Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  “You even think of telling me to turn tail and hide, and I’ll laugh you out of Montana proper.” Lake’s words left no room for argument, but we both knew that if I wanted her to leave, I could make her leave. That was what it meant to be alpha.

  I met Lake’s eyes. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. Alpha or not, forcing my will on someone else wasn’t what it meant to be me.

  An alien smell—snake oil and vinegar, feces and blood—permeated the thick wooden door, strong enough that even my human nose could make it out, and though none of the five of us moved, the shift in the room was unmistakable. My pack was ready to fight, and I was ready to let them—and to do what I could to back them up—but whoever the intruder was, he never crossed the threshold of the door.

  There was a loud thump outside, like a duffel bag being dropped onto cement, and then a high-pitched gargle—half choke, half whine—filled the air.

  Blood.

  The smell—and the meaning behind it—finally registered, and I pushed my way through my werewolf bodyguards until the only thing standing between me and the door was Mitch.

  “Someone’s hurt.” I said those two words like they were all that mattered. For a moment, I didn’t think Mitch was going to get out of the way or even open the door. He’d spent a long time living on the periphery of Callum’s pack, with Callum his alpha in name only. Mitch wasn’t used to taking orders, and even though he’d joined our pack shortly after Lake had, I wasn’t used to giving them to him.

  Please, Mitch. I met his eyes.

  With a slight nod and his gun at the ready, Mitch opened the door. I didn’t push him, didn’t rush it, but when Mitch knelt down next to a heap of bones and fur, I couldn’t hold back any longer. I was beside him in an instant—not within biting range, but close enough that I could make out every inch of this ravaged Were’s body.

  He looked like he’d been taken apart piece by piece and sewn back together—badly. He was stuck halfway between his human form and his animal one, and the patches of skin that weren’t covered with fur were angry and red, welts layered over bruises layered over burns.

  Why didn’t he finish Shifting?

  Bile rose in my throat with the question. Weres healed extremely quickly, but you couldn’t Shift and heal at the same time; it was like trying to eat while throwing up. That explained why the body in front of us was still battered to a pulp, but not why its owner had let himself be caught in the throes of Shifting for any extended period of time.

  Without meaning to, I moved my gaze to Chase. The expression on his face was completely impassive. Even I couldn’t read it, but I didn’t need to, because the last time I’d seen a Were caught between one form and another, Shifting back and forth with excruciating results, it was Chase. We’d been hunting the Rabid who’d Changed him into a Were, and the monster had turned the hunt back on us, infiltrating Chase’s head.

  “Is somebody doing this to him?” I kept my voice low, and it was almost drowned out by the heavy, tortured breaths coming from the porch. “Should I try to break off the connection?”

  That was what I’d done to free Chase from the Rabid. I’d gone into Chase’s head, taken the connection the Rabid had formed when he’d Changed him, and snapped it in two.

  If I had to, I could do it again.

  “No.” Mitch’s voice was sharper than I’d ever heard it. “This wolf isn’t yours, Bryn. Unless you’re wanting war, you’ll keep your little alpha nose out of his pack-bonds. Not all alphas are as forgiving as Callum when it comes to other people stealing their wolves.”

  I felt like Mitch had slapped me, like I was stupid and young and completely incompetent as an alpha and a person.

  “Whose is he?” I asked quietly, trying to place the wolf’s scent but thrown off by the smell of blood and the mewling sound now making its way out of the creature’s monstrous hybrid mouth.

  Mitch didn’t reply; instead, he pointed to the creature’s neck. “There’s what’s keeping him from Shifting.”

  My eyes adjusted to the darkness on the porch, and I saw the object Mitch had referenced: a long, thin metal shaft that glowed in the light of the nearly full moon.

  Silver.

  “Dev?” I could have removed it myself, but impulsive or not, even I wasn’t stupid enough to think that my going that close to an injured Were was a good idea. Whoever he was, the mass of flesh and bones on our porch was out of his mind with pain, and pain had a habit of making Weres unpredictable.

