Step. Step. Step.
And then nothing.
I knew enough about hunting to know when I was being stalked. I also knew, with chilling certainty, that the silence wasn’t an indication that the person tailing us had dropped back. She’d wanted us to know she was there, and now she wanted us to know that she could disappear from our radar, that unless she willed it, we would never hear her coming at all.
Caroline.
I kept myself from whirling around. If there was one thing I’d had pounded into my head from day one, it was the necessity of never letting fear show in my posture, the speed of my breath, the weight of my motions.
If this girl wanted to play mind games, I could play them right back.
“Aren’t you going to say hello?” I asked, voice casual, eyes pointed straight ahead.
“Hello.” Caroline spoke the word directly into my back. She was closer than I’d realized—too close—but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of reacting.
“Playing hooky?” I asked, forcing myself to continue facing forward, sending the message, loud and clear, that she wasn’t a threat worth facing head-on.
“Mental health day,” Caroline replied, her tone light, but lethal. “I’ll be back at school tomorrow. You?”
I didn’t hear her shifting positions, didn’t catch even the slightest sound as she unsheathed a blade, but somehow—instinct, maybe, or my knack—I knew. I reached back and caught her hand seconds before she would have pressed the flat of her knife to my back, just to prove that she could.
“You should stick to throwing knives,” I said, tightening my grip and forcing the bones in her wrist together as I jerked upward and spun, bringing myself face-to-face with the blonde with the dead, dead eyes. “Perfect aim doesn’t really help you in hand-to-hand.”
For a moment, the potential for bloodshed—hers, mine—hung in the air between us, and the part of me that was alpha, the part that had grown up like a Were, wanted it. The coven had come here to my territory and threatened my pack. One of their females had come at me from behind.
That wasn’t the kind of thing I was wired to take sitting down.
“Bryn.” Ali’s voice was mild, but I nodded and dropped Caroline’s gloved wrist. We hadn’t come here to fight. We’d come for information, and so far, we hadn’t gotten much. In fact, the only thing I knew now that I hadn’t known before this little melodrama had gone down was that I could take the coven’s pint-sized emissary in hand-to-hand—but if she’d had a weapon trained on me from afar …
“I’m Ali.” In a surprisingly gentle voice, my foster mother introduced herself to the girl who’d pulled a knife on me.
“Caroline,” the girl said shortly.
There was a moment of silence while the two of them appraised each other. Ali had several inches and sixteen years on Caroline, but for a split second, the two seemed disturbingly well matched.
“We didn’t know the wolf girl had human friends,” Caroline said.
Ali shrugged. “I didn’t know your coven was on good enough terms with the people in town to risk pulling a knife on someone in broad daylight—unless, of course, you have someone running interference, showing them something else.”
Caroline blinked once when Ali said the word coven and once when my foster mother called that Caroline probably hadn’t come here alone. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think that if Archer could enter my dreams, the coven might have someone who could make the rest of the people in town think they were seeing something they weren’t.
“You have no idea what you’re up against,” Caroline said, and for a second—a single second—she sounded almost sad. “Don’t tell me the two of you would die for one of them. Don’t tell me they’re worth it. They’re monsters, and you know that, same as me.”
A reply was on the tip of my tongue, but before I could press Caroline to tell me how she could call my pack monsters, given what her coven had done to a battered teenage boy, a single note, haunting and low, made its way to my ears, and suddenly, whatever I was going to say didn’t seem nearly so important.
Caroline turning and walking away didn’t seem important.
Nothing did.
Objectively, I knew that another person might describe the sound as a whistle, compare it to the product of blowing a steady stream of air into a hand-carved woodwind. But to me, it wasn’t just a sound. It was a song.
It was paralyzing.
I knew what was happening, knew that there was a person making this sound, and that when she’d made it for Lucas, he hadn’t been able to move or scream or even care that he was being tortured.
I knew, I knew, I knew—and I didn’t care.
My hands fell to my sides. My lips parted slightly, the tension evaporating from my face and jaw. All my other senses receded, because nothing mattered as much as the sound.
The sound.
On some level, I realized that Ali had gone still beside me, her muscles as liquid and useless as mine. I saw people approaching, recognized Archer, noted the old woman standing beside him, looking every inch the storybook grandmother but for the snake coiled like a scarf around her neck. And then there was the third in their little trio, the one whistling that one-note song that snaked its way through my brain, around my limbs, in and out of my blood, my skin, everything.
Archer and the old woman closed in on me from either side, the snake slithering from Grandma’s neck down her shoulder, poised to strike.
For a second, a split second, the sound stopped as the woman who was whistling took a breath, and I had a moment of clarity, a moment when I could think and move and realize exactly how bad this situation was, before the sound started again.
A feeling, alien and familiar all at once, crackled through my body. The sound pushed back against it, willing me to relax, to forget, to just stand there and let the psychics have their way with me, but this time, I heard a lower sound, an older one, a whisper from the most ancient part of my mind, from my gut, from the core of what it meant to be me.
Threat, threat, threat, it seemed to be saying. Survive.
