Wolf. Close by.
I wasn’t sure which of the little hitchhikers in my head had sent that message, but as soon as they pointed it out, I recognized the feeling in my gut for what it was. A wolf. Not Pack, but a wolf.
Burnt hair and men’s cologne. Baby powder.
I wondered at the additional component to the Rabid’s scent but didn’t let it throw me. Even monsters could pride themselves on good personal hygiene.
I crouched, covering my back with a tree, and I looked. From this distance, I could make out the cabin, which was much larger than I’d realized from what I’d seen inside the Rabid’s head. The difference gave me the illusion of distance, let me forget how close to this man I’d come in my mind.
Settling into my crouch, I scanned the perimeter of the cabin, identifying each and every point of entry. Unless Prancer decided to do us all a favor and take an early evening stroll, I wasn’t going to be able to get a sight on him.
That silent admission had the other three nipping at the heels of my mind, pushing against our bond, willing me to call them in.
But I didn’t. I held my position, and I watched.
Wolf, I thought, feeling it. Baby powder and burnt hair and men’s cologne.
And then there was movement behind one of the windows. With steady hands, I reached for my gun and pulled it out of my jeans. I could almost make out the edges of a person’s form, but given my inferior human senses, it could just as easily have been an armchair. And then, I got unbelievably lucky.
The front door opened.
I moved my arms, aiming my gun at the door, and my finger began to press down on the trigger, little by little, as I waited for my target to appear. A mile away, Lake, Devon, and Chase prepared themselves to converge on me. To protect me.
Closer. Closer. Closer.
The door was almost open. I could almost see … there, a body—
No.
The instinct surged up from my stomach, like vomit in the back of my throat. This wasn’t right. Something didn’t feel right. It didn’t smell right. It smelled …
Female. I eased my finger off the trigger, just a hair, as my intended target cleared the door.
It wasn’t the Rabid.
The realization shook me, but I didn’t lower the gun.
A girl. My age, maybe, or a little older. She had light brown hair and pale gray eyes, and there was something horribly, gut-wrenchingly familiar about the lines of her face.
Madison.
My gun lowered itself. My mind reeled. This was impossible. Madison was dead. She’d been declared dead when she was six years old. The Rabid had torn her so far apart that there was nothing but scraps left to bury.
Nothing but scraps.
No body.
Not dead.
I tried to adjust to that information, to reconcile the waiflike teen in front of me to the little girl, but before I could do that, I was body-slammed with another realization.
She wasn’t alone.
They poured out the front door, one after another, and it finally sank in that the Rabid wasn’t the only person who lived in this mammoth house in the woods.
He had people with them. Children. And every single one of them was a Were.
Retreat wasn’t in my DNA any more than it was in the average werewolf’s, but I couldn’t stay there, not when I’d almost shot a dead girl who couldn’t have been more than a year older than me.
Where had Wilson gotten all of these werewolves?
The answer was obvious. I’d always assumed that the Rabid was killing the targets we’d so painstakingly marked on our map. Hunting them. Feeding his bloodlust with prey more satisfying than a rabbit or deer. I’d assumed that Chase was a mistake, an aberration who’d gotten away and survived.
Apparently, I’d been wrong.
Wilson hadn’t been killing the children he’d attacked. He’d been turning them. Creating his own little werewolf army. It was sick.
Sick and impossible. According to what Mitch had told Keely, there had been a grand total of three, maybe four cases of a human being changed into a Were in the past thousand years. One case every two hundred and fifty years, even though the prevalence of attacks was much, much higher.
Yet somehow, this Rabid had managed to change dozens.
The girl I’d almost shot—the one who’d come outside when she’d sensed me near, the one who was my age and my height and my build almost exactly—Madison—she could have been me.
If Callum had arrived at my house a few minutes later, she would have been.
Come out, come out, wherever you are. I won’t hurt you. The Big Bad Wolf always wins in the end.
Had I been the first? A trial run? A way for him to test whatever method he’d found for changing humans? Were my parents just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Had they died because of me? Why hadn’t they changed? If this Rabid knew the secret to making new werewolves, why had he only used it on children? Did it work on adults? How could a six-year-old even survive the kind of ravaging it took to trigger the change?
My pack—my friends—descended on me the second I came within their range. Their questions pushed mine out of my head, and their touches—soft on my face, my arms, and my stomach—calmed me enough that I was able to make a sound. And unable to keep from crying.
It was supposed to be me.
They heard the words, and they absorbed them. They let me break, and then they put me back together again, all in a matter of seconds.
I straightened and cleared my throat, but when I spoke, my voice still came out husky with tears. “We’ll be needing a new plan. As it turns out, the numbers are in his favor, not ours. And also, we can’t kill them.” I paused, because the irony of the words I was about to say didn’t escape me in the least. “They’re just kids.”
“One of us should go back to the cabin,” Devon said softly, his voice cutting across mine, quiet and insistent. “Just close enough to try to scent their numbers.”
“Does it matter?” I asked, meeting his eyes and wondering how exactly the two of us had gone from algebra and the safety of Stone River to here, all in a matter of months. “If Wilson has twelve Changed werewolves, or if he has forty, does it really matter?”
Either way we were outclassed, outnumbered, overwhelmed, and screwed. In that order. Since I’d both been there and done that, I made an executive decision, one I begged the others with my mind and with my eyes to follow.
Retreat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BACK AT OUR TEENY-TINY MOTEL ROOM, I TRIED TO catch the boys up on everything Lake and I had discovered with our internet sleuthing. “It’s hard to get a real count of how many attacks this guy has been involved in. There are at least four or five confirmed deaths—with bodies and everything—that might fit his profile.”