Free Taken by Storm: A Raised by Wolves Novel by Jennifer Lynn Barnes Page A

sugar and spice, but they certainly weren’t serial killers.
    “Is she?” I forced the question out of my mouth. “The female you saw, is she rabid?”
    Callum didn’t give me an answer—though whether he was holding back or genuinely didn’t know, I wasn’t sure.
    “Your other question,” he said finally. “The one you haven’t asked yet.”
    It was just like Callum to agree to answer a question I hadn’t asked instead of the one I had, but at least this way, I didn’t have to actually say the words.
    Is it Maddy?
    Callum met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “The answer is yes.”

CHAPTER TWELVE
     

     
    C ALLUM PARKED THE CAR IN FRONT OF THE W AYFARER restaurant. I’d expected him to drop me off at the house, but given that Sora was with us, keeping our distance from Ali was probably a good idea.
    I knew for a fact that my foster mother was an excellent shot.
    “We have days, Bryn.” Callum’s voice was strained—just barely, but for him, that was the equivalent to cussing and screaming. “We have a week, if we’re lucky. Every future I can find is coated in blood. I’ll hold the other alphas off as long as I can, but you need to find her. Fast.”
    Her , as in Maddy .
    Our Maddy. The Rabid.
    “You’re not going to look for her?” I asked, forcing myself to be calm, to not think about the pictures or the bodies or the way Maddy had looked—broken, but regal—last December, when she’d walked away. “You’re just going to sit back and leave finding her to me?”
    If the future was as dire as Callum was predicting, I couldn’t fathom why he wasn’t going after Maddy himself.
    “My staying out of it will give me more leverage with the others, and someone has to do damage control with the human authorities. Wherever the girl was before, she’s gone now, and she won’t want me to be the one to find her.”
    I was going to say that Maddy wouldn’t want me to find her, either, that the whole point of her leaving was to get away from me, but Sora didn’t give me a chance to speak.
    “To catch a Rabid,” she said, with a strange and quiet intensity in her voice, “you have to think like a Rabid. There’s a dark logic to their thoughts. A hunger. If you can figure out what they’re hungry for, you can find them.”
    Them , as in plural? Sora spoke like someone who’d spent a decent amount of time tracking down rabid werewolves. That shouldn’t have surprised me, given that she had been there the day Callum had rescued me. Callum had been the one to pull me out from underneath the kitchen sink, but Sora was the one who’d fought Wilson.
    Flashes of fur. White, gleaming fangs. Red eyes. Blood.
    A warm hand on my shoulder brought me back to the present. Dev.
    “Get inside her head, figure out what she’s hungry for.” Devon repeated his mother’s words, pretending he didn’t know what I’d been thinking, that the memories hadn’t been written clearly on my face. “We can do that.”
    Sora glanced at Callum, then back at Devon. “She can do that,” Sora corrected, nodding her head at me. “Or I can. But, Devon, you’ll be staying here.”
    I didn’t remember taking a step forward, let alone four, but sud denly I was standing nose to nose with Sora, staring her down.
    “That wasn’t an order, Bryn-girl,” Callum told me. “She’s not telling your Devon what to do.”
    My Devon, my inner alpha echoed. Mine.
    “The Senate meeting is over, and without the protections that provides, an alpha can’t afford to leave his or her pack untended for long.”
    Callum’s even words managed to penetrate the thud of possessiveness, protectiveness, rage in my brain.
    I was the Cedar Ridge alpha. Dev was the most physically formidable person in our pack. If anything ever happened to me, he’d take over as alpha.
    As much as I hated to admit it, Sora was right. Devon and I couldn’t both go looking for Maddy—especially not when the other alphas might find reason to pass through our