Taken by Storm (Raised by Wolves #3)(44)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Maybe even impossible.

“What are you thinking?” Chase was the one who asked the question, but I could see reflections of it on the others’ faces—all except for Maddy, whose pale face was carefully, curiously blank.

“I asked Devon to look into something.” That wasn’t exactly an answer, but it was true. “When he gets back to me, I’ll let you guys know.”

I wasn’t going to dig up the past we’d tried so hard to bury, not until I was sure. At this point, all I had were a string of coincidences and a gut feeling, like lead in my stomach.

I wasn’t going to rip open Chase’s wounds—or Maddy’s—for that.

“I’ll go.” Maddy whispered the words, but there was a certain strength to them nonetheless. A finality.

“Go?” Lake and I repeated, our voices combining to make the question sound more like an exclamation.

“This is my fault,” Maddy said, enunciating each word with almost maniacal precision. “This thing is following me. The animals and the girl and that boy in Wyoming—it’s all me.”

“Maddy.” There was something in the way Griffin said her name that reminded me of the way Chase said mine. “None of this is your—”

“All of this is my fault.” Maddy wasn’t whispering anymore. Her vocal cords tensed with the weight of the words. “I did this. Me.”

She had her hand on her stomach again, and I wondered what exactly she was blaming herself for.

“You could have died, Bryn.” Maddy swung her gaze toward mine, but made no move to come closer to the bed. I struggled to stand, moved closer to her.

Maddy didn’t bat an eye. It was like she was trapped in her own little world, her own nightmare. “This monster went after you. It hurt you, and the last thing I wanted to do—”

She stopped talking and bit her lip. I could see her trying not to cry, trying not to remember.

“It was my fault,” she said again, but this time, it felt like the two of us were the only people in this room. “Last time, it was my fault.”

She wasn’t talking about the Shadow. Not anymore.

“You got hurt. You could have died, and I should have seen it.”

“Maddy—”

“No!” She didn’t let me finish, didn’t even let me start. “You took him in for me. You made him Pack for me. I loved him, and he would have killed you! He was always planning on killing you, and I didn’t see it. What kind of monster does that make me?”

All this time, I hadn’t realized that Maddy had been carrying the weight of guilt around, too—that she blamed herself for Lucas, more than she blamed me.

“I loved him, Bryn. I would have died for him, and he—” She took in a sharp breath, her grip on her stomach tightening. “I still loved him.” Those words held the weight of a confession. “Even afterward. Even after he—”

She couldn’t say the words.

I knew then with haunting prescience that the moment when Lucas had challenged me and I’d faced down the challenge would always be between the two of us. We would never get past it. I would always think of it when I looked at Maddy, and she would always think of it when she looked at me.

It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t betrayal, it wasn’t even hurt—but that unnameable emotion, that burden might lighten in time, but it would never really go away. Not because we couldn’t forgive each other—we had.

Things would never be simple with Maddy and me because neither one of us would ever fully forgive ourselves.

“This isn’t your fault.” I brought the conversation back to the present, back to a place where I might be able to make a difference and chip away at her guilt. “This Shadow is playing with you. It’s torturing you.”

“I let it do this,” Maddy said. “Somehow, being near me—”

“No.” I wracked my mind for something I could say, something that would smell true to her nose. “There was another murder, in Missouri, just north of the Arkansas state line. The Senate thought it was the work of the same Rabid.”

Or at least, some of them had.

“You’re not making this thing kill, Maddy. It’s following you because it can.” I could feel myself coming close to something I didn’t want to say out loud. “It wants you to feel like this is your fault. It wants your pain.”

Maddy’s eyes flickered with uncertainty, then horror, then the barest hint of recognition. She knew firsthand what it was like to live with someone who got pleasure out of other people’s pain.

“Don’t give this thing what it wants.” There was an alien depth to the emotion in those words—one I heard, even as I was saying them. Maddy heard it, too, and she heard the wealth of things I wasn’t saying.

Understanding shone in her eyes, then hardened into something else.

She knew.

Beside me, I could feel Chase’s mulling over the fact that something had passed between Maddy and me—something unspeakable. Across the room, Lake looked severely tempted to beat the answer out of me with the butt of her gun.

My cell phone rang, breaking the tension in the room. I knew before I answered it that it was Devon. The ring tone—the theme song from Moulin Rouge!—was a big tip-off.

“Remind me never to leave you alone with my cell phone again,” I said, answering on the second ring.

“Hello to you, too.”

“What have you got?” I asked. It would have been better if we’d been able to have this conversation silently, but the farther away the two of us got from each other, the fainter the connection. We’d been able to connect in our dreams, but it would be more difficult now that we were both awake, and this was one of those times when I needed to hear every single word—even if that meant that Lake, Chase, and Maddy would hear them, too.

“As soon as I woke up—and assured Ali that you would be fine, for which you owe me a day at the spa, at the very least—I went to find Mitch.”

I wasn’t sure how old Mitch was, but he was by far the oldest person in our pack—and the only one likely to have the answers I’d asked Devon to find.

“I caught him near Keely.”

“Devious,” I commented. Keely was the bartender at the Wayfarer. Like me, she had a psychic knack, but hers was for making people spill their secrets. If Mitch knew the answer to Devon’s questions, Devon would have gotten it out of him, just by virtue of Keely being in the room.