I almost couldn’t. The weird charge of energy from the meal had completely bled away.
As we rattled down the hill, I cranked down the window and gulped in air. That’s why I smelled the problem before I saw it. I grabbed Ayu’s shoulder, making her protest, but then she caught my drift. There were strange silhouettes up ahead, right where the dirt road turned to pavement again. Ayu jolted the car to a stop.
Two police cars were parked across the end of the road. Their lights weren’t on, but someone was sure as hell home. Two officers stood before the vehicles, two more behind. One the figures in front was Police Chief Alec Barron.
“Shit,” I breathed. Ayu was less polite about it. She was still busy cursing as she opened her door, and she made one hell of an entrance in the process. She’d ditched the frills, and her corset, jeans and boots included enough metal to set off airport security devices a mile away. Besides, even if she did look pale and grim, that was pretty much her usual point.
One of the officers actually shuffled back a step when she bared her teeth in an unpleasant smile.
“Mind telling us what’s up with the roadblock on our property?” she said. “Before we plow through it?”
She also bellowed Ilsa! Get the fuck down here! so loudly that I nearly slapped my hands over my ears. Not that it would have helped.
“Your property line stops right here.” Barron tapped a foot at the ragged edge of the asphalt. “We’re not trying to intrude. We just need to talk.”
“About what?”
“We’re investigating the murder of a transient named Marcus Rayner.”
I shuddered. Stay in the car, Ayu hissed at me, but I reluctantly reached for the door handle anyway.
So did someone in Barron’s car. When he emerged, I gasped. It was Grey, holding my crutches, and letting out an indescribable cry when he saw me. For a second, he looked ready to rush forward and get me.
Then he fully took in the sight. I was standing unaided, and probably looking even more like a horror show than the girl on the other side of the car. His face fell. So did the crutches, landing with a clatter on the pavement.
“Oh, no,” I whispered.
“We were hoping we might find you here,” Barron said calmly. “We had an agreement, B.”
Guilt twisted in my stomach. What was I supposed to have done, though? Drag him into that mess last night? Marcus could have slaughtered him. Or Kane would have. I couldn’t—
“You know we don’t involve outsiders in our affairs, Mr. Barron,” I heard suddenly.
It was Ilsa’s voice, echoing down the hillside.
She was perfectly composed, as usual. Her hair was up in an elegant knot, and her eyes were calm. There was the tiniest shadow on her cheek, though, like a lingering stain, although I might have been imagining things.
Behind her stood Pandora, still weary and bandaged up. To my surprise, Raoul was guiding Brandon along, too. He looked hollowed out, and a whole lot older. And no matter how subdued he seemed, he had an odd spark in his eyes that made me nervous.
“Marcus Rayner was one of our affairs, and I shouldn’t have to explain it to you.” Ilsa stopped at the edge of the property line. “But if I must go through this, I hope you don’t mind if I include the others. I’d only like to say it once.”
Grey made a shockingly wolf-like snarl. “I don’t give a shit about whatever show-and-tell you’ve got planned. B, what are you doing here? And this Marcus—don’t tell me you—”
“She found him for us, Tobias,” Ilsa said, to my shock. I hadn’t told her his name. “None of us could predict his movements. Someone had to show the way.”
Grey went ashen and looked at me. “You? Why—” He stopped. “You killed someone?”
“I didn’t even touch him,” I protested, but he only backed away, his eyes huge.
“Grey,” I cried.
Ilsa stepped in. “I’ll explain,” she said, meeting the eyes of each person in turn—except for Grey, who wouldn’t look at her. “I killed Marcus. I acted alone. Things had gone too far to do anything else. Pack laws were clear on the matter.”
“What I’m not clear on,” Barron said, “besides you thinking you’ll get away with murder, is how pack laws would treat you for letting Marcus get away with as much as he did.”
There was a long, subsonic rumble from our side of the line. Ilsa gestured for silence. “None of us wanted this. We’d all done our best to stop him. But Marcus was deeply damaged from what he’d done to try to fix himself. To fix all of us.”
