Raised by Wolves

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  We would get out of this alive.

  Trapped. Escape.

  Survive, I whispered the last word, because Chase couldn’t seem to remember what it was, and his own instincts flared to life. He was a fighter. He fought. This man was nothing.

  He wasn’t all-powerful. He was Prancer.

  And we didn’t have to let him do this.

  Chase was mine. I was his. The Rabid wanted us both, and with that realization, I felt something snap inside of Chase. The Rabid could threaten him. The Rabid could torture him. … But he had no right to think of me. None.

  I felt the hum of power, a shift in the air when Chase slammed up his mental walls and caught the sliver of power that bound him to this man between his teeth. Like an animal, a hunter, he tore into it. Shredded it.

  And as it began to reweave itself, impervious to Chase’s attack, the boy I called mine took everything that bound him to this Rabid, and in a moment of perfect symmetry, he threw it at me.

  I’d felt the sensation before. A tilting of the world on its axis. An explosion in my brain.

  Echoing, seductive silence. Silence and Chase.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “YOU OKAY?” LAKE’S VOICE BROKE INTO MY THOUGHTS and brought me back to the present. To the back porch on Cabin 12, where I’d sat down to contact Chase. “At first, you were quiet, and then you were crying. Your body starting twitching, and then, you got real still.”

  I caught my breath. “I’m fine,” I told Lake. We’re fine. Back at Callum’s, I’d panicked and rewired our pack-bonds, mine and Chase’s, and just now, when he’d sensed the Rabid threatening me, Chase had done the same. Only this time, he’d cut his connection to the Rabid completely. The pack was still there in the depths of Chase’s mind, in mine, but the Rabid was gone.

  “You didn’t feel anything?” I asked. When I’d rewired my pack-bond, every wolf in the near vicinity had felt it.

  “Nope,” Lake said. “Should I have felt something?”

  I thought for a moment: of the pack, of Chase, and of the Rabid. “No.”

  This didn’t have anything to do with Stone River. This had to do with Chase and the man who had made him. The man whose name I now knew was Wilson. The man who was residing in a cabin in the woods, a mile away from Macon’s Hardware in a place called Alpine Creek.

  “Wyoming,” I said out loud. “That’s where we’re going.”

  Lake heard me. I repeated the message silently, sending it to Chase. He was exhausted physically, and I realized that he wasn’t in any shape to travel from Colorado to Wyoming on his own.

  He’d recover. Werewolves always did. But he needed time—and time was one thing we didn’t have. Sooner or later, the alphas would pay the Rabid a visit to collect on his end of whatever deal they’d made him. Sooner or later, Ali and Mitch would get suspicious about what Lake and I were up to.

  Worst of all, there was a part of me that knew the Rabid wouldn’t react well to losing Chase. He liked blood. He liked power. And since Chase had robbed him of the latter, someone would pay with the first.

  I hated that I’d been inside the Rabid’s head. Hated that I understood him enough to know that if the three of us waited, someone else would die.

  Lake and I are going to grab some weapons and borrow the keys to her dad’s truck, I told Chase. You can’t run all the way to Wyoming. You’re going to need some help.

  There was only person in Ark Valley that I trusted enough to ask for help.

  Devon.

  Chase bristled, the way any male werewolf would have at the sound of another male’s name, so I repeated myself.

  Please, Chase. He’ll help. You know he will.

  Chase knew because I knew, and now, more than ever, he was in my mind the way I’d been in his.

  Devon, Chase repeated. Alpine Creek, Wyoming. We’ll see you there.

  “You done playing telephone?” Lake asked.

  I nodded, pulling back from my bond with Chase as he did the same with me.

  “Okay, girlie. Let’s weapon up.”

  The words weapon up were slightly terrifying coming out of Lake’s mouth, her voice a weird combination of resolve and glee.

  I shuddered, but gestured broadly with one arm nonetheless. “Lead on.”

