Ali nodded. “Love you, kiddo.”
“I love you, too.”
By the time I got to my room, I needed something to do—half so I could stop thinking about Callum and his so-called knack, and half so I wouldn’t start thinking about the fact that this wasn’t my room.
The map provided a convenient distraction. I spread it out over my bed and stood on my knees over it. There had to be some pattern to the killing. If I’d had a ruler, I would have measured the distance between each of the kills. Instead, I played connect the dots, drawing a line from the first attack—the one against my parents—to the next chronologically, and then the next. I stopped when I got to Chase’s, and still, there weren’t any answers.
There were more attacks in the West and Midwest than in the East. More in the North than in the South. But that still left a quarter of the country.
A quarter that was divided among alphas, none of whom would have tolerated a lone wolf, let alone a Rabid, on their land.
Maybe if he was at the edges of the territory? I thought. Things were certainly different at the Wayfarer than they were in Ark Valley. Using the same pen, I drew an outline over each of the territories. Callum had Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. California, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah were part of Desert Night territory. Snake Bend zigzagged from Arkansas up to to Wisconsin, looping back down for Illinois.
As I finished tracing Shay’s territory, I paused, looking closer at the map. It was the kind that had geographical information on it as well as official boundaries: rivers, mountains, that kind of thing. I thought briefly of Lake, running for something she wouldn’t reach, but then I forced myself to concentrate.
Callum had been in America longer than Colorado had been a state. I grappled with my memory, grasping at straws. Somewhere in my “surviving pack life” lessons, there’d been pack history.
Rivers. Mountains. Lakes.
That was it. Once upon a time, territories hadn’t been drawn along state lines. They’d been drawn along natural ones, and I remembered—almost remembered, couldn’t remember—something.
Something Callum had told me about the borders of our territory. Of all territories.
I forced myself to close my eyes. I pictured Callum and ignored the stinging in my throat. The phrase, if I could just remember the phrase …
No-Man’s-Land.
Triumph was sweet, the aftertaste bitter. I couldn’t have been older than six or seven when Callum had told me about it. There were places where the natural cutoffs didn’t line up well with state lines. A tiny slice of one state might be cut off from the rest of a territory by a river or by mountains. Hardly worth fighting over, but fighting was what Weres did about territory disputes, so in certain cases …
The alphas had a gentlemen’s agreement to leave the land alone.
The answer was so obvious that if I’d been any older during Callum’s little tutorial, I would have berated myself for not thinking of it sooner. With a smile, I took my pen and circled the tiny slices of the map that fell between boundaries, grateful that I’d managed to remember and that Callum had told me in the first place.
In retrospect, though, it seemed like a weird thing to teach a kid who just wanted to learn how to tell a few lies and not get eaten.
Sitting back, I examined my work. It wasn’t an answer. There were five relevant pockets of land that fell in the center of the Rabid’s attacks, each one so small that they weren’t labeled with any city names on the map. Now, I just needed to figure out which one the Rabid was using as his base of operations.
A funny feeling wormed its way through my insides. It wasn’t entirely dissimilar to what I’d felt the night I’d run with the pack, or the starburst of determination in my brain when I’d realized that I needed to touch Chase, even if it meant breaking every rule.
I was a predator, tracking her prey. I was hunting, the same way Weres took down smaller game.
“I don’t need to hunt this Rabid.” I said the words out loud, trying to convince myself that they were true. Even if I knew where he was, killing him wasn’t my job. I wasn’t as well equipped to do it as Callum and the other alphas were, and this was what they were meeting about.
The last time I’d rushed into something, things hadn’t ended well. I thought of Ali in the other room, thought of everything she’d given up for me. If I got myself killed, she’d be the furthest thing from okay, and the twins needed their mother.
I had to wait. I had to let the Senate take care of this. If they knew what I knew, that this Rabid had been hunting on all of their lands, they’d want to take care of him as badly as I did. Any werewolf with even a lick of sense knew that challenging an alpha on his own turf was a good way to get yourself dead.
I looked back at the map, and thought back to the words I’d sworn to Lake. If Callum’s not going to kill the Rabid, I will.
Until and unless that happened, I needed to get rid of this feeling. I needed to step back, even if the part of me that had grown up Pack felt like stepping away from a kill was wrong. You didn’t come between a wolf and his prey, but I forced myself to let go of mine. Folding up the map, I wondered if I should share what I’d managed to uncover so far. I had no way of knowing if any of it was valid. No way of knowing how much of it—or how much more—Callum and the other alphas already knew.
Exhausted, but knowing I wouldn’t be able to sleep, I leaned back in my bed. My breathing slowed, but my eyes didn’t close. I cleared my mind until Chase’s scent filled my nose.
If my eyes hadn’t been open, I would have sworn he was there in the room with me, but he wasn’t. Even with five hundred miles between us, we were connected. It wasn’t all-consuming the way it had been in the minutes after I’d formed the connection, but it was there, and as I stared up at the ceiling, I became aware of the fact that somewhere, Chase was staring up at a starlit sky.
I breathed in.
He breathed in.
As long as we were awake, there was no Rabid to haunt his mind, no memories to plague mine. There was just Chase and me and the uncannily comfortable silence of two people who felt as if they’d known each other for much longer than they actually had.
I saw through his eyes. He saw through mine. And for the first time since we’d come here, I felt like I was home.
Eventually, I did fall asleep, and in an ironic twist of fate, Chase wasn’t in my dreams and I wasn’t in his. In fact, my sleep was dreamless. Peaceful—until the sound of a heavy weight dropping onto my bedroom floor woke me up.