Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  Beside me, Chase breathed in deeply through his nose. Through the bond, I could feel him sorting his way through layers and textures, scent upon scent upon scent.

  “Anything?” I asked him, my voice quiet, but echoing through the silence nonetheless.

  He closed his eyes and breathed in again. Even though I couldn’t quite make out his features, I could picture the expression on his face almost exactly: long eyelashes lying still against pale skin, nostrils flared, and concentration playing around the edges of his lips.

  “There was definitely a werewolf here,” he said finally. “Female. Young.”

  He glanced at Lake, and she nodded, kneeling to the ground and bringing a handful of dirt up to her nose.

  Was it Maddy? I asked her, not wanting to give life to the question by saying it out loud.

  For the longest time, Lake didn’t reply, but even through the darkness, I could see her lowering her head toward the ground. Her blonde ponytail picked up the light of the moon, making her look like an angel caught midprayer, knees in the dirt, head bowed.

  Chase joined her on the ground, crouching down with liquid grace, the whites of his eyes catching the moonlight the way Lake’s hair had.

  I translated their actions—and the things they weren’t saying—for our human companions.

  “Maddy was here.” I paused, suddenly aware of how very much I’d hoped that Callum was wrong, just this once. “Was she in human form, or wolf?”

  “In this exact spot?” Lake asked, sniffing again. “She was human, but there’s no shortage of woods around here. If she’d decided to Shift, smart money says she would’ve gone farther in.”

  Chase stood, the motion fluid even in the darkness. “It’ll be easier to track the scent if I Shift.”

  Lake said nothing, but when I nodded in response to Chase’s unspoken query, she began stripping off her shirt.

  Clearly, Chase wasn’t the only one planning to Shift.

  Turning my attention back to our human companions, I laid out a plan of attack. “Chase and Lake are going to check out the woods. We can get started inside.”

  If Lake said there wasn’t anyone out here except us, I believed her, but that didn’t mean it would stay that way for long. If we wanted to check out the inside of the house—the actual crime scene—sneaking in under the cover of darkness seemed like a good way to go.

  “Police might have someone set up, watching the place,” Jed said, “to see if the killer comes back.”

  Killer, my mind echoed. Maddy.

  I didn’t push the thought away, but didn’t dwell on it, either. “There’s no one here now. Chase and Lake would have smelled it if there were.”

  I spared a glance for Caroline, who was standing so silent and still that I couldn’t be 100 percent sure I was glancing in the right spot. “You’ll let us know if you hear a car coming?”

  I didn’t know the full extent of Caroline’s knack, but I did know that she was a deadly hunter: impossible to track and good at tracking others. She also had perfect aim, no matter how impossible the shot. While her senses probably weren’t as good as a Were’s, I was going to go out on a limb and bet they were probably pretty darn close.

  “No,” she replied. “If I hear the police drive up, I’ll keep that little gem to myself to spite you all.”

  Jed snorted, and I realized that Caroline was being sarcastic.

  “If we’re going to go,” she said, impatience peppering her tone, “let’s go.”

  Behind me, the sound of snapping bones and guttural, inhuman cries told me Chase and Lake had begun to Shift. A second later, a wave of power hit me, tantalizing and torture, all at once.

  I wanted my pack. I wanted to run. I wanted to stay here with Chase and Lake, I wanted to Shift—

  But I couldn’t. Couldn’t Shift. Couldn’t stay here. Instead, I fought the call of the wild and took a step toward civilization.

  The house.

  We closed the distance between the woods and the front porch with quiet efficiency. Caroline circled the entire house, keen eyes looking for weaknesses and points of entry. She came to a stop beside us, unnaturally still and utterly sure of herself, and addressed her next words to Jed.

  “Killer came through here.”

  I wasn’t sure how she could be so certain, or so calm, but it was hard not to take Caroline’s words at face value. When it came to games played between predator and prey, I had no doubt that she was as much of an expert as any Were.