My body was relaxed, my limbs frozen in place, but that single word was enough to free my mind. My vision blurred. Darkness began to close in from all sides, and even before I saw red, I tasted it, the color tinny and electric on my tongue.
This was what it meant to be Resilient. The taste, the color, the rush of adrenaline into my bloodstream. The fury and power and uncompromising need to escape. To fight back.
To survive.
Instinct took over. One second I was standing there, and the next, the roar inside me was deafening, drowning out anything my external senses had to offer. I leapt forward, the world colored in shades of black and blood, blood-red, and by the time I came fully back into myself, the sound had stopped, and everyone who wasn’t me and wasn’t Ali was on the ground.
I couldn’t remember how they’d gotten there, or what I’d done, but whatever it was must have sent a message, because as they climbed to their feet, the woman who’d been whistling kept her mouth closed, and the other two kept their distance.
“Easy there, mutt-lover. If we wanted to fight, you’d be dead right now.” Archer gave me a genial smile. Like he knew me. Like we were friends. “I’m not much of a fighter, but even I could have slid a knife between your ribs in the time it took you to fight off Bridget’s hold.”
Having said his piece, Archer glanced pointedly to his left, at the old woman, who was stroking her snake’s triangular head like it was a kitten. The suggestion was clear—if Grandma had wanted me dead, her pet could have seen to that just fine.
“You should know what you’re up against.” Bridget’s speaking voice was absurdly plain compared to the sound she’d made before. For some reason, that didn’t surprise me, but the note of kindness in it did. “If we fight you, really fight you, there will be casualties on both sides, but we will win. Your people will fall, some of them”—she glanced at Ali—“without ever realizing
there’s a battle they should be fighting.”
Bridget’s warning sank in.
Being Resilient meant being resistant to dominance and having a knack for escaping even the direst situations. If I could fight my way through Bridget’s hypnotic hold, chances were good that Chase, Maddy, and the other Resilients could do the same.
Eventually.
I tried not to think about what the rest of Bridget’s coven could do in the time it took us to combat her ability. I tried not to think about the fact that Ali, Mitch, Devon, and Lake might not be able to fight it in the first place.
Lucas hadn’t.
“You’ve seen Caroline,” Bridget continued softly. “You know what she can do.”
Darkness flecked across Bridget’s eyes when she said Caroline’s name. Fear, thick and uncompromising, with a life of its own.
For a moment, the same expression descended over the others’ faces, like Caroline was their bogeyman as much as she was ours.
Archer recovered first. “This shouldn’t be your fight, Bryn,” he said softly. “Sometimes, backing down is the right choice. The smart one.” Archer reached out to tweak the end of my hair, but Ali caught his hand in hers.
“You don’t talk to my daughter,” she said. “You talk to me.” She looked from Archer to Bridget to the old woman cooing at the snake. “Is this how your coven operates? You send a child out to issue your threats? You torture teenagers and play mind games with little girls?”
I hadn’t been a little girl in a very long time, but Ali on a rampage was a thing to behold, and far be it from me to interrupt.
“You make me sick.” Ali spat out the words, and Archer faltered, his smile replaced by something uncertain, some measure of loathing for himself and what he was doing, but as quickly as the emotion had come, something else replaced it.
Anger.
Bloodthirstiness.
Disgust.
The same expression overtook the whistler’s face and the old lady’s, as potent as the fear they’d shown at Caroline’s name. The emotions writhed beneath the surface of their flesh, so vivid it looked like it might at any moment take on a life—and an agenda—of its own.
“Did Lucas do something to you?” I asked, floored by the depth of their hatred, but unable to keep the doubt that Lucas was actually capable of doing anything more than annoying them out of my tone.
“He’s a werewolf,” Archer said finally, his voice venomous, but somehow dull. “They’re animals—all of them.”
The woman with the snake shook her head. “Not natural,” she murmured. “Not animals. Worse.”
I bristled. Nobody knew better than I did what a werewolf could do, if he chose to cross that line. I’d spent my entire childhood aware that my life could have been forfeited the minute any one of them lost control. If Callum hadn’t made my safety a matter of Pack Law, I might not have survived to adolescence, and I still dreamed about the sound human flesh made when canines tore it apart.
But that kind of werewolf was the exception, not the rule. Alphas didn’t allow their wolves to run wild. We killed our own if they hunted humans. We weren’t—my family and friends, they weren’t monsters.
Werewolves were people, too.
“You’ve had a run-in with a Rabid,” Ali said, judging their reactions. “Your coven has lost someone.”
Her words were met with steely silence, and I braced myself for another attack as Ali kept pushing at it, kept pushing them.
“He or she must have been very important. You must have loved whoever it was very much.”
Bridget quivered like a rabbit facing off against a fox and then snapped. Her hand connected with Ali’s cheek with a loud crack. I was already in motion, retaliating, when Ali smiled. She’d gotten a rise out of them, and for whatever reason, she was happy about it.