  If Devon got bitten, he’d heal in a matter of moments. If I got bitten, I might never heal, and if I got bitten badly enough, I’d end up either dead or Changed—and neither one of those was a future I would particularly relish.

  Devon walked forward, and without waiting a beat, he knelt, closed a hand around the shaft, and pulled. Most werewolves were allergic to silver, but as in many areas of life, Devon was an exception. As he jerked the hated object out of the wound, the injured Were reared back, and I heard teeth snapping and the sound of flesh—though whose, I wasn’t sure—giving way.

  Chase came to my side, and I thought of that moment of quiet in the woods—how fragile it had been, how fleeting.

  Dev tossed the silver rod to one side. “We’ll want to pick that up,” he said, almost absentmindedly. “Wouldn’t want one of the kiddos to get ahold of it.”

  Our visitor’s body registered the silver’s removal. It shuddered and finally gave way to one form.

  Human form.

  If I’d been horrified before, I was sickened now. There wasn’t a piece of flesh that had been left untouched, and for a moment, I thought I might throw up or cry or both.

  The injured Were was a boy. Not a man, not a threat. A boy—maybe a year or so younger than me. All business, Mitch bent and hefted the boy into his arms, eliciting a high-pitched whine more lupine than not.

  “Tell Ali I’ll need medical supplies,” he said. “Lake knows where they are.” With those words, Mitch turned to carry the boy away, leaving the rest of us standing there, slack-jawed and tense.

  Lake was the first to snap out of it, and she hurried back to the kitchen to relay the message to Ali. Chase’s eyes followed Mitch’s progression, and I could see the gears in his head turning as he analyzed the situation. He ran a hand through my hair, assuring himself with every light touch that I was all right, convincing the wolf inside him to still.

  Devon didn’t move, and this time, I said his name silently.

  Dev?

  After a long moment, Devon managed to drag his eyes away from the blood seeping into the wooden planks of the porch. His fists clenched, and he turned toward me. “Bryn.”

  There was a wealth of information in that one word, and I knew that whatever Devon said next was going to send a tremor through our pack, like static feedback or a punch to the gut.

  “I caught his scent, and it wasn’t pretty.”

  I waited for Devon to make a comment about Calvin Klein cologne or something equally flippant, but he didn’t. Instead, he cut right to the chase.

  “This kid is from the Snake Bend Pack, Bryn. His alpha is Shay.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I ONLY KNEW THREE THINGS ABOUT SHAY MACALISTER.

  One: he was a purebred werewolf, one of a relatively small number in the country who’d been born to two werewolf parents instead of just one. Purebreds were larger, stronger, and faster and had fewer weaknesses than werewolves with human blood flowing in their veins.

  Two: Shay wanted me dead. It wasn’t personal. I had something he wanted. More females in a pack meant more live births and stronger, purebred children, and the only thing standing between the other alphas and doubling their numbers—and their power base—was me.

  And, okay, maybe it was a little personal for Shay, since I’d been responsible for destroying a Rabid who knew the secret to changing human girls into Weres. It was also possible that once I’d done so, I’d derived great satisfaction from putting the screws to the other alphas—and Shay in particular
—flaunting the laws that forbid one alpha from taking wolves who belonged to another, even if that other alpha was a teenage, human female.

  At the moment, however, it was Shay’s third distinguishing characteristic that turned my stomach to lead and blew a cold chill down the length of my spine.

  Shay was Devon’s—my Devon’s—brother. He was everything Dev didn’t want to be, everything he’d spent his entire life rebelling against, and already the presence of one of Shay’s wolves on my land had sapped the mirth from Devon’s features and left something stone hard and formidable in its place.

  “Hey.” I reached out for Devon’s arm. “You okay?”

  Devon stood there, every muscle in his body tensed. He didn’t answer my question. Callum would have forced Dev’s eyes to his and repeated the query, but I nudged Devon’s shoulder with my head, a gesture of comfort far less human than I was and not particularly alpha in the least.