  All business, Jed took something out of his pocket and managed to jimmy open the front door.

  “If you want to touch anything,” he told me, glancing back over his shoulder, “you’re going to need to put on gloves.”

  I hadn’t brought any. In the course of my time as alpha, I hadn’t had nearly as much practice breaking and entering as I had with breaking and reinstating psychic bonds. Clearly, I had not come prepared.

  “Here.” Caroline made no move to invade my personal space, but as Jed flipped on a hallway light, she held out a single white glove.

  My eyes were drawn immediately to the skin she’d bared. Thick, sinewy scars—some white, some sickeningly pink, even after all these years—marred her flesh from the elbow down. Looking at it hurt and reminded me that Shay was the one who had given Caroline those scars—one more reason that we couldn’t afford to let him be the one who found Maddy.

  I took the proffered glove. Cold and detached, Caroline strode past me into the house. I followed, and in the dim light Jed had turned on, I could see dark blotches on the tan stone floor.

  Drops of blood.

  Someone had made an attempt at cleaning up since the crime scene photos were taken, but the aftereffects of slaughter were still visible, tangible proof that what had happened here couldn’t be exorcised with cleaner and bleach.

  Drawn like a moth to the flame, I followed the trail of blood and watched as the dark spots got bigger and thicker the farther into the labyrinthine hallway we got.

  “It started with a puncture wound.” Caroline walked the path of blood, as light on her feet as a dancer, her head tilted slightly to one side. “A small one. A warning.”

  Caroline met Jed’s eyes, but not mine. “Killer gave his target time to run.”

  The hallway dead-ended into a large, open living room. The stone fireplace on the far end was discolored, and Caroline stopped in front of it.

  “Second and third puncture wounds. Then a long, deep cut.” She gestured to the dark spots on the floor. Her words could have just as easily been describing a knife attack, but somehow, I doubted a rabid werewolf would have bothered with a blade.

  No, our killer would have Shifted—in full or in part—and gouged the victim. Once. Twice. Three times.

  “The target scrambled backward,” Caroline said—and I realized for the first time exactly how different our mental vocabulary was. My victim was her target.

  “Target was already bleeding. Here”—she touched her still-gloved hand to the ghostly remains of what had once been a pool of red on the ground—“he slipped and hit his head.”

  Caroline dragged her fingertips over the discolored area on the fireplace. Her face darkened. “And then it happened all at once.”

  I took those words to mean that her discomfiting expertise started and ended with the aspects of this kill that seemed almost human. What had happened after the victim had fallen on the fireplace wasn’t human at all.

  “The attacker Shifted,” I said, carefully avoiding all use of the pronoun she—or anything else that might bring Maddy’s face to my mind. “After a minute, maybe two, the smell of blood would have been too much for the wolf.”

  Based on the way the corpse had been positioned in the photos I’d seen, our Rabid must have dragged the victim—or possibly the body by that point—across the room. I followed the path, overcome with images that felt like memories, as my mind took what I knew and filled in the horrifying gaps.

  Memorize the way it feels, I told myse
lf. Keep it under lock and key.

  In wolf form, a rabid werewolf would have been unable to keep from going for the throat, and that was probably responsible for most of the splatter on the baseboards and the walls.

  I could smell it. I could hear the sound it made, that awful, ungodly sound of shredding flesh, interspersed with raindrops on a windshield.

  “There should be footprints,” Caroline said. Still caught up in a trance of my own making, I slipped on my borrowed glove and ran my right hand over the surface of the wall.

  “With this much blood, the target shouldn’t have been the only one slipping. If the killer didn’t clean up afterward—and if this is what it looks like a week later, I doubt they did—then he or she should have left footprints. Paw prints. Whatever.”

  I thought back to the crime scene photos. There’d been evidence that someone had dipped human hands into the blood and smeared it along the walls, but Caroline was right—there’d only been one set of footprints.

