Page 82 of Crave

I stared up into Lacey’s eyes and felt my throat go dry.

“What do you say we give that white picket fence another try?”

I’d spent half my life convinced I was the black sheep of this family, discarded, unwanted, sure nothing I could do would ever be good enough. But life wasn’t about tallying up all the ways you’d been wronged. It wasn’t about holding grudges or demanding apologies. It was about making the most of each day, living the best life you could in the moment. It was about finding the people who had your back and holding them close—your family, whether that was one you were born into or one you found later. Lacey and I had fought our way back to each other again. And I was never letting her go.

“I love you,” she whispered, and as I swept her up into my arms, whoops and hollers sounded from the open screen door.

Cal clapped me on the back, hugging me for a long moment. “Proud of you, Dally. Dad would be, too.”

A lump formed in my throat. I’d only had two sessions so far with the therapist he’d recommended, but I had a good feeling. He’d helped me find a meeting dealing with addiction recovery to attend once a week in the next town over. Sometimes the first step was the hardest one to take. Hayden hugged Lacey, eyes bright. She’d taken the news about Ellie hard. Let’s just say her latest open mic night at Dark had been a barely disguised rage session directed at my youngest brother.

Slowly everyone made their way back into the house but me, Brody, West and August.

Brody turned to West. “I don’t like what you’re planning with Topher. He’s unstable. You take him out in the field and both of you are going to get hurt.”

West folded his arms. “His brother is out there somewhere, maybe being held against his will. This doesn’t end for him until we get answers—one way or another.”

“Then you’re going to clear anything you’re planning with me or River.” Frowning, he lowered his voice. “But that isn’t why I needed the three of you to stay. We’ve got trouble.”

My pulse kicked, senses instantly on high alert. “What’s going on?”

“For right now, what I’m about to say doesn’t leave the four of us. We clear?”

Everyone nodded. Brody paced to the far side of the patio.

“You probably already know I asked River to poke around but keep it quiet. Turns out we were right. The Council has been developing a treatment targeted at Ferals whose viral loads are too high. The original goal was to find a way to help them lead normal lives and reduce the risk to the human population. They were searching for a drug that affected shifters could take once a month at the full moon—something that could turn high viral loads into a manageable chronic condition.”

“They’d never go feral at all,” August said quietly. “No more colonies on the outskirts of pack territory. No need for Alphas and Tracers to step in. No more safe rooms. No more horror stories.”

I folded my arms. “That’s been tried before.”

“Apparently, this time they’re close to making it work.”

West snorted. “You know, except for the inconvenient part where the vamps are weaponizing their drug so it can be used to kill or kidnap shifters.”

August spoke in a low voice. “When River tried to go in last month and find out who could have accessed the pack security protocols and therefore would have known which cameras to take out just before the bombing, the data had all been corrupted. Whoever did this had high level clearance.”

“And knew how to cover their tracks,” I added.

“We have to assume that person was the one who leaked the biologic agent they were developing to the vamps,” Brody said.

“Why?” West leaned against one of the patio chairs, staring up at the sky.

“That’s the question. Who stands to gain from a move like that?”

“River believes that someone’s trying to overthrow the Council,” I shot a look at August, who nodded.

West frowned. “Maybe. But by helping the fang-heads? I don’t see how that angle gets them anywhere. And how does this tie back to the vamp activity we’ve seen the past few weeks? First attack was lower caste vamps, their regular ground soldiers, then they send coven leaders the other night? Something about this has smelled off from the start.”

I thought back to what the first vampire Lacey and I encountered had said. The prisoner isn’t who you think he is. At the time I’d taken it as typical trash talk. A leech screwing with my head in the middle of a fight. But what if we’d all been wrong? About everything.

Frowning, I pulled up a search on my phone.

#DashCamVlad

Dozens of images popped up. I clicked on a profile shot. In it, his hair was blond and spiked, unlike the vampire I’d fought just before Thanksgiving, who’d had black hair. The photo showed no evidence of any piercings or the gauges he’d had in both ears. Even their eye color was different. But there was no mistaking it, and now I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen it earlier.

The vampire Lacey and I had fought had been the most wanted undead in the world.