  On instinct, Dev nudged me back, his muscles relaxing—but not by much. “Only you,” he said crisply, “would be worried about me at a time like this.”

  Like Shay, Devon was purebred. Boy-band tendencies aside, he could take care of himself—physically.

  “Seriously, Dev. You want to tell me this isn’t messing with your head at all?” I didn’t have to put even an ounce of my power as alpha behind the words. Best-friend privilege said it all.

  “Well, of course it is,” Devon replied. “One of Brother Dearest’s wolves showed up on our land, beaten within an inch of his life and caught between Shifts. If you’d been the one to open that door instead of Mitch, the smell of human blood probably would have sent him rabid, and you’d be significantly less charming as a decimated pile of meat.”

  Dev—do you think Shay sent him? I couldn’t make myself ask the question out loud, and Devon responded in key.

  I don’t think anything is below Shay. He’s not like other people, Bryn. You know he’s not.

  “If your brother wanted Bryn dead, is this how he’d do it?” Chase’s words took me off guard—not because I had forgotten that he was in the room (though I had), but because his tone, understated and detached, contrasted so sharply with the animal set to his features. His wolf wanted to touch me, to protect me, to tear Shay to pieces, but Chase’s human side wanted answers—whether asking the question was like driving an elbow into Devon’s gut or not.

  “I don’t know,” Devon said shortly, his jaw turning to granite, his gaze averted from mine. “I’m not exactly an expert on the inner workings of Shay’s dark and twisted mind.”

  By the time Devon had come along, his much older brother was already the alpha of the Snake Bend Pack. They weren’t exactly what one would call close.

  “Okay. I had to ask. If you think of anything, let us know.” With that, Chase turned his attention from Dev to me. “What do you need?”

  The look in Chase’s pale blue eyes was still feral, the desire to protect me simmering just under the surface—but he’d grown up in a world very different from the one I’d known as part of Callum’s pack, a world where females weren’t shuffled off into a back room or given bodyguards at the first sign of trouble. Chase was asking, not telling; thinking instead of acting on instinct.

  I’d never been so glad that Chase was Chase and that neither one of us had been born a Were.

  “I need to talk to Mitch,” I said, following his example and trying to think this through, even though I wasn’t exactly known for an overdeveloped tendency to look before I leapt. “Whatever happens, our first priority is making sure that whoever this visitor is, he doesn’t die.”

  I hadn’t been an alpha for long, but even I knew that having a Snake Bend wolf die on my territory wouldn’t look good. Until I knew exactly what was going on, and how to proceed, I couldn’t afford to give Shay any reason to come here, looking like the injured party and demanding something—or worse, someone—in return.

  It was two days before they let me anywhere near the injured boy—two days for his injuries to heal enough that he was in control of his wolf, two days that I spent gnashing my teeth and trying to unravel the tangled web of political possibilities surrounding his entry to our territory.

  Had Shay sent him here, on the verge of death, with the hope that he’d attack me? Would the other alphas blame Shay for the action of a wolf who was clearly Rabid? Had someone attacked one of Shay’s wolves on our land—and if so, who? A member of one of the other packs, crossing into our territory to make trouble? A Rabid, gone rogue or mad and hunting anyone and anything in his way? Or, God forbid, one of my own peripherals?

  By Senate law, our peripherals could attack trespassers, but what had been done to this boy wasn’t animal retribution.

  It was torture.

  I had to talk to him, and after two days of letting Mitch—and more importantly, Ali—tell me no, I was done listening to the word. In a happy coincidence, they also appeared to be done saying it, so I didn’t have to go through the awkward and unquestionably ill-fated process of trying to pull rank on the woman who’d been my mother since I was four.

  “I want to go with you.” Devon’s voice was perfectly pleasant, but I recognized the look in his eye, because the exact same expression had been staring out at me from the mirror for days.

  “Can you behave yourself?” I asked mildly.

  Devon did a good impression of someone who was offended. “Moi?” He ruined the effect somewhat by brushing invisible dust off the tips of his fingers, a motion as close to popping his knuckles as someone with Devon’s sensibilities could come.

