Taken by Storm: A Raised by Wolves Novel (6 page)

CHAPTER TEN

T
HE SILENCE FOLLOWING
S
HAY’S PROCLAMATION WAS
deafening. The undercurrent of power in the room surged, unmistakable and violent. Muscles tensed. Pupils pulsed. The air, thick with unspoken emotion, was hot in my lungs. I felt like I might suffocate on the unbearable intensity of it all, and even though I’d known objectively that I was in a room full of people who weren’t human and didn’t live by human laws, the beasts inside them were much closer to the surface now.

Close enough that if even one of them Shifted, I could easily find myself in a room full of wolves.

“A female Rabid?” The alpha from Shadow Bluff—a man I knew only by reputation, one that said he had a habit of going through human wives like Kleenex—recovered first. “There’s no such thing.”

Just like there wasn’t such a thing as a female alpha. Just like there was no such thing as a werewolf who was born human, but Changed.

“You can’t honestly expect us to believe that a female is responsible for this.” That was from the Ash Mountain
alpha—William. I didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered that he didn’t think my sex was even remotely capable of committing this kind of violence.

“I think females are capable of many things.” Shay let his eyes linger on my face, my body for a second too long. “Does anyone in this room doubt that my mother could kill? That she has killed?”

There wasn’t an individual in the Senate who hadn’t taken a life—myself included. Sora had been around for centuries—at least—and she was one of the most dominant wolves in the Stone River Pack.

There probably wasn’t much she wasn’t capable of.

“You’re not suggesting that your mother is responsible
for this.” The Luna Mesa alpha—the one who’d challenged Shay to prove that this Rabid was Senate business at all—was incredulous. Of all of them, he seemed the least taken in by Shay’s performance, the most skeptical.

“My mother,” Shay said, glancing meaningfully at Callum, “is otherwise occupied. But this Rabid
is
female, and I think you’ll all agree that complicates things.”

That was putting it mildly. The standard operating procedure with Rabids—with the exception of the one who’d managed to bargain with the Senate—was immediate execution, brutal and
absolute. But there wasn’t a man in this room who would willingly kill a female werewolf. There were too few of them. Even with the addition of the six females in my pack who had been born human, there were fewer than two dozen female Weres in the country.

I wasn’t sure Shay’s pack had even one.

“What evidence do you have that our killer is female?” Callum asked. If he’d seen this turn of events coming, he gave
no visible indication of it, but there was no surprise in his
features, either.

Shay leaned forward and delivered the answer to Callum’s
question. “The police in Wyoming have a witness that puts a
female between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one at the
crime scene. No one knows where she came from or where she went, but there’s an indication that she may have been living in the woods.”

A female werewolf. Living by herself. In the unclaimed land between Callum’s territory and my own.

No.

I didn’t want to give purchase to the thought. I didn’t want to consider that it might be possible. It
wasn’t
possible.

“I trust that no one here is missing a female?”

At Shay’s question, every single person in the room turned to look at me. More than a third of the female werewolves in the country were members of my pack, and if anyone else had been in possession of a female Were in that age range, they almost certainly would have kept her close to home.

“I’m not missing any wolves,” I said firmly. I wasn’t. My
pack only had twenty members, and each one was accounted for.

But Maddy …

Maddy wasn’t.

“You have two peripheral females.” Shay played those words like a trump card. All eyes were on me, and this time, I didn’t just feel the power—I felt the
animosity
. The violent, animal rage that I had something they wanted. The suspicion that I might not be protecting that most valuable of resources.

The Ash Meadow alpha, the alpha from Flint Creek,
Shay—none of them would have let a female live on the edges of their territories. None of them would have given her that kind of freedom. Even Callum had probably only let Lake live in Montana when she was a part of his pack because her father lived there, too.

“The Cedar Ridge Pack has two peripheral females,” I said, my voice steely and utterly unapologetic. “And I know exactly where they are. At all times. Always.”

Not because they were female. Because they were Pack.

“Phoebe and Sage haven’t been anywhere near Wyoming,” I said, allowing the others to smell the truth in my words. What I didn’t say was that Maddy could have been there, and I wouldn’t have known it. She’d broken off from the pack, and I’d willingly withdrawn my mind from hers. I had no idea where she was, or what she was doing, or if she was even okay. She certainly hadn’t been okay when she’d left. She’d been heartbroken and bowled over by grief and angry—at me, at Lucas, at herself.

And I’d let her go.

I couldn’t let myself think about that, couldn’t risk a tell working its way onto my face. Unless Shay specifically mentioned Maddy, I could answer his questions in a way that would smell true to the other alphas, without giving a hint to the fact that I knew more than I was letting on.

I just had to bank on the likelihood that none of the others, Callum included, would ask if I’d withdrawn my claim to one of the females in my pack. I had to hope that none of the men in this room would consider that possibility, because they never would have entertained the idea themselves.

Most alphas didn’t even like losing males. The larger a pack, the stronger the alpha, and werewolves weren’t naturally inclined to make themselves weak.

“If you deny that one of your wolves is responsible,” Shay told me, lingering on the word
if
, “then we have to consider the possibility that Samuel Wilson may have Changed at least one additional female of whom we had no knowledge up to this point.”

Samuel Wilson.
I’d never even heard his first name before. In my mind, he’d always been “the Rabid,” the monster who had killed my parents and haunted my dreams. But now, we were dealing with another Rabid, and the monster from my nightmares had a name.

