At this point, I was fairly sure they had. Which of course I had to tell her. As succinctly as I could, I filled her in on Declan’s disappearance and what we’d learned from the pigeons. To no one’s surprise at all, she wasn’t thrilled with our current choices.

“Turn your car around. I’m calling the authorities. We’ll handle it.”

I held my phone away from my ear. “I’m sorry,” I yelled as Van leaned over to me and started making crackling noises. “I’m going through a tunnel.”

“That is absolute bullshit, and you know it!” Prisha yelled back. “Damn it, Louise! You could be sanctioned—”

This time, I made the crackling noises, doing a poor job of mimicking static. “I can’t hear you!” I hung up. My phone immediately rang again. It was the same number as before. I silenced it, saving Prisha’s number for later. “So what’s our plan. Do we have one?”

“It’s a little difficult,” Bay said, “planning an attack until we know what we’re facing.”

Everyone started chattering at once, trying to brainstorm ideas, but Bay was right: we had no idea what we were facing. Where was Declan now? What were they doing to him? Was he okay? I hugged myself tight.

“It’s okay,” Trick said, reaching over so he could give my arm a squeeze. “We’ll get there in time. Everything is going to be okay.”

“You can’t know that.” Though I wanted to believe him, anyway. “It’s an empty promise.” Van squeezed my hand, giving me support.

“Yeah,” Will said, handing me a tissue, “but as empty promises go, it’s a pretty good one.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Declan

I woke up in a barn, bound hand and foot, a collar around my neck, the oozing feeling of too much magic used in one place crawling up my skin. Someone had been doing a lot of nasty spell work here. In some magic dense areas—Lou’s clinic, for example—I could feel the magic there, but it was like a warm flutter of butterfly wings. Here it crawled along my skin, making me want to scratch until I bled.

All I could do was lie there as my body tried to come back online. I’d made Savannah some homemade Play-Doh last week. She’d laughed as she squished it through her fists. Right now I knew exactly how that Play-Doh felt.

A wave of nausea hit me. From the sedatives or the Taser, I wasn’t sure which. I tried closing my eyes and taking slow breaths, but that didn’t help, because the barn reeked of dirty straw, rats, and an absolute fuck-ton of werewolves. It had been a long time, but I recognized some of the scents from my father’s old pack.

I was in deep shit.

Pulling up what little energy I had, I tried to shift to wolf and get out of my bonds.

Nothing happened.

I tried again, the wolf inside me yelping.

The collar. Now I really wanted to puke. They’d trussed me up in an inhibitor collar. I wouldn’t be able to shift until it was gone. For the first time in my life, I was separated from my wolf. I could hear him, but I couldn’t feel him. I broke into a sweat, my stomach heaving.