On the downside, that meant we had no safety net, no backup plan, no options.
Ask him if he knows anything about the deal, Chase suggested quietly. He, Lake, and Dev had been so quiet that I’d almost forgotten they were there.
“Lucas said that Valerie made some kind of deal with his alpha,” I said, searching Jed’s features for some kind of reaction. “Shay gave Lucas to Valerie. Any idea what he asked for in return?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Jed replied facetiously. “This Shay guy got any reason to want anyone in your pack dead?”
I could practically feel the blood drain out of my face. Shay had reason to want anyone who stood between him and the Changed females dead—including, but not limited to, me.
“Thought so.” Jed ran a scarred hand roughly over his neck. “Going after your pack is a risk, and Valerie’s not in the habit of risking something for nothing. The question you should be asking isn’t what Shay wanted Valerie to do—it’s why she’s doing it.”
My mind was reeling. Shay sent Lucas to the coven. They tortured him. Lucas escaped and came running straight to me. Shay had to have known that Lucas would go for help—maybe he’d even asked the coven to let him escape conveniently close to my territory so that I would be the obvious choice. Then, when Valerie came after our pack, she could use Lucas as an excuse—a focal point for her coven, an excuse to keep me from figuring everything out.
From the outside, it would appear that the coven had their own reasons for fighting us—reasons that weren’t Senate business in the least.
Somewhere, in Snake Bend territory, the Snake Bend alpha was sitting back on his haunches and watching a group of psychics fight the battles that Senate law wouldn’t let him fight. Shay couldn’t challenge me. He couldn’t fight me, and he couldn’t take what was mine, but technically, he wasn’t.
He was letting someone else do the dirty work for him.
Why would Valerie agree to something like that? What could Shay have possibly offered her to justify the risk? And more importantly, now that I knew that giving Lucas back wouldn’t change our situation, what exactly could I do to stop this from turning into an all-out war?
“If we take Valerie out,” I said, disturbed by how easy it was for me to ask the question, “does everyone else go back to normal?”
“You a killer?” There was no condemnation in my companion’s voice, and I got the distinct feeling that if he’d gotten any of his scars fighting, his opponents probably hadn’t lived long enough to scar.
“No,” I said. “I’m not a killer, but I do have a tranq gun, and we could keep her unconscious for a good, long time.”
“Val uses her own daughter to keep the others in line. She’s convinced the entire coven that Caro is a remorseless, soulless killer. Kid even believes it herself. If undoing that were as easy as knocking Val out, I would have done it myself, years ago.” Jed stared me straight in the eye. “Doesn’t matter if she’s unconscious. There’s a part of her mind that doesn’t sleep, and once a suggestion is implanted, it’s in there good. Killing her might work, but it also might not.”
He watched me, waiting for some indication of whether or not I was up to the task. Whether I could kill just because it might break Valerie’s spell.
I had a knife.
I had the training.
We have a problem. Dev’s voice broke into my thoughts, sparing me from answering the question. You need to come home, Bryn. Now.
“I have to go,” I said, and Jed nodded, like that answered that.
“Go on, then,” he said. “But don’t be surprised if Valerie moves up her little game. You came here, to her house. She’s likely to answer in kind.”
I would have liked to ask Jed other things—what sort of knacks the other members of the coven had, how many of them there were, what we could do to defend ourselves—but I didn’t get the chance, because whatever the problem back at the Wayfarer was, it was a big one.
Lake, Devon, and Chase pulled out of my head at once.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I MADE IT TO THE EDGE OF THE PSYCHICS’ PROPERTY, running at a solid and furious pace, my skull pounding with the sudden withdrawal of my guard. I could still sense them—Lake and Devon were at the Wayfarer; Chase was on his way here; and all three of them were on edge, like someone had shot a flare directly into the heart of our pack, but the two-way street that I’d opened for them was closed.
Something had snapped them out of my mind and back into their own.
Someone want to tell me what’s going on? I made it to the road and sent the question out to anyone who might feel compelled to listen.
Chase answered my call. Four peripherals, Bryn. At the Wayfarer.
Through the bond, I could feel Chase getting closer, moving faster, and I realized—belatedly—that Lake had loaned him her truck.
“Peripherals.” I said the word out loud and let the ramifications wash over me. I ran harder, faster, every inch the alpha determined to get back to her pack. The road was deserted, the morning sky giving way to what looked to be another gray afternoon. My limbs were human-heavy, my pace too slow.
I needed to be there. With them. Now.
Forcing myself to calm down, I kept my eye on the road and tried to focus on logic over instinct. There were peripherals at the Wayfarer, and they’d arrived unannounced. When the Wayfarer had been at the edges of Callum’s territory, that might not have been nearly as much of an insult, but it was the center of ours—our base of operations, our home—and four peripherals coming this far into our territory without permission was on par with an act of war.
Whose peripherals are they? I sent the question to Chase, possibilities dogging me at every step. Maybe Callum had broken his hands-off policy and sent me backup. Maybe Shay had gotten tired of waiting for the psychics to do his dirty work and had launched another attack.
Maybe—
I heard the truck before I saw it. Chase slammed on the brakes and threw open the door. “Ours.”
He didn’t bother repeating the question, didn’t say more than that one word, but it was enough to make my entire body relax. Shay wasn’t attacking. Callum hadn’t foreseen some fuzzy future I couldn’t combat without him. The members of our pack who lived at the border of our territory—the ones Chase visited when he was running patrol—had simply come home.
“All four?” I asked.
“Jackson, Eric, Phoebe, and Sage.” The way Chase said their names told me something I hadn’t realized before—that the peripherals weren’t peripheral to him. They were the loners, the outsiders, the ones who could keep their distance and survive.