Wolf.
And not one of ours, either.
“Easy, girl,” Lake said, even though I got the feeling that the intruder’s presence sent her hackles up, same way it did mine. “This here’s neutral territory. We welcome all types.”
Technically speaking, this wasn’t neutral territory, and it wasn’t Lake’s. Montana was Stone River territory. It belonged to Callum, and the wolf behind us did not.
“He’s a peripheral,” Lake told me. “One of Shay’s.”
I hadn’t had much practice identifying other packs by smell, but I recognized the name. Shay was the youngest alpha in North America. He’d challenged the former leader of the Snake Bend Pack around the turn of the century and won. Like Devon, Shay was a purebred Were, and Sora was his mother, too. Technically, that made him Devon’s half-brother, but since neither of us particularly cared for him, we didn’t think of him that way. Shay had broken all ties with his family—and Callum—long before either Devon or I were born.
“Your dad lets Shay’s wolves eat here?” I asked. It was unfathomable.
“Only the peripherals, and only the ones that can mind their manners,” Lake said. “It doesn’t hurt to have friends.”
I tried to see the sense in that, however much my instincts were telling me it was wrong-wrong-wrong. I’d thought that the Wayfarer was a resting point for Stone River peripherals, but given the host of smells in the air, its clientele was far more eclectic than I’d given it credit for.
All the more reason to talk to the bartender and find out what she knew.
“I’m Bryn.” I opened my eyes again and met hers, and if she noticed that I’d been smelling her, she didn’t comment on it.
“Keely.” For a long moment that was all she said, and then she turned and narrowed her eyes at Lake. “You up to something?”
Lake’s lips worked their way into an easy grin. “Always. You heard anything about a Rabid?”
I’d expected her to finesse the question more, but who was I kidding? This was Lake. Keely paused for a moment and then snorted. “If I lied, you’d smell it, so I’ll stick with that’s no concern of yours and suggest you leave it at that.”
Lake opened her mouth to argue, but I pinched her leg in the age-old sign for shut up and let me do the talking.
“You know about werewolves,” I said, meeting Keely’s gaze.
“I expect I might,” Keely allowed.
“And you’re not dead.”
Keely snorted. “This one sure knows how to sweet-talk a girl, doesn’t she, Lake?”
I wondered if Callum knew that there were humans in Montana who knew who and what we were, but if he didn’t, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. “The fact that you’re alive means you know how to keep your mouth shut. I can respect that.”
Lake pinched my leg. I ignored her.
“So I won’t ask you about any Rabids or any secrets.”
Another pinch. Harder this time. I swatted Lake’s hand away.
“But I am going to ask what you’ve heard about what it takes for a human to become a Were.”
My logic in asking that question wasn’t so much a rationale as an instinct. Any human who’d been within five feet of a werewolf and known him for what he was had thought about it. What it would be like to Change. What it would take to trigger it.
Ribs popping. Head throbbing. Punch after punch after punch.
I forced the swell of fear down before Lake could smell it, before the peripheral in the back right corner could get a taste of me. Keely and I weren’t talking about a beating. I had no reason to be thinking about that. None. We weren’t talking about Marks or being bitten.
We were talking about slaughter.
“I asked about that,” Keely said. “When Mitch told me what he and Lake were and warned me that things could get rowdy here. He said he wouldn’t let a soul touch me, but even so, I asked what would happen if I got bitten or scratched—if I would change or just keel over. Never hurts to be informed.”
“Humans becoming Weres is supposed to be impossible,” I said, thinking that instead of celebrating birthdays, I should start marking my life by its impossibilities. One for a four-year-old escaping a Rabid. Two for being Marked by a thousand-year-old alpha. Three for closing my mind off to the pack so completely for so long. Four for a boy who should be dead.
Five for the way I’d claimed him above and beyond our allegiance to Callum’s pack. Six for the way Chase had come to me in my dreams.
“It’s not impossible,” Keely said, leaning forward on her elbows. “Just unlikely.”
Now that was interesting. In silent agreement with my assessment, Lake finally stopped pinching my thigh. “That so?” she asked Keely, her voice a low rumble that reminded me of her dad’s.
Keely nodded. “The way I’ve heard it, in the past thousand years, a human being changed has happened three or four times. Mostly, they just die. If anyone could figure out how to bring humans over without killing ’em dead, I suspect there’d be a lot more of you wolf-types than there are.”
There was power in numbers. The larger the pack, the more powerful the alpha.
I digested the information Keely had given me slowly. Chase’s situation wasn’t impossible. It was improbable. I filed that information away for future knowledge.
“You know anything about the other times it has happened?” I asked Keely, not really expecting an answer. She shook her head and then excused herself, as the Were I’d felt earlier came up to the bar.
“I thought you wanted to find out about the Rabid,” Lake said, dropping her voice to a whisper.
“I do,” I whispered back, “but Miss Keely over there wasn’t talking, and right now, our best lead on the Rabid is Chase.”
I had no idea where the Rabid was or what he was doing, but I did know that a part of him was in Chase’s head.
Burnt hair and men’s cologne.
Banishing the memory of the smell, I told Lake about the first time Callum had taken me to see Chase. About the way that, for a few moments, the Rabid’s claim to his prey had outweighed Callum’s. About the way I’d seen Chase in my dreams and followed him into his own enough to know that the Rabid was still playing games.
“Let me get this straight,” Lake said when I was done, leaning back on her bar stool in a position I would never have been able to manage. “You and the Stone River Pack alpha and El Rabido are fighting it out for dominance in lover boy’s head.”