Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  WE CUT OUT ON THE REST OF THE SCHOOL DAY, AND as Chase leapt in wolf form into the back of Lake’s Jeep and I buried my fingers in his stiff, damp fur, I had a sinking feeling that none of us would be back.

  Not until this threat was taken care of.

  Maybe not ever.

  For as long as I could remember, I’d attended public school, human school, pretending that I could be one of them. That I could be normal. That I had some kind of future outside the boundaries of a werewolf pack. But maybe that was all it would ever be.

  Pretense.

  One way or the other, I had no business going through the motions of a normal school day while a foreign wolf lay on a bed in Cabin 13. Maybe this was a sign that as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t give Maddy homeroom or prom or any typical teen experience to make up for all the things she’d missed growing up.

  The five of us were Pack, and we belonged with the others. We belonged at home, not out in the open where a threat could waltz up to us at lunchtime and calmly issue ultimatums we weren’t at liberty to respond to.

  It was a miracle that none of the Weres had lost their grip and Shifted.

  That wasn’t a chance I was going to be taking again anytime soon. If Caroline and her “family” wanted a confrontation, they would have to come to us. I had to believe that on our turf, werewolf strength and instinct and the thirst for our enemies’ blood would be worth something, no matter what—besides Caroline—the other side had in their arsenal.

  Worse comes to worst, you don’t have to fight them, the pragmatic part of my brain whispered. Give them what they want, and they’ll go away.

  I didn’t want to be the kind of person who could consider that option, but what I wanted wasn’t what mattered. Keeping my pack safe mattered. Making sure that no one laid a finger on Katie or Alex or Lily mattered.

  But didn’t Lucas, with his haunted eyes and heartbreaking wariness, matter, too?

  “He really did lie.” Maddy’s thoughts weren’t far from my own, but I knew that this was harder for her, that she’d wanted to believe in Lucas, because she’d seen so much of herself in the things that had been done to him. “Lucas lied.”

  “No,” Lake corrected tersely, taking a turn with all the zeal of an Indy 500 driver. “He didn’t lie. He just left out a few key details, such as the fact that the humans who are after him aren’t exactly what you’d call run of the mill.”

  I’m a hunter, the little blonde girl had said. It’s what I was made for. It’s all that I do.

  “Caroline might have been exaggerating her abilities.” I had to say the words, even though I didn’t believe them. There was a tone to Caroline’s voice, a look in her eyes that I recognized all too well. “If you can’t smell her, you wouldn’t be able to tell if she was telling the truth.”

  Devon glanced at me for a second, maybe less. “You believe her,” he said—a statement, not a question.

  “Believe what?” I asked. “That she’s the perfect hunter?”

  The kind you didn’t see coming. The kind who never missed.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it of unwanted thoughts.

  “I believe,” I said slowly, “that she’s a threat, and I know she’s not working alone.”

  The burn on my skin was fading, but the questions it had inspired weren’t going away. We didn’t know how big Caroline’s family was. We didn’t know what they were, other than human. We didn’t know why they wanted Lucas, and we certainly didn’t know the limits of what they could do.

  “You think they’re like Keely?” Lake asked, gunning the engine the moment she said the bartender’s name. “With her … you know …?”

  Before Ali had yanked me out of Callum’s pack and brought me to the Wayfarer, I hadn’t known there was anything unusual in the world, other than werewolves. I hadn’t known that Callum saw possible futures laid out in a complicated web, or that I had an unnatural ability to survive things that would kill a normal girl. I hadn’t had a clue that there were people out there like Keely, who could make you spill your secrets just by looking at you a certain way.

  In all the time since I’d discovered those things, I hadn’t once stopped to wonder what else—or, more to the point, who else—was out there.

  “So, what?” I said. “Some people are really scrappy, and some people are easy to talk to, and some people are made to hunt?”

  My words were met with silence.

  “And what about the other guy?” I continued. “The one I keep seeing in my dreams? That’s not just a knack. You can’t just be born with a knack for burning people in their sleep. That’s …”

  Impossible?

