Taken by Storm
Page 26
Chase and Lake could have made the distance in short time, but Caroline, Jed, and I were stuck with “slow and steady,” and when we finally made our way to the edges of “town,” it was already abuzz with news of the body that had been found, right outside the Bait & Tackle. They were calling it an animal attack, but I knew better.
Most animals didn’t play with a corpse and then leave it in the middle of Main Street, like a present for the masses. Then again, most werewolves didn’t, either.
“Victim’s a teenage girl, and she wasn’t killed here.” Caroline’s voice was quiet enough that if she hadn’t been standing right next to me, I wouldn’t have heard it. Still, talking about this in the light of day, out where anyone could hear us, didn’t seem like the best idea in the world. “The blood’s not right,” she murmured, “and the body …”
We were standing far enough away that my eyes couldn’t make out the details, but Caroline had incredible long-distance vision. The same thing that let her hit a target a football field away meant that even from our vantage point, a block away, she could still make out the details of the scene.
Unlike in bigger cities, there was no police tape here. Just a sheriff, a couple of deputies, and an off-white sheet that someone used to cover the body.
Badly.
“I’m starting to think our killer wants to get caught.” Jed’s voice was just as low as Caroline’s. “You all got any reason to believe that’s true?”
I thought back to the dream Maddy and I had shared. She’d been quiet, self-contained, maybe a little unhinged, with the way she’d insisted that she hadn’t done anything and immediately gone on to qualify that she hadn’t meant to.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if she’s the one who did this, or why she’d choose to do it like this.”
The one thing I was sure about was that if Maddy was killing, it wasn’t because she wanted to. It was because she couldn’t stop.
“It’s like a hound,” Lake said, “dropping a dead bird on your front porch and expecting you to be pleased.”
From the way they were talking, you would have thought that Maddy did this—all of this—for me.
That thought never left my mind—not as we made our way to the lone Winchester gas station and not as Jed gave our cover story, which involved fly-fishing, family bonding, a very bad sense of direction, and a car running out of gas. The possibility that Maddy had killed to get my attention was there as I listened to the loud whispers of the town folk, fascination warring with horror in their tones.
“I reckon it was a bear. Strange that it would come this far into town, but the Sutton boys have been at their old tricks again—probably led it straight to us.”
“Those Suttons are a menace. And that poor Johnson girl. First, her daddy kills her mama, and now this. Earl and Betsy must be taking it hard.”
I didn’t get to find out who Earl and Betsy were, because at that exact moment, I noticed a change in the pack-bond. Across the room, Chase stiffened, his nostrils flaring outward, his fingertips curling slightly inward, like claws.
“—just coming home from work, and now she’s gone. Funeral won’t be open casket, that’s for sure—”
Beside Chase, Lake paused, too. They smelled something.
Someone.
Making my way out to the front of the gas station, I scanned the streets for Maddy. Surely, she wouldn’t have come back here. Surely, she wouldn’t have stayed so close to a kill.
I smell … I smell …, Chase whispered the words straight into my mind.
What? What did he smell?
The answer came to me as nothing more than a vague sense that Chase was smelling something he’d smelled before—at the Wyoming murder site, at Wilson’s cabin in Alpine Creek.
It was faint. Different. It smelled like a werewolf, and it didn’t.
It smelled the way things did in dreams—a fraction off, a shade too, too … something.
For the first time, I really and truly let myself believe that Maddy might not be the one behind the murders. But that meant someone—or something—else was. Something that Lake and Chase couldn’t quite scent.
Something that was close.
Caroline and Jed must have noticed something was wrong, because they paid and followed us quickly out of the store.
Watching Caroline sparked a memory, and I sent a question silently to Chase and Lake. You guys can’t smell Caroline, I said. You can’t track her. It’s part of her knack. Do you think what you’re smelling—not smelling—now could be something similar?
Based on the crime scene, I’d been certain that our killer was a werewolf, but like Callum and the Resilient wolves in my pack, some werewolves had knacks, too.
In Wyoming, the killer hadn’t left any footprints in the victim’s blood.
What if this thing wasn’t a werewolf? What if it was something else? Something that made as much sense to me as psychics and werewolves would have to anyone else?
Without warning, Chase took off, as quick as a serpent’s strike. Lake followed, holding back on her speed enough to appear human. Jed, Caroline, and I slipped out of town, following them to the edge of the mountain and then into the forest.
We stopped at a densely wooded area where the smell of blood was so thick in the air that even with human senses, I wanted to gag.