  The victim’s.

  There hadn’t been any paw prints at all. How was that possible?

  One of these days, I thought, I’m going to excise that word from my vocabulary.

  Werewolves and psychics weren’t exactly the height of possibility, either.

  Beside me, Caroline snapped to attention, pulling her body back into the shadows, her eyes narrowed and her pupils wide. The sound of creaking wood on the front porch alerted me to the reason for her behavior. I reached out to keep her from flying into action.

  “It’s Chase,” I told her. “Not the police.”

  Hearing his name, Chase ducked into the room, quiet and unobtrusive. “There’s no evidence that Maddy ever Shifted in the woods,” he said, by way of greeting. “If she was living there, she was living there as a human.”

  He paused and took in the sights and smells in this room. To his nose, the astringent smell of bleach would have washed away some of the blood scent, but not all of it.

  Fresh off his own Shift, Chase was able to press down against his inner wolf, but I could feel the animal response bubbling beneath the surface of his mind. “Do you think she Shifted in here?” he asked, his voice throaty and low.

  I turned the question right back around at him. “Do you think she did?”

  Chase was silent, and for several seconds, none of us said a word. He breathed in and out. I watched the way his chest rose and fell, waiting for my answer.

  The answer I didn’t want to hear.

  “Maddy was here,” he said finally. “She Shifted—and I don’t think she was alone.”

  Not alone?

  “Was she with another werewolf?” I asked, my mind racing with the implications. If Maddy was with another Were, she might not have been the one to do the actual killing. Maybe she just stood there and watched.

  Not that that’s much better.

  “I don’t know.” Chase’s voice was intense with concentration. He took another deep breath, pushing his way past the overwhelming scent of blood. “The scent is different. It’s faint. One second it’s there and the next it’s not, but I smell someone … something …”

  A growl broke free from his throat as he tried to put what he was smelling into words. Even in the dim light, I could see the way Caroline responded to the sound. Her hands went automatically for the weapon strapped to her side. She turned her back to the wall.

  Casually, I stepped in between Caroline and Chase, removing the glove I’d borrowed and handing it back to her, while he got control of his wolf.

  “We should go.” Jed had been so quiet while Caroline and I were walking through the killer’s motions that I’d almost forgotten he was here. “We’ve seen what we came to see. No use pushing our luck.”

  I hesitated, not wanting to stay here any longer than I had to, but unable to banish the feeling that I was missing something. Maddy was here. Someone was with her. And Chase couldn’t quite tell who—or what—that someone was. I’d assumed when Maddy left the pack that she wanted to be alone. But what if she’d met someone somewhere along the way?

  With more questions than answers, the four of us left the way we came—softly, silently, disappearing back into the night.

  “I lost Maddy’s scent at the river.” Lake, half-naked and utterly unapologetic about it, picked her discarded shirt up off the ground, skin glistening with sweat and hair streaming free down her back. “When she left, she left fast.”

  As Lake finished getting dressed, I took stock of what we knew. Maddy had lived in these woods as a human. She’d left quickly. The killer had somehow managed to avoid stepping in the rivulets of blood. The victim—whoever he was—had died bloody.

  “Pain,” Chase said. He brought the side of his face to rest on the top of my head. “Sora said that to track a Rabid, we needed to figure out what he was hungry for.”

  What she was hungry for, I corrected silently, unable to shake the image of Maddy in that house, Maddy’s mouth covered in blood.

  “Whoever killed that boy is hungry for pain.” Chase closed his eyes for a moment, his forehead creased and a dark look falling over his face. “If it was Maddy, if she did that, if she’s looking for pain—I think I know where we should go next.” He opened his eyes and met mine. “Alpine Creek.”

  The town where Samuel Wilson had lived, where he’d kept Maddy and the others like pets. The place where her pain had started.

  “Chase is right, Bryn.” Caroline took a step toward us. “This isn’t just about killing. This is about hurting people.”

