Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  She’d gotten pregnant.

  And then the one person she’d trusted—more than anyone—that person had killed the boy she loved, the father of her baby.

  Pregnant, alone, heartbroken, in pain of every conceivable kind—was it any wonder she might have broken? Was it that unthinkable that a splintered part of her might have started craving other people’s pain?

  Everything I touch dies, she’d told me. I didn’t mean to.

  “Bryn.”

  I was still bent over at the waist, but now I was actually on the ground, rocks and dirt digging into my kneecaps. Chase wrapped his arms around me, pulled my body back against his.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got you. It’s okay.”

  But it wasn’t okay. How could anything be okay? How could it ever be okay again?

  I pulled back from Chase’s grip, but he held tight, and I didn’t fight him. “Maddy,” I said, croaking her name. I didn’t have to finish.

  “I know,” he said. “Archer told us.”

  Now all of them knew—what had happened to Maddy. What I’d been a part of. What I’d done.

  “Stop it.” This time, Chase’s voice wasn’t soft, and it wasn’t gentle. “Just stop it.”

  “Stop what?” I said, jerking backward and out of his arms for real. I stumbled to my feet, my hair falling into my face and covering my eyes, my cheeks hot with tears I could no longer hold back.

  “Stop doing this to yourself,” Chase said, his voice throaty and low. “Stop telling yourself that this is your fault.”

  “This is my fault.”

  He was on his feet now, coming toward me, but I took a step back. I didn’t want him to touch me, not when Maddy would never touch Lucas again.

  “He’s the one who challenged you.” The fury in Chase’s voice was undeniable. “Lucas did this, Bryn. He challenged you, and you did what you had to do.”

  “Did I?” That was the question, the one I hadn’t let myself think for seven long months. “What if there was another way, and I just couldn’t find it? And even if I didn’t have any other choice, I should have known. I should have seen what was happening. I shouldn’t have accepted him into the pack. I shouldn’t have given him the opportunity to challenge me. I should have found a way—”

  “A way to what?” Chase didn’t move any closer to me physically, but he kept pushing. He didn’t back down, not even when I stood straighter and met his gaze, head-on, everything I was and everything I was feeling palpable in my stare.

  “You should have found a way to what?” he asked again.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.

  “You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Bryn. I’ve sat back and watched for months. I’ve given you space, but this is tearing you apart, and I can’t just keep sitting here, watching you, doing nothing—”

  I hadn’t known—that he’d seen what I’d kept hidden, that not being able to make it better hurt him the same way that it would have hurt me if our positions were reversed.

  “You don’t understand, Chase.” The words burst out of my mouth. I couldn’t stop them, even though I wanted to. “You won’t ever understand. You can’t.”

  “You think you’re the only one who’s ever made a mistake?” This time, he did take a step toward me. Just one. “Do you think you’re the only person who’s had to make horrible decisions, or who’s felt like everything they do lets someone down?”

  He took another step forward.

  “Do you think you’re the only person who can’t let themselves feel things, because you feel them too damn much?”

  There was something dark in his eyes, something powerful and raw. The edges of his mind blurred against the edges of mine, and I knew that, somehow, in his human life, he’d been where I was now.

  “You’re not perfect.” Those were the last words I’d ever expected to hear him say—because from the first moment we’d met, I’d been his everything. “You don’t have to be. You can’t be—no one can—and you need to let it go.”

  Maddy, Lucas, the murder in Wyoming—how could I let any of that go?

  “You did what you had to do, Bryn, and even if there was another way, if there was something that none of us thought of then and none of us have been able to think of since, if there was some mythical answer that would have made things turn out differently, made them better—you’d still have to let it go.”

  We were right next to each other now, his cheek very nearly touching mine.

  “People make mistakes, Bryn. It’s what we do.”

  I felt the fight drain out of me, and with it, some fraction of the emotion that had been pent up inside of me for months. He put his hands under my chin, angled my head toward his.

  My lips met his, and I closed my eyes, my hands reaching around his body and grabbing on to the back of his shirt, like I was holding on for dear life.

  That was the most I’d ever heard him say at once, the most of the person he’d been before the Change that I had ever seen. I wanted this, wanted him, but there was still a part of me that couldn’t do what he wanted me to, couldn’t entirely forgive myself, couldn’t let it go.

  Because, yes, everyone made mistakes—but when I made them, people died. Chase had lifted some portion of the burden off my shoulders, but there was still a weight there.

  There always would be.

  His thumbs traced the lines of my jaw. I leaned into his touch, opening my eyes and staring into his, so blue that I could have lost myself in them, if only for a moment.

  “Ahem.”

  Chase broke away from the kiss, and the two of us turned to our left to see Caroline and Lake standing side by side. Lake had a good nine inches on Caroline, and though they were both blonde, they looked nothing alike—but the expressions on their faces were almost identical.

  This wasn’t awkward or anything.

  Lake, who’d known me longer and was less capable of keeping her smart mouth shut, broke the silence. “Sorry to interrupt, but we weren’t sure if or when you two crazy kids were going to come up for air.”

  I wondered how much, if any, of our fight they had overheard.