I swallowed hard. Was Ilsa actually admitting—
Barron arched an eyebrow at her. “Given the evidence, you’re not doing that badly.”
“This?” She waved a hand at herself. It ended in a shrug. “We’ve tried a lot of things. Most weren’t enough. We were still getting weaker and struggling with the transformations. Our leader claimed we could learn to control it better, but Marcus finally decided we couldn’t just leave it up to willpower alone. He made other plans.”
“And those were…?”
Ilsa said it simply. “He and I found a doctor with research experience who was willing to help find some sort of treatment. Maybe even a cure.”
There was an explosion of shock from the rest of the pack. Ilsa ignored it and kept talking. “We knew it was dangerous, so Marcus took the first treatments himself. At first everything was promising. He was even able to keep his mind completely when he was a wolf, for a while. But that…didn’t last.”
“How long ago was this?” Barron asked.
“Ten years back. When he started having trouble, I insisted he stop taking the drugs, but he must have kept taking them covertly. Eventually, he snapped. And he attacked someone here in town.”
She meant me, of course. Grey looked clobbered.
“After that, our pack leader called challenge against him, but he ran. He evaded us for weeks. Others got hurt along the way. Eventually, our leader was just too worn down to continue. He began a long, slow decline after that. He tried to pick up the search again later—guilt-driven, I’d say. But he never did succeed.”
“You’re still talking about ten years here,” Barron said skeptically. “You didn’t do anything about your renegade in all that time?”
She grimaced. “You can only chase a ghost for so long. Marcus was gone, and priorities changed. We were still growing sicker. I had to do something.”
“So what was it?” I couldn’t decide whether Grey sounded scornful or miserable. “Yoga? Granola? The power of positive thinking?”
“Or tricking your pack with drugged food?” I said.
Ilsa didn’t look at me, but everyone else did. Brandon made a face like he was chewing over something distasteful, and spat it out with, I knew it, you bitch. But the only one to say anything aloud was Barron.
“Is that true?”
“Kane and I…” She snagged, just once, over Kane’s name. “We eventually asked our doctor to continue his work. I said he had to give it one more try. Our leader didn’t know what I was doing. He would have stopped me if he had.”
“And what’s his name?” Barron pressed.
“We only call him the Elder.”
“No. The doctor. I need his name.”
Ilsa didn’t answer. “He promised me he could work up a better treatment. I volunteered myself for it this time; I dared do no less. And it worked. I felt stronger. More capable. So yes…I began administering this to the rest of the pack. I gave it to everyone but the Elder. I was going to reveal it to him once I had enough proof. To be honest, B, that proof was going to be you.”
I stepped back, feeling queasy. The others took the opportunity to leap in. Brandon did it almost literally, in fact, and Raoul struggled to hold him back. In the tumult that followed, most of it telepathic, I heard everyone’s shouted accusations. Brandon was spitting bile about Ilsa and her games, Ayu was yelling at him to shut up before he started something even worse, and Pandora—I was stunned—snapped that Ilsa
hadn’t even been entirely wrong about what she’d done.
There was no way they’d resolve this mess without claws. I cast a desperate look at Barron. He couldn’t hear everything, but he wasn’t stupid, and I’d told him the pack could talk mind to mind. So he held up a hand and raised his voice.
“So explain why Marcus came back and started attacking people now,” he said, loudly enough to get everyone’s attention. “What changed?”
The others pulled back from her a step or two, leaving Ilsa alone where she stood. I’ll give her this, though: she still set her chin and spoke steadily.
“He was trying to break us down. Some sort of vendetta, probably. I don’t know what happened in his head after all this time.”