  Lake didn’t take any more urging. It took her less than a minute to jimmy open the back door to Cabin 12, and when the door opened to reveal her father’s weapon’s cache, my mouth dropped open. I’d expected a couple of guns, an excess of silver bullets, and a knife or two. Instead, I saw a room as large as the cabin that Ali, the twins, and I were sharing. Letting out a low whistle, I took in the 360 view.

  One side was clearly dedicated to creating the weapons. I recognized a forge in one corner, and there were a variety of tools, and a few things I couldn’t identify that seemed to have a vaguely Frankensteinian feel about them. The other side—and three of the walls—were covered with weapons. Guns. Knives. Axes. Traps. Snares. And several things that I couldn’t even identify.

  Lake breathed out a happy sigh as she approached the row filled with guns. “Matilda was my first, but, ladies, you know how to make a girl want to stray,” she said.

  “Lake, could you please stop sweet-talking the weapons? It’s kind of freaking me out.”

  This room didn’t look like the cautious work of a dad who was afraid that someone might get a little fresh with his teenage daughter. It looked like the work of a man preparing for a brutal and inevitable war.

  Lake stuck her bottom lip out in a pout at my reproach but then shifted into business mode. “Silver bullets are in the chest on your right,” she said. Then she paused, picked up a container full of some kind of arrows, and poured them on the ground. “Fill this up. Grab a dozen or so silver arrows, too. I’ll take care of the crossbows and guns.”

  While I followed her instructions and started stocking up on ammunition, Lake hauled a large, empty duffel bag off one of the shelves and began throwing in the big guns. Literally.

  And some small guns.

  Three crossbows.

  “Lake, you do know that there are only three of us, right?”

  She snorted. “All of this is just for me. I’m getting to you. Callum taught you how to shoot on a nine millimeter, right?”

  I nodded.

  She threw several more guns into the bag, moving so quickly that her choices should have seemed haphazard but didn’t.

  “Is this good?” I asked Lake, after I’d pulled several boxes of handmade silver bullets out of the cabinet and gathered a few of the arrows off the floor.

  “Yup. You prefer a crossbow, a longbow, or old school?” Lake asked me.

  “I’m better with knives,” I said.

  Lake nodded, and then she looked at me very closely and said, “Stand up.”

  I did.

  “You’ve got two on you right now, correct?”

  I nodded, not bothering to ask how she could tell. “I don’t go anywhere without them.”

  “You’ll be better with your own than you are with mine, but I’ll bring a few extras, for throwing. First, though …” She trailed off, thoughtful. “How tall are you?”

  “Five-six.”

  “You’re a couple of inches shorter than me,” Lake said, “but you’ve got pretty long arms, so …”

  I had no idea where this was going, until Lake walked over to the workbench and picked up two metal wrist guards about the length and width of my forearms, but thin. “Let me put these on you,” she said. I complied. The metal was much lighter on my wrists than it should have been.

  “Can you lift your arms?” she asked me.

  I nodded.

  “Can you fight?”

  She didn’t give me a chance to answer the question—she just attacked me. In a room full of enough firepower to blow the whole reservation to kingdom come.

  I managed to dodge her blows and get in one of my own. The weight of the wrist guards didn’t slow me down, but I couldn’t put the same kind
of force behind my blows.

  “With these, you won’t need to,” Lake said. “My dad made them for me. Just in case. Take a step back and then twist your wrists sideways, hard.” She demonstrated and, mystified, I obeyed. Four long, thin silver blades popped out of each of the wrist guards.

  “If you’re fighting something with claws, you might as well have some of your own,” she said.

  I stared at them and then began to experimentally move my wrists. “Your dad a big fan of the X-Men?” I asked.

  Lake shrugged. “Worse comes to worst, he wanted to give me an edge.”

  “You couldn’t Shift with these on,” I told Lake.

  Lake arched an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t need to. Land one or two good hits to a Were with these, and you’ve bought yourself some exit time.”

  Mitch had said that he didn’t know many werewolves who were even half as fast as Lake. If she took them off guard in her human form, they might not be able to catch up to her as a wolf.

  “Twist your wrists the other way, and the claws will retract. Now, let me throw in some explosives and we’ll be good to go.”