  Insane?

  “That’s not a knack,” I said mutinously. “That’s magic.”

  The word felt ridiculous coming out my mouth. I’d grown up around things that would have made normal girls take off screaming, but I’d never once believed in magic. Werewolves were just another species. Pack-bonds were connections, as natural as a mother feeding her infant in the womb. Even Callum’s seeing the future was something I could write off as …

  Quirky.

  But this? The symbol carved into Lucas’s skin. The foreign presence in my dreams. My pink and sunburned skin.

  This was a whole new world of weird.

  “I’m going to throttle Lucas,” I said, my voice deceptively cheerful. “I mean, seriously? He couldn’t have warned us?”

  “Maybe he knew that if he told us the truth, we would send him away.” Maddy’s voice was soft, and in an uncharacteristically affectionate gesture, she laid her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. “Maybe he doesn’t believe that anyone else could ever want to fight for him.”

  I leaned my head over so that my temple was touching the top of Maddy’s head. Behind us, Chase stood up on his hind legs and put one paw on my shoulder and one on hers, huffing into our faces before nudging each of us with a wet, cold nose. The affection he showed Maddy surprised me, and my surprise made me realize that in human form, Chase never touched anyone but me.

  “This is all Shay’s fault,” Devon said from the front seat. “He’s the one who gave Lucas to those … whatever they are. Shay probably sent Lucas there hoping that he would run to us and bring She Who Hunts to Kill right to our front porch.”

  That did sound kind of like the type of thing Shay would do. For a few minutes, the five of us were silent. Then Lake pulled into the parking lot in front of the restaurant and slammed the car into park. “So, who wants to share all of this with my dad and Ali?”

  “Not it,” Devon said quickly.

  “Not it,” Lake and Maddy chorused. Beside me, Chase let out a small howl, and I cursed under my breath.

  “Have I ever mentioned that being alpha sucks?” I said.

  “A time or two,” Devon replied, but he didn’t even have the decency to sound sorry for me.

  Sitting there in the backseat of Lake’s car, Chase and Maddy close enough that they felt more like extensions of my physical body than members of my pack, I tried to remember what it was like to be a normal teenager, but the next second, Lake popped open the driver’s-side door, and a burst of winter wind brought with it the smell of wet fur and cedar trees.

  We were home, and underneath the familiar pack scent, my senses registered something else.

  Something foreign.

  Close.

  Still in wolf form, Chase leapt out of the car and came to a halt a few feet in front of us, glancing back over his shoulder, as if to tell us to stay where we were. Undaunted, Lake sauntered forward, Devon on her heels.

  “Looks like Lucas is feeling better,” Lake said pithily. “Because unless my nose is mistaken, he’s not in Cabin thirteen.”

  Maddy glanced at me and then slid out of the backseat. I followed, concentrating on my pack-sense and trying to pinpoint who among our pack was inside the Wayfarer restaurant and what they were feeling.

  Lily. Mitch. Three of the older Resilient kids.

  They were i
n there, with Lucas. The same Lucas who’d lied to me. The one who was currently topping the Not Just Humans’ Most Wanted List.

  For once, the constant chill on the back of my neck that told me there was a foreign wolf nearby was drowned out by another feeling.

  I was now officially pissed.

  The first thing I saw when I stepped across the threshold of the Wayfarer was Lucas, his hands wrapped around Lily’s tiny frame. The first thing I heard was the three-year-old’s scream, shrill enough to shatter glass.

  Lily, I thought, my heart jumping into my throat. I was already moving for the shotgun behind the counter when I realized that neither Devon nor Lake was reacting like Lucas was threatening one of ours. A split second later, I registered that on the other end of the bond, Lily wasn’t frightened. She wasn’t hurting. She was ecstatic.

  “No, no, no!” she shrieked, trying to escape Lucas’s grasp but holding back just enough that she couldn’t. “No more tickles!”

  In response, Lucas hooked his arms around her body and flipped her upside down.