  I reached out to him with my mind but hit a smooth, blank wall. Of all the wolves in my pack, Dev was the one most clearly poised to become alpha himself someday. The promise of his future dominance made him an ideal second-in-command, but there was power there, too, and that power meant that if he wanted to, Dev could guard his mind from me absolutely, in a way that no one else in our pack could.

  “Dev.”

  “What do you expect me to say, Bronwyn?” he asked, adopting Callum’s habit of calling me by my full first name when he was irked. “This boy—who belongs to Shay—came here, to our territory, half mad and out of control of his Shift, and plopped himself down more or less on your front porch. He could have killed you, and accident or not, that’s not the kind of thing you can expect me to shrug off like a hideous hair day.”

  Challenge.

  There was a whisper of it in the bond between us, and I brought my eyes to Devon’s in a staring contest that neither one of us wanted to be engaging in. For several seconds, we stood there, locked in something we didn’t completely understand, and then Devon blinked.

  Literally.

  He didn’t avert his gaze. He didn’t round his shoulders, but he blinked, and that was enough.

  I’d won.

  “I’m still coming with you, you impossibly irritating little wench.”

  From Dev, that was a term of endearment, and I took the degree to which he sounded on the verge of slipping into an exaggerated British accent as an indication that he was in control of himself—and that unless my life was in immediate danger, he’d behave when cross-examining Shay’s wolf.

  “Yeah,” I said, punching him lightly in the stomach, “I love you, too.”

  Taking a deep breath, I knocked on the door of Cabin 13, where Mitch had been tending to the injured wolf.

  Lake answered the door and pulled me inside. “ ’Bout time you got here,” she said. “Now would you please tell him I can stay and to stop picking at me to take to the hills?”

  Based on the mutinous expression on her father’s face, I inferred that the “him” Lake was referring to was Mitch.

  “Well, go on. Tell him.” Lake folded her arms over her chest, the expression on her face an exact mirror of the scowl on Mitch’s.

  Are you crazy? I asked, sending the words from my mind to hers. In response, Lake shrugged, which I took to mean something along the lines of “Yes, in fact, I am.”

  �
�It’s okay by me if she stays,” I said, but that was as far as I was willing to go; I hadn’t thrown down with Ali on my own behalf, so I wasn’t about to press the issue with Mitch for Lake. Besides, why she would want to be anywhere near a male Were from a pack that was, in all likelihood, less female-friendly than ours was a mystery to me.

  “Please,” Lake snorted in response to the expression on my face. “Have you seen this kid? I reckon I could take him with three paws tied behind my back, no shotguns, no knives.”

  “If you had paws,” Devon volunteered helpfully, “you wouldn’t be able to use a shotgun.”

  In her human form, Lake fought dirty, which for a Were meant using weapons other than claws and teeth. In wolf form, she was faster than just about anyone I’d ever seen, but she wasn’t as big as most males and couldn’t match them in brute strength—so she improvised.

  “You three gonna squabble like children, or do you want to talk to the boy?”

  I took Mitch’s question as implicit permission for Lake to stay. I could almost pretend this was just another adventure, with Devon and Lake and me alternating between keeping one another out of trouble and getting into it.

  Almost.

  “I’ll do the talking.” I said the words quietly, more to psych myself up for the coming interrogation than anything else. Mitch nodded his approval, and then he stepped aside to allow the three of us entry to a small hallway.

  Wolf. Foreign.

  The feeling washed over me as I walked forward, but it receded more quickly than it had before, like my instincts knew as well as I did that even if the boy was a threat, they were no longer needed to sound the alarm. That thought in mind, I breathed through the unmistakable smell of Snake Bend in the air, noting that it was tinged with antiseptic and something that smelled like coffee or chocolate: the boy’s scent, separate from the smell of his pack.

  Lucas, Bryn. Mitch’s voice was rough in my mind, and my brain itched just listening to it. The boy’s name is Lucas.