“You’ll be better with your own than you are with mine, but I’ll bring a few extras, for throwing. First, though …” She trailed off, thoughtful. “How tall are you?”

“Five-six.”

“You’re a couple of inches shorter than me,” Lake said, “but you’ve got pretty long arms, so …”

I had no idea where this was going, until Lake walked over to the workbench and picked up two metal wrist guards about the length and width of my forearms, but thin. “Let me put these on you,” she said. I complied. The metal was much lighter on my wrists than it should have been.

“Can you lift your arms?” she asked me.

I nodded.

“Can you fight?”

She didn’t give me a chance to answer the question—she just attacked me. In a room full of enough firepower to blow the whole reservation to kingdom come.

I managed to dodge her blows and get in one of my own. The weight of the wrist guards didn’t slow me down, but I couldn’t put the same kind of force behind my blows.

“With these, you won’t need to,” Lake said. “My dad made them for me. Just in case. Take a step back and then twist your wrists sideways, hard.” She demonstrated and, mystified, I obeyed. Four long, thin silver blades popped out of each of the wrist guards.

“If you’re fighting something with claws, you might as well have some of your own,” she said.

I stared at them and then began to experimentally move my wrists. “Your dad a big fan of the X-Men?” I asked.

Lake shrugged. “Worse comes to worst, he wanted to give me an edge.”

“You couldn’t Shift with these on,” I told Lake.

Lake arched an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t need to. Land one or two good hits to a Were with these, and you’ve bought yourself some exit time.”

Mitch had said that he didn’t know many werewolves who were even half as fast as Lake. If she took them off guard in her human form, they might not be able to catch up to her as a wolf.

“Twist your wrists the other way, and the claws will retract. Now, let me throw in some explosives and we’ll be good to go.”

As Lake added the finishing touches to our artillery and slung the duffel bag over her shoulder, I picked up the box I’d loaded up with ammo. “You okay?” I asked her.

Lake snorted. “Do I look not okay to you?”

She didn’t look the way she had the other night, as we’d lain in my bed, listening to foreign alphas passing through.

“You look fine.”

“I am fine.”

I nodded. There would be plenty of time for me to play werewolf Dr. Phil later. Right now, Lake and I needed a ride. Preferably one with GPS. “Ready to commit a felony?” I asked her.

She met that statement with the most serene of smiles. “It’s not grand theft auto if the vehicle in question belongs to your father. And b-t-w, if anyone asks you what’s in that box, I’d advise you to say, ‘Feminine supplies.’”

The box was large and heavy, and there was a distinct clanging sound as I carried it. “As in tampons?”

“Keely’s not going to ask questions. Ali’s busy with the twins, and everyone else around here is male. Tampons scare the bejeezus out of them, my dad included, but if the person who asks is a Were, they’d smell the lie. Hence, feminine supplies.”

“Because we’re females, and they’re our supplies?” I guessed.

“No. Because weapons are feminine.” Lake gave me an insulted look. “Why do you think I named my gun Matilda?”

All things considered, I was kind of surprised that Lake was planning on going into this battle without her double-barrel.

“Matilda maims,” Lake explained when I asked her. “She doesn’t kill.”

“Enough said,” I replied, because after what the Rabid had done to Chase this afternoon, after what he’d done to the little girl named Madison, after everything he’d taken away from me, starting with my parents and ending with my faith in Callum, this S.O.B. was dead.

The distance between Montana and Wyoming went by disturbingly quickly with Lake behind the wheel, and as the two of us reached our destination, I registered the fact that we’d arrived in record time and absorbed what little sightseeing the Rabid’s town had to offer.

Alpine Creek was bordered by a river on one side and the ugly, jagged edge of a mountain on the other. Even a human wouldn’t have been surprised to hear it called No-Man’s-Land, and as Lake drove our pilfered vehicle down Main Street, toward the town’s single stoplight, déjà vu hit me like a blow to the chest.

Macon’s Hardware.

Barren street corners.

A dirt path snaking past the town’s lone restaurant, leading into the woods.

I’d seen these things from inside the head of a monster, and at the end of that dirt path, buried miles into the woods, there was a cabin. The monster lived there. His name was Wilson. I was willing to bet that if the townspeople knew about him at all, they weren’t sure whether that name was his first or his last.

I didn’t care.

“Bryn?” Lake’s voice cracked my thoughts open, and reality trickled in. She’d stopped the car in front of a rundown house whose owner appeared to have declared it to be some kind of motel. I took in a long, ragged breath.

Did the Rabid already know we were here? Could he smell us? Could he feel us coming from miles away? Was this a mistake?

“We should get a room.” I tried not to let the questions show on my face or in my voice. “Chase will be here soon. We’ll need someplace to strategize.”

Under other circumstances, I might have spent a good chunk of time wondering what it would be like to see Chase again. For as long as I’d known him, other people had been tearing us apart. But right now, I didn’t have time to ponder the way my blood turned thin and hot in my veins just thinking about him. I didn’t have time for the repetition, with each beat of my heart, of an all-too-familiar word: Mine. Mine. Mine.

Right now, I couldn’t be Chase’s first and the pack’s second. My first allegiance was—and had to be—to what we’d come here to do.

Lake and I paid for a room in cash, and I pushed down the growing sensation that as Chase got closer and closer, I was riding a roller coaster climbing steadily to its highest peak, the anticipation of the world dropping out from underneath me to a screaming, hand-waving, heart-thumping freefall, the moment Chase and I met eyes. I didn’t have time for that, any of that. I was within ten miles of the man who’d killed my family. The one who’d broken Chase and laughed at the breaking.

That man needed to die.

That thought in the forefront of my mind—and probably Lake’s, too—we passed the time waiting for Devon and Chase by settling into our room: one twin bed, no window, no air-conditioning. To Lake’s credit, she didn’t say a word about my silence, or the volley of emotions that must have been crisscrossing my face as minutes turned into hours. She just took out two knives and started sharpening them against each other, the rhythmic ching-ching-ching of metal on metal providing a fitting sound track to my own violent thoughts.

The Rabid’s death wouldn’t be bloody. Revenge was a luxury for those who had the upper hand, and we didn’t. There were more of us, but Wilson was older. He might not have known we were coming yet, but he’d sense Lake, Devon, and Chase the second they got within a mile of his little cabin in the woods. Mulling our disadvantage over in my mind, I detached from the instincts that told me that this man needed to be torn limb from limb. Werewolves were all about the instincts. The one advantage I might have in this game was that I wasn’t a Were.

When I had to, I could think like a human.

I didn’t need to see my parents’ murderer torn limb from limb. All I needed was to put a silver bullet through his forehead and a matching set in his heart and lungs.

I was so caught up in weaving in and out of the situation’s logic that I almost didn’t recognize the feel of the world turning upside down, my stomach flipping inside out, every hair on my body standing slightly on end, like I’d found myself in the center of an electrical storm.