  As Lake added the finishing touches to our artillery and slung the duffel bag over her shoulder, I picked up the box I’d loaded up with ammo. “You okay?” I asked her.

  Lake snorted. “Do I look not okay to you?”

  She didn’t look the way she had the other night, as we’d lain in my bed, listening to foreign alphas passing through.

  “You look fine.”

  “I am fine.”

  I nodded. There would be plenty of time for me to play werewolf Dr. Phil later. Right now, Lake and I needed a ride. Preferably one with GPS. “Ready to commit a felony?” I asked her.

  She met that statement with the most serene of smiles. “It’s not grand theft auto if the vehicle in question belongs to your father. And b-t-w, if anyone asks you what’s in that box, I’d advise you to say, ‘Feminine supplies.’”

  The box was large and heavy, and there was a distinct clanging sound as I carried it. “As in tampons?”

  “Keely’s not going to ask questions. Ali’s busy with the twins, and everyone else around here is male. Tampons scare the bejeezus out of them, my dad included, but if the person who asks is a Were, they’d smell the lie. Hence, feminine supplies.”

  “Because we’re females, and they’re our supplies?” I guessed.

  “No. Because weapons are feminine.” Lake gave me an insulted look. “Why do you think I named my gun Matilda?”

  All things considered, I was kind of surprised that Lake was planning on going into this battle without her double-barrel.

  “Matilda maims,” Lake explained when I asked her. “She doesn’t kill.”

  “Enough said,” I replied, because after what the Rabid had done to Chase this afternoon, after what he’d done to the little girl named Madison, after everything he’d taken away from me, starting with my parents and ending with my faith in Callum, this S.O.B. was dead.

  The distance between Montana and Wyoming went by disturbingly quickly with Lake behind the wheel, and as the two of us reached our destination, I registered the fact that we’d arrived in record time and absorbed what little sightseeing the Rabid’s town had to offer.

  Alpine Creek was bordered by a river on one side and the ugly, jagged edge of a mountain on the other. Even a human wouldn’t have been surprised to hear it called No-Man’s-Land, and as Lake drove our pilfered vehicle down Main Street, toward the town’s single stoplight, déjà vu hit me like a blow to the chest.

  Macon’s Hardware.

  Barren street corners.

  A dirt path snaking past the town’s lone restaurant, leading into the woods.

  I’d seen these things from inside the head of a monster, and at the end of that dirt path, buried miles into the woods, there was a cabin. The monster lived there. His name was Wilson. I was willing to bet that if the townspeople knew about him at all, they weren’t sure whether that name was his first or his last.

  I didn’t care.

  “Bryn?” Lake’s voice cracked my thoughts open, and reality trickled in. She’d stopped the car in front of a rundown house whose owner appeared to have declared it to be some kind of motel. I took in a long, ragged breath.

  Did the Rabid already know we were here? Could he smell us? Could he feel us coming from miles away? Was this a mistake?

  “We should get a room.” I tried not to let the questions show on my face or in my voice. “Chase will be here soon. We’ll need someplace to strategize.”

  Under other circumstances, I might have spent a good chunk of time wondering what it would be like to see Chase again. For as long as I’d known him, other people had been tearing us apart. But right now, I didn’t have time to ponder the way my blood turned thin and hot in my veins just thinking about him. I didn’t have time for the repetition, with each beat of my heart, of an all-too-familiar word: Mine. Mine. Mine.

  Right now, I couldn’t be Chase’s first and the pack’s second. My first allegiance was—and had to be—to what we’d come here to do.

  Lake and I paid for a room in cash, and I pushed down the growing sensation that as Chase got closer and closer, I was riding a roller coaster climbing steadily to its highest peak, the anticipation of the world dropping out from underneath me to a screaming, hand-waving, heart-thumping freefall, the moment Chase and I met eyes. I didn’t have time for that, any of that. I was within ten miles of the man who’d killed my family. The one who’d broken Chase and laughed at the breaking.

  That man needed to die.

