Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  “Yes, baby. You are.”

  Ali hadn’t called me baby in so long. All of a sudden, I felt like the world’s most ungrateful brat for fighting with her.

  “I’m going to see him.”

  The words weren’t the apology I’d been aiming for, but Ali seemed to understand. “Yeah.”

  It felt like I’d be working toward this for so long that somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten that there was an end goal. Now that it was here and real, I couldn’t believe it. Not at all.

  “You’re going to see him. You’ll ask him what you need to ask him. You’ll do what you need to do. And then, this will all be over. No more permissions. No more conditions. Just us.”

  No more fights.

  No more bond.

  No more running with the pack when the moon was full.

  I’d be me again. The me Ali wanted me to be. I thought of the ball I’d visualized before I’d let down my shields that night at the Crescent and given myself over to the pack-mentality. The things I’d wanted and been before.

  Were they still there, safe where I’d left them? Could I go back? Did I want to?

  “Go on,” Ali told me. “Get dressed. Make your bed. And for heaven’s sakes, Bryn, brush your hair. You’re starting to look like a cavegirl.”

  “Bryn want kill dinosaur,” I said, pantomiming what I thought passed for a decent dinosaur-killing motion.

  For the first time in weeks, Ali laughed. “Go on. And if you’re very good, Ali show Bryn big heaping secret. Fiiiiiirrrre. Make tasty warm dinosaur meat.”

  I snorted. “Dork.”

  “Right back at ya, kiddo.”

  The exchange felt so normal. So human. So far from whatever it was that I was becoming, day by day. Now that I was going to see Chase, an insane part of me wanted him to see this Bryn—the one who laughed with Ali, not the one who Callum had molded into a paragon of self-defense.

  “I’m going to see him,” I said, testing out the sound of the words, wondering which me Chase would meet. “Today.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “CASEY, IF THERE’S A HAIR ON HER HEAD OUT OF place when you get back, you’re sleeping on the couch for the rest of your life.” Ali kissed her husband as she said those words, but he didn’t take her any less seriously for it. She moved to turn her threats on Callum, but he shook his head at her.

  “Have I ever returned her to you in worse shape than I took her?” he asked.

  Ali opened her mouth to answer, and my sarcasm barometer sensed an oncoming change in pressure, but Callum just gave Ali the eyebrow arch that she’d given me.

  “Alison.”

  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who got the full-first-name treatment. “You’ve never brought her back irreparably harmed,” Ali admitted grudgingly. “This better not be a first.”

  The other Weres in the room, including Casey, narrowed their eyes at her, their backs stiffening. My pack-sense told me that they didn’t like the challenge to our alpha’s authority. It was unnatural. Ungodly. Impertinent. When Ali married Casey, she should have adopted his status in the pack, but she’d lived among them for too long without a place in the hierarchy to settle into one now, and her challenge rankled. At the very least, Casey should have known what he was getting into with Ali; she’d never made even the least effort to hide her lack of respect for pack tradition.

  “Ali—” Casey started to say something, but the look on her face stopped him cold, and a wave of calm—originating from Callum—went through the room.

  “I’ll take care of her, Alison,” Callum said, dispelling Ali’s worries even as he calmed the wolves.

  I always do.

  Ali nodded, and then without another word, she walked out of the room. Callum turned his attention to me. “From the moment we leave this house, I’m invoking the second condition of your permissions. Sora, Casey, and Lance are dominant. You are not. Whatever they say, you do it. Whatever they tell you, you comply. There is no room for argument, no room for discussion, and there will be no leniency for disobedience. You’re Pack and you’ll act like it. Am I clear?”

  In retrospect, it was a really good thing Ali had left when she did. And probably also not a coincidence that Callum had waited for her to leave before laying down the law, because I saw in his eyes that he wasn’t guaranteeing my safety, not in all things. Chase wouldn’t lay fang, claw, or hand on me, but I knew what happened to subordinate wolves who challenged dominance.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  “You’re clear, Alpha.”

