Taken by Storm (Raised by Wolves #3)(26)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

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If I hadn’t severed the pack-bond and withdrawn my mind from Maddy’s, we could have actually shared dreams.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.

And the person who’d orchestrated them?

He’d had a knack for getting under people’s skin and entering their dreams, the way I could sneak peeks at my pack’s.

I might not be able to connect with Maddy, but that didn’t mean she was off the grid altogether.

This time, when I went back into the tent, I was able to close my eyes. I was able to sleep. Because the person who’d spent the better part of last fall haunting my nightmares, the one who might have stood a fighting chance at finding Maddy, or at the very least, her dreams—

He owed me. Big time.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“CHANGE OF PLANS,” I TOLD LAKE, WHO HAD “WEAPoned up” in anticipation of the morning’s adventures. “You, Caroline, and Chase are going to scout out the Rabid’s old house in Alpine Creek.”

I paused.

“Wilson’s house,” I corrected myself.

Samuel Wilson had been the Rabid in my mind for so long: the one, the only. Referring to him by name felt wrong, but with another killer on the loose, it seemed simpler—unless I wanted to give in and start referring to the current Rabid as Maddy.

She wasn’t the only one there when that boy was killed. I clung to that thought, seesawing back and forth between believing that Maddy had lost it and hoping that, despite appearances, she had not.

Chase had smelled something else at that house. A partner? An intruder? A demon plaguing her mind?

There’s no such thing as demons, I thought, but I could still see the Maddy of my dreams, sipping blood from a teacup. Six months ago, I would have sworn she wasn’t capable of murder. Two years ago, I would have told you with a straight face that there was no such thing as someone who could see the future or a woman who could control other people’s thoughts.

At this point, we really couldn’t rule anything out.

“See what you can find at the old house,” I told Lake, sticking to the task at hand and banishing the trip down memory lane until later. “Check the woods, too, but lie low.”

The last thing we needed was anyone from Alpine Creek recognizing that two of my three scouts had been there before.

“If Maddy’s there, call me. If you see anything, if you smell anything, if you even think you might remember something that could lead us to her, call me.”

“Sir, yes, sir.” Lake gave a lazy little salute, but the set of her jaw told me that she was glad to be doing something—and that she would have followed me straight to the ends of the earth if I’d asked her to.

“Where are you going?” Caroline announced her presence with a question. Unlike Lake, our human companion didn’t trust me to hand out orders.

“Me?” I asked, figuring that it served her right for eavesdropping.

“No, not you. The other insomniac mutt-lover in the vicinity.” The term mutt-lover should have made me angry, and it should have brought up bad memories, but instead, it

sounded almost like a nickname. Caroline sounded almost human.

“Well, half-pint,” I said, matching her nickname/slur for nickname/slur, “I’m hoping Jed will take me to see an old friend.”

“And what old friend might that be?” Jed sounded only mildly put out that I’d already started breaking up the crew, when he’d been sent along specifically for adult supervision.

I took that as a good sign and turned around. “Do you keep in touch with the rest of the coven?” I asked him.

Jed mulled over the question, his stare telling me that there was only a fifty-fifty chance I’d get an answer. “Some, yes,” he said finally. “Some, no.”

Before Caroline’s psychotic mother had come along, married the coven’s leader, and had him killed, the group of psychics had lived together as a family. But under her influence, they’d done horrible things, and besides Caroline and Jed, who had stayed at the Wayfarer, the rest had scattered to the wind the moment Valerie’s psychic influence had worn off.

“Who exactly are you wanting me to take you to see?”

I gave Jed a stare of my own, one that I hoped told him that if he didn’t help me, I’d find some other way to do it on my own. And then I smiled in a way I hoped he would find at least a little bit endearing.

“Remember Archer?”

I didn’t know Archer’s last name. I wasn’t sure how old he was, or what he’d been doing in the months since I’d seen him last.

Right now I didn’t care.

He slid into the booth across from me. Jed had chosen our rendezvous point. The others had dropped us off, and calling this particular diner a dive would have been generous. Over in the corner, the old man dropped two quarters into an old-fashioned jukebox, leaving Archer and me some semblance of privacy.

I didn’t beat around the bush. We’d spent enough time coming here to meet him—with the clock ticking, there was no time to waste.

“You stalked me.” I opted for bluntness over charm. “You tormented me, you tried to burn me in my sleep, and unless my memory is mistaken, at one point when we were awake, you actually set me on fire.”

The Archer I’d known—the one who’d dogged my dreams and played mind games with me, literally—was caustic. He was half seduction, half sadist, and he hadn’t seen me as a person, because Valerie hadn’t wanted him to.