  “I mean, really, B., you and lover boy here ought to look into careers in deep-sea diving.”

  Sometimes, having friends who were like family was a good thing, and sometimes, it was like having an endless supply of very nosy, very irritating siblings.

  For a second, it looked like Caroline was considering chiming in as well, but ultimately, she exercised that trademarked restraint. “You have a phone call,” she said instead. “On your cell.”

  I glanced back at Lake and saw that, all teasing aside, there was tension in her body and a sharpness to her eyes.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  Lake gave me an apologetic smile. “It’s Callum.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I DEBATED WHETHER OR NOT TO TELL CALLUM WHAT, exactly, had sent Maddy over the edge, and then I debated what the likelihood was that he already knew about the baby. The second I came on the line, though, he spoke, and I immediately had other concerns.

  Bigger ones.

  “She’s going to kill again. Tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure?” It was a stupid question, one that came out as a reflex.

  “I’m sure someone dies,” Callum replied. “And I’m sure that we’ll have thirty-six hours after the body is discovered before Shay learns there’s been another attack and moves to enact the Senate’s vote.”

  Thirty-six hours? We’d been looking for Maddy for longer than that already, and while the picture of how she’d spent these past few months was becoming clearer and clearer, I still didn’t know where she was now.

  Thinking back to the dream we’d shared, I grasped for clues. I’d seen images in her mind: sharp stones, the dark walls of a hollow place, some kind of stream. The mountains, maybe? Was she holed up in some kind of cave?

  That didn’t exactly narrow things down.

  “Is there any way to
stop this?” I wasn’t sure whether I was asking if there was a way to prevent another attack, or to keep the other alphas from racing to find Maddy on their own.

  Both, probably, but I would have settled for either.

  Callum did not oblige. “The future’s been uncertain, Bryn, but in the past hour, certain outcomes have become more and more likely.” He didn’t pause, didn’t give me time to process. “Someone else is going to die.”

  I thought of blood-streaked walls, of Maddy’s haunted eyes and broken words.

  Everything I touch dies.

  “And the Senate?” I asked. There was no use dwelling on the things I couldn’t change, not if this was something that I could. “Is there anything we can do to keep that from happening?”

  “There might be. There might not.”

  Well, that was less than helpful.

  “Either way, Bryn, you need to find her first.”

  A year ago, I might have snapped at him for telling me the obvious. Instead, I relayed what I’d seen in the dream, the images that I’d pulled from Maddy’s mind of the place she’d been staying.

  “If we could get an idea of the general area she’s in,” I concluded, “I might be able to find her, but there’s too much No-Man’s-Land, and we don’t even know for sure that she hasn’t crossed a border somewhere.”

  She could just as easily be holed up in the remotest areas of our territory—or someone else’s. If she was careful to stay far enough away from the other wolves, they might not even know she was there.

  “There’s a third-rate ski resort near your western border in a town called Winchester. It falls between Shadow Bluff territory and Cedar Ridge, but the northern packs could reach it through the mountains.”

  “And that’s where Maddy is?” I asked, wondering why, if he knew that, he hadn’t just sent me straight there, before the countdown to confrontation had gotten so tight.

  “That’s where the next attack happens,” Callum said. “You won’t get there in time to stop it.”

  “But if we move quickly,” I said, “she might still be in the area when we get there.”

  Maddy wouldn’t stay in the immediate area—she was too smart for that, but if she was hiding out in the mountains, she might retreat to the place I’d seen in the dream. Assuming it was close by, we might be able to put two and two together and find it.

  Find her.

  “Be careful, Bryn. Things could get bad, and I’d not have you dying, not for this, not now.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said reflexively. “Rumor has it I’m hard to kill.”

  For the first time in memory, I hung up the phone on him first. There was something Callum wasn’t telling me—probably lots of somethings. That was nothing new, but this time, I couldn’t tell whether this was just another stage of the Let Her Make Her Own Mistakes plan in which he seemed to revel, or if there was another reason for keeping me in the dark.

  If my knowing something would cause me to act differently than I otherwise would have, and if that difference led to an undesirable future, Callum wouldn’t bat an eye at keeping things to himself—even if those were things I wanted—and maybe even needed—to know.

  Then again, I hadn’t exactly told him that Maddy was pregnant.

  “This is my cue to leave.” Archer kept his distance and very wisely did not put a hand on my shoulder this time. “I was happy to help, but I gave up danger for Lent.”

  “It’s August,” I told him.

  “Global warming,” he replied, without missing a beat.

  “Fine,” I said. “Go.” I didn’t even watch him leave. Instead, I turned my attention back to the others.

  “We’re going north,” I said. “Weapon up.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  WINCHESTER, IDAHO, WAS A TWO-BIT TOWN COVERED in dirt. Winchester, Montana, wasn’t much better. The two sat nestled beside each other in the middle of a pile of rocks that looked less like a mountain than an environmental death trap.

  “Ski resort?” I muttered. “Yeah, right. And I’m Molly Ringwald.”