  Callum nodded, and we left, the five of us. I took a page from Lance’s book and didn’t say a word, and the others followed suit. Understanding passed between us, though—silent words and thoughts and feelings. The rumblings of their wolves; the butterflies in my stomach. I fingered the knives strapped to my side, seeking comfort in the familiar.

  I don’t know what I expected when we got to Callum’s house, but it wasn’t to see Chase sitting on Callum’s couch, playing Grand Theft Auto, his fingers moving the controller with frightening accuracy, even when he turned away from the screen and looked directly at me.

  “Hi, Bryn.”

  He was a far cry from the boy I remembered, caged in the basement, shadows in his eyes. But when I looked at him, really looked at him, I could almost see them. Almost, but not quite.

  He just looked so normal.

  Then again, so did I.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” Callum said. “You have an hour.”

  I realized with a start that Callum was leaving. To give us privacy? Or as much privacy as anyone with three lupine nannies could have?

  No. There must have been another reason for it. Callum didn’t do anything without a reason, but I decided that I could debate his motivations and intentions later. Right now, I had an hour.

  “Ummm … can I sit down?” I wasn’t sure who I was addressing the question to—the other wolves, or Chase. The latter nodded and brought his legs down off the couch. I started to move forward, but a deep rumbling from Lance’s lips held me back.

  Apparently, this was the kind of thing that a submissive needed permission for.

  I paused, and the three guards exchanged a look. “Chase, move to the chair. Bryn, stay on the couch. You’re not to touch each other.” Sora spoke each word with an emphasis that made me think that she was considering the way she verbalized the orders very, very carefully.

  I ingested them, internalized them, and let my pack-sense get a grip on them. Obey. Obey. Obey. I had to obey.

  Moving swiftly and with what I hoped passed for some amount of grace, I took up the spot Sora had indicated, and Chase slid over to the chair. His movements were so smooth that they were nearly liquid. He didn’t move. He flowed. Chase may have made progress in learning to control what he was, but he still wasn’t able to hide it. I didn’t think anyone could look at him and not know that there was something different. That he was more.

  “So … ummmm … how’s it been?” I asked.

  I cursed Ali for snapping me back into myself enough that the words didn’t come automatically, that my first instinct was entirely human: to make small talk. I wanted answers. I wanted to push at his bond with the pack, to explore it, to get inside his head and absorb everything he knew, but I didn’t.

  I pushed down the desire and absorbed what my instincts were telling me instead. At some point, Callum had made Chase Pack. He was Stone River the way Lance was Stone River, the way I was, but until we were here, in the same room with each other, I’d never felt him. I hadn’t realized Callum had brought him into the pack at all.

  “I can’t complain.” Chase’s voice was completely dry as he answered my question. “There’s food. There’s a television. We run through the forest at night. I have superhuman strength and don’t particularly miss the foster-care system.”

  “You were in foster care?”

  Focus, I told myself. Ask the important questions. But the human in me insisted that these were the im
portant questions. That I’d been right all along to feel that Chase and I were the same.

  “From the time I was eight. Dad took off. Mom died when I was little.”

  “My parents did, too. They died, I mean.”

  “You don’t need to talk about that, sweetheart,” Casey said, and for a split second, the fact that he’d used an endearment masked his words enough that I didn’t realize that he meant them as an order. “Leave that subject alone. You don’t want to get upset,” he explained.

  Part of me wanted to point out that in the time that Casey and Ali had been married, he’d pretty much steered clear of playing Daddy. Now was an awfully convenient time for him to suddenly become concerned with my mental well-being. Especially considering the fact that I had to obey.

  Fine. I wouldn’t talk about my dead parents. About how I didn’t remember them. But if Casey thought that he was going to keep me from asking hard questions, he was wrong.

  “What were you like, before?”

  Okay, so that wasn’t exactly a hard question, but I needed to know.

  “Different,” Chase said. “Quiet. Hard. Angry.”

  “And now you’re …?”