  That thought in the forefront of my mind—and probably Lake’s, too—we passed the time waiting for Devon and Chase by settling into our room: one twin bed, no window, no air-conditioning. To Lake’s credit, she didn’t say a word about my silence, or the volley of emotions that must have been crisscrossing my face as minutes turned into hours. She just took out two knives and started sharpening them against each other, the rhythmic ching-ching-ching of metal on metal providing a fitting sound track to my own violent thoughts.

  The Rabid’s death wouldn’t be bloody. Revenge was a luxury for those who had the upper hand, and we didn’t. There were more of us, but Wilson was older. He might not have known we were coming yet, but he’d sense Lake, Devon, and Chase the second they got within a mile of his little cabin in the woods. Mulling our disadvantage over in my mind, I detached from the instincts that told me that this man needed to be torn limb from limb. Werewolves were all about the instincts. The one advantage I might have in this game was that I wasn’t a Were.

  When I had to, I could think like a human.

  I didn’t need to see my parents’ murderer torn limb from limb. All I needed was to put a silver bullet through his forehead and a matching set in his heart and lungs.

  I was so caught up in weaving in and out of the situation’s logic that I almost didn’t recognize the feel of the world turning upside down, my stomach flipping inside out, every hair on my body standing slightly on end, like I’d found myself in the center of an electrical storm.

  “Chase.” The moment Chase opened the door to our motel room, I said his name, because from the second I saw him, it was the only sound my mouth agreed to produce.

  “Bryn.” His voice was deep and thicker than I remembered. He seemed to have recovered, as much as anyone could, from what the Rabid had done to him before.

  I was wrong, I thought, as I crossed the room to kill the space between us, needing to assure myself that, yes, he really was okay—that, no, my brilliant plan hadn’t broken him past the point of repair. Seeing him was nothing like the downward swing of a roller coaster. It felt like having my soul pulled out of my nose.

  It hurt.

  His arms wrapped around me, and I turned my head to the side and pressed my face into one of them, assuring myself that he was solid and real. That the Rabid hadn’t destroyed him. That I hadn’t failed him in a way that he never would have failed me.

  “Oh
, I see how it is. Baby finds her Johnny Castle, and all of a sudden, she forgets about the small matter of her BFF?”

  There was only one person in the world who could deliver that line with a straight face. Until I’d heard his voice, I hadn’t realized just how much I’d missed it.

  “Devon!”

  Chase stiffened as Dev’s name left my lips, and Devon beamed at me, doing a good impression of someone who hadn’t been bristling a moment before, when I’d buried myself in Chase’s arms.

  “In the flesh,” Devon said. “When you call, Miss Bronwyn, I answer. Always.” It was a testament to the gravity of the moment that he didn’t treat everyone present to an impromptu performance of “Ain’t No Mountain.” Lest Devon decide the situation did call for some tunes, I pushed on.

  “You probably shouldn’t have come,” I told him. When I’d told Chase to go to Devon for help, I hadn’t thought through the full extent of what it would mean. Two male Weres, both of whom had some claim to a single girl, in one car for hours on end. If Chase had been born a werewolf, or if Devon and I had ever been more than friends, they probably wouldn’t have both made it to Wyoming in one piece. And even if the four of us did survive the next few hours and the Rabid in the woods, Devon would still have to deal with the fact that he’d left Ark Valley without permission to come assist me in blowing a Senate mandate to smithereens.

  “Do you have any idea what Callum’s going to do to you when he finds out you came here?” I asked Devon, cursing myself for involving him in this and for not being able to think far enough ahead to realize what it would mean.

  Devon’s eyes flashed at my question, like he knew what I was thinking and resented the very idea of being left behind. Again. “Yes, Bryn, I think I have a pretty good idea of what Callum might do to someone who disobeys the pack.”

  So much passed between the two of us unspoken then. The fact that he’d probably seen the aftermath of my own punishment, while I’d been unconscious. The fact that his mother had been the one to dispense the so-called justice. The way Devon had been furious at me for putting myself in danger by going to see Chase in the first place. The fact that long before I’d been Chase’s, I’d been Dev’s.