Devon didn’t move, and this time, I said his name silently.
Dev?
After a long moment, Devon managed to drag his eyes away from the blood seeping into the wooden planks of the porch. His fists clenched, and he turned toward me. “Bryn.”
There was a wealth of information in that one word, and I knew that whatever Devon said next was going to send a tremor through our pack, like static feedback or a punch to the gut.
“I caught his scent, and it wasn’t pretty.”
I waited for Devon to make a comment about Calvin Klein cologne or something equally flippant, but he didn’t. Instead, he cut right to the chase.
“This kid is from the Snake Bend Pack, Bryn. His alpha is Shay.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I ONLY KNEW THREE THINGS ABOUT SHAY MACALISTER.
One: he was a purebred werewolf, one of a relatively small number in the country who’d been born to two werewolf parents instead of just one. Purebreds were larger, stronger, and faster and had fewer weaknesses than werewolves with human blood flowing in their veins.
Two: Shay wanted me dead. It wasn’t personal. I had something he wanted. More females in a pack meant more live births and stronger, purebred children, and the only thing standing between the other alphas and doubling their numbers—and their power base—was me.
And, okay, maybe it was a little personal for Shay, since I’d been responsible for destroying a Rabid who knew the secret to changing human girls into Weres. It was also possible that once I’d done so, I’d derived great satisfaction from putting the screws to the other alphas—and Shay in particular—flaunting the laws that forbid one alpha from taking wolves who belonged to another, even if that other alpha was a teenage, human female.
At the moment, however, it was Shay’s third distinguishing characteristic that turned my stomach to lead and blew a cold chill down the length of my spine.
Shay was Devon’s—my Devon’s—brother. He was everything Dev didn’t want to be, everything he’d spent his entire life rebelling against, and already the presence of one of Shay’s wolves on my land had sapped the mirth from Devon’s features and left something stone hard and formidable in its place.
“Hey.” I reached out for Devon’s arm. “You okay?”
Devon stood there, every muscle in his body tensed. He didn’t answer my question. Callum would have forced Dev’s eyes to his and repeated the query, but I nudged Devon’s shoulder with my head, a gesture of comfort far less human than I was and not particularly alpha in the least.
On instinct, Dev nudged me back, his muscles relaxing—but not by much. “Only you,” he said crisply, “would be worried about me at a time like this.”
Like Shay, Devon was purebred. Boy-band tendencies aside, he could take care of himself—physically.
“Seriously, Dev. You want to tell me this isn’t messing with your head at all?” I didn’t have to put even an ounce of my power as alpha behind the words. Best-friend privilege said it all.
“Well, of course it is,” Devon replied. “One of Brother Dearest’s wolves showed up on our land, beaten within an inch of his life and caught between Shifts. If you’d been the one to open that door instead of Mitch, the smell of human blood probably would have sent him rabid, and you’d be significantly less charming as a decimated pile of meat.”
Dev—do you think Shay sent him? I couldn’t make myself ask the question out loud, and Devon responded in key.
I don’t think anything is below Shay. He’s not like other people, Bryn. You know he’s not.
“If your brother wanted Bryn dead, is this how he’d do it?” Chase’s words took me off guard—not because I had forgotten that he was in the room (though I had), but because his tone, understated and detached, contrasted so sharply with the animal set to his features. His wolf wanted to touch me, to protect me, to tear Shay to pieces, but Chase’s human side wanted answers—whether asking the question was like driving an elbow into Devon’s gut or not.
“I don’t know,” Devon said shortly, his jaw turning to granite, his gaze averted from mine. “I’m not exactly an expert on the inner workings of Shay’s dark and twisted mind.”
By the time Devon had come along, his much older brother was already the alpha of the Snake Bend Pack. They weren’t exactly what one would call close.
“Okay. I had to ask. If you think of anything, let us know.” With that, Chase turned his attention from Dev to me. “What do you need?”
The look in Chase’s pale blue eyes was still feral, the desire to protect me simmering just under the surface—but he’d grown up in a world very different from the one I’d known as part of Callum’s pack, a world where females weren’t shuffled off into a back room or given bodyguards at the first sign of trouble. Chase was asking, not telling; thinking instead of acting on instinct.
I’d never been so glad that Chase was Chase and that neither one of us had been born a Were.
“I need to talk to Mitch,” I said, following his example and trying to think this through, even though I wasn’t exactly known for an overdeveloped tendency to look before I leapt. “Whatever happens, our first priority is making sure that whoever this visitor is, he doesn’t die.”
I hadn’t been an alpha for long, but even I knew that having a Snake Bend wolf die on my territory wouldn’t look good. Until I knew exactly what was going on, and how to proceed, I couldn’t afford to give Shay any reason to come here, looking like the injured party and demanding something—or worse, someone—in return.
It was two days before they let me anywhere near the injured boy—two days for his injuries to heal enough that he was in control of his wolf, two days that I spent gnashing my teeth and trying to unravel the tangled web of political possibilities surrounding his entry to our territory.
Had Shay sent him here, on the verge of death, with the hope that he’d attack me? Would the other alphas blame Shay for the action of a wolf who was clearly Rabid? Had someone attacked one of Shay’s wolves on our land—and if so, who? A member of one of the other packs, crossing into our territory to make trouble? A Rabid, gone rogue or mad and hunting anyone and anything in his way? Or, God forbid, one of my own peripherals?
By Senate law, our peripherals could attack trespassers, but what had been done to this boy wasn’t animal retribution.
It was torture.