Taken by Storm Read online

  “Are we talking days? Weeks? Months?” Caroline was all business.

  “Months,” Chase said, looking up from the blankets. “I’d say she left three, maybe four months ago.”

  That left three months unaccounted for after Maddy had left the Wayfarer, and at least as much time between when she left here and the Wyoming murder. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d hunted in the woods, but couldn’t figure out why she would have gone to the trouble of killing so many animals in the house. Why had she come here in the first place? Why had she left?

  “Did she sleep with this, too?” I turned back to the battered teddy, the one that had probably once belonged to Lily or Sophie or one of the younger kids.

  Lake nodded, and I wondered if she could picture Maddy the way I could, curled up on a blanket, holding on to the only piece of the pack she had left.

  My heart hurt.

  The day was almost over, and Callum had told me we’d have at most a week. We weren’t any closer to finding Maddy than we had been when we left, and the state of Wilson’s cabin didn’t do much to assuage my doubts about Maddy’s mental state.

  Time to bring out the big gun.

  “Here,” I said, taking the teddy bear from Lake and handing it to Archer. “You said you needed something that belonged to Maddy. It’s not clothing or hair, but hopefully, it’ll do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  NIGHTFALL—AND SLEEP—COULDN’T COME FAST enough. We set up camp again, on our side of the border, but Archer opted for sleeping in his car—either because he didn’t like people watching him work, or because the idea of sleeping in close proximity to two werewolves, a girl he’d tried to kill, and a girl he’d been conditioned to think of only as a killer probably fell under the classification of “let’s not and say we did.”

  Or maybe a little of both.

  Rather than sleeping myself, I practiced. I practiced taking everything I’d seen the past few days—every horror, every drop of blood—and locking it away, so deep in my mind that I could pretend that nothing had happened.

  And then I practiced letting it out.

  This time, I didn’t start with a specific memory. I didn’t walk myself step by step through a scene. Instead, I built a room inside my head—a tiny room with white walls and no windows and no doors. No way out.

  In that room, I put the sound of screams, tearing flesh, and heavy breathing, the smell of rancid blood. Everything I’d been holding back, everything threatening to devour me whole was there—in the ceiling of that room, the corners, the floor.

  In a way, I’d been building rooms just like this one in my mind my entire life—for fear and sadness and everything I couldn’t let myself want. But this time, it was different, because even though there were no windows or doors, no way out—there was a way in.

  I just pictured myself there, surrounded on all sides until I could taste it, smell it, feel it in my pounding pulse. Fear. It was endless, infinite and overwhelming.

  Copper on the tip of my tongue.

  Chills on my skin.

  A breath caught like sandpaper in my throat.

  Can’t stay here, I thought desperately. Can’t. It’s too much, it’s all too much. Have to—

  Escape. That wasn’t a thought. It was a feeling, familiar, but ancient.

  Escape. Escape. Escape.

  My eyelids fluttered.

  Survive.

  “Bryn?”

  Archer made the mistake of placing a hand on my shoulder, and suddenly, it was like I was watching myself from outside my body. The world around me settled into slow motion, silence—

  And the next thing I knew, he was down.

  Realizing, on some level, that Archer wasn’t actually a threat, I jerked myself out of the room I’d built for my fears, slamming an extra set of mental walls up all around it.

  Safe. The feeling—the instinct—the adrenaline subsided.

  “I’m sorry,” Archer said. Coming from someone I’d just tossed through the air like I was training for the shot put, that was the last thing I’d expected to hear.

  “Sorry for what?”

  Archer tilted his head forward and rolled his eyes up to meet mine, his brows slightly arched. “Not entirely sure what the right answer is here, so I’m going to hedge my bets and go with everything.”

  His tone was sardonic enough that I wasn’t sure whether he meant the words or not. If Devon had been there, he probably would have started crooning apology songs, just to break the tension.

  “Well, I’m sorry—for kicking your butt,” I said finally.

  He snorted.

  “Did you find anything?” I asked, then amended my question. “Maddy.” I made myself say her name. “Did you talk to her?”

  Archer shook his head. “She wouldn’t talk to me. She ran.”

  I was fairly certain that when Archer had entered my dreams, I hadn’t been able to run. He’d been able to freeze me in place, or beckon me forward.

  “I could force her,” Archer said lightly. “I don’t want to.”

  My first instinct was to tell him to do it anyway, but the part of me that was still human couldn’t form the words.

  Archer saved me the trouble. “I’m hoping that if you come with me, I might not have to get rough.”

  “Come with you?” I asked. I hadn’t known that kind of thing was even possible. “How am I supposed to come with you?”

  He shrugged. “I enter your dream. I enter hers. We hope I can splice the two together, and voilà.”

  That seemed like the kind of thing he should have mentioned in the first place. He must have seen the irritation on my face, because a matching expression flickered across his features, and I remembered that, technically, he was the one doing me the favor.

  “Do you need a piece of my clothing?” I asked, deciding this wasn’t worth arguing over.

  Archer gave me a look. “You’re right here,” he said slowly, as if I were very dull. “Why would I need your clothes?”

  Well, excuse me for not knowing exactly how his knack worked—I was just learning the ins and outs of my own.