“You think Wilson made another female Were?” the Flint Creek alpha asked, his eyes alight with hunger.

“So it would seem,” Shay replied.

I wanted to latch on to the possibility—wanted to ignore the reality that Maddy was missing, and a female had turned up in the middle of a murder investigation in a place she might
well have gone. But I knew my pack. I’d been in their heads, and they’d lived with good old
Samuel Wilson
for years. He’d been power hungry, abusive, psychotic. He wouldn’t have let a female
wander away from the fold any more than Shay would have.

That meant that if there really was a female Rabid, in all likelihood, it wasn’t some unknown girl, who’d never had a
pack. It was—

No.

I wasn’t going there. Not here. Not now.

“And if there is a new Were out there on her own?” Callum met Shay’s eyes, and though there was nothing aggressive in the motion, I could see Shay actively fighting the urge to turn away.

“If there’s another female,” Shay said, his voice a whisper
that cut through the air like a snake through the bushes, “a
lone
female, then there’s a question of what’s to be done about it.”

The Ash Mountain alpha was the first to catch on. “It goes without saying that we can’t kill her, Rabid or not. But if she’s out there, without a pack, it’s our duty to offer her
protection
and
guidance
.”

I didn’t know which was more sickening—the way he said the words, or the expression on his face.

“If there is a female Rabid in Wyoming, she’s between
Callum’s territory and Bryn’s.” The Luna Mesa alpha was the first one to actually say my name at this little meeting, the first one to openly acknowledge that I had territory, that I was one of them.

“Are you suggesting that we give this girl to Callum or
Bryn?” Shay’s counter caused a rumble of discontent to pass through the room—audible and animalistic.

Threat.

It was there, in the air, and there was no mistaking the fact that it was aimed at me.

“Shay’s right.”

Those two words should never have exited Callum’s mouth. Under any circumstances. Ever. Silence fell on the room once more, and the sinister edge in the air receded, like a wave being pulled by the undertow back to sea.

“There’s no reason that either Bryn or I should have special privilege here. If there’s a female, and if she’s unclaimed, Senate Law says that whoever gets to her first is free to claim her.” Callum leaned back in his seat, in a motion that looked almost human, but not quite. “Of course, Senate Law also says that neither Bryn nor I has to grant you access to our territories, and I’m sure you’ll understand, given the circumstances, if I’m reluctant to do so.”

Callum wasn’t claiming special privilege. He wasn’t forcing his will on the rest of the Senate—but if this Rabid really was in Wyoming, even in No-Man’s-Land, there were only a few ways to get there.

You could go through my territory.

You could go through Callum’s.

Or you could go through a sliver of particularly rough terrain that belonged to Shadow Bluff.

“We don’t know if she’s still in Wyoming,” Shay said, and I thought about the case in Missouri—the one that may have been the work of the same Rabid.

If it was Maddy, what was she doing that close to Snake Bend territory? How had she gotten there, without passing through a hostile alpha’s land?

Stop it,
I told myself, hating that I could even think a thing
like that. Angry or not, grief stricken or not, alone or not—
Maddy couldn’t hurt another person.

She wouldn’t kill someone.

Would she?

“It’s entirely possible that the Rabid we’re looking for is no longer in Wyoming,” Callum said, “just like it’s entirely possible that this whole thing is some kind of mistake, but I’m fairly certain, Shay, that if you thought there were a lone female anywhere near Snake Bend territory, this meeting would never have been called.”

As subtle as the accusation was, it worked, and the rest of the alphas fixed their weighty stares on Shay. The Snake Bend alpha hadn’t called this meeting out of the goodness of his heart. He knew that this girl—if there really was a girl—wasn’t within his reach, and he was hoping to change that, hoping to mobilize the Senate in a way that might give him access to this femme fatale.

“If this Rabid continues killing, if there’s a threat of exposure …” Shay let his words hang in the air.

“This could become a Senate concern,” the Flint Creek alpha finished.

If the risk of exposure was imminent, if the Senate felt that the local alpha or alphas weren’t sufficiently dealing with the
threat a Rabid posed, if this girl killed again and the authorities
connected another murder to either of the first two …

Callum met my eyes across the table, and a wealth of understanding passed from his mind to mine. He would forbid the rest of the Senate entry to his land as an alpha, but if Shay could make a case that this girl was a real exposure risk, if the Senate voted to intervene, Callum would either have to cede to the vote or fight them all.

A year and a half ago, I would have wondered why he bothered with democracy when he could have taken control of it all by force, but now I knew. Without the Senate, Callum would have had to kill Shay. And William. And anyone else dominant enough that they would refuse to submit.

Sooner or later, Callum would have had to kill every man in this room. And if I wasn’t careful, he might have to kill me, too.

“If this girl becomes a real problem,” Shay said, eyes
glittering with a desire I didn’t want to understand, “I’d like to bring a motion that the Senate intervene.”

They were voting on a future that I hoped would never come to pass—but it was one that most of the men in this room would welcome. Forget the risk of exposure. They wanted a loophole, a legal reason to demand equal access to the person responsible for the corpses on the screen.

She’s not a person to them,
I thought.
She’s not even a monster.

This Rabid was a prize.

“The Flint Creek alpha votes in favor of this proposal.”