Taken by Storm (Raised by Wolves #3)(42)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Couldn’t let myself.

Flashing out—as Jed called it—took energy. If I fell back into an ordinary state, getting here again would cost me. Maybe this thing really was gone.

But maybe it was waiting.

So I stayed right where I was, my mind in a room with nothing but the sound of heavy breathing, the smell of rancid blood. Endless, infinite, overwhelming.

Fear.

I stood perfectly still, caught up in a nightmare I’d made for myself, playing possum and waiting.

Come and get me, I thought.

The Shadow obliged, but this time, its form felt nothing like a person. This time, it felt like a wolf.

It hadn’t wanted me to hear it Shifting, so I hadn’t—but if I’d been outclassed before, I was completely screwed now. I couldn’t keep running. Couldn’t keep dodging. The world settled into slow motion around me, but it didn’t matter.

Paws caught my shoulder, knocked me down. Nails as sharp as knives dug into my shoulder, tearing through fabric and into skin. I felt its breath on my face and twisted viciously to one side.

Teeth tore into my shoulder, instead of my throat.

Survive. Survive. Have to—

I was still fighting, still scrambling, still holding out and holding on, but I lost track of the details—of time and space and everything but the incredible need.

To get out of there.

To get away.

To live.

I couldn’t see anything but red, couldn’t feel anything but fear and power and red, red, red—

And then I was lying on the ground, and people were yelling my name, and the thing I’d been fighting—the thing that had sunk its teeth into me—was gone.

Vision came first, then exhaustion, then pain—a strange, numb pain, halfway between frostbite and a phantom limb.

“Bryn.” The last thing I heard before losing consciousness was Chase saying my name—his voice aching and angry, equal parts boy and wolf.

The last thing I saw was Griffin standing over my body.

And then I was gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I DREAMED ABOUT NOTHING. NOTHING BUT THE SKY overhead and the dirt under my feet. Nothing but rain that hung in the air without falling.

Nothing but the moon.

“If you’re dead, Miss Ali is going to be really, truly, exceptionally pissed.”

I turned sideways and found Dev standing beside me. For a second, I thought he was like the raindrops and the dirt and the moon, but then he took a step toward me.

“Bronwyn.” His voice was dangerously pleasant.

“Yes?”

“Picture, if you will, my feelings about Pierce Brosnan’s performance in the Mamma Mia movie, circa 2008.”

I winced.

“Now,” he continued, “picture someone forcing me to grow a mini-mustache and setting my entire summer wardrobe aflame.”

Uh-oh.

“Dev,” I started to say, but he didn’t give me the chance to finish.

“And now,” he said, closing the space between us, “tell me what the hell is going on here.”

This was Devon in full-on alpha mode—a hint to the person he’d someday be.

“It’s not that bad,” I told him.

He gave me a look.

“Okay,” I said, “maybe it is that bad. But I’m at least sixty percent sure that I’m unconscious and that we’re sharing a dream. I really don’t think I’m dead.”

Dev buried his head in his hands and then ran them through his artfully mussed hair. “Start at the beginning?”

A rush of emotion—his, not mine—hit me all at once.

I nodded. My teeth worried at my bottom lip. Then I told him everything.

About Griffin.

About Maddy.

About Shadows and the one that had just done its best to kill me.

Devon was silent right up until the point when I finished talking, and then he let loose. “Lake’s brother is alive and up until a few minutes ago, you thought he might be evil; Maddy’s pregnant; Callum’s knack is on hiatus; and the Rabid you’re supposed to be hunting is capable of tearing a person to pieces without ever assuming physical form?”

Well, when you put it that way, it did sound really bad.

Rather than acknowledge that fact, I concentrated on the last bit. “Shadows are hard to describe,” I said. “It was like, one second, he was almost solid, and the next, he was everywhere. When he was on top of me, I could touch him, I could feel him, but I couldn’t hurt him.”

The word hurt was a reminder of all of the pain that awaited me on the other side of this dream.

“How bad is it?” Devon asked.

I tried to avoid the question, with little success.

“How bad, Bronwyn?”

I could have lied. In a dream, he might not have smelled it—but I couldn’t do that, not when we had no guarantee that this was an expedition I’d make it back from alive.

“Two inches to the right, and this thing would have had my throat.”

If I’d been any slower, any weaker, if my senses had been any less sharp, if even a bit of exhaustion had managed to beat its way through my altered state, I wouldn’t be here.

Not in this dream.

Not on this planet.

I’d be splatter—like the boy in Wyoming, the girl in Winchester.

Like my parents.

My parents. I don’t know if it was the dream, or the fact that Dev was there, the way he had been the day Callum had brought me home, but the universe realigned itself, suddenly and without warning.

I’d known that if I ran, the Shadow would chase me.

To catch a Rabid, you have to think like a Rabid, Sora had said. There’s a dark logic … a hunger …

This thing was following Maddy. Torturing Maddy. And when I had run, it had come after me.

“Devon,” I said, feeling like the earth itself had been jerked out from under my feet. “I need you to talk to Mitch and find out something for me.”

I’d asked Callum how many female Weres had a dead twin—but that wasn’t the right question. Not now, after feeling that thing’s breath on me.

Now that it had tasted my blood.

“What do you need?” Devon didn’t hesitate, wouldn’t, no matter what I asked of him.

I thought of the cabin in Alpine Creek. The dead animals. The Shadow’s human victims, teenagers all.

“I need you,” I said slowly, “to find out if Samuel Wilson had a twin.”

I came to on a bed in a different motel. Apparently, we’d become persona non grata at the old one.

Go figure.

Chase was lying beside me, his body curled around my smaller frame. On my other side, Jed was calmly and efficiently digging a needle into my flesh: quick, clean strokes.