After what I saw in the river, I had some idea. He’d decided to stop the experiments for good, and cut off her supplies. Silently, I started gnawing over the connections. Madison had told me that one of the victims had worked in medicine. Any kind of crazy-ass secret lab like Ilsa was hinting at would have to have security, and I knew those guards at Gilman High had other jobs after school hours. And Marcus had been heading toward my clinic…
Was that the nexus of all this? If so, when Dr. Fitzpatrick had offered me a new, experimental drug…was that this?
I wanted to tell Grey, but he’d backed against the car, his shoulders hunched and his eyes shadowed. The words died in my mouth.
“Mr. Barron, I know what you want,” Ilsa said. “You want justice. You want to reassure your town that the danger’s gone. But I don’t know what I can offer besides the truth, which is that I did the best I could to help everyone. The fact that we’re standing here is proof that it worked. B is proof that it worked. She was an invalid for most of her life. Look at her now. None of you could do better.”
I cringed, but couldn’t exactly contradict her. Grey looked devastated. He saw the truth of it, too.
“Meanwhile, Mr. Barron, your murderer is dead and the threat is gone. We’ve done you a favor. And no, I cannot give you our doctor’s name. I won’t have you investigating him when his only fault was having to confront such an impossible case.”
“And when without him, you’ll wither and die,” Barron said.
“We all have our agendas,” Ilsa calmly replied.
Personally, my only plan was to get through this mess and then get back home. Now, Grey was regarding me like I’d become a completely new kind of monster. “I don’t care what your agenda is,” he spat. “It was a murder. Why are we rationalizing this?”
“Because it is still our right to administer pack justice,” Ilsa answered. “Even your police chief will back me up on that. That was our agreement.”
“That was contingent on you keeping trouble out of town.”
“And you,” Ilsa said, her voice dangerously sweet, “promised you wouldn’t tell anyone else about our presence here.”
Barron considered his other officers. If she’d been expecting him to look guilty, he didn’t give her the pleasure. “You really think no one else guessed there were werewolves here? Don’t get too impressed with yourself. They volunteered for this.”
A single muscle in her cheek twitched.
I had to hand it to Barron: he was facing down an entire pack of werewolves—or what was left of the pack—without blinking. Granted, the police were armed, and I wasn’t feeling particularly intimidating against that. I moved a few steps to one side, feeling one of the officers’ guns tracking me. I wanted to go to my brother, but I didn’t get that far. The instant my foot touched the ragged end of the road, I heard a warning metallic click.
Barron was looking at me dead-on. It was his gun.
“If you want to resolve your troubles amongst yourselves, fine,” he said. “But the pack doesn’t get to step foot over city boundaries again or we will act accordingly.”
“Even me?” I heard myself whisper.
“Either you’re in the pack or you’re not,” Barron answered. There was pity somewhere under the words, but it was awfully deep down. “I suggest you choose.”
I turned back and forth, stuttering. The pack’s swirling thoughts only confused me further.
We don’t need them, I heard Pandora say.
They’ve got our doctor, Ayu said, more quietly. We still need him.
Then there was Raoul, speaking into the center of my head. We need you, B.
I cast my gaze to Grey, trying to decide what to do, and hoping for some gesture, some sort of connection. Unfortunately, what crossed his face wasn’t acceptance or understanding. It was pain—and revulsion.
“You lied,” Grey told me. “All that bullshit you fed me about why you wanted to stay…none of it was true, was it?”
My knees nearly gave out. “Grey, no. Please.”
“And it wasn’t just me,” he said, on the edge of a ragged, broken laugh. “You lied to our mother. You told us all sorts of lies about loyalty so you could join a pack of monsters instead. And I was worried sick over whatever happened to you last night…while you were doing this?”
He sounded heartbroken. I felt even worse. I wanted to say he had it wrong, but I couldn’t get the words out in any way that felt like it would matter. Especially when he ended it with this:
“I’ve been trying so hard. But I give up. They can have you.”
When he kicked my crutches over the line, I let out a sound that wasn’t wholly human, and fell to my knees in the mud.
I vaguely heard voices, shouts, and someone declaring, “This is done. Get back.” Then there were engines growling and receding. The police were leaving.
