Taken by Storm (Raised by Wolves #3)(33)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

What? What did he smell?

The answer came to me as nothing more than a vague sense that Chase was smelling something he’d smelled before—at the Wyoming murder site, at Wilson’s cabin in Alpine Creek.

It was faint. Different. It smelled like a werewolf, and it didn’t.

It smelled the way things did in dreams—a fraction off, a shade too, too … something.

For the first time, I really and truly let myself believe that Maddy might not be the one behind the murders. But that meant someone—or something—else was. Something that Lake and Chase couldn’t quite scent.

Something that was close.

Caroline and Jed must have noticed something was wrong, because they paid and followed us quickly out of the store.

Watching Caroline sparked a memory, and I sent a question silently to Chase and Lake. You guys can’t smell Caroline, I said. You can’t track her. It’s part of her knack. Do you think what you’re smelling—not smelling—now could be something similar?

Based on the crime scene, I’d been certain that our killer was a werewolf, but like Callum and the Resilient wolves in my pack, some werewolves had knacks, too.

In Wyoming, the killer hadn’t left any footprints in the victim’s blood.

What if this thing wasn’t a werewolf? What if it was something else? Something that made as much sense to me as psychics and werewolves would have to anyone else?

Without warning, Chase took off, as quick as a serpent’s strike. Lake followed, holding back on her speed enough to appear human. Jed, Caroline, and I slipped out of town, following them to the edge of the mountain and then into the forest.

We stopped at a densely wooded area where the smell of blood was so thick in the air that even with human senses, I wanted to gag.

Fresh blood this time—and it didn’t belong to an animal. It was human blood, and odds were good that it belonged to the girl whose remains had been found on Main Street.

This was where she was killed.

Through the pack-bond, I could hear Chase’s racing thoughts, and Lake’s, and I realized that beneath the pungent scent of iron and human flesh, they could smell something else.

The kind of something that smelled like a werewolf, but not. A dream smell, a memory, a scent they couldn’t quite make out.

I heard a noise then—a rustling in the brush to my left. Caroline whirled, her blonde hair fanning out around her baby-doll face. She had a crossbow in her left hand and a pistol in her right, and she was halfway to pulling the triggers before my eyes ever locked in on her prey.

It was a boy, about my age, standing only a few feet away—

a pale and almost see-through boy, standing in a field of blood. He had golden hair, halfway between honey and a light, sun-kissed brown. There was a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose. His cheekbones were sharp, and his eyes were green, the exact same shade as Lake’s.

Caroline fired, and I watched as a bullet passed straight through the boy. A bolt came within a foot of his body, but he waved his hand, and it fell to the ground.

This was what Chase had smelled at the crime scene.

This was the kind of monster who could kill without leaving a trail.

This was a nightmare, dressed up like a boy.

It started walking toward us, and a sense of déjà vu washed over my body. There was something familiar about this thing, this boy. Something more than the way he smelled—or didn’t smell—and the serious expression on his face.

“Lake,” he said.

For a split second, there was silence all around us, and then Lake replied, her voice barely more than a whisper, but filled with a whole host of emotions, each as sharp as glass.

One word.

She just said one word.

“Griff.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

GRIFF? AS IN GRIFFIN ? AS IN …

“Lake,” he said again. “Lakie.”

I hadn’t heard anyone call her that, not since the first summer she and Mitch came to visit the Stone River Pack alone. We were six years old, and she was wild—wild with grief, with anger, with an emptiness that slowly, over time, Devon and I had seemed to fill.

An emptiness that, looking at Lake now, I knew we never had.

“This isn’t happening,” Lake said. “You aren’t real. You’re never real.”

The depth of anguish in her voice told me how much I’d never known about one of my closest friends. She made a point of being strong and fearless and bulletproof in every way that mattered. She was the one who’d pulled me out of the dark place after Callum had ordered me beaten, and I’d never fully realized—she’d never let me realize—that she had a dark place of her own.

Every time I’d come close to it, she’d pulled back.

But now all of that darkness was bleeding off her, like radio waves of pain—and her brother, her dead brother, was standing there in front of us, with a body that bullets passed straight through and a scent the others couldn’t quite grasp.

A scent present at the Wyoming murder.

“Lake—” I was going to tell her to back away from him, but realized that she wouldn’t hear me if I did. It was like she and this boy—this creature with her dead brother’s face—were the only two people in the world.

She walked toward him, her body shaking with every step, her head thrown back, like if she could just face this head-on, everything would be fine.

She would be fine.

Watching her, I thought of Katie and Alex, the bond between them growing stronger by the day. I felt something building up inside of Lake, fire where she once was frozen, numbness giving way to pain.

“I told you once,” the boy who couldn’t have been Griffin said, “that I was never going to let anything get you, and I never have. Every fight you fought, I fought. Every tree you climbed, I climbed. And when you ran, Lake, I ran with you. Always.”

I could hear Griffin in this thing’s words. I could see the boy I barely remembered in the lines of his face. But this couldn’t be Griffin. Griffin was dead, and we had every reason to believe that this thing in front of us was a killer.

“You weren’t there.” Lake’s voice was uneven and shrill. She sounded like a little kid on the verge of a meltdown. “You weren’t there, and every time I thought I felt you, every shadow I saw out of the corner of my eye—on our birthday—”

“I was there. I was always there.” His voice was an echo of hers, quiet and intense and so full of emotion that I thought he might choke on the words, trying not to cry. “And now I’m here.”