Fresh blood this time—and it didn’t belong to an animal. It was human blood, and odds were good that it belonged to the girl whose remains had been found on Main Street.
This was where she was killed.
Through the pack-bond, I could hear Chase’s racing thoughts, and Lake’s, and I realized that beneath the pungent scent of iron and human flesh, they could smell something else.
The kind of something that smelled like a werewolf, but not. A dream smell, a memory, a scent they couldn’t quite make out.
I heard a noise then—a rustling in the brush to my left. Caroline whirled, her blonde hair fanning out around her baby-doll face. She had a crossbow in her left hand and a pistol in her right, and she was halfway to pulling the triggers before my eyes ever locked in on her prey.
It was a boy, about my age, standing only a few feet away—
a pale and almost see-through boy, standing in a field of blood. He had golden hair, halfway between honey and a light, sun-kissed brown. There was a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose. His cheekbones were sharp, and his eyes were green, the exact same shade as Lake’s.
Caroline fired, and I watched as a bullet passed straight through the boy. A bolt came within a foot of his body, but he waved his hand, and it fell to the ground.
This was what Chase had smelled at the crime scene.
This was the kind of monster who could kill without leaving a trail.
This was a nightmare, dressed up like a boy.
It started walking toward us, and a sense of déjà vu washed over my body. There was something familiar about this thing, this boy. Something more than the way he smelled—or didn’t smell—and the serious expression on his face.
“Lake,” he said.
For a split second, there was silence all around us, and then Lake replied, her voice barely more than a whisper, but filled with a whole host of emotions, each as sharp as glass.
One word.
She just said one word.
“Griff.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
GRIFF? AS IN GRIFFIN ? AS IN …
“Lake,” he said again. “Lakie.”
I hadn’t heard anyone call her that, not since the first summer she and Mitch came to visit the Stone River Pack alone. We were six years old, and she was wild—wild with grief, with anger, with an emptiness that slowly, over time, Devon and I had seemed to fill.
An emptiness that, looking at Lake now, I knew we never had.
“This isn’t happening,” Lake said. “You aren’t real. You’re never real.”
The depth of anguish in her voice told me how much I’d never known about one of my closest friends. She made a point of being strong and fearless and bulletproof in every way that mattered. She was the one who’d pulled me out of the dark place after Callum had ordered me beaten, and I’d never fully realized—she’d never let me realize—that she had a dark place of her own.
Most animals didn’t play with a corpse and then leave it in the middle of Main Street, like a present for the masses. Then again, most werewolves didn’t, either.
“Victim’s a teenage girl, and she wasn’t killed here.” Caroline’s voice was quiet enough that if she hadn’t been standing right next to me, I wouldn’t have heard it. Still, talking about this in the light of day, out where anyone could hear us, didn’t seem like the best idea in the world. “The blood’s not right,” she murmured, “and the body …”
We were standing far enough away that my eyes couldn’t make out the details, but Caroline had incredible long-distance vision. The same thing that let her hit a target a football field away meant that even from our vantage point, a block away, she could still make out the details of the scene.
Unlike in bigger cities, there was no police tape here. Just a sheriff, a couple of deputies, and an off-white sheet that someone used to cover the body.
Badly.
“I’m starting to think our killer wants to get caught.” Jed’s voice was just as low as Caroline’s. “You all got any reason to believe that’s true?”
I thought back to the dream Maddy and I had shared. She’d been quiet, self-contained, maybe a little unhinged, with the way she’d insisted that she hadn’t done anything and immediately gone on to qualify that she hadn’t meant to.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if she’s the one who did this, or why she’d choose to do it like this.”
The one thing I was sure about was that if Maddy was killing, it wasn’t because she wanted to. It was because she couldn’t stop.
“It’s like a hound,” Lake said, “dropping a dead bird on your front porch and expecting you to be pleased.”
From the way they were talking, you would have thought that Maddy did this—all of this—for me.
That thought never left my mind—not as we made our way to the lone Winchester gas station and not as Jed gave our cover story, which involved fly-fishing, family bonding, a very bad sense of direction, and a car running out of gas. The possibility that Maddy had killed to get my attention was there as I listened to the loud whispers of the town folk, fascination warring with horror in their tones.
“I reckon it was a bear. Strange that it would come this far into town, but the Sutton boys have been at their old tricks again—probably led it straight to us.”
“Those Suttons are a menace. And that poor Johnson girl. First, her daddy kills her mama, and now this. Earl and Betsy must be taking it hard.”
