“Did… did Thomas ever come back to Caswell? After you left for Green Creek.”
She blinked. “Several times. He knew he needed to at least show his face so the wolves would know he hadn’t forgotten them. Anything big, decisions or punishments, he was there, working in tandem with Michelle. Why?”
“I…. In one of the books. It’s one of the oldest. There are dates listed going back to the 1600s. It describes a wolf, one who has lost everything. Tether, mate, pack. I thought at first it was describing an Omega. But there were annotations, notes written in the margins. Newer. Much newer.” He took a deep breath. “I found this book when I was in Caswell… before. I’d forgotten about it until Gordo said he hadn’t found anything when he’d come here. He wouldn’t have found it. It slipped behind the bookshelf, and I just… left it there because things were getting weird. I recognized the handwriting. It was the same in a letter you gave me once. And the journal I gave to you.”
“Thomas,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” Robbie said. He sounded uncomfortable. “I think so. Kelly and Joe do too, and they’d probably know better than I would.”
“It’s him,” Joe said firmly. “We know it.”
“What did it say?” Mark asked, leaning over the phone, eyes narrowed.
“It wasn’t much,” Kelly said. “But we think we know what it means.”
“Read it,” Joe said, voice crackling through the line.
And Robbie said, “Is this what he could become? Should we have killed him when we had the chance? I don’t know. They assure me he’s trapped forever.” And then Robbie said something else that we couldn’t quite make out.
“Say that again, Robbie,” Mom said. “We missed that last part.”
“Ox,” Joe said, and the world tilted on its axis. “He said he thinks it’s Ox. He wrote that Ox is something more than we ever thought. The last notes say he’s an Alpha. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. But if this is true, if the beast can rise, then an equal and opposite must also rise. Ox. Ox. Ox.”
We stared at the phone, thunderstruck.
Jessie stepped forward. “Thomas was dead long before Ox ever became a wolf. How could he know—”
“Alpha,” Mom said. She was staring off into nothing.
“Lizzie?” Mark asked.
She shook her head. “He knew. Even before we did. When those Omegas came. When they took Jessie. Ox was….” She raised her head. At first I thought she was staring at Rico and Tanner and Chris. She wasn’t. She rounded the desk, motioning for them to move. They did. Gavin stood there, wringing his hands. She cupped his face, brushing her thumbs over his cheeks. “Gavin? You were there too with the Omegas.”
He nodded miserably.
“Did you feel it?” she asked quietly. “All that he could be?”
Gavin’s gaze darted over to me before settling back on my mother. “Bright. It scared me. Big. Bigger than anything. I felt him. He pulled. All of us. He let some of us go. We ran. But we felt it. Human. But more. Wolf. Alpha.”
Mom dropped her hands, looking dazed.
“He knew, Mom,” Joe said. “He knew, even then. He knew and he didn’t tell us.”
“We don’t know that,” Rico said. “He could be talking about—”
“There’s something else,” Robbie said. “Not from Thomas. From the book. I don’t know what it means. The rest of it is gone or illegible. But I can read this last thing.”
“What?” Mark asked as he tried to connect the call again.
“A single word,” Kelly said. “Sacrifice.”
The screen on the wall beeped twice quickly.
The call connected via video link.
We turned toward the monitor.
It was dark. The image was fuzzy, the pixels blurred and stuck. I thought I heard the wind. It took me a moment to realize it was someone breathing heavily.