  “You sleep,” Archer said, in a voice that reminded me he could be a dangerous person. “I’ll do the rest.”

  I might have balked at the idea of letting him inside my head again, but he was still holding that ratty old teddy bear that smelled like Maddy and had probably belonged to one of the younger kids, once upon a time.

  It’s hard to hold anything against a guy with a teddy.

  “Okay.” I didn’t say any more than that. I just made my way back inside the tent and lay down, ignoring the open-eyed Caroline sleeping six inches away.

  I closed my eyes, I opened my mind, and I slept.

  My dream started off the way my dreams always seemed to these days—in the forest. I didn’t remember, at first, that this wasn’t real, but then I came to an opening at the edge of the woods and saw a cartoon mouse the size of a man. He was wearing overalls and sitting on a motorcycle, and although that didn’t strike me as particularly unlikely or strange, I began to get that nagging feeling that said, “Something isn’t right.”

  “Bryn.” A voice called my name softly. The moment I saw Archer, I remembered—why we were here, what he was trying to do.

  “Maddy?” I asked.

  He reached out to take my hand. I didn’t hesitate as I slipped my fingers into his. He caught sight of the mouse on the motorcycle and shook his head.

  “I’m not even going to ask.”

  The scene around us changed slowly. The sky overhead went from night to day. The leaves on the trees thinned to needles; the grass underfoot turned a bright, spring-sheen green.

  And then I saw her.

  Maddy.

  I wasn’t sure whether I thought her name, or said it out loud. Either way, she heard me.

  She ran.

  I ran after her, and for the first time in days, I wasn’t scared of her, of what we would find. I just wanted to be there, to see her,
to put my arms around her and know that she was real.

  Or at least, as real as anything in a dream could be.

  “Maddy, wait!” This time, I called after her out loud, and she turned to glance at me, just for a second.

  Something isn’t right.

  I didn’t know what it was, so I kept running—through forest after forest, with changing scenery, changing leaves. Abruptly, Maddy stopped running. I stopped running, too. I walked toward her, weightless and light on my toes. Her brown hair was straight and neat, not a strand out of place. Her clothes were dirty and torn, but there was grace to Maddy’s stance, the tilt of her head.

  I reached out to touch her shoulder, and my hand passed right through.

  “It’s my fault,” Maddy said, without turning around. “Everywhere I go, it never stops.” She turned her head to the side, until I could see her profile in the shadows. “You shouldn’t touch me.”

  I couldn’t touch her. Whether that was the work of her subconscious or mine, I wasn’t sure.

  “Everything I touch dies,” Maddy said, the words quiet, but distinct.

  Suddenly, the two of us weren’t in the forest anymore. We were in a cabin. Samuel Wilson’s cabin, in Alpine Creek.

  There was blood everywhere—fresh blood.

  “I didn’t do it,” Maddy said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Maddy.” I tried to touch her arm again and failed. “Where are you?”

  She didn’t answer, but a jolt of images crossed from her mind to mine: sharp stone, dark walls, a little river.

  A tiny slat of light.

  “Maddy, look at me.”

  She looked at me, and I was struck by the fact that she didn’t look different. She looked like Maddy, our Maddy, not the specter from my dream that night before.

  She didn’t look like a killer.

  “The Senate knows about Wyoming.”

  She weathered those words like a blow.

  “Callum’s stalling them, but if I can’t find you, if something happens again—”

  I couldn’t put what had been done in that house in Wyoming into words. I couldn’t even think the word

  monster.

  “The other alphas will come for you. First come, first serve. I need to find you, Maddy. You need to let me help you.”

  “Help me?” Maddy said, and this time, she didn’t sound like herself, not at all. “You can’t help me, Bryn. The only person who can help me is dead.”

  Lucas.

  She was talking about Lucas.

  “You don’t know,” Maddy said. “You just don’t know.”

  She didn’t cry, but the intensity in her voice made me want to. A physical change came over her body—the way she stood, the arch to her back, the lines of her threadbare clothes.

  “You just don’t know,” she said again.

  I touched her arm, really touched it this time, and she turned all the way around to face me. I watched as she brought her right hand to rest on her stomach.

  Her very pregnant stomach.

  And then I woke up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I HAD NO IDEA IF ARCHER HAD SEEN WHAT I’D SEEN, but as soon as he opened his eyes, I was right there in his face.

  “Tell me that was just a dream,” I said.

  You don’t know. Maddy’s voice echoed in my head. You just don’t know.

  The only person who can help me is dead.

  “The life-size mouse was a dream,” Archer said, his tone almost comically serious. “The forest, the cabin, the way she looked when you first saw her—that was all a dream.”

  But her stomach …

  “It wasn’t a dream, Bryn.” Archer’s voice was very soft, very gentle. “I knew there was something when I went into her dreams on my own. I couldn’t tell what it was, exactly, but—”

  “Maddy’s pregnant.” My voice was even softer than Archer’s. He didn’t reply, and I didn’t wait for him to. I just walked away—away from Archer, away from our camp, away from everyone and everything.