  “Angry, quiet, and hard?” he suggested with a quirk of his mouth that drew my eyes to a small crescent-shaped scar at one corner of his lips.

  “Angry, quiet, and hard,” I repeated, a smile tugging at the edges of my own. “Because that’s so different.”

  “Everything is.” He paused. “That night, when you came for me—”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry I, you know …”

  “Wanted to eat me?” I suggested.

  He nodded, and even that relatively benign motion was filled with eerie grace. I stared at his face, captured for a moment by the way the power of his wolf seemed to emanate from his skin. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn that he was glowing, but luminescence wasn’t a part of the werewolf package.

  “You confused me,” Chase said. “You’re …”

  “Different?” I suggested.

  He nodded.

  “It’s kind of ironic.” I tried to sound offhand. “You were raised by humans and now you’re a Were, and I was raised by Weres, but I’m human.”

  “You’re Bryn,” he said, and the way he said my name made me think that in the past couple of months, he’d been indoctrinated into werewolf culture enough to know who and what I was. Little Orphan Annie. Oliver Twist. Bryn.

  We were iconic, really.

  “I want you to tell me what happened to you,” I said, half sure that the others would step in, that they’d stop us from talking about anything I really needed to hear.

  “It’s really not that long of a story. I was working late, got off my shift, walked home in the dark, and this guy cornered me. One second he was a man, and the next, he wasn’t. I kind of lost it and grabbed a pipe, I tried to beat that thing off me, but …”

  “Didn’t go so well?” I ventured to guess.

  He nodded. “I got bit.”

  This time, the words didn’t have the same effect on me. Maybe that was the point behind all of Callum’s training. He’d been systematically working the fear out of me. He’d said it was so I wouldn’t be scared of Chase, but I was starting to wonder if it was because there was a part of me that had been scared for way too long.

  “Most people who get bitten die,” I said, willing Chase to look at my face and read in it the meaning that I couldn’t say out loud. “When Rabids attack, humans die. They don’t change. They just …”

  Die, I finished silently.

  Our eyes met, and every muscle in my body tensed, ever so slightly.

  Like your parents?

  I didn’t move. Didn’t bat an eye. Didn’t give any visual cue to the fact that Chase’s voice was in my head. I also didn’t respond to his question.

  They told you not to talk about your parents, he said silently, but technically, we’re not talking.

  He understood. Thank God, he understood. Out loud, I said something else. “How did he bite you?”

  “Throat first. Then stomach. It’s hard to remember. Everything went dark after that. I think I managed to throw him off, but he kept coming back. First my arms, then my legs—”

  “Enough,” Sora said, cutting Chase off.

  He stopped speaking, and the air around us seemed to shift, weighed down by the power of Sora’s command. I looked from Sora to Chase and back again, and that was when I realized—he had to listen to them, too.

  Obey. Obey. The pack was to be obeyed.

  “I hear you like art,” Chase said, probably under orders to make small talk instead of talking about being systematically disemboweled.

  I nodded. “I used to.”

  I thought of my exchange with Ali that morning, of the bit of myself I’d hidden far away, and for a split second, it began to crack, and with it came the intensity with which I’d wanted to ask these questions, the incredible, undeniable need to see him.

  “What did you like to do, when you were … human?” That wasn’t the question I wanted to be asking, but I could practically feel my pack-bond as a leash around my neck, choking me, pulling me back from asking the things I really wanted to know.

  You can fight this, a tiny voice whispered in the back of my head. Not Chase’s. Mine.

  Fight.

  Fight.

  Trapped.

  Fight.

  But I didn’t. I slowed my breathing and pushed back the panicked haze that threatened to descend on my body the moment I realized just how tight my metaphorical leash really was. A low whimper caught in the back of my throat, and I waited for Chase’s answer. For more than small talk. For whatever Callum—through his henchmen—would actually allow me to hear.

  “Before the attack, I liked cars, Yeats, and having a lock on my bedroom door.” Chase paused, and behind his wry, self-deprecating grin, I saw an echo of the whine still caught in my throat.

