Ali had slept. The twins had slept. What I’d done—at least the latter half of the night—wasn’t sleeping.
It wasn’t human, either.
“How are you feeling?” I could tell by Ali’s tone—forced casualness—that she expected me to jump down her throat for asking the question.
Scared. Angry. Sad, I thought. But all I said out loud was, “A little better, maybe.”
Ali wrinkled her forehead and cocked her head to the side. Clearly, she hadn’t prepared herself for me to be pleasant. After a moment, her eyes narrowed. “What exactly did you and Lake do yesterday?” she asked, like we might have held up a gas station and gone on a crime spree across the country, all in the span of just a few hours.
“We went to Mexico, had some tequila, eloped with a pair of drug smugglers, and took part-time jobs as exotic dancers. You know, same old, same old.”
Ali snorted.
“I’m torn on stripper names. It’s either going to be Lady Love or Wolfsbane Lane. Thoughts?”
Ali threw a onesie at me. “Brat.”
Considering I’d cost her a husband and her home, that was probably putting things lightly.
“Talking about it might help,” Ali said, seeing a tell on my face to the guilt sloshing around in my stomach. “You’re going to have to talk to someone eventually, Bryn.”
I thought back to the dream. Back to Chase. Back to the screaming girl and the name buried in my mind.
“I am talking to someone,” I said, making the executive decision that Ali didn’t need to know that the person I was talking to was a teenage werewolf haunted by the psychopath who’d murdered my birth parents. “And you’re right, it helps.”
Ali was dumbfounded. Obviously, this wasn’t the response she’d been expecting. Before she could formulate a reply or press me for answers, I bounded off the bed and went in search of clean clothes.
“Where are you going?” she called after me.
“First, I’m getting dressed,” I called back. “And then I’m going to see what Lake is up to. I have a project for her.”
The day before, our best lead to the Rabid had been Chase, but today, I had more. I had a mental image of a girl. I had a name. And I had a deep and abiding suspicion that if my family had been the Rabid’s first set of victims, and Chase was his most recent, they weren’t alone.
Somewhere along the line, the Big Bad Wolf had attacked someone else, too. Her name was Madison.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
LAKE AND I SET UP SHOP IN THE RESTAURANT. I ordered cheese fries; Lake got a triple-bacon cheeseburger. Breakfast of champions, all the way.
“I take it you have a plan, Picasso?” Lake asked, after she’d had her way with the burger. I ignored her for a few seconds, putting the finishing touches on the face I was sketching on a napkin. Given the limitations of (a) my skill and (b) my current medium, the likeness wasn’t a bad one.
“This girl,” I told Lake. “The Rabid was thinking about her last night. I think she’s one of his victims.”
When the Rabid attacked my family, I’d gotten away unharmed.
Chase had nearly died.
Somehow, I didn’t think that the Rabid’s other victims had been so lucky. In the past thousand years, only a handful of humans had survived a major werewolf attack long enough to go Were themselves, and Chase was a lot older than the girl I’d seen in his mind and in the Rabid’s.
Stronger.
“Okay,” Lake said cheerfully. “We’ve got a face on a napkin.” I could practically hear an unspoken is it time to shoot someone yet? on the end of that sentence, but I pressed on.
“We have a picture, and we have a name.”
MADISON, I wrote in all capital letters on the napkin.
“And,” I continued as I wrote, “if she’s one of this guy’s victims, her body was either found torn apart by wild animals, or he hid her bones after eating the rest of her.”
Anyone else probably would have balked at my bluntness, but Lake just twirled her blonde hair around her right index finger and nodded.
“Google?” she asked.
“Unless you have a better starting place,” I replied, “then, yes. You guys have wireless in here?”
Lake leaned back and grinned, slinging her arm over the back of our booth. “What do you think we are, heathens? Course we have wireless.”
Most of the older Weres were technologically resistant, but I’d grown up with the internet and so had Lake. Together, we probably knew more about technology than the entire old guard of Stone River combined.
We also had laptops.
It was early enough in the day that the rest of the restaurant was empty, save for Keely, and if she thought the sight of two teenagers surfing the internet in a werewolf bar was a bit odd, she certainly didn’t say so.
“I’ll start by searching news stories. You see if you can find some kind of missing-persons database in case our girl’s body was never found.”
“Anybody ever tell you you’re bossy?” Lake asked.
“That a rhetorical question?” I returned, while entering the words Madison, wolf attack, dead OR missing, and girl into the search field.
“Nope,” Lake replied, her own fingers moving lazily across the keys. “Not a rhetorical question.”
“In that case, yes. I’ve been told on occasion that I’m bossy.”
“Thought so.”
The two of us fell into silence as we combed through our search results. Fifteen minutes later, I reached for a cheese fry, only to find the plate empty. I shot arrows at Lake with my eyes, but she just grinned.
You snooze, you lose. It was practically wolf law.
“You finding anything?” Lake asked.
I shook my head. “Nope. You?”
“I’ve checked two missing-children databases and none of them have a Madison that looks a thing like your girl there.” Lake paused, the perpetual motion of her body stilling. “Lot of missing kids out there,” she added.
Frustrated that my plan hadn’t yielded even a smidgen of a lead, I switched from surfing news stories to searching images. Since the missing-children databases hadn’t turned up our girl, I tried a new combination of words.
Madison, in loving memory
A couple of clicks had the search engine displaying a hundred images per page, and fourteen pages and half an hour in, I saw her. Hands shaking, I clicked on the picture and followed the link.
Madison Covey, age six