  I was fairly certain that was the first time Caroline had ever referred to Chase by name. Of all the wolves in my pack, he was the least human in appearance and behavior, and Caroline—as much as she wouldn’t have wanted to admit it—still wasn’t 100 percent comfortable around Weres.

  If the two of them agreed on something, chances were good they were right.

  “What happened in that house wasn’t a clean kill.” Caroline shook her head. “It wasn’t even an animal one.”

  “What was it?” Lake asked, her voice strained and high.

  Caroline didn’t answer, so I did, on her behalf.

  “That,” I said, shivering in the night and drawing what little warmth I could from Chase’s body, “was retribution.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  WE SET UP CAMP AN HOUR AWAY, JUST INSIDE THE Cedar Ridge border. Tomorrow, we’d head back into No-Man’s-Land and swing down to Alpine Creek, a sleepy mountain town where people didn’t ask questions and the sheriff was easy to bribe.

  If Chase was right, Maddy might have gone back to the place where this nightmare had started for her, a place where she’d felt more pain than most people could ever imagine.

  “Tent’s up.” Chase never used ten words when two words would do. I looked up at the sky—cloud covered and seemingly starless—and then back at our makeshift campground.

  Jed had, at one point in his life, apparently been something of a survivalist. He’d stated, in his quietly authoritative way, that there was no reason for us to risk being seen checking into a motel, no matter how far from the crime scene we’d traveled. I hadn’t argued. The werewolves among us were just as comfortable—maybe more so—sleeping outside, and I wasn’t holding out much hope that I would be able to sleep at all.

  Chase sat down behind me and swept my hair off my neck. He laid his cheek against the skin he’d exposed, then pressed his lips gently to the place where my shoulder met my neck.

  “Brought you something,” he said. “To help you sleep.”

  I turned back, my face so close to his that I could barely tell where I ended and he began. “What?”

  “Maps.” With a crooked smile, he pulled back and began to spread them out between us.

  It was easier out here, away from the rest of the pack, to believe that he understood me, my priorities, the things that made me tick. On the edges of the Cedar Ridge territory, I didn’t feel quite so alpha, and Chase wasn’t quite so self-contained.

  �
�You brought me maps,” I repeated. “To help me sleep.”

  “You’ll sleep better once you have a long-term plan,” he murmured, placing a hand on mine and dragging them both over the surface of the paper. “Maps. Plan.”

  I got up on my knees to get a better look. It was easy enough to see the lines of the maps by lamplight, though if Ali had been there, she almost certainly would have told me that reading in these conditions would ruin my eyes.

  Had I thought there was even the slightest chance that I would stay human long enough for that to matter, I might have cared.

  Instead, I turned my full attention to Chase’s gift, sorting through the maps and arranging one next to the other until we had the whole of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Utah spread out in front of us.

  I drew an invisible circle with the tip of my finger. “We’re here.” I dragged my finger downward. “No-Man’s-Land starts here, goes through Alpine Creek, and stretches up to the location of the last murder, here.”

  I quickly outlined the borders of No-Man’s-Land.

  “This side is Shadow Bluff territory.”

  Idaho.

  “Cedar Ridge.”

  Montana.

  “And Stone River starts here. There’s another slice of No-Man’s-Land between Stone River and Luna Mesa here.”

  Before Maddy had left, I’d advised her to stick to our territory, or Callum’s. Whether or not she’d listened was another matter. From the moment she’d told me she was leaving, she’d seemed certain that she was fully capable of staying off the beaten path, that wherever she was going, no one else would or could follow.

  “When I have to get away, I go for the mountains.” Lake took a seat on the other side of the maps, stretching out her mile-long legs and eyeing our handiwork. “I usually turn around before I get there, but it’s nice to have someplace to run to.”

  Mountains? Right now we were smack-dab in the center of the Rockies. Even if Maddy had headed for the mountains, we had no idea of knowing which ones.