  Out.

  Out.

  Out.

  We wanted out.

  Chase’s eyes pulsed amber, and without a word, Lance walked over and put a firm hand on each of his shoulders. Forced him off the chair and to his knees.

  A high-pitched sound escaped my throat, and Sora laid a hand lightly on my shoulder. She didn’t push. She didn’t force a confrontation, but as I leaned forward, her grip tightened, pulling me gently back.

  “Look at me.” Lance growled the words, and on the floor, Chase responded. His body jerked once, twice, three times against Lance’s hold, and the smell of burning hair and men’s cologne filled the air. The smell wasn’t Chase. It wasn’t Stone River. It was something different, something foreign, and it was here.

  One second I was sitting and the next, Sora had shoved me at Casey. “Get her out of here!”

  But since the order hadn’t been directed to me, I didn’t have to obey, and Casey’s main concern seemed to be staring at Chase—staring and staring and daring him to come closer.

  Pack. Not Pack. Pack. Not Pack. Pack.

  The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. I’d never seen anything like it before. Callum had made Chase a part of the Stone River Pack, but every wolf in the room was reacting like he was a stranger.

  A foreign wolf on our lands.

  A threat.

  Mine, I thought.

  A moment ago, I’d been talking to Chase.

  He’d been in my head.

  Even now, I could feel each spasm of his body in the corresponding muscles in mine.

  “Chase. Look at me.” This time, Lance’s voice was low and soothing, but I felt the command behind the words, felt shades of Callum—alpha—in Lance’s tone.

  Look at him, I begged Chase silently, sure it would help, but uncertain why. Look at Lance.

  He did, and slowly, the scent of foreign wolf receded, until the only thing in this room was us.

  Me, Chase, Casey, Sora, and Lance.

  Pack.

  “What just h
appened here?” I recovered my voice before the others found theirs. If I’d been paying attention, I might have noticed just how close to the edge Callum’s guards were.

  How close they’d come to Shifting themselves.

  “He’s in my head.” Chase’s voice was soft. Too soft. Any other girl wouldn’t have been able to make out the form of his words.

  “Callum. The wolf. Both of them.”

  It wasn’t Callum’s wolf that had flooded the room with a foreign scent, and it wasn’t Callum who’d put the haunted expression—empty and clear—in Chase’s eyes.

  It was the Rabid.

  If a Mark connected you to a werewolf, what did a full-blown attack do? There wouldn’t have been a ceremony, but …

  “When the Rabid attacked you, did you feel it?” As far as stupid questions went, this one ranked pretty high, and I struggled to make myself clearer. “Did you feel it here?” I closed my fist and touched it gently to my chest. Casey still had a hold on my shoulder; otherwise, I might have moved and gone to Chase, who was still kneeling on the floor, to place my hand over his heart.

  “I felt it everywhere,” Chase said, his simple words cutting into me like a knife to the stomach. “Sometimes, I still do.”

  “I think that’s enough for today,” Sora said, and beside me, I felt Casey stiffen, his head dropping even as his spine snapped back. Sora had told him to get me out of there. He hadn’t.

  Dominance lash-backs. They were enough to give a girl fits.

  “Bryn, outside. Now.” Sora’s words took on the hollow tone of an order issued at half strength, and I got the sense that the kid mitts were more for Chase’s benefit than for mine. On the floor, Lance still had his hands on Chase’s arms, but instead of holding him down, he appeared to be holding the younger wolf up. Just looking at him, I felt Chase’s exhaustion, felt his muscles liquefy as the battle in his head subsided.

  “I’m sorry.” I hadn’t planned on apologizing, but as Sora’s words compelled me toward the door, the apology came out of my mouth anyway. Chase had been in control. He’d been Callum’s. And something I’d said had ruined that.

  “No sorry.” Chase’s voice was liquid, too, just like his muscles, fluid and flowing, one word running into the next as he closed his eyes. “Never sorry.”