  “She throws up, you’ll be dealing with it,” Mitch told him, but his lips twitched, like he was trying to keep from smiling at the picture that Lily and Lucas made.

  “That dastardly fiend,” Devon whispered. “She’s never going to wind down in time for her nap.”

  Lily made a sound halfway between a giggle and a bark and kicked her feet. Beside me, Chase bristled, and I felt the hair on the back of my own neck rising in tandem with his hackles.

  Whatever Chase had learned when he went to see Lucas, the feeling I was getting, loud and clear, through the pack-bond was that he didn’t trust him, and now that Chase was in wolf form, his instinct to protect our territory was sharper, his bond to the rest of the pack harder to deny and his brain incapable of understanding human thoughts—or recognizing that, red-faced and screaming in the hands of the enemy, Lily was fine.

  He leapt forward, teeth bared, growling.

  I reached out to him with my mind but was met with the uncompromising certainty of the wolf. Lily was ours. Lucas was foreign. He was touching her, and the pup was screaming.

  “Chase!” I yelled at the exact same moment that Mitch took a casual step forward and grabbed Chase by the scruff of his neck. Bearing down on him, Mitch forced wolf eyes to meet his, and slowly, Chase sank to the floor.

  Lily, seeing further opportunity for mischief, wriggled her way out of Lucas’s arms and leapt to land on Chase. “Wrestle!” she declared.

  Before I could do a thing, the jumper she was wearing went the way of many play clothes before it. Shifting was simpler for the younger wolves: they melted from one form to another with liquid ease, and all it had taken to trigger Lily was seeing Chase in wolf form.

  Now in animal form herself, Lily bobbed her furry head slightly and then grinned, an expression that looked eerie on her puppy face.

  Slowly, awareness dawned on Chase. The human part of his brain realized that Lily was fine, that she was happy, and his wolf instincts recognized the unmistakable signal that she was ready to play. In the wild, play fighting was nature’s way of preparing wolf pups for the real thing. At the Wayfarer, it was par for the course.

  Lily pounced on Chase’s paws, and I looked toward the other kids, all of whom were valiantly holding on to their human forms, just to show that they could. Most of our pack were right at that age when they tried very hard not to want to be kids, even though they weren’t quite adolescents.

  “Go ahead,” I told them. “Somebody has to watch out for Chase. Lily’s going to decimate him.”

  For a moment, none of the kids moved, but I flicked my gaze over to them and made it an order, and that was all it took. They were off and running before they even switched forms, and as much as Chase didn’t want to leave my side, a silent please convinced him to lead them out to play.

  Or, more to the point, out of harm’s way.

  I pulled my mind away from Chase’s, but not quickly enough to keep from picking up that while Chase and his wolf would guard the pups, neither wanted to turn his back on Lucas, and neither wanted to leave me there with him.

  Luckily, Chase’s human half seemed to know that I could take care of myself, and his wolf half knew, on a bone-deep level, that I was alpha, and together, those things were enough to buy me some time alone with Lucas—if alone meant “with Lake, Devon, Maddy, Mitch, and Keely standing by.”

  Lucas took one look at my face, and he knew. I couldn’t smell fear, not the way the Weres could, but I knew what it looked like, etched into features that were trying desperately not to show it, and when I took a step forward, Lucas went as still as a corpse. I could see his pulse jumping in his throat, but he closed his eyes and stood there, waiting.

  Just like that, I was back in the woods behind Callum’s house, my lips bleeding, my ribs cracked. It had taken everything I had not to fight Sora as she came at me again and again. I’d swallowed every instinct, and with each blow, I’d lost a tiny bit of myself, of the life I’d always thought that I’d lead.

  I’d broken the rules, Callum had ordered me beaten, and I’d stood there, just like Lucas was standing now.

  Pissed or not, betrayed or not, I wasn’t going to be the kind of alpha who inspired that kind of fear.

  “Maybe we should sit down,” I said. On all sides of me, I felt my backup fighting their own internal battles, their wolves crying out for retribution, and their human halves seeing what I saw and thinking that there had to be a way, some way, for it to be different.

