and a dark look falling over his face. “If it was Maddy, if she did that, if she’s looking for pain—I think I know where we should go next.” He opened his eyes and met mine. “Alpine Creek.”

The town where Samuel Wilson had lived, where he’d kept Maddy and the others like pets. The place where her pain had started.

“Chase is right, Bryn.” Caroline took a step toward us. “This isn’t just about killing. This is about hurting people.”

I was fairly certain that was the first time Caroline had ever referred to Chase by name. Of all the wolves in my pack, he was the least human in appearance and behavior, and Caroline—as much as she wouldn’t have wanted to admit it—still wasn’t 100 percent comfortable around Weres.

If the two of them agreed on something, chances were good they were right.

“What happened in that house wasn’t a clean kill.” Caroline shook her head. “It wasn’t even an animal one.”

“What was it?” Lake asked, her voice strained and high.

Caroline didn’t answer, so I did, on her behalf.

“That,” I said, shivering in the night and drawing what little warmth I could from Chase’s body, “was retribution.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

WE 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.”