  Maddy had left the Wayfarer in December, two weeks after Lucas had died. She’d been holding it together by a string, and she’d said she was leaving because she couldn’t get better with me in her head.

  She’d said that she needed to be somewhere that I wasn’t.

  Now, seven months later, she was pregnant—and judging by the size of her stomach, pretty far along.

  The only person who can help me is dead.

  I’d known objectively that Maddy had loved Lucas. I’d known that the time I’d spent fighting Valerie’s coven, she’d spent with him. But I hadn’t realized—

  I’d never even thought—

  She was pregnant when she left. I couldn’t hide from that realization, couldn’t deny it. And that means Lucas is the father.

  Just like that, I was right there again, in the woods outside the Wayfarer, kneeling next to him, running my hand over the fur on his neck, telling him to go to sleep.

  To die.

  And now Maddy was out there broken and alone and pregnant. A wave of nausea crashed into my body, and I bent over at the waist, afraid that I might actually throw up.

  The Senate didn’t know. Shay didn’t know. Because if they had, if they’d known that not only was there a female up for grabs, but also a baby, not even Callum could have kept them away.

  There was nothing more important to Weres than children. Nothing. The idea that I’d let a pregnant teenager carrying a werewolf pup go off into the big, bad world alone would have seemed more monstrous to the other alphas than the Wyoming murder.

  Was that why Maddy went Rabid? I wondered. Werewolves were wired for pack living. Lone wolves were under enough strain going it alone in normal circumstances, but werewolf pregnancies were notoriously difficult, notoriously painful. Most human women didn’t survive, but even for female Weres, it was far from a walk in the park.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone should have to go through alone.

  With sudden clarity, I saw Maddy’s life stretched out before me, from the day she’d been Changed until now.

  Viciously attacked by a Rabid, her human life torn away.

  Forced to live under the thumb of the monster who’d done that to her—a sadist just as psychopathic in human form as he was as a wolf.

  Then, finally, she’d gotten a break. Finally, things had gotten better. She’d had friends, a family. She’d been safe. She’d met a boy and fallen in love.

  She’d gotten pregnant.

  And then the one person she’d trusted—more than anyone—that person had killed the boy she loved, the father of her baby.

  Pregnant, alone, heartbroken, in pain of every conceivable kind—was it any wonder she might have broken? Was it that unthinkable that a splintered part of her might have started craving other people’s pain?

  Everything I touch dies, she’d told me. I didn’t mean to.

  “Bryn.”

  I was still bent over at the waist, but now I was actually on the ground, rocks and dirt digging into my kneecaps. Chase wrapped his arms around me, pulled my body back against his.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got you. It’s okay.”

  But it wasn’t okay. How could anything be okay? How could it ever be okay again?

  I pulled back from Chase’s grip, but he held tight, and I didn’t fight him. “Maddy,” I said, croaking her name. I didn’t have to finish.

  “I know,” he said. “Archer told us.”

  Now all of them knew—what had happened to Maddy. What I’d been a part of. What I’d done.

  “Stop it.” This time, Chase’s voice wasn’t soft, and it wasn’t gentle. “Just stop it.”

  “Stop what?” I said, jerking backward and out of his arms for real. I stumbled to my feet, my hair falling into my face and covering my eyes, my cheeks hot with tears I could no longer hold back.

  “Stop doing this to yourself,” Chase said, his voice throaty and low. “Stop telling yourself that this is your f
ault.”

  “This is my fault.”

  He was on his feet now, coming toward me, but I took a step back. I didn’t want him to touch me, not when Maddy would never touch Lucas again.

  “He’s the one who challenged you.” The fury in Chase’s voice was undeniable. “Lucas did this, Bryn. He challenged you, and you did what you had to do.”

  “Did I?” That was the question, the one I hadn’t let myself think for seven long months. “What if there was another way, and I just couldn’t find it? And even if I didn’t have any other choice, I should have known. I should have seen what was happening. I shouldn’t have accepted him into the pack. I shouldn’t have given him the opportunity to challenge me. I should have found a way—”

  “A way to what?” Chase didn’t move any closer to me physically, but he kept pushing. He didn’t back down, not even when I stood straighter and met his gaze, head-on, everything I was and everything I was feeling palpable in my stare.

  “You should have found a way to what?” he asked again.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.

  “You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Bryn. I’ve sat back and watched for months. I’ve given you space, but this is tearing you apart, and I can’t just keep sitting here, watching you, doing nothing—”

  I hadn’t known—that he’d seen what I’d kept hidden, that not being able to make it better hurt him the same way that it would have hurt me if our positions were reversed.

  “You don’t understand, Chase.” The words burst out of my mouth. I couldn’t stop them, even though I wanted to. “You won’t ever understand. You can’t.”

  “You think you’re the only one who’s ever made a mistake?” This time, he did take a step toward me. Just one. “Do you think you’re the only person who’s had to make horrible decisions, or who’s felt like everything they do lets someone down?”

  He took another step forward.

  “Do you think you’re the only person who can’t let themselves feel things, because you feel them too damn much?”

  There was something dark in his eyes, something powerful and raw. The edges of his mind blurred against the edges of mine, and I knew that, somehow, in his human life, he’d been where I was now.