  In the silence that followed my words, I felt Devon’s absence like a missing piece of my own body. I wasn’t sure how he would have replied to my sarcastic statement, but I was almost certain it would have involved some variation on the phrase pretty in pink.

  Getting to Winchester hadn’t been easy—especially since we didn’t have the option of entering from the west. The Montana side of Winchester wasn’t exactly accessible by car—not if you didn’t want to risk blowing a couple of tires, at least. Since we couldn’t risk trespassing on Shadow Bluff territory, that left us traversing the last few miles by foot.

  Chase and Lake could have made the distance in short time, but Caroline, Jed, and I were stuck with “slow and steady,” and when we finally made our way to the edges of “town,” it was already abuzz with news of the body that had been found, right outside the Bait & Tackle. They were calling it an animal attack, but I knew better.

  Most animals didn’t play with a corpse and then leave it in the middle of Main Street, like a present for the masses. Then again, most werewolves didn’t, either.

  “Victim’s a teenage girl, and she wasn’t killed here.” Caroline’s voice was quiet enough that if she hadn’t been standing right next to me, I wouldn’t have heard it. Still, talking about this in the light of day, out where anyone could hear us, didn’t seem like the best idea in the world. “The blood’s not right,” she murmured, “and the body …”

  We were standing far enough away that my eyes couldn’t make out the details, but Caroline had incredible long-distance vision. The same thing that let her hit a target a football field away meant that even from our vantage point, a block away, she could still make out the details of the scene.

  Unlike in bigger cities, there was no police tape here. Just a sheriff, a couple of deputies, and an off-white sheet that someone used to cover the body.

  Badly.

  “I’m starting to think our killer wants to get caught.” Jed’s voice was just as low as Caroline’s. “You all got any reason to believe that’s true?”

  I thought back to the dream Maddy and I had shared. She’d been quiet, self-contained, maybe a little unhinged, with the way she’d insisted that she hadn’t done anything and immediately gone on to qualify that she hadn’t meant to.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if she’s the one who did this, or why she’d choose to do it like this.”

  The one thing I was sure about was that if Maddy was killing, it wasn’t because she wanted to. It was because she couldn’t stop.

  “It’s like a hound,” Lake said, “dropping a dead bird on your front porch and expecting you to be pleased.”

  From the way they were talking, you would have thought that Maddy did this—all of this—for me.

  That thought never left my mind—not as we made our way to the lone Winchester gas station and not as Jed gave our cover story, which involved fly-fishing, family bonding, a very bad sense of direction, and a car running out of gas. The possibility that Maddy had killed to get my attention was there as I listened to the loud whispers of the town folk, fascination warring with horror in their tones.

  “I reckon it was a bear. Strange that it would come this far into town, but the Sutton boys have been at their old tricks again—probably led it straight to us.”

  “Those Suttons are a menace. And that poor Johnson girl. First, her daddy kills her mama, and now this. Earl and Betsy must be taking it hard.”

  I didn’t get to find out who Earl and Betsy were, because at that exact moment, I noticed a change in the pack-bond. Across the room, Chase stiffened, his nostrils flaring outward, his fingertips curling slightly inward, like claws.

  “—just coming home from work, and now she’s gone. Funeral won’t be open casket, that’s for sure—”

  Beside Chase, Lake paused, too. They smelled something.

  Someone.

  Making my way out to the front o
f the gas station, I scanned the streets for Maddy. Surely, she wouldn’t have come back here. Surely, she wouldn’t have stayed so close to a kill.

  I smell … I smell …, Chase whispered the words straight into my mind.

  What? What did he smell?

  The answer came to me as nothing more than a vague sense that Chase was smelling something he’d smelled before—at the Wyoming murder site, at Wilson’s cabin in Alpine Creek.

  It was faint. Different. It smelled like a werewolf, and it didn’t.

  It smelled the way things did in dreams—a fraction off, a shade too, too … something.

  For the first time, I really and truly let myself believe that Maddy might not be the one behind the murders. But that meant someone—or something—else was. Something that Lake and Chase couldn’t quite scent.

  Something that was close.

  Caroline and Jed must have noticed something was wrong, because they paid and followed us quickly out of the store.

  Watching Caroline sparked a memory, and I sent a question silently to Chase and Lake. You guys can’t smell Caroline, I said. You can’t track her. It’s part of her knack. Do you think what you’re smelling—not smelling—now could be something similar?

  Based on the crime scene, I’d been certain that our killer was a werewolf, but like Callum and the Resilient wolves in my pack, some werewolves had knacks, too.

  In Wyoming, the killer hadn’t left any footprints in the victim’s blood.

  What if this thing wasn’t a werewolf? What if it was something else? Something that made as much sense to me as psychics and werewolves would have to anyone else?

  Without warning, Chase took off, as quick as a serpent’s strike. Lake followed, holding back on her speed enough to appear human. Jed, Caroline, and I slipped out of town, following them to the edge of the mountain and then into the forest.

  We stopped at a densely wooded area where the smell of blood was so thick in the air that even with human senses, I wanted to gag.

  Fresh blood this time—and it didn’t belong to an animal. It was human blood, and odds were good that it belonged to the girl whose remains had been found on Main Street.