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“I don’t think it’s a call. There’s a red light down in the corner of the screen. See?”

“What?” I grabbed it and was deciding what the honorable but safe action was when Evren arrived on the porch and shifted.

A moment later, she came in, dressed and beaming, accompanied by Lark’s wolf. “Hey, has anyone seen my phone? It was…

I handed it to her. “Do you know what this is?”

“I don’t —hey, there’s a red light blinking.”

“Yes.” I took it back from her. “Not something you recognize? Not an app?”

“No!”

“All right. This is a tracking app. I’ve seen it before, but I just wanted to make sure you didn’t know about it.”

She paled.

I wanted to kill whoever was tracking her. Whoever hurt her. Whoever made her lose her smile.

Chapter Seventeen

Evren

Rain yanked the battery out of my phone.

“But they can’t be tracking me. I didn’t take a pack phone. I bought my own and even my own phone plan, just so they wouldn’t be able to add any software like that to my device. “It’s not possible.” Hysteria bubbled up in my stomach, and all the happiness I’d experienced in my run through the forest, especially when Lark joined me toward the end, evaporated. “It must just be something broken. Isn’t that what a red light indicates? A glitch?”

“No.” Rain dropped the phone to the floor and crushed it under his heel. “It was tracking software, and if it was sophisticated enough it might even work without a battery.”

“Really?” Warren asked. “Without a battery? What powers it?”

“Nothing now. But it was still blinking after I took it out.”

I couldn’t imagine my boring awful pack having access to anything that high tech.

“We’ll get you a new phone, and I promise we won’t sneak any software on there that you don’t know about.” Lark had disappeared and returned dressed. “It will be okay, mate.”

“It’s not the phone. It was one of those really cheap ones with almost no memory and a really limited ability to do anything beyond phone calls, texts, and pictures. Oh and a few apps, but I didn’t have very many.”

“You had the Mail-Order Matings app,” Warren reminded me.

“Yes, and basically nothing else. I tried to download a free game to play once, one everyone I knew was playing, and it glitched. I had to get rid of it.”

“An app the others in your pack were playing?” Rain shook his head. “That was how they did it, then. They made it so that everyone just thought it was fun, but it would have had a virus, of sorts, built in.”

“Oh no.” I pulled out a chair and at down, dropping my head to rest on the kitchen table. “This is the worst. So, after I spent my hard-saved dollars on a phone to make sure they couldn’t put any software on it, I downloaded it myself. Who ever thought they’d be so sophisticated?”

“Well, my boot was a little more sophisticated. And we’ll have your new phone by the end of the day.”

“I am way less upset about the phone itself than the fact that I may have endangered all of you. If they were tracking me the whole time, what’s to stop them from being here any time? I took the slow route, but they could just hop on a plane. I’m so sorry. I should go before I put you all in more jeopardy from being around me. I’ll just go upstairs and pack.”

“You’re going nowhere.” Warren came and stood in front of me. “If anyone shows up here, they’ll find out it was a mistake to cross paths with us. Look at us. Do we seem like people who can’t protect those they care for?”

“I-I you what?”

“We are going to take care of everything.” Rain moved on before I could get into what I really wanted to explore. “Lark, take Evrin to the bakery and bake something with her while Warren and I consider how we need to handle the situation.” He rubbed his hands together, looking almost gleeful. “I was trying to talk myself out of going to where your pack is and kill a few people for how they treated you. Now I don’t have to do that. If they went to all the trouble to track you, it seems more than likely that they will follow through on coming here. The only question is when.”

Lark took my hand. “I’d like to stay and help, but I appreciate that we need Evrin out of harm’s way for the moment. Get in a punch for me. Come on. Let’s go.”