I didn’t get to find out who Earl and Betsy were, because at that exact moment, I noticed a change in the pack-bond. Across the room, Chase stiffened, his nostrils flaring outward, his fingertips curling slightly inward, like claws.
“—just coming home from work, and now she’s gone. Funeral won’t be open casket, that’s for sure—”
Beside Chase, Lake paused, too. They smelled something.
Someone.
Making my way out to the front of the gas station, I scanned the streets for Maddy. Surely, she wouldn’t have come back here. Surely, she wouldn’t have stayed so close to a kill.
I smell … I smell …, Chase whispered the words straight into my mind.
What? What did he smell?
The answer came to me as nothing more than a vague sense that Chase was smelling something he’d smelled before—at the Wyoming murder site, at Wilson’s cabin in Alpine Creek.
It was faint. Different. It smelled like a werewolf, and it didn’t.
It smelled the way things did in dreams—a fraction off, a shade too, too … something.
For the first time, I really and truly let myself believe that Maddy might not be the one behind the murders. But that meant someone—or something—else was. Something that Lake and Chase couldn’t quite scent.
Something that was close.
Caroline and Jed must have noticed something was wrong, because they paid and followed us quickly out of the store.
Watching Caroline sparked a memory, and I sent a question silently to Chase and Lake. You guys can’t smell Caroline, I said. You can’t track her. It’s part of her knack. Do you think what you’re smelling—not smelling—now could be something similar?
Based on the crime scene, I’d been certain that our killer was a werewolf, but like Callum and the Resilient wolves in my pack, some werewolves had knacks, too.
In Wyoming, the killer hadn’t left any footprints in the victim’s blood.
What if this thing wasn’t a werewolf? What if it was something else? Something that made as much sense to me as psychics and werewolves would have to anyone else?
Without warning, Chase took off, as quick as a serpent’s strike. Lake followed, holding back on her speed enough to appear human. Jed, Caroline, and I slipped out of town, following them to the edge of the mountain and then into the forest.
We stopped at a densely wooded area where the smell of blood was so thick in the air that even with human senses, I wanted to gag.
Fresh blood this time—and it didn’t belong to an animal. It was human blood, and odds were good that it belonged to the girl whose remains had been found on Main Street.
This was where she was killed.
Through the pack-bond, I could hear Chase’s racing thoughts, and Lake’s, and I realized that beneath the pungent scent of iron and human flesh, they could smell something else.
The kind of something that smelled like a werewolf, but not. A dream smell, a memory, a scent they couldn’t quite make out.
I heard a noise then—a rustling in the brush to my left. Caroline whirled, her blonde hair fanning out around her baby-doll face. She had a crossbow in her left hand and a pistol in her right, and she was halfway to pulling the triggers before my eyes ever locked in on her prey.
It was a boy, about my age, standing only a few feet away—
a pale and almost see-through boy, standing in a field of blood. He had golden hair, halfway between honey and a light, sun-kissed brown. There was a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose. His cheekbones were sharp, and his eyes were green, the exact same shade as Lake’s.
Caroline fired, and I watched as a bullet passed straight through the boy. A bolt came within a foot of his body, but he waved his hand, and it fell to the ground.
This was what Chase had smelled at the crime scene.
This was the kind of monster who could kill without leaving a trail.
This was a nightmare, dressed up like a boy.
It started walking toward us, and a sense of déjà vu washed over my body. There was something familiar about this thing, this boy. Something more than the way he smelled—or didn’t smell—and the serious expression on his face.
“Lake,” he said.
For a split second, there was silence all around us, and then Lake replied, her voice barely more than a whisper, but filled with a whole host of emotions, each as sharp as glass.
One word.
She just said one word.
“Griff.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
GRIFF? AS IN GRIFFIN ? AS IN …
“Lake,” he said again. “Lakie.”
I hadn’t heard anyone call her that, not since the first summer she and Mitch came to visit the Stone River Pack alone. We were six years old, and she was wild—wild with grief, with anger, with an emptiness that slowly, over time, Devon and I had seemed to fill.
An emptiness that, looking at Lake now, I knew we never had.
“This isn’t happening,” Lake said. “You aren’t real. You’re never real.”
The depth of anguish in her voice told me how much I’d never known about one of my closest friends. She made a point of being strong and fearless and bulletproof in every way that mattered. She was the one who’d pulled me out of the dark place after Callum had ordered me beaten, and I’d never fully realized—she’d never let me realize—that she had a dark place of her own.