  Sitting down at a table felt like fitting a noose around my own neck, but I forced myself to do it anyway and waited for the others to do the same. One by one, the Weres came to join me: Devon first and Lucas last, with Mitch, Maddy, and Lake spread out in between.

  For a long time, none of us said anything. I didn’t press Lucas. I didn’t force him to hold my stare. I just waited, and finally, he spoke.

  “You know,” he said.

  “And you didn’t tell us,” I replied, keeping my voice soft and even and wondering how it was that three minutes after swearing I would be a different kind of alpha than Callum, I could hear the man who’d trained me in every single one of my words.

  “Who did they send?” Lucas asked dully. “To tell you?”

  “Hey there, boy-o,” Devon said, leaning forward slightly. “I think we’ll be the ones asking the questions here.”

  Lucas glanced sideways and slumped lower into his seat. Maddy said his name softly, and after a moment, he nodded.

  “Ask your questions,” he said, wiping the palms of his hands on denim jeans.

  I didn’t have to be told twice.

  “What are they?”

  “Human.”

  “What else are they?”

  Lucas took a breath and then he shrugged. “I don’t know if there’s a word for it,” he said. “If there is, I’ve never heard it. They’re just humans who can … do things.”

  “Things like what?” Lake asked, and I could tell it was taking everything she had not to make the question any more leading than that.

  “All of them are different,” Lucas said slowly. “They each have an … ability. One of them gets inside your head. He can make you see things that aren’t there, make you feel them. They feed you silver, make you think it’s chocolate.”

  I thought of my dreams: the throbbing in my temples, the tone in Archer’s voice—pleasant, but deadly underneath.

  “There’s a woman, an old woman. She’s got a way with animals, a way of making them do things. She likes snakes, and if you’re a werewolf, she can force your Shift.”

  I really, really did not like the sound of that—not that being mentally set on fire was a walk in the park.

  “What else?” I asked. Since he hadn’t yet referenced someone with Caroline’s power, I knew he hadn’t told us everything, and I wanted to save my ace in the hole for after I’d squeezed everything out of him that I could myself.

  “There’s an
other woman, her name is Bridget, and she does this … whistling thing. It makes you forget. It’s like one second you’re there and you’re fighting, and the next, you can’t fight. You just listen. Even if they’re cutting you open, even if you can feel it hurting, you can’t do anything but listen.”

  I waited to see if Lucas would say anything else, trying not to fully digest the horror of what he’d already said.

  “They told me that they had someone who’s really good at finding things when they go missing.” Lucas laughed, and it was a miserable, hair-raising sound. “I guess they were telling the truth.”

  “You came here knowing they could track you?” I couldn’t help the exasperation in my voice. “And you didn’t think it was a good idea to give us any warning that someone might come after you? Even after we specifically asked you who that someone was, you didn’t think it might be pertinent to mention that they have about a thousand ways of killing people that normal humans don’t?”

  You’re getting off track, I told myself. Yelling at him doesn’t get you answers. He’ll either shut down or expect you to beat them out of him.

  That was what any other alpha would do—except for maybe Callum, who was all the more lethal for how seldom he resorted to using brute force.

  Think, I told myself. What would Callum do?

  My brain wasn’t forthcoming with answers, so I decided to focus on my pack’s own particular strengths. It was time to bring in the big guns.

  “Lucas, would you like something to drink?” The change in tactic took the Were completely off guard. Unbeknownst to him, however, that was more of a by-product than the point.

  “Drink?” Lucas repeated dumbly.

  “Like a milkshake or a soda or something?”

  Mitch caught my eyes from across the table, and it was clear that he knew exactly what I was doing.

  Careful, Bryn, he warned. The other alphas don’t know about Keely. If you send this boy back and he ends up tipping Shay off, we could all be in for a world of hurt.

  I knew as well as Mitch did that most alphas wouldn’t take kindly to the idea of a human who could loosen lips just by brushing up against someone or looking them in the eye.