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“You’re here for one reason, Aerin. Just one.That—” He points his bloody claws at Shane, “—is the only warning you’re going to get. Back to your room.Now.”

I duck past him, hurrying back toward the house, peering over my shoulder, shaking with fear that he will kill me anyway.

But he lets me go.

I’m shaking all over by the time I’ve rushed inside the house. The hallway is still dark and I don’t see a single person as I half-run, half-walk back to my room.

Even after I’ve slammed the door shut and it’s just me, I never stop being afraid.

Eye glued to the dark wood, and still trembling, I back up until my thighs hits the edge of the bed and I suddenly lose all strength in my legs.

I thump heavily onto the side of the bed and I sit there, staring at the door.

12

MACK

“This probably won’t end well,” I say as I sit in the car with, of all people, Douglas.

It hadn’t been my idea to do reconnaissance with Aerin’s dad, but as we pored over the map of Karson that we’d used a red pen to outline the Raleigh property, Douglas had decided we would do this together.

None of us is even sure if the old Raleigh borders are the same now as they were when I remember it.

It’s why it made sense for me and my dad to be in separate vehicles.

Clary has been quiet in the back seat and we’ve been sitting in the dark car for the last thirty minutes, staring through trees in the vain hope we’ll see some way we can rescue Aerin and the other omegas.

“We need information,” Douglas says thoughtfully. “Once we have that, then we have a way in.”

I stop staring between trees and raise my eyebrow. “Information is the easy, theoretical part. We still don’t even know how many we’d be facing.”

My dad was a proponent of the charge in and hit them too fast to hit back.

Douglas wants to take things a little slower. Hence the reason we’re sitting in a car parked near what I remember as being a boundary for the Raleigh forest. None of us have seen anything in all that time.

Even my dad couldn’t say for sure if those boundary lines were the same because, although the land had been privately owned, I saw the building in flames when I left. If it had been empty all that time before these new Raleighs rebuilt, who's to say someone hadn’t come along and claimed a parcel of some of that land as their own?

“No more than thirty,” Douglas says, seemingly plucking a number out of thin air.

I raise my eyebrow a little higher. “And you know that how, exactly?”

“What makes you so sure?” Clary asks, not hiding his doubt. “They hit a lot of packs and they couldn’t have done that with so few people.”

“Not necessarily,” Douglas says. “They could have hit sequentially, so there’s no reason to think it’s a big pack. Just a small, well-organized one that made a plan to hit and move on as soon as they had what they came from.”

“Like Aerin,” I say.

That sounds plausible.

Before Shane kidnapped her, they seemed to be trying to throw us off their scent.

After a few days of confusing behavior, like sightings of a wolf who didn’t attack and a tourist that wandered into my property then disappeared just as suddenly, once they hit the house, they were gone in under thirty minutes.

Even if it hadn’t been 2 in the morning at the time, I doubt the locals in town would have seen a thing. They were efficient.

And there had only been a handful who had attacked us in the forest near the hotel. If they had larger numbers, they couldhave wiped us out. It’s as if they sent just enough to get the job done and no more.

“Like Aerin,” Douglas echoes.

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