I picked up the phone. I dialed.

“Hello.”

One word. Just one—but the moment I heard Callum’s voice, I had to sit down.

“This is the alpha of the Cedar Ridge Pack,” I said, my voice shaking with the things I wasn’t saying. “We have a situation with some humans, and from one alpha to another, I need some advice.”

“Bryn.” That was all he said—my name—but it was enough to make me feel absolutely naked, like he could see the expression on my face, like he could see inside me, no matter how far away he was.

“Callum.” A hint of steel crept into my voice. This wasn’t a social call.

“Did you get my gift?”

“Yes.” I paused. “I don’t suppose it means that the key to the coven’s destruction is horses.”

Callum made a choking sound, and I wondered if I’d actually managed to surprise a laugh out of him.

“This is serious, Callum. We have kids here. Katie. Alex. A half dozen others under the age of ten. Ali’s packing them up as we speak.”

“And where are you sending them?”

There was only one place I could send them, one person I could trust with their safety. Callum had to know that.

Had to know that it was him.

“I’ll get them out of the line of fire however I can.” I danced around the truth.

“And how many escorts will you be sending with your little ones?” Callum did a passable job of sounding curious, but I wasn’t fooled. He wasn’t asking for his benefit.

He was asking for mine, and I realized almost immediately that I couldn’t send the kids off by themselves—and that I didn’t have many guards to spare. Counting the peripherals, and me, we had ten able-bodied fighters—eleven if Lucas could heal enough to fight by our side. I couldn’t spare more than one or two to escort the kids, and that wasn’t good enough, not when the coven—or, if he was up for risking the Senate’s wrath, Shay—could feasibly intercept them along the way.

“I’ll send the kids into lockdown here,” I told Callum, thinking out loud. “If we fight the psychics, there’ll probably be casualties, but to get to the kids, they’d have to take us all out, and I don’t think they have that kind of manpower, knacks or not.”

“Who do you think they’ll kill?”

If I hadn’t known Callum, hadn’t spent my entire life reading meaning into his most indecipherable tones, I would have thought the question was facetious, but it wasn’t.

He wanted names.

“You’d know better than I would,” I said, my voice catching in my throat.

Callum didn’t respond. I couldn’t even hear him breathing on the other side of the line, but werewolf hearing probably meant that he could hear the beating of my heart, the sound I made each time I swallowed.

“There are eleven of us,” I said, “assuming the wolf I just won from Shay can fight.” I didn’t mention that this assumption was stretching it, given Lucas’s current condition—and his previous experience with the psychics. “Chase, Maddy, and the peripherals are … scrappy.”

Like me, they had a way of surviving things that should have killed them dead.

“Devon’s Dev, and I don’t even know how old Mitch is.”

That left Lake. I’d already almost lost her once.

To Shay.

Thinking of the way Shay had looked at her, the expression on his face, made me remember exactly who and what Lake was. She was a female Were—one of very, very few, even with the addition of Changed Weres in my pack. Shay wouldn’t want her dead. If she died—if any of the females died—the hope that any of the alphas would be able to get their hands on them—now, a year from now, a hundred years from now—died, too.

“They won’t kill the females.”

I measured Callum’s response to my words.

Silence.

“The psychics have a deal with Shay,” I said, working through the logic out loud. “And Shay would want the females alive.”

The number of people Shay wanted dead was probably relatively small: me; Mitch if he got in the way; depending on Shay’s mood, maybe Devon …

“This isn’t war,” I said softly, unsure if I was talking to Callum or myself. “It’s a hit.”

Slowly, the layers of Shay’s plan crystallized in my mind. He’d set the psychics up to attack us. He’d offered me help, hoping to gain access to our territory, and when I’d refused …

“You could die, Bryn.” Callum confirmed my thoughts, and for the first time, I heard emotion in his words. It was faint, but it was there, and though I had to strain to hear it, once I did, something inside me, something broken, began putting itself back together again, bit by bit by bit.

“I could die,” I repeated. “If I do, Devon will go alpha.”

There was no doubt of that in my mind; with Dev, it was only a matter of time.

“Devon could die,” Callum said softly.

“And if Devon died …” I forced myself to imagine it. I was the alpha; Dev was my second-in-command. If we were both dead—

“There’s not an obvious third,” I said.

There were two ways to become alpha: as a member of a given pack, you could challenge and kill the current alpha and take their rank, or, if the alpha was killed by an outsider, you could be strong enough that there was never any question that you would be next in line. Mitch was too peripheral to lead. Lake, Chase, and Maddy—they all had their natural strengths, but the hierarchy between them was far from clear, and unlike most Weres, my pack wouldn’t jump straight to fighting it out for supremacy.

In the time it took for them to reach a consensus, they’d be easy targets.

Sitting ducks.

Open.

“Senate Law forbids taking another alpha’s wolf,” I said slowly. “But if there’s no alpha, then technically, there isn’t a pack.”

If the psychics killed me, if they killed Devon, there would be an opening, however brief, for someone else to come rushing in.

I thought of Shay’s wolves, lined up and down the edge of our border. Waiting.

“Dev can’t fight,” I said, coming to a conclusion that crept under my skin and hung in the air all around me. “If I fight, Devon can’t, and I have to fight.”

Callum didn’t respond, but he didn’t have to. I was the alpha, and an alpha couldn’t run and hide, couldn’t send the pack off to fight, die on their own. The pack needed me there, the same way the peripherals had needed to see me when they’d arrived at the Wayfarer, the same way the others looked to me for the signal to run on the full moon.

“In the end,” Callum said, his voice soft, gentle, “it all comes back to you. You protect them, you love them, you live for them, and someday, you die. That’s what it means, Bryn-girl, to be what we are. It’s lonely. It’s impossible. It’s all-consuming.”

It is what it is.

Callum didn’t say it. Neither did I. But it was there, between us. And it was true.

“Okay,” I said, fighting for acceptance the way a drowning man tries for air. “Devon can’t fight. I can’t risk sending the kids away, because someone could intercept them before they get to you. During the actual confrontation, the coven will be gunning for me, and they’ll be under orders from Shay not to kill any of the female Weres.”

Granted, Callum hadn’t said any of that. He’d just sat there, on the other end of the line, asking questions and letting me come to it on my own.

“Now I just need a plan for neutralizing the coven as quickly as possible,” I said. “Any idea if taking out their leader will free up the others’ minds?”

Callum didn’t respond.

“Callum? Words of wisdom? Cryptic hints? Anything?”

Nothing. No answer. Silence.

And that was when I realized he’d already hung up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

AS I STALKED OUT OF THE HOUSE AND BACK TOWARD the restaurant, my mind jumped from one thought to another, a never-ending medley of the things Callum had said, the promised confrontation with the psychics, and Jed’s suggestion that the only way to stop Valerie was to kill her. I thought of the carving Callum had sent me, and remembered all the times growing up that I’d seen him with a piece of wood in his hands. I remembered “borrowing” his knife when I was eight, trying to carve something myself. If Ali had been the one to catch me unsupervised with the sharp object, she would have freaked, but Callum had just sat down behind me and pulled me onto his lap. He’d put his hands over mine, guiding them, ready to catch the blade if it slipped.