Trust me, Bryn. It’s a good thing. That was the first time I’d ever heard Ali through the bond she shared with my pack, and I went into a state of immediate shock, stopping all onslaught. Being human allowed Ali to keep her bond shut, the way I had for most of my life in Callum’s pack. That she’d opened it, even for a second, told me it was crucial that I keep calm and let her continue playing her current game.
“You must have loved him,” Ali repeated. “Whoever it was that you lost. It makes me wonder, though—if a werewolf did that to someone you loved, if you hate their kind so much, why would you trust one to give you a gift? Why make a deal with the devil?”
Ali’s words didn’t permeate the loathing the trio wore on their faces, as permanent and striking as some kind of tattoo, but I registered their meaning instantly.
Shay had sent Lucas to the coven.
Lucas had said it was part of some kind of deal.
So what had the coven given Shay in exchange? And why would they have agreed to give him anything in the first place?
“We should probably be heading home,” Ali said, tucking a strand of my hair behind my shoulder, in a maternal gesture that would have been a lot more appropriate if the two of us had been out shopping. “We’ve been standing here awhile, and unless one of you is still actively blocking it, I think we’ve probably put on enough of a show for the rest of the town, don’t you?”
I glanced around and realized that more than one shop owner was watching our exchange with feigned disinterest, and a couple of people were gawking in a way that suggested they might have seen me lash out and put the newcomers on the ground.
In retrospect, it was probably a very good thing that I’d already decided to withdraw from the local high school.
“Nice meeting you all,” Ali said in a tone that suggested it was anything but.
Archer was the one to reply, and despite Ali’s warning, he directed the words at me, not her.
“Six days.”
I turned. Ali turned. We walked back to the car in silence. I knew what we were up against now, better than I had before, knew at least part of what they had in their arsenal. I’d marked the way they looked at and interacted with each other. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that they considered Caroline to be the biggest threat.
I climbed into the car. Ali climbed into the car. We shut our doors.
If anything, this recon mission had assured me that my earlier assumptions were correct. If we fought the coven, there would be bloodshed, and a large portion of it would be ours. If we gave in to their demands and let them have Lucas, he would be better off dead.
Six days.
I had less than a week to decide between two evils. Less than a week to find out what kind of deal the coven had made with Shay.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE RIDE BACK TO THE WAYFARER WAS SIGNIFICANTLY quieter than the ride out. Ali seemed calmer somehow, like the interaction, which had sent a rush of adrenaline surging through my veins, had sedated whatever worries she’d been holding on to all day.
Instead of thinking about Shay, or the coven, or the partly unhinged werewolf waiting for me to save him from both of the above, I thought about Ali and the way she was handling all of this. We’d been hypnotized. A natural hunter had pulled a knife on me. Violence had been promised and there was every indication that this group, family, coven, whatever could deliver.
Ali was taking it in stride.
She’d pushed them and prodded them and borne their presence in her mind without so much as blinking. She hadn’t shown any sign of weakness, any sign of fear.
Any surprise.
People are allowed to have secrets, Bryn. Even from you.
The words Ali had said in our conversation about Chase came back to me with a vengeance. Ali was handling this well—too well—and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was keeping secrets from me, the same way she’d never bothered to mention that Callum could see the future.
The same way I hadn’t told her when I went off to hunt the Rabid.
The same way I probably wasn’t going to tell her that I already had plans to go on a second recon mission. Alone.
The coven had a deal with Shay. I needed to know what it was, and I wasn’t going to find out by letting my foster mother ask the questions. For whatever reason, she knew psychics, but I knew alphas, and I couldn’t imagine Shay giving Lucas to the coven without asking for something in return.
I also couldn’t imagine that the werewolf Senate would be happy to find out that one of the pack alphas had made some kind of alliance with a group of werewolf-hating humans. Once I found out what the deal was, once I had proof, I might actually have something to hold over Shay’s head. And if I had the backing of the Senate, I might be able to convince the coven to back off.
“What are you thinking?” Ali asked. After ten minutes of silence, I was surprised to hear her voice.
“I’m thinking about secrets.” I leaned the side of my head against the window and watched the mounds of snow pass by as we drove. “Yours. Mine.”
“If you want to know something, Bryn, just ask.”
People were allowed to have secrets. Being alpha didn’t mean I had to know everything—I didn’t need to know how Ali felt about Mitch, or what she was planning to do about Casey, or why she would never consent to running with the pack.
But I needed to know everything I could about psychics, so I had to ask. “You handled that well.”
“That wasn’t a question,” Ali commented, her tone completely neutral.
“You knew what to expect. You knew how to read them. And I can’t shake the feeling that you got more answers out of that little exchange than I did. Am I wrong?”
“No.” Ali pulled the car over to the side of the road and slid the gearshift into park. She left the key in the ignition and the heat blasting, but unbuckled her seat belt and turned to face me. “Did you see the look in their eyes whenever they talked about werewolves?”
Hatred, undiluted and pure. “Hard to miss,” I said.
Ali inclined her head slightly. “Did you happen to notice the size of their pupils?”
I was used to watching Weres’ eyes for hints of the Change, so it only took me a second to walk my way back through the scene and pinpoint the moment Ali had referenced.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology Page 44
