That someone else was after him.
And he’d come here, to my land, and asked for my help, without so much as a word of warning.
“Assume that whoever might be coming after you is coming,” I told him sharply. “Who is it?”
Lucas didn’t answer. I took a step forward, pitching my voice low and staring directly into his eyes with an intensity none of my wolves could have denied. “Is it one of the other alphas?”
“No.”
“Is it a Rabid werewolf?”
“No.”
“Is it your family?”
“I don’t have a family.”
“Lucas, we can’t help you if we don’t know what we’re up against. Keeping this information to yourself is the same as lying, and if you lie to me, I will send you back.”
I felt, rather than saw, Maddy stirring, but she didn’t object to my words. If Lucas was a threat—if the people after him were a threat—we needed to know. She knew that. She trusted me.
Lucas turned to look at her and took a ragged breath, and then he answered my question, his words coming out in a rushed whisper. “They’re human, okay? The Snake Bend Pack has dealings with humans, and Shay … loaned me out.”
“He what?” Lake and I spoke at the same time. Maddy didn’t even blink.
“Shay gave me to some humans, okay? Not forever, just for a little while, to punish me for whatever he was punishing me for.” Lucas brought one hand to the scar on the back of his neck, and in that moment, I knew that Shay wasn’t the only one who’d left a mark on his body.
Whoever these humans were, whatever they wanted with a Were, they’d left their mark, too.
“Humans aren’t even supposed to know about us,” Lake said. “The Senate kills people when they find out.”
It was an ugly truth of our world that sometimes the secret of a pack’s existence took precedence over a single human life—even now. In all the time I’d known Callum, he had never lifted a lethal hand to a human, but I wasn’t naïve enough to think that the other alphas batted an eye at safeguarding our secret with that kind of force.
Most Weres hadn’t been thrilled with the idea of Callum allowing Ali and me into his pack. Human females were for breeding, and most Weres accepted that only because there were so few females of their own kind to go around. The idea of an alpha handing one of his wolves over to humans was unfathomable.
Lucas tore his eyes away from Maddy and spoke directly to me. “I don’t know why Shay does what he does. Most of the time, it’s not exactly advisable to ask, but when he got tired of beating me, he gave me to some humans and let them do the same. They were strong, and they had weapons, and I was restrained.”
As strong as werewolves were, they could still be outnumbered, and Lucas wasn’t really on the more formidable end of the werewolf spectrum to begin with.
“So, yes, Shay might be telling the truth when he says that he’s not the only one looking for me. They had me, and they hurt me, and when I finally got loose, I ran away. I turned tail, and I ran, and they might come looking for their pet werewolf, okay?” Lucas’s voice grew louder as he spoke, but the neutral expression on his face never wavered. “It’s not like the alpha is going to give them anyone else.”
The alpha.
The words echoed in my head, and I wanted to drive my fist through a wall—or better yet, through Shay’s small intestine.
Alphas were supposed to protect their packs. Sometimes that meant fighting an outside threat. Sometimes that meant being the bad guy to keep order within the pack, sacrificing the needs of the few to ensure the best outcome for the pack as a whole. But being alpha never meant throwing someone out like he was garbage.
It never meant letting a bunch of humans cut into one of your Weres like he was some kind of science experiment or a slice of meat.
“Are you sending me back?” Lucas’s voice was devoid of any emotion, quiet and clear.
“We’ll see,” I said, which was the best I could give him. Still, for the first time since I’d read Shay’s email, the muscles in my neck and back began to relax. A known threat was preferable to an unknown one.
Besides, we had an entire werewolf pack at our disposal. A small one, granted, and young, but still—how much of a threat could a bunch of humans possibly be?
CHAPTER EIGHT
I MADE THE EXECUTIVE DECISION NOT TO TELL Devon or Chase about my correspondence with Shay—Chase because I wanted him to form his own impressions of Lucas, and Devon because Lake and I had agreed that the less Devon knew about Shay’s machinations, the better. I did, however, tell Mitch everything. If someone was after Lucas—human or not—I couldn’t just leave the Wayfarer and the youngest, most vulnerable members of our pack without cluing someone in to what was going on, and there was no way to skip school without raising a pack-wide alarm.
The fact that I was one of nine werewolf alphas in North America and had to suffer through the tenth grade was wrong on so, so many levels, but try telling that to Ali “Education Is Your Future” Clare.
I had, multiple times, and it wasn’t an experience I was looking to repeat.
So instead, I let Lake drive me to school and watched Maddy stare out the window as we drove, knowing without probing her thoughts that her mind was on Lucas—and unable to think of a single thing to say to distract her. Devon spent the entire drive looking at me with a familiar expression—suspicion, exasperation, and steely calm—on his face, and I dug my heels in and refused to allow my mouth to form as much as a single syllable of what he wanted to know.
I could handle this, and besides, it wasn’t like I told Devon everything.
Somehow, I made it through first period without giving my human classmates any visible indication that something was wrong. The last thing I needed was to fan the rumor mill flames, but for once, fate was on my side. With Thanksgiving break over, the entire high school was living on borrowed time. Finals were looming and winter vacation was less than three weeks away. My eyes were bloodshot, and with each passing lecture, I became more and more aware of the sleep I hadn’t gotten the night before, but that did little to nothing to separate me from my classmates.
If anything, it made me blend in.
At the front of my third-period classroom, my history teacher droned on about Oliver Cromwell, and the pages of my three-ring binder began to look increasingly inviting. My head drooped. Each blink lasted just a little bit longer than the one before. Every time I closed my eyes, I let the bond that tied me to the pack flare, assuring myself that everyone was still there, that everyone was in one piece, that they were okay.