Grey was going with them.
I caught one last glimpse of him when I raised my head. He seemed stricken, either at what I’d become, or as though he was realizing he’d made a mistake. That was probably wishful thinking on my part, though, because he still turned away. That left me in the desperately cold company of a pack in tatters, ready to rip each other to bits at the slightest wrong move. And the only one to say anything to me was Brandon, who muttered under his breath, “Well, now you almost understand what it’s like to lose a brother.”
I did. And I hated him for it. I hated all of them.
Before my temper could snap, I got up. I didn’t let any of them touch me, not even Raoul. And with nowhere else I could go, I began the long, hard trek back up the hill alone.
*
The aftermath of that mess unfolded strangely.
No one attacked Ilsa outright over that confession, which seemed like a miracle. Then again, she’d rigged this well. We were all so flattened and shell-shocked that we couldn’t manage confronting her now. She’d even gotten sympathy from a few of us. Especially Pandora.
In fact, I tried to go see Pandora while she continued recuperating. Ayu was off with the Elder, so I thought we’d have a few minutes to talk. Unfortunately, Ilsa beat me there. I hesitated at the door, watching Ilsa speak to her over a bowl of suspiciously familiar stew. Pandora ate it slowly, moving her spoon in listless swirls, but she did eat, and eventually focused on whatever Ilsa was saying. Ilsa was being canny enough to speak mind-to-mind, so I didn’t catch anything but a few murmurs, and then a wave of tired gratitude from Pandora.
It was impossible to watch that and not remember Grey taking care of me after full moons. I had to swallow a sound of pain before anyone could hear me, and I left without saying a word.
Outside the cabin, though, I heard much louder voices approaching. I stopped in my tracks when I saw Brandon storming toward the house. Raoul was doing his best to stop him, because whatever Brandon was after, it was obvious that talking to Ilsa and Pandora wasn’t what he had in mind.
“Calm? You’re asking me to calm down?” Brandon was shouting over his shoulder. “After this—”
I edged out of sight, going tense. I worried I’d have to step in soon, though. He clearly wanted a fight, and Raoul had his hands full.
“We’re all angry,” Raoul said. His voice was so thick with emotion that even Brandon
couldn’t disbelieve him, and persuasion began coloring his words. “But do you really want to go start a fight when Pandora’s trying to heal? She’s been through enough.”
“She killed my—”
“You know who sent her after him. You know who’s actually responsible.”
Brandon, still quivering with energy, zeroed in on that. He went worryingly silent.
“I know what you want,” Raoul said quietly. “But not like this.”
Brandon looked like he was about to retort, but maybe Raoul was getting through to him. Finally, looking both tired and disgusted, he turned to walk away. He only noticed me at the very last second. His eyes were so haunted that I backed up a step, chilled down to my bones.
Then he was gone.
Raoul slumped with exhaustion. I immediately went to him. “You okay?”
“He was just about ready to blow,” Raoul said softly. “That…took a lot out of me.”
I helped prop him up, then took a guess. “It’s hard to stop him from doing something you actually want him to do, huh?”
Raoul rubbed one hand over his face. A weary, sardonic smile flickered there. Then he took another difficult breath. “Can you walk with me?”
I wasn’t sure. Ilsa hadn’t been playing nurse with me that morning, so my knees and back were starting to hurt again. Still, I nodded. Raoul turned in the opposite direction Brandon had gone, and the two of us headed off together.
We tromped a fair distance through the forest, far enough that every joint that hadn’t been complaining before was certainly complaining now. But Raoul knew where he was going, and so I followed until we reached a hillside vantage point, one where we could overlook the whole of the town. It glittered down there, bright and warm and strange. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to cry, or to bend my head back and howl at it.
Raoul stood quiet a moment and waited.
“Brandon wants to call challenge against Ilsa,” he said at last.
He’d used that particular phrase before. “You mean like when Kane…” I stuttered over the name. “When he challenged you out of the pack?”
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